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Intellect Books - Albert Moran

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296 pages

English

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Description

Whether we stream them on our laptops, enjoy them in theatres or slide them into DVD players to watch on our TVs, movies are part of what it means to be socially connected in the twenty-first century. Despite its significant role in our lives, the act of watching films remains an area of social activity that is little studied and thus, little understood.

In Watching Films, an international cast of contributors correct this problem with a comprehensive investigation of movie going, cinema exhibition, and film reception around the world. With a focus on the social, economic and cultural factors that influence how we watch and think about movies, this volume centres its investigations on four areas of inquiry: Who watches films? Under what circumstances? What consequences and affects follow? And what do these acts of consumption mean? Responding to these questions, the contributors provide both historical perspective and fresh insights about the ways in which new viewing arrangements and technologies influence how films get watched everywhere from Canada to China to Ireland.

A long-overdue consideration of an important topic, Watching Films provides an engrossing overview of how we do just that in our homes and across the globe.

Sujets

Power Resources

Sciences et techniques

General officer

Technology

History of film

Engineering

Anthropology

General

Cultural Studies

Energie & environnement

Informations

Publié par	Intellect Books
Date de parution	06 janvier 2013
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781783201655
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1250€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2013 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2013 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2013 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover designer: Holly Rose
Copy-editor: Sue Jarvis
Production manager: Melanie Marshall/Tom Newman
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
ISBN 978-1-84150-511-4
ePDF ISBN 978-1-78320-042-9
ePUB ISBN 978-1-78320-165-5
Printed and bound by Hobbs the Printers Ltd, UK

Dedication For David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson who have done so much to help us all see.
Contents
Foreword
Richard Maltby
Figures and Tables
Acknowledgements
About the Contributors
Introduction: New Perspectives on Movie-Going, Exhibition and Reception1
Karina Aveyard and Albert Moran
Part I: Theoretical Perspectives
Chapter 1: Cinema, Modernity and Audiences: Revisiting and Expanding the Debate
Daniel Biltereyst
Chapter 2: What is a Cinema? Death, Closure and the Database
Deb Verhoeven
Chapter 3: A Poetics of Film-audience Reception? Barbara Deming Goes to the Movies
Albert Moran
Chapter 4: The Porous Boundaries of Newsreel Memory Research
Louise Anderson
Chapter 5: Why are Children the Most Important Audience for Pornography in Australia?
Alan McKee
Part II: The Film Industry – Systems and Practices
Chapter 6: Local Promotion of a ‘Picture Personality’: A Case Study of the Vitagraph Girl
Kathryn Fuller-Seeley
Chapter 7: ‘Calamity Howling’: The Advent of Television and Australian Cinema Exhibition
Mike Walsh
Chapter 8: A Nation of Film-goers: Audiences, Exhibition and Distribution in New Zealand
Geoff Lealand
Chapter 9: The Critical Reception of Certified Copy : Original Art or Copy of a Rom-com?
Eylem Akatav
Part III: Movie Theatres – From Picture Palace to the Multiplex
Chapter 10: Movie-going in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia: A Case Study of Place, Transportation, Audiences, Racism, Censorship and Sunday Showings
Douglas Gomery
Chapter 11: From Mom-and-Pop to Paramount-Publix: Selling the Community on the Benefits of National Theatre Chains
Jeffrey Klenotic
Chapter 12: A Progressive City and Its Cinemas: Technology, Modernity and the Spectacle of Abundance
Mark Jancovich and Lucy Faire with Sarah Stubbings
Chapter 13: ‘They Don’t Need Me in Heaven … There are No Cinemas There, Ye Know’: Cinema Culture in Antwerp (Belgium) and the Empire of Georges Heylen, 1945–75
Kathleen Lotze and Philippe Meers
Chapter 14: From Out-of-town to the Edge and Back to the Centre: Multiplexes in Britain from the 1990s
Stuart Hanson
Part IV: On the Margins
Chapter 15: The Place of Rural Exhibition: Makeshift Cinema-going and the Highlands and Islands Film Guild (Scotland)
Ian Goode
Chapter 16: ‘A Popcorn-free Zone’: Distinctions in Independent Film Exhibition in Wellington, New Zealand
Ian Huffer
Chapter 17: Getting to See Women’s Cinema
Julia Knight
Chapter 18: Shifting Fandoms of Film, Community and Family
Tom Phillips
Part V: Just Watching Movies?
Chapter 19: Watching Popular Films in the Netherlands, 1934–36
Clara Pafort-Overduin
Chapter 20: Contemporary Italian Film-goers and Their Critics
Alan O’Leary and Catherine O’Rawe
Chapter 21: Imagining a ‘Decent Crowd’ at the Indian Multiplex
Adrian Mabbott Athique
Chapter 22: The VHS Generation and their Movie Experiences
Janna Jones
Index
Foreword
This collection of new essays on watching films engages in a conversation with a new research direction in cinema studies, one that focuses less on the form and content of films and instead explores their circulation and consumption, and that considers the cinema as a site of social and cultural exchange. Borrowing concerns about both distribution and reception from work in other areas of media studies, this trend is underpinned by a strengthening recognition that if we intend to address the social and cultural significance of cinema, we must find ways to write about its audiences, not as imaginary spectators but as civic agents who invest time in incorporating commercial fantasies into the continuities of their everyday lives.
The recognition that audiences go to the movies for a complex mix of reasons to do with family, workplace and community must be matched by an acknowledgement of the transitory nature of any individual film’s exhibition history. Since their industrial beginnings, motion pictures have been understood as consumables: viewed once, disposed of and replaced by a substitute providing a comparable experience. Encouraging and sustaining audiences’ habits of cinema-going as a regular and frequent social activity has required a constant flow of film products, ensuring that the evanescent images on the screen have formed the most expendable element of the experience of cinema.
The project of writing what Jeffrey Klenotic (2007) terms ‘a people’s history of cinema’ will also lead us to produce a more market-focused account of the existence of individual films – an account that pays attention to the global traffic of their circulation, the variations and regularities in the patterns of their consumption, and the ways in which the resilient parochialism of individuals and communities accommodates the passing content occupying their screens to their local concerns.
Giving consideration to the economics of distribution or the behaviour of audiences inevitably displaces the films themselves from their conventionally central place in the history of cinema, by asking questions that cannot be answered by formal analysis. These questions can, however, engage researchers from other disciplines who have not been schooled in the professional orthodoxy that the proper business of film studies is the study of films. For geographers, demographers, economists or anthropologists, the observation that cinemas are sites of social and cultural significance will unproblematically have as much to do with patterns of employment, urban development, transport systems and leisure practices that shape cinema’s global diffusion as it does with what happens in the brief encounter between an individual audience member and a film print.
The events at which these encounters between the everyday and the extraordinary take place are themselves ephemeral: each such encounter is at the same time unique, quotidian and reiterated. The event of cinema – the screening – is a social experience in which every spectator contributes and in which they share as part of the temporary existence of an audience. But each movie audience is an unstructured social agglomeration, assembled for that event and afterwards dissolved, less durable even than the shadow images it watches. Screenings embody Fernand Braudel’s (1982) metaphor for the historical event: the phosphorescent firefly that glows and goes out ‘without piercing the night with any true illumination’. Because movie screenings leave only residual, contextual traces of their existence, even the idea of studying them presents researchers with a range of evidential and methodological challenges. Some of these challenges can be addressed by using the computational apparatus of databases, spatial analysis and geovisualization to compile information that was previously too time-consuming and labour-intensive to acquire. They also present opportunities for film studies to escape the confines of textual analysis, overcome the self-perpetuating insularity of middle-level accounts of film’s medium-specificity, and begin at last to speak with other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, in the expectation that the study of cinema should be more than an entertaining diversion decorating the margins of other discourses, and that it has something of substance to contribute to our broader understanding of social and cultural practice.
The evanescence of these events is, however, also essential to their existence as cinema – and indeed to the existence of cinema studies. Every aspirational encounter with cinema’s dreams of abundance is a particular act of individual imagination, taking place in the particular circumstances of the Great Dark Room, where cinema exists in the transient space between the audience and the screen. Accounts of the cinematic equation that pay more attention to the audience than they do to the screen – such as those in this book – are no less accounts of cinema because of that emphasis.
Richard Maltby
References
Braudel, F. (1982), On History , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Klenotic, J. (2007) ‘Four Hours of Hootin’ and Hollerin’: Moviegoing and Everyday Life Outside the Movie Palace’, in R. Maltby and M. Stokes (eds), Going to the Movies: Hollywood and the Social Experience of Cinema , Exeter: University of Exeter Press.
Figures and Tables
Figures Figure 2.1 Screenshot of the CAARP database record for the Ascot Cinema before the database revision Figure 2.2 Screenshot of the CAARP database record for the Ascot Cinema after the database revision showing different events in the cinema’s timeline Figure 11.1 The public opening at the Paramount Theater appealed to Springfield’s metropolitan ambitions and national aspirations – advertisement from The Springfield Daily Republican Figure 11.2 The Paramount Theater was located adjacent to an elevated railroad arch built to deliver passengers to a new station on the east side of Main Street – detail from city planning map Figure 11.3a Corner of Main and Railroad Streets prior to the arch; view looking north at the open border that joined downtown Springfield to the once vibrant and prestigious north en