Week 12 - Audiences

In the ideology and representation topic, we looked at how certain social ideologies are present within films. One of the ways we come to decipher these ideologies is through reflecting on our own belief systems and see if they agree or disagree with the values present in the film’s story and subtext. Here, we are coming from a viewer perspective as a member of the film’s audience. The different ways in which audiences relate to films is the focus of this topic. There are many different theories and ideas on how audiences engage with film texts — from emotionally, physically, cognitively, or psychologically. The way in which audiences relate and understand films can change, most obviously from person to person depending on their ideologies, but also depending on the era, age or cultural background. For example, the Disney film Fantasia (1940) was originally seen as a children’s animated film, yet when viewed within 1960s youth counterculture, it was perceived as a cult film due to its use of psychedelic colours and scenarios.

Further, let’s look at this scene from Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story (Rob Cohen, 1993). Consider what is happening here between Bruce Lee and Linda as they watch Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

How are their viewing experiences different and why?

What do you think influences our responses to and reception of cinema?

What influences the ways in which we interpret meaning?

These are questions we are going to explore in this topic. We are going to look through a few ways in which the audience has been conceived within film studies, which can help us as filmmakers to better understand how our films may be received and related to. This will lead on to the next topic where we can consider the role of audiences in the advancement of cinema technologies to enhance visual spectacle.

Spectatorship

In our ideology topic, we looked at the way gender is represented and the position of the audience member as a masculine spectator aligned with the male protagonist of the film through the use of cinematography. This was Laura Mulvey’s theory from the 1970s, which was a time in film theory that saw the rise of a number of spectatorship theories. In these theories, the viewer is seen as subjected to the ideological effects of cinema; viewers no more than the effect of the film text (i.e. for a film to exist, it must have an audience). In the 1960s and 1970s, the dominant model of the spectator was ‘passive’ meaning that the film viewer is controlled by the mechanisms and physical presence of the film screening, so that we are vulnerable to the assumed ideological effects of the film experience. This overlooked that a politics of representation needed to be grounded in specific cultural contexts, like what we have seen above with Dragon. Your required reading for this week by Patrick Phillips discusses in detail the changes between passive and active audiences, which in part has to do with how we are trained to watch films — in a darkened cinema, quiet and facing a screen.

The emphasis more recently has been on the ‘active’ spectator who makes meaning and ‘negotiates’ with the film in the act of consuming it. Do you agree with the description of a ‘passive’ spectator, or do you think we are ‘active’ when watching a film? Consider what ‘active’ could mean in this context. How are we ‘active’ when watching a film? The following concepts may help explain this. This may also be a discussion point for your tutorials this week.

Audience studies

Audience-oriented or reception studies aim to explore the differences between communities of historically situated viewers and overcome the limitations of purely textual analysis by taking an interest in specific encounters between texts, viewers, and contexts. This approach accounts for the way meaning of a text is not fixed but changes over time, which is a way of discussing the Fantasia example, for instance. Sometimes this is also called historical reception studies.

One of the purposes of audience studies is to identify and interpret broad tendencies in film viewing. So methods have been used to locate individual viewing experiences in order to identify larger patterns of behaviour. The most obvious uses from these kinds of studies are for marketing purposes and working out target audiences for certain films. From a cultural studies standpoint though, these kinds of quantitative studies can assist in better understanding how people engage with film and cinema more broadly. More recently, however, studies in audience behaviour have moved towards looking at local conditions and circumstances with increased sensitivity (rather than making larger generalisations). These have been called ‘thick’ approaches to audience study that respect the diverse backgrounds and motivations of subgroups, like minority ethnicities, that constitute the larger audience.

Part of audience studies also looks at the various ways we respond to films — whether it be psychologically, cognitively, or emotionally. One way this occurs is through the process of “interpellation”, where the spectator is drawn into the world of the film, caught inside and between the characters. This is achieved through editing and point-of-view and we had a look at this idea in our ideology week in how we can identify with characters in a gendered way through cinematography — the camera in the position of the eye.

Let’s take a further look at the cognitive and emotional or affective potential of cinema on the audience.

Cognitivism

Instead of the notion that we are ‘subjected’ to films, this approach takes as a starting point with the idea that audience response can largely be explained by reference to conscious and routine activity.

These recognisable elements are called ‘schema’ in this approach, which refers to our mental processes of finding familiarity in a new stimulus, in this case, a film — so it could be through identifying the director/auteur (auteur schema) or the film’s star (star schema).

A criticism of the cognitive approach, however, is that by relating the film to the everyday routines of mental processing, it can only emphasise the similarities or familiarities and not the differences between the film experience and other kinds of activity. For example, what about the specific ways in which films provide us with moments of intensity or triggering our memories that other activities cannot? What ways does the film experience make it safe for these moments of intensity to occur? Think about how a Holocaust survivor would react to a film like Schindler’s List (1993).

There are mechanisms at work within the film experience that allows for the safe exploration of these intense moments — such as narrative elements and structure or sitting in a dark movie theatre. In this sense, the real challenge for filmmakers then is to create a different kind of film experience or even forcing the spectator to look and think differently.

Reflective question:

Can you think of any films or filmmakers that have challenged the way you think about something? That encourages you to think outside our everyday experiences?

Affect

In the affective approach, we assume that films do more than simply show us a representation — they go beyond that to a kind of lingering feeling we may get from the film that lasts beyond the film’s end credits. This approach also shifts away from the film exploring a concept with a meaning through systems of representation and towards one of affect (feeling and emotion). An affect is residue that is felt as an excess of the representational system. The genre of film that directly engages with affect, or has affect as its purpose, is melodrama. Melodrama utilises transitions between meaning and affect, by encouraging the audience to feel rather than think to construct meaning, to emotionally identify with the film in some way (character, events, tragedy).

For example, early melodrama in the studio era can be ideologically understood as attempting to reaffirm American heterosexual values, but on the level of affect, the experience is quite different, particularly for its target audience of women. It encourages its audience to desire cinema, creating an atmosphere conducive for exploring desire in various ways. On the other hand, we also feel an excess of emotion in the form of disappointment with a film, or anger, but the film has still changed us emotionally in some way since watching it.

Consider the framing of this sequence from Hichcocks' Vertigo (1958). What feeling does Scottie (James Stewart) have for Madeleine? Do you have the same feelings for Madeleine? How is the effect achieved?

‘Thick’ approaches to cinema audiences

This refers to the various readings we can take from a film. Phillips refers to these readings in the following categories:

• Preferred readings — the spectator takes up/understands the intended meaning of the film. The film makes its meaning or subtext very clear.

• Oppositional readings — the spectator rejects the intended meaning for a different one he or she believes to be more suitable

• Negotiated readings — the spectator and the film interact to move through elements that create intended meanings and oppositional readings; there is a sense of appealing and unappealing readings within the film.

• Aberrant readings — completely off track, missing the actual meaning of the film, if this is possible. If the film is too ambiguous or subtle or confusing, it can lead to this reading.

Spike Lee generally produces films that are very clear in what they intend the audience to read and understand; they clearly explore racial and class relationships in New York City boroughs). On the other hand, meanings from films that use irony may need to be negotiated by the viewer. If irony is taken as sincerity it can produce an aberrant reading, where the audience misses the meaning entirely.

As an example, think about the excessive lifestyle and the way its shot in Wolf of Wall Street (2013). The film has been condemned for glorifying the rich and wasteful lifestyle of Jordan and his fellow stockbrokers, but have these readings missed the point? Is it more of an ironic take on the lifestyle in order to critique its emptiness and repulsiveness?

Film Exhibition

As an audience we are predisposed to a certain level of investment of ourselves in the film screening — paying for a ticket is one of the reasons for this. The fact that we have paid also indicates that we have certain expectations, which will further increase our willingness to concentrate. So in this sense, the cinema experience can be acknowledged as special or different to other viewing mediums, partly due to expectations with cinema etiquette (people remain quiet throughout the film, for instance), and partly to do with the audience occupying both public and private spaces at the same time.

Cinema-going has historically been a social activity. As Timothy Corrigan notes: 1930s-40s: “cinema as an institution was a primary social ritual” (29). 60s-70s: audiences went to “see a movie”. Now film is part of a broader leisure activity (suited to blockbusters, multiplexes).

Phillips states that we must also look at how viewing positions change (as social, cultural and personal activities) in the contemporary era of digital “home cinemas” and the Internet (watching other types of screens — computers, phones, iPads).

We could think about how the downloading of film files or streaming a film online for home viewing has changed the spectatorship experience. Some questions we can discuss in tutorials perhaps are:

• Is it more or less social than going to a cinema? Do we focus less at home because we haven’t paid cinema prices for our tickets?

• How has home exhibition changed to become more popular or at least almost comparable to watching films at a movie theatre?

• How has the attitude towards film exhibition changed in your opinion, if you think it has?

Extra-textual Discourses

Extra-textual discourses refer to the way in which films are discussed outside of the film text. These discourses can be located through publicity materials and marketing, fan behaviour and activities, identification with stars, and just generally how audiences talk about films with one another.

Publicity seeks to give the film a saleable popular identity and negotiates the social encounter between the film and its audience. We are constructed in this sense as members of a ‘potential audience’ in at least two ways. The potential audience is exposed to the promotional and marketing hype designed to create expectations. Also, we are drawn into a conversation about issues relating to a movie which may be circulating within our culture, resulting from the profile the film enjoys in other media.

Even after we see the film, we engage in further expressions of our membership in an audience by discussing our reactions in a variety of contexts — at a pub or cafe, on the train or tram or at work, for instance, and this may be for days afterwards. This means that as an audience, we are part of a shared community involved in numerous activities with one another that assist in giving a film a particular identity.

Two examples of this would be the use of online viral marketing campaigns used in connection with films like The Blair Witch Project (1999) or Cloverfield (2008). Both of these films had massive online viral marketing campaigns centred around building a backstory and myth based on the narrative. Fans developed through the mystery and intrigue created, where they wanted to find more clues and speculate about what they would see in the film.

Stars and stardom

The film star serves as an interface between industrial production practices, the text and its social context. For example, Gil Branston (2000) notes that there has been a history of female audiences identifying with Hollywood female stars in various ways. Anything from a desired haircut or ‘look’ the star is wearing to the situation their character goes through in a film’s narrative. Generally, these modes of identification offer aspects of pleasurable escape for audiences through emphasising similarities (as fantastic as they may really be). The audience member displays a devotion to the star.

The opposite can also be true when films are judged by the external behaviour of its starts — for example, Mel Gibson’s drunken anti-Semitic rant at a police officer in 2006 saw him unofficially blacklisted from the Hollywood community for years. It didn’t help his cause when recorded phone conversations were released in 2010, where he ranted and verbally abused his ex-girlfriend. Some of the consequences for Gibson were his agent dropping him as a client, but otherwise, he found it difficult to find work and was considered for a time, box office poison.

Here is another example. Let’s look at some of the clips that led to audiences turning away from Tom Cruise films and contributing to box office failures. Rock of Ages made for 75mil, did a global box office of 59.4mil — Cruise’s biggest flop.

More recently, Will Smith's assault on Chris Rock at the 2022 Academy Awards ceremony after Rock made a joke at the expense of Smith's wife became worldwide news. In the short term it overshadowed both the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Smith's own Oscar win for best actor in biopic King Richard. Over the longer term it will be interesting to see Smith's behaviour impacts his career. Generally an Oscar win is beneficial to an actor's career, but in the aftermath several projects that Smith was involved with were cancelled or postponed. It remains to be seen if Smith becomes a pariah, or whether he manages, like Cruise and Gibson, to recover his career. Whether he will be offered projects in the future will ultimately depend on whether producers believe he can continue to draw an audience.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are many ways and approaches to how audiences are positioned and relate to film texts. When you watch your next film, consider your relationship with it — what is the film asking you to do or be? Passive? Active? Is it challenging you in some way? To think about something out of the ordinary? Reflecting on your own viewing habits can help you as a filmmaker to reach your target audience and make your work meaningful.

References

Branston, G. (2000). “Stars, bodies, galaxies”. Cinema and cultural modernity. Buckingham [England]; Philadelphia: Open University Press, 2000. pp. 106–130.

Corrigan, T. (1991). A Cinema Without Wails Movies and Culture after Vietnam New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Phillips, P. (2012). “Spectator, audience and response”. In J. Nelmes (Ed.), Introduction to Film Studies. London; New York: Routledge. pp. 113–141.