This thesis will explore how DVD technology has provided a new context for viewing films, and how these changes in the technology of film viewing has generated a new relationship between films and film viewers. Using Jean Louis Baudry’s theory of the cinematic apparatus (derived from his essays “Ideological Effects of the Cinematic Apparatus” and “The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in Cinema”) to illustrate the ways in which former modes of film viewing foster a passive viewer, I will explore how DVD technology is markedly different from previous modes of film viewing, and from these differences I will discuss the need for a new formulation of the psychology of film viewing which takes into account these changes I am discussing in relation to new DVD technology of the past decade.