Abstract: Imagination as psychic or subjective ability, put into films, means spiritual capability of creating new meaning for the cinema. The imagination of cinema involves two basic propositions in film theory: “how cinema imagines”, and “how cinema affects the audience” or in other words, “how the audience appreciate or imagine cinema”. On the first level, the analogy between cinema and mind has appeared since Hugo Münsterberg, according to whom mimagination, as the secret mechanism of human mind, is an important dimension in interpreting the ontology and effect of film as media. On the second level, compared with other artistic media such as literature, cinema is criticized as depriving the audience’s imagination because of its isomorphism with consciousness and its image-bearing characteristics. Abstract, experimental and avant-garde art films and imaginative fantasy films are the two genres that could improve the audience’s imagination participation. In the digital age, the increasingly diversified cinema forms and new ways of cinema viewing and consumption enable the viewers to be collaborators and prosumers （producer-consumers）, thus providing a new means of engaging the audience’s imagination or imagination consumption in the post-cinema era.

Key words: imagination, imagination consumption, post-cinema, interactivity-image, participatory culture