Making Sense of Cinema: Empirical Studies into Film Spectators and Spectatorship 9781501302947, 9781501302978, 9781501302954

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
List of Contributors
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction: Empirical Approaches to Film Spectators and Spectatorship
2. Spectatorship in Public Space: The Moving Image in Public Art
3. The Festival Collective: Cult Audiences and Japanese Extreme Cinema
4. Transnational Investments: Aging in Les Invisibles (Sébastien Lifshitz, 2012) and Its Reception
5. Preferred Readings and Dissociative Appropriations: Group Discussions Following and Challenging the Tradition of Cultural Studies
6. “Legolas, He’s Cool . . . and He’s Hot!”: The Meanings and Implications of Audiences’ Favorite Characters
7. In Search of the Child Spectator in the Late Silent Era
8. Seeing, Sensing Sound: Eye-Tracking Soundscapes in Saving Private Ryan and Monsters, Inc.
9. Seeing Animated Worlds: Eye Tracking and the Spectator’s Experience of Narrative
10. Focalization, Attachment, and Film Viewers’ Responses to Film Characters: Experimental Design with Qualitative Data Collection
11. Making Sense of the American Superhero Film: Experiences of Entanglement and Detachment
12. Indexing the Events of an Art Film by Audiences with Different Viewing Backgrounds
13. Exploring the Role of Narrative Contextualization in Film Interpretation: Issues and Challenges for Eye-Tracking Methodology
14. Conclusion: A Methodological Toolbox for Film Reception Studies
Index

Citation preview

Making Sense of Cinema

Making Sense of Cinema Empirical Studies into Film Spectators and Spectatorship Edited by CarrieLynn D. Reinhard and Christopher J. Olson

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc. N E W YO R K • LO N D O N • OX F O R D • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc. 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC 1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 Paperback edition first published 2017 © CarrieLynn D. Reinhard, Christopher J. Olson, and Contributors, 2016 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Making sense of cinema : empirical studies into film spectators and spectatorship / edited by CarrieLynn D. Reinhard, Christopher J. Olson. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-5013-0294-7 (hardback) 1. Motion picture audiences––Research––Methodology. I. Reinhard, CarrieLynn D. editor. II . Olson, Christopher J. PN 1995.9.A8M275 2016 302.23′43––dc23 2015028704 ISBN :

HB : PB: ePub: ePDF :

978-1-5013-0294-7 978-1-5013-2021-7 978-1-5013-0296-1 978-1-5013-0295-4

Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

Contents List of Figures List of Tables List of Contributors Acknowledgments 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

vii ix x xvi

Introduction: Empirical Approaches to Film Spectators and Spectatorship, CarrieLynn D. Reinhard and Christopher J. Olson

1

Spectatorship in Public Space: The Moving Image in Public Art, Annie Dell’Aria

17

The Festival Collective: Cult Audiences and Japanese Extreme Cinema, Jessica Hughes

37

Transnational Investments: Aging in Les Invisibles (Sébastien Lifshitz, 2012) and Its Reception, Darren Waldron

57

Preferred Readings and Dissociative Appropriations: Group Discussions Following and Challenging the Tradition of Cultural Studies, Alexander Geimer

77

“Legolas, He’s Cool . . . and He’s Hot!”: The Meanings and Implications of Audiences’ Favorite Characters, Martin Barker

97

In Search of the Child Spectator in the Late Silent Era, Amanda C. Fleming

119

Seeing, Sensing Sound: Eye-Tracking Soundscapes in Saving Private Ryan and Monsters, Inc., Andrea Rassell, Sean Redmond, Jenny Robinson, Jane Stadler, Darrin Verhagen and Sarah Pink

139

Seeing Animated Worlds: Eye Tracking and the Spectator’s Experience of Narrative, Craig Batty, Adrian Dyer, Claire Perkins and Jodi Sita

165

vi

Contents

10 Focalization, Attachment, and Film Viewers’ Responses to Film Characters: Experimental Design with Qualitative Data Collection, Katalin Bálint and András Bálint Kovács

187

11 Making Sense of the American Superhero Film: Experiences of Entanglement and Detachment, CarrieLynn D. Reinhard

211

12 Indexing the Events of an Art Film by Audiences with Different Viewing Backgrounds, Sermin Ildirar

235

13 Exploring the Role of Narrative Contextualization in Film Interpretation: Issues and Challenges for Eye-Tracking Methodology, Thorsten Kluss, John Bateman, Heinz-Peter Preußer and Kerstin Schill

257

14 Conclusion: A Methodological Toolbox for Film Reception Studies, Christopher J. Olson

285

Index

291

List of Figures 2.1 2.2 8.1a 8.1b 8.2a 8.2b 8.3a 8.3b 8.4 8.5a 8.5b 8.6a 8.6b 8.7a 8.7b 8.8a 8.8b 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5 9.6 9.7

Crown Fountain at night. August 2014. Photo: Annie Dell’Aria. Plymouth screen with live broadcast of Tosca from London. July 17, 2013. Photo: Annie Dell’Aria. Internal focalization, sound off. Internal focalization, sound on. Internal focalization, sound off. Internal focalization, sound on. Sand dunes, sound off. Sand dunes, sound on. Example of central Area of Interest. Environmental reveal, sound off. Environmental reveal, sound on. Sharp descent, sound off. Sharp descent, sound on. Conversation, sound off. Conversation, sound on. Conversation, sound off. Conversation, sound on. Five AOI s highlighted in one scene analyzed in the study (Hill Climb 2). Mean visit durations (sec) on main characters during each scene. One subject’s gaze plot, fixations on Carl and Ellie in Wedding segment. Fixation gaze plot showing one subject’s viewing pattern over Hill Climb 1 segment. Gaze plots for all twelve subjects as they viewed the Grass (Dreaming of Babies) segment. Heat map showing collective gaze weighting for all twelve subjects watching Post Loss (Grieving) segment. Heat map showing collective gaze weighting for all twelve subjects watching Look Back (Life Continues) segment.

28 31 146 147 148 148 150 150 151 153 153 155 156 156 157 159 159 173 174 175 177 178 179 181

viii

9.8 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 11.1 11.2 12.1 13.1 13.2 13.3 13.4 13.5 13.6 13.7 13.8 13.9 13.10

List of Figures

Heat map showing collective gaze weighting for all twelve subjects watching Hill Climb 2 segment. The conceptual model of the present study. Hierarchical taxonomy of film viewers’ responses. Interaction effect of focalization and attachment avoidance on character engagement responses. Interaction effect of focalization and attachment on mentalization responses. Example of worksheet row for recording reactions to film. Frequency of entanglement and detachment across spectatorship experiences. Main effects for film watching experience and gender on situation-change judgments. Graphic representation of the experimental conditions. Spatial decomposition of the film frame into regions defined as static AOI s. Example eye tracks from On the Other Side. Example eye tracks during from the opening beach scene in Imitation of Life. Fixation duration on dynamic AOI s. Attention drawn to lettering on railing as potential source of information in Imitation of Life extract. Example of subjects directing attention to protagonist’s viewpoint. Example showing fixation on a nonsalient object in upper right. Typical eye-movement behavior in the context of a close-up. Graphic depiction of traveling AOI s and associated eye tracking information for Blow extract.

182 189 191 202 202 218 223 247 263 265 267 267 271 272 273 273 278 278

List of Tables 6.1 8.1 10.1 10.2 11.1 11.2 11.3 11.4 11.5 12.1 13.1 13.2

Coding of reasons given for choosing favorite character. “Sand dunes” fixation and visit data for sound on and sound off. Descriptive statistics comparing EF and IF for both AA groups. Test statistics and p-values of the Wilcox Robust ANOVA . Comparison of reactions to similar narrative sequences, X2: X-Men United and Spider-Man 3. Comparison of reactions for similar narrative sequences, Ghost Rider and Iron Man. Comparison of reactions to the same narrative sequence in The Dark Knight. Comparison of reactions to the same narrative point in Spider-Man. Comparison of reactions to the same narrative point in Elektra. Frequency reports for situational change judgments for art film and commercial film watchers. ANOVA s on static AOI s with significant interactions. ANOVA s on dynamic AOI s with significant interactions.

102 151 200 201 224 225 226 227 228 248 266 269

List of Contributors Katalin Bálint is a post-doctoral research fellow in the Institution of Communication, Media, and Knowledge at the University of Augsburg in Germany. Her research focuses on the psychological processes and narrative determinants of media experiences, with a special emphasis on character engagement. Her publications include work on narrative absorption with Ed S. Tan (Projections), the experience of suspense with Miruna Doicaru and Ed S. Tan (Metropolis), and focalization and attachment with András Bálint Kovács (Pszichológia). András Bálint Kovács is a professor and founding chair of the Film Department at ELTE University in Hungary. He teaches film history of modern cinema and film analysis. His current research projects include: quantitative analysis and psychological research on emotion regulation, and causal thinking in film viewing. His publications include: The Cinema of Béla Tarr (2013), Screening Modernism (2008), Les Mondes d’Andrej Tarkovsky (1987), and Metropolis, Paris: The Abstract Subjective Style in Film (1992). Martin Barker is Emeritus Professor at Aberystwyth University in Wales, United Kingdom. After a wide-ranging research career, for the past twenty-five years he has focused on the development of audience research, including founding and now co-editing the online journal Participations. He has been involved in many major audience research projects, including the international studies of the reception of the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films. John Bateman is Professor of Applied Linguistics at Bremen University in Germany, where he has been researching issues of multimodality in several media for more than a decade. He has published widely in the area, such as with a recent book focusing on the application of functional semiotics to the audiovisual moving image (with Karl-Heinrich Schmidt, 2012). He is currently head of the Bremen Institute for Transmedial Textuality Research (BItT), overseeing several projects on the analysis of film.

List of Contributors

xi

Craig Batty is Associate Professor of Screenwriting at RMIT University in Australia. He has published eight books, including Screenwriters and Screenwriting: Putting Practice into Context (2014), The Creative Screenwriter: Exercises to Expand Your Craft (2012), and Movies That Move Us: Screenwriting and the Power of the Protagonist’s Journey (2011). He is also a writer, script editor, and script consultant. His latest feature film project as script editor, I am Evangeline, was released in 2015. Annie Dell’Aria is Assistant Professor of Art History at Miami University in Ohio. She holds a PhD from The Graduate Center of The City University of New York (CUNY) and has previously taught at Hanover College, Parsons, and CUNY campuses. She has published in Public Art Dialogue, Moving Image Review and Art Journal, Mediascapes, The Conversation, and two edited volumes. Her current book project examines the moving image in contemporary public art. Adrian Dyer is a vision scientist and photographer in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University in Australia. He seeks to understand how the representation of an image is created and can be used to interpret the complex world in which we live. His research interests center on understanding how visual systems learn perceptually difficult tasks. This work involves both using human psychophysics and imaging studies. Amanda C. Fleming is a PhD candidate at Indiana University in the United States. Her dissertation is concerned with the rapid proliferation and variety of fictional serial killer narratives on contemporary American television. Her research interests include fan studies, historical reception studies, genre theory and children’s films. She is the Assistant Editor of Black Camera: An International Film Journal. Alexander Geimer is a junior professor for qualitative inquiry in the Institute for Sociology at the University of Hamburg in Germany. His research interests include cultural studies, film studies, and the praxeological sociology of knowledge. He has published several articles in German on these topics, including “Bildung als Transformation von Selbst-und Weltverhältnissen und die dissoziative Aneignung von diskursiven Subjektfiguren in posttraditionellen Gesellschaften” (2012) in ZBF , Zeitschrift für Bildungsforschung.

xii

List of Contributors

Jessica Hughes is a PhD student at the University of Queensland in Australia. She holds an MA in Film Studies from the University of British Columbia. She is currently working on her dissertation that examines Asian Extreme cinema, violence in cinema, and cult cinema. Sermin Ildirar is a post-doctoral research fellow in the Cinema Department at Istanbul University in Turkey. Her primary research interests include cognitive processing during viewing of moving images by adults and young children, the perception of moving and still images, and intercultural differences in perception. Her publications include “Watching Film for the First Time: How Adult Viewers Interpret Perceptual Discontinuities in Film” with Stephan Schwan (2010) in Psychological Science. Thorsten Kluss is in the Mathematics and Computer Science Department at the University of Bremen in Germany. He currently is part of the Cognitive Neuroinformatics division. His research interests include adaptive mechanisms in the human brain interaction between sensory modalities and representative processes. He has published numerous works on the multisensory perception, spatial cognition, and experimental methods in virtual reality. Christopher J. Olson is an adjunct professor at Dominican University in the United States where he teaches about masculinity and interracial communication. He received his MA from DePaul University, where he wrote his thesis on depictions of masculinity in the films of Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn. He cohosts The Pop Culture Lens podcast with CarrieLynn D. Reinhard, and together, they co-authored a book on exorcism cinema. Claire Perkins is a lecturer in film and screen studies at Monash University in Australia. She authored the work American Smart Cinema (2012), and co-edited US Independent Film After 1989: Possible Films (2015), B is for Bad Cinema: Aesthetics, Politics and Cultural Value (2014), and Film Trilogies: New Critical Approaches (2012). Her writing has appeared in screen and cultural studies journals, including Camera Obscura, Critical Studies in Television, Celebrity Studies, and The Velvet Light Trap. Sarah Pink is a professor for the Design Research Institute and the School of Media and Communications at RMIT University in Australia. She holds a PhD

List of Contributors

xiii

in Social Anthropology from the University of Kent and an MA in Visual Anthropology from the University of Manchester. She is a global authority on visual and sensory ethnography methodologies, and continues to develop this field in new ways relating to digital technologies. Heinz-Peter Preußer is a professor in media theory, media history, and contemporary literature at the University of Bielefeld in Germany. He researches issues of transmedia, cross-media, and interdisciplinary aesthetics as well as film studies. He is author of the recently published books Pathische Ästhetik: Ludwig Klages und die Urgeschichte der Postmoderne (2015), Anschauen und Vorstellen: Gelenkte Imagination im Kino (2014), and Transmediale Texturen. Lektüren zum Film und angrenzenden Künsten (2013). Andrea Rassell is a practice-based researcher and PhD candidate in Media and Communication at RMIT University in Australia. Her research takes place within the practice of filmmaking, where she focuses on the essayistic, documentry and scientific film forms. Her current research integrates scientific imaging processes with filmmaking to investigate technological mediation and the shift to data-derived images. Sean Redmond is an associate professor in media and communication, School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University in Australia. He is author of Celebrity and the Media (2013) and The Cinema of Takeshi Kitano: Flowering Blood (2013). He is editor of the journal Celebrity Studies, and is working on a book for Bloomsbury on the cinema of Kathryn Bigelow. With Jodi Sita, he convenes the eye tracking and moving-image research group. CarrieLynn D. Reinhard is an associate professor in communication arts and sciences at Dominican University in the United States. Her research focuses on fan, audience and reception studies, and new methodologies for their study. She has published numerous articles and book chapters on this topic as well as other topics regarding digital media studies. She hosts a podcast with Christopher J. Olson on pop culture, and together they co-authored a book on exorcism cinema. Jenny Robinson is a lecturer in media and communication at RMIT University in Australia. She is interested in how media and psychology intersect and inform each other. Her previous research involved using biometrics and experimental

xiv

List of Contributors

methodology to investigate how audiences receive multiplatform advertising models, and she is currently investigating young people’s use of mobile/social media. She has co-authored many journal articles as well as more than twenty industry reports. Kerstin Schill is Dean of the Mathematics and Computer Science department at the University of Bremen in Germany and head of the Cognitive Neuroinformatics division. She has been a board member for the Collaborative Research Center “Spatial Cognition” and since 2014 she has been senator of the German Science Foundation (DFG). Her research involves biologically inspired methods, including findings from basic neurocognitive research that provide the underlying models for healthcare robotics, and aerospace applications. Jodi Sita is a senior lecturer at Australian Catholic University with six years research expertise in the area of eye tracking using the Tobii infrared eye tracking system and software. Her research interests involve exploring how the behavior of the eye can help explain complex human behaviors. Her publications include the forthcoming: “Eye Movements during Word Writing: Single Words and Words in Sentences” with Katelyn Taylor (2014) in The Journal of Human Movement Sciences. Jane Stadler is an associate professor of film and media studies in the School of Communication and Arts at the University of Queensland in Australia. She is author of Pulling Focus: Intersubjective Experience, Narrative Film and Ethics (2008); co-author of Imagined Landscapes: Geovisualizing Australian Spatial Narratives (in press), Screen Media (2009), and Media and Society (2012); and co-editor of an adaptation studies anthology, Pockets of Change: Adaptation and Cultural Transition (2011). Darrin Verhagen is a senior lecturer and practice-based researcher at RMIT University in Australia. His soundtrack career has traversed many media with his most recent multisensory installations exhibited at the National Gallery of Victoria. He runs the Audiokientic Experiments (AKE ) Lab, using motion simulators, 4D cinema seating, transduction sound, and light to explore the relationships among hearing, vision, movement, and vibration. He is currently completing his doctoral research studying the functional mechanics of Noise music.

List of Contributors

xv

Darren Waldron is a senior lecturer in French screen studies at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom. He is co-investigator on the AHRC -funded project “Queer Cinema from Spain and France. The Translation of Desire and the Formation of Transnational Queer Identities.” His books include France at the Flicks: Trends in Contemporary French Popular Cinema (2007), Queering Contemporary French Popular Cinema: Images and their Reception (2009), Jacques Demy (2014), Alain Delon: Style, Stardom and Masculinity (2015) and French and Spanish Queer Film: Audiences, Communities and Cultural Exchange (2016).

Acknowledgments The editors would like to thank their peers and colleagues for all their intellectual, creative, and emotional support during the process of crafting this collection. Furthermore, and most importantly, they would like to thank their friends and family—near and far, alive and dead—for all the years of love and support that helped them get this far.

1

Introduction Empirical Approaches to Film Spectators and Spectatorship CarrieLynn D. Reinhard and Christopher J. Olson Dominican University

“My whole life I’ve wondered what it would be like to be this side of the screen.” —Cecilia, The Purple Rose of Cairo In the film The Purple Rose of Cairo (Woody Allen, 1985), an awkward young waitress named Cecilia (Mia Farrow) goes to the movies to escape her abusive marriage and the overall bleakness of her life during the Great Depression. Her favorite film is a screwball comedy in which handsome Egyptologist Tom Baxter (Jeff Daniels) spends a madcap weekend in Manhattan with a group of wacky socialites. Cecilia sees it so often that Tom eventually notices her sitting in the audience, and he steps out of the screen and into her life. Later, he escorts Cecilia into the world of the film, where they spend a romantic evening together. A similar incident occurs in the action spoof Last Action Hero (John McTiernan, 1993), wherein a magic movie ticket transports young film fanatic Danny Madigan (Austin O’Brien) into the fictional world of action hero Jack Slater (Arnold Schwarzenegger). Eventually, one of Slater’s enemies obtains the ticket, which allows him to escape the confines of the film and enter the real world, where he wreaks all sorts of havoc. To stop the madman’s rampage, Slater must also leave the cinematic realm and enter Danny’s reality. We mention these movies because they serve to illustrate how audiences can actively engage with a film text. They belong to a cinematic tradition stretching all the way back to Buster Keaton’s comedic masterpiece Sherlock Jr. (1924), and they each function as allegories for the type of interaction that can occur between

2

Making Sense of Cinema

movies and active audiences. In these films and others, viewers actively enter the world of a film and take a piece of that film into their own lives. Film critic Jason Bailey (2014) discusses this idea in his essay on The Purple Rose of Cairo, writing “They transport you, the movies, and for the next hour and a half, poor Cecilia will go somewhere else, and be someone else, leaving her life and her troubles far, far away” (64). In other words, the experience of engaging with a film can affect a viewer’s life and perceptions. Of course, in real life, viewers cannot step through the film screen and have a life-transforming adventure, yet film spectatorship and the act of engaging with a film can profoundly impact an individual. From the era of silent films and nickelodeons to the time of smartphones and Netflix, movies have captivated viewers. But what does it really mean to be captivated by a motion picture? What does it mean to understand a film, to engage with a movie, to interpret a motion picture, to make sense of cinema? This book considers how to understand film spectators and their interactions with film texts in the process of film spectatorship. As explained in the following sections, definitions of film spectator and film spectatorship have changed over time as different theoretical conceptions emerged; but in this book, we use the terms in a general sense. An individual becomes a film spectator when he or she engages with a film text. A film text represents a motion picture of varying genres, media, and modes of exhibition; a film text can be fictional or nonfictional, feature length or short, viewed in a theater or online. A film text thus represents any combination of audio and visual stimuli not intended as a television series. Film spectatorship, then, is the process of engaging with a film text. The empirical studies collected here represent an attempt to understand the interaction between the film spectator and the film text in the process of film spectatorship. Each study examines how the individual film spectator or collective film spectators make sense of the interaction with the film text or texts to understand what, how, and why meaning occurs within these spectatorship experiences. These studies attempt to understand how film spectators make sense of, construct meaning in, and understand their experiences when engaging with films. The research questions vary, but they all concern the following: What does the film, and the experience of engaging with it, mean to spectators? How do spectators make sense of the film and the experience? How does the experience make sense perceptually, bodily, cognitively, affectively, behaviorally, contextually, socially, culturally, historically and personally? This book considers the role, the agency, and the activity of each and every film spectator when he or she enters into a relationship with a film, whether

Introduction

3

viewed in a movie theater, a home theater, or on a smartphone while commuting. The studies collected here concern the reasons for and practices of interpretation, appropriation, sense-making, and meaning-making. Thus, this collection considers how a film spectator makes sense of a film text while co-constructing the experience and meaning of the film spectatorship. Through a collection of interdisciplinary theoretical and methodological approaches, this volume considers the acts that occur before, during, and after the engagement in an attempt to understand spectatorship as the experience of engaging with a text. With this collection of empirical studies, we interrogate, discuss, and reason about what leads film spectators to interpret and appropriate film texts in actual situations of engagement. We do this to understand how film spectators make sense of what they see, hear, and experience. We consider how these different methods and methodologies further our scholarly pursuit to answer research questions, validate hypotheses, and test theories. This book consists of a scholarly conversation across theories and methods regarding real studies. By discussing the benefits and drawbacks these scholars experienced in their studies, we hope to inspire future scholars to engage in their own empirical research into understanding film spectators and film spectatorship.

The Theory of the Implied Spectator Over the years, many thought experiments, theorizations, and close readings of films have yielded the film spectator as a concept worthy of study. Film audiences were first studied in an attempt to address concerns about the susceptibility of vulnerable populations to mediated messages; along with radio audiences, film audiences represented one of the earliest examples of mass audiences, and thus, they received academic attention that aimed to uncover how much they were being influenced by these mass communication media (Christie 2012; Gripsrud and Lavik 2008; Meers 2001). Prior to the 1970s, however, there existed no systematic theorizing on the role of the film spectator in film reception. This does not mean there were no attempts to account for and include the film spectator when discussing film either as an aesthetic piece or a “new” medium. Janet Staiger’s (1992; 2002) accounting of spectator theory demonstrates how classical film theorists conceived of the spectator. Both formalists—who desired to elevate film as an aesthetic piece separate from reality—and realists—who desired to develop film as an avenue to knowing reality—constructed the

4

Making Sense of Cinema

spectator as a passive participant who receives either the unreality or the reality of the film. Such concepts of passive film spectators aligned with concepts from mass communication theories at the time, in which individuals were considered to be impacted in the same way by the mediated message, as if by a “magic bullet” or “hypodermic needle” (Reinhard and Dervin 2009). However, not all classical film theorists saw film spectators as passive recipients of mediated messages. In developing his theories on montage editing, Sergei Eisenstein regarded people as potentially active spectators, and was concerned they could potentially misread the sociopolitical commentaries of films if they did not share the same historical and contextual background (Bordwell 1985; Staiger 1992; 2002). Eisenstein exhibited concern over how film spectators’ expectations and inferences, as based on their personal backgrounds, might disrupt their reception of the intended meaning of his texts. While similar to Eisenstein, Hugo Münsterberg’s thoughts on film spectators reflected what would become a cognitive stance (Staiger 1992; 2002). Münsterberg saw the film text as supplying data that each film spectator would interact with differently based on his or her innate individual experiences and contextual background. This idea of the active film spectator, however, would become trumped by the passive conceptualization in film theory for decades to come. The reason lay with theories that developed into “screen theory” during the 1960s and 1970s: the signification of Barthesian semiotics, the ideological analysis of Althusserian structuralism, and the unconscious and symbolic concept from Lacanian psychoanalysis (Mayne 1993/1995; Moores 1994; Sweeney 1995; Plantinga 2009). This contemporary linguistic theory (Staiger 1992; 2002; 2005) borrowed from semiotics to explain how spectators would use codes—signs that signify meaning—in the film text to “read” it as one would read a literary work. Film theorists became concerned with how films could act as one of Louis Althusser’s (1972) ideological state apparatuses, owing to the capitalistic industry from whence the majority originated, and could thereby turn spectators into subjects. The film spectator was subject to the ideologies encoded into the features of the film text; that is, the film text was seen as “creating its ‘subject,’ structuring and determining the viewer’s relationship to the screen” (Marchetti 1993: 63). With Lacanian psychoanalysis (which was also one of Althusser’s inspirations) and its focus on how subjects are created through symbols and signification, theorists such as Christian Metz, Laura Mulvey, and Peter Wollen focused on analyzing the textual cues of films to understand the film spectator’s subject position and thereby expected reactions to the text.

Introduction

5

From these theories came the idea that textual features would constantly and continuously bring the spectator into the flow of the film. Such suturing was thought to occur as a film hailed a film spectator, or subject, through specific textual and production features that provide positions the viewer can take in relation to the film’s content (Marchetti 1993; Moores 1994). For example, as the camera provided the means by which the film spectator entered the world of the film, the camera’s position became a focus of analysis, leading to Mulvey’s theorization of the “male gaze” (Mulvey 1975). Hence, the term for this trajectory of structuralist theories was apparatus theory (Plantinga 1995). Originally developed by Jean-Louis Baudry (1974), apparatus theory argues that the structures of cinema, such as the darkness of the movie theater and the centrality of the movie screen, interpellate spectators as existing within specific psychoanalytic and ideological positions (Sweeney 1995). The nature of film was thought to be so powerful that it represented a special experience, which resulted in what some theorists considered a visual primacy that offset film from other media. According to these theories, if the medium was different than the visual primacy of film, then the supposed impact on the film spectator’s reception would be different; what was important in determining reception was not the individual but the nature of the film spectatorship. In empowering the camera and creating a sutured viewer, however, the film spectator was no longer considered an active individual who brings his or her background and knowledge into the viewing, outside of the unconscious interpretive baggage allowed by Lacanian psychoanalysis. Instead, the film spectator became conceptualized as an “ideal reader,” constructed by the text of the film and existing nowhere but in the moment(s) of their engagement with that particular text (Moores 1994). There were no expected differences among viewers as spectators were all expected to respond to the film’s features in the same manner (Marchetti 1993). Film spectatorship was therefore presumed to be universal and ahistorical, matching with the ideological intentions of the film, as revealed by academic critics, who somehow managed to avoid becoming subject to the same type of passive spectatorship as everyone else. Indeed, the various theories regarding how the ideal film spectator should respond to a text probably say more about the interpretive baggage of the critic(s) insisting on this reading than the actual reception on the part of the proposed ideal spectator (Staiger 1992). Although apparatus theories continued into the 1980s, with theorists such as Mary Ann Doane claiming the only proper analysis for spectatorship was the

6

Making Sense of Cinema

text, it did meet with criticism (Allen 2006). Part of that criticism arose from another theory of reception from the 1970s: British cultural studies, and Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding theory. Hall’s theory allowed for the Althusserians’ ideological construction of film spectatorship, but it also endowed the film spectator with the potential to become an active reader who brought individual differences into their engagement with the film text, allowing them to accept, negotiate, or resist the dominant meanings of the text (Hall 1973/1993; Staiger 1992; 2002). Research following the encoding/decoding theory grew in the 1980s to focus on ethnographies as a way of analyzing the film spectator as part of a larger, contextual social group, determined by such demographics as gender, class, and ethnicity (Moores 1994) or a different type of subculture (Marchetti 1993). Thus, the encoding/decoding approach to media reception allows for an active film spectator, though one who may need to possess the competence required to resist manipulation by the ideologies encoded into the media text. While many of these cultural studies researchers focused on television texts, film studies researchers appropriated the theoretical and empirical approach to challenge apparatus theories by examining how film spectators actually respond to film texts, and the extent to which their different circumstances impact their reception (Mayne 1993/1995). Yet such contextual theories possessed their own problems. While the ideal spectator was no longer presumed to be created by the film text, spectatorship was considered a product of social and historical factors outside of the film spectator’s control. Such theories conceived the film spectator as an ideal representative of the social or historical category to which the researcher placed them (Bortolussi and Dixon 2003; Staiger 1992; 2002). Thus the actual spectator’s engagement with the film text remained elusive. While the cultural studies trajectory began to be applied in film studies, another trajectory grew from cognitive psychology’s rise, also in the 1970s (Gripsrud and Lavik 2008). In the 1980s, theorists such as David Bordwell, Noël Carroll, and Edward Branigan turned to cognitivism to outline the specific meaning-making strategies film spectators employ to comprehend and interpret the film text (Bordwell 1985; 1989; Sweeney 1995). A basic assumption of this trajectory states that the meaning of the film text does not originate within the text itself, but rather the spectator must construct the meaning, building on cues provided by the text (Barbatsis 2005; Bordwell 1985; 1989; Staiger 1992; 2002). According to Bordwell (1989), the film spectator must be active, an architect of sorts, searching for information to complete the task of reading the film text, and thus, achieve the goal of making sense of the text. In other words, a film text only

Introduction

7

contains meaning if film spectators actively construct meaning from the textual cues (Sweeney 1995). This approach sees the application of principles from cognitive psychology, namely heuristics and schemata, to outline the specific meaning-making strategies film spectators employ to comprehend and interpret the film text by constructing the meaning of the text (Staiger 2002). According to this theory, film texts contain cues that can range from narrative elements to visual and auditory components. Active, competent spectators can match those textual cues to the strategies they have learned and developed as preexisting scripts, or schema, that have helped them make sense of their lives (Bordwell 1989). Employing such schema allows the film spectator to make sense of the film’s meaning. The cognitive psychology theory of film spectatorship has led to the invention of related and further interdisciplinary theories of film spectators, such as participant (Gerrig and Prentice 1996), ecological (Anderson 1996), radical constructivism (Redfern 2004), neurocinematics (Hasson et  al. 2008), and psychocinematics (Shimamura 2013). Another trajectory focuses not on the specific cognitive processes the spectator engages in, but on the pleasure received by watching the film. Part of this trajectory can be found in the realm of how psychoanalysis treats the spectator’s fantasy (Mayne 1993/1995), which removes the problem of fixed positions that plagued apparatus theories. Pleasure becomes something the actual film spectator constructs from the film text by identifying with positions other than the one dictated by the camera’s placement. Another part of this trajectory aligns with the cognitivist approach. Carl Plantinga (1995) outlined five sources for spectator pleasure: orientation and discovery; visceral experience; empathy and character identification; narrational structure; and reflexive criticism and appreciation. His discussion as to how these pleasures occur aligns him with Bordwell’s discussion regarding how meaning results from a reading of the textual cues. Here, pleasures can result from cognitive or affective reactions to the film, from the meaning-making Bordwell outlines, to the emotional reaction to the narrative, and even to the recognition of the film’s intertextuality. Plantinga (2009) has termed his approach the cognitive-perceptual theory. Across structuralist, psychoanalytic, cultural studies, cognitive, and affective theories, much has been said about the ideal, implied, competent, sutured, subject, historical, hypothetical, and active film spectator (Bortolussi and Dixon 2003; Staiger 1992). Yet theorization requires testing in the furnaces of reality; arguing for the nature of things must be subjected to the validity and reliability

8

Making Sense of Cinema

of testing made possible through empirical studies (van Peer, Hakemulder and Zyngier 2007). Such attempts to objectively validate theories contribute to the advancement of knowledge, and prevent the possibility of speculation overtaking empiricism and potentially leading to contradictory and divergent untested theories (Bortolussi and Dixon 2003). The ideal spectator must be compared to the actual spectator to determine the success of any theory to explain film spectatorship. The theories discussed above have all focused on defining the film spectator in relationship to the film text. The next section considers how film scholars have sought to understand the film spectator in relationship to the context of actual historical or situated reception.

The Study of the Actual Spectator While the cultural, cognitive, and affective trajectories do account for the active role of the spectator in engaging the text, a text-centric theory of spectatorship remains. For example, Martin Barker (2006) argues cognitivists such as Bordwell are only interested in the formation of the film and “the conditions of comprehension” (134), or in the case of the affectivists, the conditions of pleasuring. The implied reader becomes a competent reader (Staiger 1992), and loses the variety of factors brought into the engagement by the film spectator that may account for the response and reception. The social, cultural, and historical contexts and other interpretive baggage disappear as the film spectator is presumed to be able to make sense of a text using the cues the text provides for this purpose. Judith Mayne (1993/1995) called for more empirical work to be done in this field as a challenge to the research that attempts to address this conceptualization of the film spectator. Thus, while focusing on the spectator as an active sense-maker represented a commendable theoretical advancement, and the calls for empirical film studies can be traced back to the 1990s, more empirical work needs to be done that is “based on real evidence, that is, on evidence from the real world, which can be inspected by anyone” (van Peer, Hakemulder and Zyngier 2007: 7). Increased alignment with the larger media studies field of reception study could provide for this empiricism. Especially when considering Hall’s work in cultural studies, overlaps between film studies’ focus on spectators and spectatorship and the larger media studies field of reception studies do occur. Reception studies utilize reader-response theory, reader-oriented criticism, reception aesthetics, and reception theory to

Introduction

9

focus on the interaction between the individual and the text, where the text could be literary, visual, or auditory (Barbatsis 2005; Bortolussi and Dixon 2003; Staiger 1992). Interpretation, appropriation, sense-making, and meaning-making all function as part of this interaction. Of course, it can be difficult to understand the interpretive practices and processes of reception due to the problems that can arise when dealing with human subjects (e.g., memory, self-reflexivity, social desirability). Jackie Stacey (1994) may have identified the reason that film scholars do not conduct more empirical research when she contends that academic critics occasionally feel their position as the expert researcher does not allow them to reliably and ethically analyze the interpretations of the film spectator. When we doubt our ability to study people, then we are less inclined to do so. Of course, such hesitancy could also result from the fact that reception research frequently proves quite difficult, often prohibitively so, and therefore, researchers opt to engage in other methods of study or focus instead on theory. Decades of research in cultural studies and social sciences exist that could potentially address these doubts, and some film scholars have attempted to do just that. Staiger (1992; 2002) identifies three approaches researchers have taken to answer questions regarding film spectatorship: text-activated, spectatoractivated, and context-activated. Text-activated includes the theories previously mentioned, wherein explaining spectatorship depends on understanding the film text via an illustration of the features intended to have an impact on the ideal or competent spectator. Spectator-activated includes the theories and methodologies (such as encoding/decoding and ethnography) that promote the spectator as actively engaging with a text within the parameters of some psychologically, socially, or culturally defined category. Here again is an ideal spectator, a representative of a larger group, who is expected to embody and enact universal interpretations due to their group membership. Seeing problems with the idealization of the spectator in both of these approaches, Staiger argues for the context-activated approach, which understands interpretation, meaningmaking, and sense-making as contextually bound by the historical period in which film spectatorship occurs. Meaning does not belong primarily to either the film text or the film spectator, but through the interaction of the two in some specific context of engagement (Barbatsis 2005; Mayne 1993/1995; Plantinga 2009). This historical focus has been seen in an array of research since the 1990s, with the work of Staiger (1992; 2000), Stacey (1994), Miriam Hansen (1991), Robert C. Allen (1990; 2006) and others looking into historical records to parse

10

Making Sense of Cinema

out what actual film audiences and spectators thought, felt, and did in regards to films. Staiger (1992) argues that doing so allows the researcher to better understand the interpretive frames the film spectators could draw on to understand the text, since these frames are influenced by the historical age; that is, the social, cultural, and material aspects of that historical period provide information the film spectator could utilize to make sense of the film text. In a way, Staiger’s interpretive frames appear similar to Bordwell’s use of schema or reception studies researcher Stanley E. Fish’s (1976) interpretive communities as they all concern the identification of interpretation strategies to make sense of a text. And yet, without interaction between the researcher and researchee, there can be no guarantee that a film spectator’s interpretation, appropriation, sensemaking and meaning-making are being adequately understood by the researcher. Such reception work runs the risk of being more speculative than contemporary work (Plantinga 2009). Historical reception studies can provide valuable data, and represent an important empirical approach, but even more should be done. Historical reception studies focus on the analysis of “found data,” including published critical reviews, fan writings, previously reported surveys, and so forth. In addition to found data analysis, there exist numerous methods and methodologies that can be used to understand the reception of actual spectators. The benefit of doing empirical studies is the ability to align with other research, concepts, theories, methods, and methodologies in reception studies, whether from cultural studies or social sciences. Film as a medium is rapidly disappearing in the twenty-first century as filmmakers increasingly embrace digital filmmaking technologies, and ever more film spectators opt to watch movies via digital technologies. At the same time, film spectatorship as an experience moves further into our domestic and private spheres, often as a result of the same digital technologies causing the extinction of the physical medium of film, and we could learn more about this experience by drawing on what has been learned about other media reception. Conversely, what we learn about engaging with film could be applied to other media (Meers 2001). Understanding film as just another mediated experience allows for comparisons of concepts, processes, and methods for conducting research and understanding how people make sense of the film text and how they engage with it. Bridging the gaps among humanities, cultural studies, and social sciences can help all disciplines study, understand, and explain the human conditions of engaging with themselves, others, and the world via mediated texts.

Introduction

11

The past decade, in particular, has seen an uptick in film studies that employ the range of the methods and methodologies from reception studies to test the numerous film spectatorship theories that have been developed. Jun Tang (2008) and Doug Meyer (2009) utilized questionnaires to understand, respectively, the reception of subtitles and gender ideology. Darren Waldron (2004) combined questionnaires with interviews and focus groups to understand how spectators negotiated their positions in response to representations of lesbianism. Christian Gudehus, Stewart Anderson and David Keller (2010) conducted interviews to measure the recall of a historical drama, while Juan-José Igartua and Carlos Muñiz (2008) used interviews to understand people’s identification with film characters. Sara L. Friedman (2006) produced an ethnographic account of how Chinese spectators identified with the representation of their ethnic group. Monika Suckfüll (2000; 2010) has utilized the physiological measurements of heart rate and skin conductance in experiments on reactions to key narrative moments. In different ways, Bradford Owen and Matt Riggs (2012), Holger Schramm and Werner Wirth (2010), Pilar Orero (2008), and Stephan Schwan, Friedrich W. Hesse and Bärbel Garsoffky (1998) have manipulated aspects of films and measured how people responded to these differences in their experiments. Stephan Schwan and Sermin Ildirar (2010) have compared people with little experience watching films to those who have more experience. This sampling of the current literature on film reception studies demonstrates the array of theories, methods, and methodologies that align with the research that has been and continues to be done in other reception studies. These studies have been published in a variety of journals, representing an array of disciplines previously identified as useful in understanding both reception and film spectatorship. This collection represents an attempt to bring together this array of research on film spectators and film spectatorship, and to present them as a dialogue meant to highlight the journeys, struggles, and successes experienced by the researchers who choose to embark on such research.

The Goal of This Collection This volume builds on the work collected in others like it regarding film spectators and film spectatorship. Other scholars have written books on the theories of film spectatorship (e.g., Bordwell 1989; Plantinga 2009) and the need for empirical studies to test such theories (e.g., Shimamura 2013; Staiger 1992).

12

Making Sense of Cinema

While other authors have presented empirical studies, they were focused on historical spectators with whom they have not had firsthand experience (e.g., Christie 2012; Staiger 1992), or they have written about contemporary experiences but did not provide details as to how the original research was conducted (e.g., Shimamura 2013). Following in the footsteps of Bruce A. Austin (1983; 1985), this book brings together different empirical approaches to focus the discussion on the details of their empirical work—on what was done, how it was done, and why—to empirically understand how film spectators make sense of their spectatorship of film texts. This edited volume contains essays of empirical studies from a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives that together represent an interdisciplinary presentation and discussion of studying film spectatorship and the benefits and drawbacks of the various empirical approaches used to do so. With different empirical approaches, our essayists seek to illuminate how the film spectator makes sense of the film text or the ways in which the text fits into the spectator’s everyday life. Overall, we hope this collection illuminates how the empirical study of film spectatorship hinges on an interaction analysis of film spectator, film text, and the film spectatorship situation, and answers the questions regarding how people make sense of these experiences going into them, while in them, and after exiting them. By gathering various approaches to interaction analysis and honestly discussing their drawbacks and benefits, we hope to inspire future scholars in film studies and other fields, and provide them with the foundational knowledge required to conduct their own empiricism. The range of empirical approaches presented in this collection include ethnographies, focus groups, interviews, questionnaires, historical found data analyses, qualitative experiments, and physiological experiments. Annie Dell’Aria utilizes an ethnographic approach to understand audience responses to art films exhibited in public spaces. Jessica Hughes combines ethnography with phenomenology to understand the collective experience of being a film festival audience. Darren Waldron employs questionnaires to understand Spanish and British responses to French queer cinema. Alexander Geimer uses a specific form of focus groups to understand how young people critically interpret and appropriate the movie Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999). Martin Barker draws on the global Lord of the Rings questionnaire to understand how and why people identify with fictional characters. Amanda C. Fleming analyzes the found data of a historical study to understand children’s cinema-going habits in the 1920s. Andrea Rassell and her research team use the physiological measurement of eye

Introduction

13

tracking to gauge the importance of sound as textual cues, while Craig Batty and his team use the same procedure to understand how spectators’ respond to the unreality of animated films. Katalin Bálint and András Bálint Kovács employ talk aloud protocols in an experiment to understand spectators’ responses to film characters. CarrieLynn D. Reinhard utilizes self-interviewing protocols in an experiment to understand how people can be simultaneously entangled in and critical of a movie. Sermin Ildirar conducts a qualitative experiment to understand how cognitive film theory applies to an art film. Finally, Thorsten Kluss and colleagues employ eye tracking to explore ways of gathering evidence concerning the effects of narrative expectations on spectators’ interpretative strategies. This collection focuses on understanding how to conduct film reception studies. In their essays, the contributors have been asked not to focus on their findings but rather on the journey of how they got to those findings. The goal is to demonstrate what can be done—what can be studied and how, to what end, and with what benefits and drawbacks—when applying empiricism to make sense of film spectators and film spectatorship. We focus on the journey of research rather than its end so as to help guide other scholars down their own empirical paths.

References Allen, R. C. (1990), “From Exhibition to Reception: Reflections on the Audience in Film History,” Screen, 31 (4): 347–56. Allen, R. C. (2006), “Relocating American Film History: The ‘Problem’ of the Empirical,” Cultural Studies, 20 (1): 48–88. Althusser, L. (1972), Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays, New York: Monthly Review Press. Anderson, J. D. (1996), The Reality of Illusion: An Ecological Approach to Cognitive Film Theory, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Austin, B. A. (1983), The Film Audience: An International Bibliography of Research, London: Scarecrow. Austin, B. A., ed. (1985), Current Research in Film: Audiences, Economics and Law, Norwood, NJ : Ablex Publishing Corporation. Bailey, J. (2014), “The Purple Rose of Cairo,” in The Ultimate Woody Allen Film Companion, 62–64, Minneapolis: Voyageur Press. Barbatsis, G. (2005), “Reception Theory,” in K. Smith, S. Moriarty, G. Barbatsis and K. Kenney (eds), Handbook of Visual Communication: Theory, Methods and Media, 271–93, Mahwah, NJ : Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

14

Making Sense of Cinema

Barker, M. (2006), “I Have Seen the Future and It Is Not Here Yet . . .; Or, On Being Ambitious for Audience Research,” The Communication Review, 9: 123–41. Baudry, J. L. (1974), “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” trans. A. Williams, Film Quarterly, 28 (2): 39–47. Bordwell, D. (1985), Narration in the Fiction Film, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Bordwell, D. (1989), Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema, Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press. Bortolussi, M. and P. Dixon (2003), Psychonarratology: Foundations for the Empirical Study of Literary Response, New York: Cambridge University Press. Christie, I., ed. (2012), “Introduction: In Search of Audiences,” in Audiences: Defining and Researching Screen Entertainment Reception, 11–21, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Fish, S. E. (1976), “Interpreting the Variorum,” Critical Inquiry, 2 (3): 465–86. Friedman, S. L. (2006), “Watching Twin Bracelets in China: The Role of Spectatorship and Identification in an Ethnographic Analysis of Film Reception,” Cultural Anthropology, 21 (4): 603–32. Gerrig, R. J. and D. A. Prentice (1996), “Notes on Audience Response,” in D. Bordwell and N. Carroll (eds), Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, 388–403, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Gripsrud, J. and E. Lavik (2008), “Film Audiences,” In J. Donald and M. Renov (eds), The Sage Handbook of Film Studies, 454–70, Thousand Oaks, CA : Sage Publications. Gudehus, C., S. Anderson, and D. Keller (2010), “Understanding Hotel Rwanda: A Reception Study,” Memory Studies, 3 (4): 344–63. Hall, S. (1973/1993), “Encoding, decoding,” in S. During (ed.), The Cultural Studies Reader, 90–103, New York: Routledge. Hansen, M. (1991), Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film, Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press. Hasson, U., O. Landesman, B. Knappmeyer, I. Vallinese, N. Rubin, and D. J. Heeger (2008), “Neurocinematics: The Neuroscience of Film,” Projections, 2 (1): 1–26. Igartua, J. J. and C. Muñiz (2008), “Identification with the Characters and Enjoyment with Feature Films: An Empirical Research,” Comunicacion y Sociedad, 21 (1): 25–51. Marchetti, G. (1993); “Subcultural Studies and the Film Audience: Rethinking the Film Viewing Context,” in B. A. Austin (ed.), Current Research in Film: Audiences, Economics, and Law (Volume 2), 62–79, Norwood, NJ : Ablex Publishing Corporation. Mayne, J. (1993/1995), “Paradoxes of Spectatorship,” in L. Williams (ed.), Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, 155–83, New Brunswick, NJ : Rutgers University Press. Meers, P. (2001), “Is There an Audience in the House? New Research Perspectives on (European) Film Audiences,” Journal of Popular Film and Television, 29 (3): 138–44. Meyer, D. (2009), “ ‘She Acts Out in Inappropriate Ways’: Students’ Evaluations of Violent Women in Film,” Journal of Gender Studies, 18 (1): 63–73.

Introduction

15

Moores, S. (1994), “Texts, Readers and Contexts of Reading: Developments in the Study of Media Audiences,” in D. Graddol and O. Boyd-Barrett (eds), Media Texts: Authors and Readers, 256–72, Philadelphia: Multilingual Matters Ltd. Mulvey, L. (1975), “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen, 16 (3): 6–18. Orero, P. (2008), “Three Different Receptions of the Same Film: ‘The Pear Stories Project’ Applied to Audio Description,” European Journal of English Studies, 12 (2): 179–93. Owen, B. and M. Riggs (2012), “Transportation, Need for Cognition, and Affective Disposition as Factors in Enjoyment of Film Narratives,” Scientific Study of Literature, 2 (1): 128–49. Plantinga, C. (1995), “Movie Pleasures and the Spectator’s Experience: Toward a Cognitive Approach,” Film and Philosophy, vol. 2: 3–19. Plantinga, C. (2009), Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience, Los Angeles: University of California Press. Redfern, N. (2004), “Communication and Meaning in the Cinema,” Constructivism in the Human Sciences, 9 (2): 39–48. Reinhard, C. D. and B. Dervin. (2009), “Media Uses and Gratifications,” in W. F. Eadie (ed.), 21st Century Communication, 506–15, Thousand Oaks, CA : Sage Publications. Schramm, H. and W. Wirth (2010), “Exploring the Paradox of Sad-Film Enjoyment: The Role of Multiple Appraisals and Meta-Appraisals,” Poetics, 38 (3): 319–35. Schwan, S., F. W. Hesse, and B. Garsoffky (1998), “The Relationship between Formal Filmic Means and the Segmentation Behavior of Film Viewers,” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, 42 (2): 237–49. Schwan, S. and S. Ildirar (2010), “Watching Film for the First Time: How Adult Viewers Interpret Perceptual Discontinuities in Film,” Psychological Science, 21 (7): 970–6. Shimamura, A. P. (2013), Psychocinematics: Exploring Cognition at the Movies, New York: Oxford University Press. Stacey, J. (1994), Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship in 1940s and 1950s Britain, New York: Routledge. Staiger, J. (1992), Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema, Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press. Staiger, J. (2002), “Reception Studies in Film and Television,” in G. Turner (ed.), The Film Cultures Reader, 46–72, New York: Routledge. Staiger, J. (2005), Media Reception Studies, New York: New York University Press. Suckfüll, M. (2000), “Film Analysis and Psychophysiology: Effects of Moments of Impact and Protagonists,” Media Psychology, 2, 269–301. Suckfüll, M. (2010), “Films that Move Us: Moments of Narrative Impact in an Animated Short Film,” Projections, 4 (2): 41–63. Sweeney, K. (1995), “Constructivism in Cognitive Film Theory,” Film and Philosophy, 2: 33–44.

16

Making Sense of Cinema

Tang, J. (2008), “A Cross-Cultural Perspective on Production and Reception of Disney’s Mulan Through its Chinese Subtitles,” European Journal of English Studies, 12 (2): 149–62. Van Peer, W., J. Hakemulder, and S. Zyngier (2007), Muses and Measures: Empirical Research Methods for the Humanities, Newcastle, UK : Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Waldron, D. (2004), “Incorporating Qualitative Audience Research into French Film Studies: The Case of Gazon maudit (Balasko, 1995),” Studies in French Cinema, 4 (2): 121–33.

2

Spectatorship in Public Space The Moving Image in Public Art Annie Dell’Aria Hanover College

Introduction The contemporary city is marked by a proliferation of screens; moving images flash before a mobile, distracted, and ever-shifting audience in spaces as iconic as New York’s Times Square or as mundane as a suburban commuter train station. Often associated with the increased reach of advertising in daily life, the proliferation of moving image screens throughout many cities has become synonymous with the encroachment of capitalist and private interests into public space. As early as the beginning of the electrified city in the early twentieth century, communities voiced concern and opposition over the intrusion of electrified signage on public space (Bogart 1999: 79–124). Still, moving images increasingly lit up city streets throughout the industrialized world. In the wake of television and advertising’s explosion in the postwar years, Guy Debord’s (1967/1994) phrase “society of the spectacle” came to define a world in which “the commodity completes its colonization of social life,” a notion often attached to the encroachment of screens and advertising imagery into public and private space (29). While Debord’s actual claims about the spectacle are far more vague, the negative connotation of the mere term spectacle continues to haunt the discourse around moving image-riddled public spaces like Times Square. Spectacular images, however, have many properties, including the ability to enchant, move, and inspire us. A narrow view of our relationship to public screens (i.e., one that views anything approaching the spectacle as negative) disallows two very important possibilities: 1) the ability of spectators to construct their own paths and “switch channels” as they navigate these spaces; and 2) the capacity for public screens to bring art into the public realm. Indeed, in the past three decades, artists have increasingly turned to the public realm in media projects, continuing a long

18

Making Sense of Cinema

history of projected light, moving images, and screens in public space (Huhtamo 2009; McQuire 2008). Clearly, moving images and screens are ubiquitous forms for art in the public realm, though little research attempts to understand these projects as both works of art and as particular forms of moving image spectatorship.1 What arises when the moving images are encountered in public spaces are specific situations.2 The context, content, and structure of the work, in addition to the specificity of the spectator, construct each situation. The meaning of the work of public art is thus embedded within that particular configuration of space, place, image, sound, and spectator. These factors become complex and variable in public space, though certain modalities and affordances can be articulated. By this I mean the ways in which a work’s mode of address generates (or at least inspires) a particular relationship between viewer and screen. In my longer research, I chart three typologies of public art, analyzing distinct types of situations created by moving images and screens in relationship to the eye, body, and place.3 These three categories—visual enchantment, ludic interface, and fabric of place—inform my larger reading of moving image-based public art, a study informed (whenever possible) by a ground-level analysis of spectators in action. This approach folds observation of real, live people in public spaces into its discussion of a work of art’s structure, meaning, and significance. In this chapter, I explore the strengths and weaknesses of this ground-level approach to researching spectatorship. I forge a path through the literature on both screen cultures and public art that looks to examine unique screen situations with an interdisciplinary approach, understanding each work of public art on its own specific terms. I conclude with a set of case studies that illuminate how this approach can work in practice. This chapter outlines a method of understanding spectators by not only observing them and conversing with them, but also by becoming one of them—a passerby, if you will. Rather than conducting scientific experiments to measure the success or failure of a work to transmit a certain message, I find it more helpful to engage with the viewers and the work more organically, understanding the moving image’s particular situation without losing sight of an art historian’s reliance on a work of art’s formal properties.

Public Art and Public Screens In analyzing specific situations in public art, the historian/critic/researcher must be careful to avoid falling into trite divisions of “success” or “failure” determined

Spectatorship in Public Space

19

by various measures of engagement. Art historian Cher Knight (2008) argues for a populist conception of public art that looks to the “quality and impact of [art’s] exchanges with audiences” that hinge “on art’s ability to extend reasonable and fair opportunities for members of the public to understand and negotiate their own relationships with it” (ix). In this reading of public art, a work’s significance lies neither in its formal or political content, nor in wide acceptance or comprehensibility, but rather in the exchange between the work of art and members of the public—an exchange that comes out of its particular situation in space and time. Exchange, a term that is intimately connected to commerce, suggests that images and screens in public space create their own economy.4 This makes images not static signifiers locked in iconographic meaning, but rather actors within a larger matrix of meaning, or in W. J. T. Mitchell’s (2006) terms, desiring subjects. Examining public art in terms of its exchanges not only gives much needed attention to the multivalent possibilities of its particular situation, but also avoids another common generalization in the critical analysis of contemporary public art: relying too heavily on measurable “good” provided for the community. What Claire Bishop (2012) refers to as the “ethical turn” in the criticism of socially engaged art risks marginalizing the aesthetic autonomy of a work of art in favor of discussing it only in “positivist terms . . . focusing on demonstrable impact” (18). While Bishop speaks about projects that call for a much more direct collaboration with the spectator than the works I analyze, the dangers of relying too heavily on measurability of positive impact on the community remain in the critical analysis of nearly all art placed in the public realm. Furthermore, considering the negative implications of spectacle associated with images in public space, there is a similarly problematic privileging of criticality with public works that operate in the same spaces as advertising. Moving images in public spaces clearly interact with spectators far differently than they do in the theater or even in the spaces of the home. We encounter images and screens in public space intentionally, unintentionally, fully, partially, or not at all. Unlike the predetermined architecture and seating arrangements of the cinema and domestic television, the body’s relationship to the screen in public space is ever-changing and fluid. How spectators negotiate and construct meaning from a work of public art is contingent on the individual spectator as well as her specific temporal and locational situation. With such fleeting glimpses at the works in question, any empirical study of spectatorship encounters myriad logistical complications and obstacles, and almost always hovers dangerously

20

Making Sense of Cinema

close to promoting generalizations. However, to look at public art without examining how it generates exchanges with actual people would be to consider them in a vacuum and not as public art. A study of moving image-based public art, then, must necessarily engage with spectators’ response and engagement, but not at the expense of losing sight of each work’s unique formal structure and particular placement within a broader public context and space. As Anna McCarthy (2001) argued about television, the “material elements” of a screen’s setting in public space play as significant a part in the “positioning of subjects both in the site of viewing and within wider geographies of power and knowledge” as the content delivered by the screen (9). A screen’s positioning affords a certain mode of spectatorship, though individuals’ responses may differ from those anticipated. We can chart a similar shift when art film and video is screened in a gallery space instead of a theater, as discussed by Douglas Crimp (2012) in his analysis of Andy Warhol’s Empire (1964). Empire’s post-theatrical later life has restructured the relationship among image, duration, and spectator by relegating the film to the background, running on a loop in a gallery where viewers pass by momentarily in a gallery or public space, creating an optional mode of viewing rather than enduring the film’s eight hour running time from start to finish in a theater, which was the initial mode of exhibition. BBC Big Screens programmer Kate Taylor (2006) uses Empire as an example of effective programming from public spaces, and the Empire State Building recently screened Warhol’s film in its lobby in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the film, suggesting our spatial and temporal relationship to this particular film has shifted in the past five decades. In terms of film theory’s understanding of the spectator, the late 1980s and 1990s saw two concurrent turns—the spatial turn and the bodily turn—that challenged the prevailing understanding of film in relationship to an ideal static spectator in a darkened theater. Both of these intellectual shifts essentially de-privilege the screen-as-metaphor and instead consider the screen as an actor or catalyst for a more complex situated and embodied event. Reception studies by scholars such as Janet Staiger (1992) and historical studies such as those of Miriam Hansen (1991) and Tom Gunning (2009) brought focus away from the image/text and back onto the specific spatial and social construction of the cinematic experience. Theorists Giuliana Bruno (2002) and Vivian Sobchack (1991) turn to the body’s relationship to the screen in terms of both its sense of movement and phenomenological experience. Bruno’s writings are particularly relevant for moving images in public space in how she articulates the connections

Spectatorship in Public Space

21

between the cinema and movement, turning the static voyeur of apparatus theory into the liberated voyager. These theoretical shifts happened at a moment when the moving image itself mutated from its celluloid predecessor. As explored by Anne Friedberg (1993), the rise of VCR and home video shifted our relationship to film’s linear narrative, and the screen moved into a variety of locations both public and private. Simultaneously, artists began exploring new ways of using moving images in gallery installations of the 1980s and 1990s that broke with the urge to deconstruct our relationship to screens. Kate Mondloch (2010) analyzes the range of practices artists employ in the gallery to produce particular “screen subjects” and viewing situations. Though her study does much to expand art historical discourse to include film and media theories to understand media art, she discusses hypothetical spectators rather than actual ones in her analysis of how screen situations articulate spectatorship. Infusing Mondloch’s articulation of screen subjectivity with actual analysis of spectators is particularly important in public art, in which the presumption of an ideal spectator is perhaps even more problematic than in the gallery, given that individuals encounter works of art outside of an art context. The three case studies discussed in this chapter have received scant to moderate scholarly or critical attention, mostly in the form of monographic publications or journalistic coverage of events. Doug Aitken’s SONG 1 (2012) received a good degree of critical attention, including coverage in major publications and periodicals as well as catalog essays (Brougher et al. 2012; Yi 2012). Similarly, Jaume Plensa’s Crown Fountain (2005) received not only a wealth of coverage in periodicals, but also a chapter in Timothy Gilfoyle’s (2006) book on Millennium Park and its own large-format photo-book with text by the artist and an inception-to-realization narrative written by Keith Patrick (2008). While such literature often betrays a sophisticated engagement with each artist’s oeuvre, a narrative of the projects’ completion, relationship to the history of art, and sustained interest in viewer response is almost entirely lacking outside of journalistic coverage. In the case of the BBC Big Screens, a networked broadcasting initiative in public spaces, some empirical studies have attempted to articulate varying modes of spectatorship. Funded by the BBC , these studies were mostly an attempt to gauge branding (O’Hara and Glancy 2009). Using ticker counts, observation, and brief interviews, Maxine Glancy and Kenton O’Hara’s study, though producing important knowledge about reach and branding, ignores the many possible ways art can reach a public. These studies downplay the incidental, ambient mode of

22

Making Sense of Cinema

viewing in favor of interactive content or events by taking much the same stance toward viewer engagement as traditional television, that is, measuring success by how long the viewer stays on the channel. Harry Brignull and Yvonne Rogers’ (2003) study on interaction with public screens outlines a workflow for overcoming “social embarrassment” to get viewers to engage with a screen in public space. They make a distinction between peripheral awareness, focal awareness, and direct interaction, with the ultimate goal, of course, being to increase the incidence of the third category. I argue that to look at works of art as they do would be to only understand it on the same terms as advertising—in terms of “eyeballs”—and not to look at the entire screen situation. Any attempt to quantify engagement to measure success or failure risks over-simplifying the complex diversity of exchanges that occur within the economy of images in public space. Franceso Casetti (2013) has taken theoretical steps to illuminate the ways contemporary screens operate in spaces. He outlines three metaphors that counter the frame/window/mirror triad of earlier film theory: the monitor, referring to contemporary screens’ penchant for surveillance of dispersive movements; the bulletin board or blackboard, referring to the function of screens as directors in space for a distracted viewer or a “veil on reality”; and mailbox or scrapbook, referring to the layering and accumulation of images through social media. To Casetti, the function of moving images and projections today is more akin to a display (which merely makes present images and information) than a screen (into which we abandon ourselves). However, he does not argue for the death of cinema.“We still need public spaces in which to welcome and experience images . . . these spaces can no longer exist as temples dedicated to a preestablished rite . . . they can only be meeting points between images and spectators, both of whom are in transit” (Casetti 2013: 35). What Casetti calls “meeting points” are precisely the situations within the economy of images in public space that moving image-based public art generate, and they naturally take different forms in relationship to engagement. In terms of precedents in empirical studies examining how spectators navigate the economy of images in public spaces, one study that stands out is that of Zlatan Krajina (2013), who uses ethnographic research to understand the everyday encounters commuters have with urban screens on the London Underground. Krajina also makes use of the term situational to understand how individuals navigate screens in public spaces and negotiate their own relationships to them, often “domesticating” them for particular micro-social uses beyond what advertisers intended. A great example of this is how riders on the train will

Spectatorship in Public Space

23

focus on advertisements to avoid unwanted eye contact (Krajina 2013). While my study focuses more specifically on works of art, Krajina’s emphasis on the spatiality of encounters with screens and his incorporation of spectator response informs my methodology. Rather than employing the long interview format, I find situating oneself as a fellow viewer allows access to the fleeting microexchanges that happen between viewer and screen. Rather than analyzing habits, understanding spectatorship in public art is perhaps best understood as an analysis of exchanges.

Case Studies Given the fleeting nature of moving images in public space, empirical research of a purely scientific kind would either be near impossible or subject to manipulation of data. Anyone who responds at all to a stranger’s approach in public space is somewhat self-selecting in terms of being comfortable sharing thoughts on art. Furthermore, given the few measurable metrics of physical engagement (e.g., “eyeballs,” footfall count, seconds stopped in front of a screen, etc.), a quantitative empirical study would necessarily relegate the study of art to the overly simplistic success or failure concerns that guide advertising. While the methods of advertising and its attraction of attention are surely no stranger to artists working to make an impact on the public realm (Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer are two clear examples), to use such metrics as a measure of art criticism would be to misunderstand how different types of public art can extend Knight’s (2008) “reasonable and fair opportunities” for meaningful exchanges. Similarly, spectator interviews have a tendency to fall into the same traps of success and failure, and public art itself has often been the fodder for over-hyped and often misinterpreted conflict between the “art world” and “the public.”5 Nevertheless, the incredible reach of public art and the impact it can have on communities should compel serious scholarly engagement, something that has been lacking overall in the field (Senie 2003). Furthermore, given the radically different parameters in which public art is received by the public, reception studies and audience responses should guide or at least inform any scholarly study of public art. Over the past four years, I’ve employed questionnaires, interviews, and on-site observation to explore spectatorship, which I see as an essential component to understanding public art’s significance and function

24

Making Sense of Cinema

within its broader context. My means of studying spectatorship stems from an understanding of the structure of the work in question: its situation. To comprehend this, I first situate myself as a spectator/participant, a fellow passerby. By engaging with the work on its own terms, I can then evaluate the engagement of others in the shared space around me. In some instances, conversations can spark wonderful contributions. In others where sound is important or space is cramped, interviewing fellow spectators is both less feasible and actually affects the responses as the interviewer feels like an intruder. There are certain questions I ask across works of art, such as whether or not the visitor is encountering a work for the first time and how he or she came across it; other questions are guided by the specific nature of the piece. In the end, the approach I employ is both observational and ethnographic: interviewing subjects not to evaluate data against a control set, but rather sparking conversation to understand how people engage with something in the here and now. With this observational data, I can discover potential film and art critical scaffolds for analysis.

Case Study 1: SONG 1 and the Seduction of Cinema Doug Aitken’s SONG 1 (2012) transformed the surface of Washington, DC ’s Hirshhorn Museum into a massive cinematic screen, and its surrounding gardens and streetscape into an open theater. The work, a high production-value digital film featuring multiple renditions of the American standard “I Only Have Eyes for You,” is nonnarrative, includes sound, and is shown on a loop. In terms of its basic content, it was not dissimilar from the gallery installations of Aitken and others that have dominated the contemporary art scene since the 1990s. Aitken also worked in public projections five years prior with Sleepwalkers (2007) projected on the surface of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. What makes SONG 1 an interesting case, however, is the peculiar form of its image and screen: the cylindrical façade of Gordon Bunshaft’s 1974 modernist building. The image is continuous for 360 degrees across an almost perfectly smooth convex surface. The film could never be seen completely by a viewer at any single angle. SONG 1 played from sunset to midnight March 22 to May 20, illuminating and serenading a part of the city that is normally dark and quiet during nonworking hours. I visited the work on two cool evenings in April to conduct my observations, take notes, and engage viewers in discussion. First, however, I

Spectatorship in Public Space

25

watched an entire cycle of the film and explored the multiple viewing points around the museum’s perimeter. Speaking with roughly two dozen visitors, I ascertained that the work most definitely fit with the museum director’s goal to expand the museum’s reach to a broader audience (Koshalek 2012). When asked about how they came to be there, most respondents noted that they heard about the piece through the media, most often citing the newspaper or the local news. Furthermore, most respondents also declined to identify themselves as regular visitors to the Hirshhorn Museum. Clearly the scale of the project and the feeling of it being an event inspired most of the viewers I spoke with, rather than a chance encounter passing by, which makes sense given that this part of the city is relatively quiet in the evening. Before visiting the work, I anticipated that, similar to many of Aitken’s installation works, viewers would encounter the piece in motion, following the curved surface of the building and circumnavigating the image as they walked through the surrounding gardens. In one of his first major installations, electric earth (1999), Aitken makes this form of movement essential. In this multichannel installation, the viewer must constantly shift from room to room, screen to screen, to understand the piece. Aitken has discussed his desire in his installation work as explicitly to “break through” the linear nature of film and video, to “collapse or expand [the filmic experience] so it no longer unfolds in this narrow form” (Mondloch 2010: 49). SONG 1’s cylindrical image formally resists and even disputes conventional cinema’s immersive screen. My study of spectatorship, however, suggested viewers forged their own relationships with the image and sound, and that the cinematic situation of the work involved visitors negotiating the sculptural form of the screen with established modes of art viewing and cinema spectatorship. On both evenings, I noticed there was a rather curious distribution of viewers around the screen. While some were peppered on all sides, the vast majority of visitors were located on the east side of the site, where there were fewer trees to block the screen and less light pollution from some construction due west of the museum. Furthermore, there were pockets of viewers at specific points along the east side: one inside the sculpture garden tucked into the dark walled corner of 7th Street and Jefferson Drive next to Claes Oldenburg’s Geometric Mouse: Variation I, Scale A (1975), and a second group standing against or sitting on a ledge across Jefferson Drive. The first group adopted established codes for viewing narrative cinema outside: they did not speak or move, and some brought chairs and blankets, suggesting they intended to view the entire cycle. Notably,

26

Making Sense of Cinema

these viewers were less inclined to speak with me; wanting instead to be immersed in the film, they craned their necks to take in the image, which stretched in front of the viewer like an IMAX screen. The slightly larger group across Jefferson Drive was more talkative, and the seating/standing area slightly more illuminated under an amber-colored streetlight and not closed off by a wall like the location in the corner. Nevertheless, the position was definitely darker than the south side of the building, which featured no seating and faced the wide Independence Avenue. At the Jefferson Drive vantage point, the screen appeared more cylindrical and architectural than in the immersive proximity of the group seated closer to the building. Interestingly, the screen from this angle, the most popular among viewers, was interrupted by the balcony to the Lerner Room and partially obscured by Roy Lichtenstein’s Brushstroke (1996). Despite the disruption in the image, viewers preferred the environmental elements of the north side of the building—its darkness and seating—to the seamless image on the south side, suggesting spectators adopted normative codes for cinematic spectatorship based on proximity to the screen and surrounding environs. Though a smaller group set up across the wide 7th Street on the sidewalk next to the National Air and Space Museum and considered their spot to be “the best. . .because we can see the whole building,” their manner of engagement had an important similarity to those larger groups closer to the building: they generally stayed put. Rather than moving around the expansive, cylindrical screen in a frantic attempt to see the “entire” film, viewers eventually adopted cinema’s spectatorial stasis for a significant part of their experience in order to comprehend the work. SONG 1, unlike electric earth, acts more like a cinema-inthe-round than a cinema-path (Dell’Aria 2014). Viewers accept that they cannot see the entire screen, and instead use duration to access the entire piece. The work’s entire image, which at times is completely seamless (such as when a series of matches forms a crown around the entire surface), was also digitally broken up into five-to-seven sub-images or “screens.” These were not repeating images, as some would have a different angle or a different scene from the particular rendition of the song in question, but the separation of the 360-degree image into these segments that scanned the façade afforded the manner of viewing I witnessed among spectators. Duration, rather than movement, allows spectators a feeling of access to the entire piece. Though the screen’s shape and the nonlinear looped content of the film suggest a fluid, mobile viewer, in practice, this appears not to have been the

Spectatorship in Public Space

27

situation. Negotiating their own expectations with large-scale screens, established codes for film spectatorship, and the arresting quality of a familiar song, viewers of SONG 1 allowed themselves to be entranced by the image on the circular screen, stopping in their tracks to be carried away by the song and the images glimpsed on the expansive convex screen.

Case Study 2: Crown Fountain and the Ludic Civic Space Jaume Plensa’s Crown Fountain (2005) anchors the southwest corner of Chicago’s Millennium Park. Adjacent to Anish Kapoor’s now-iconic Cloud Gate (2006), locally known as “the Bean,” Plensa’s work is the most technologically sophisticated public work in the park. The park itself is an incredibly popular, highly interactive space that merges private and public interests, something particularly noticeable by all of the corporate branding of each pavilion or feature.6 Like the mirrored surface of Kapoor’s bean, Crown Fountain both reflects the population of Chicago and invites interaction. Two large monoliths face each other across a long, shallow pool of water. The façade of each tower features a video image of a face that serenely looks directly out toward the other, occasionally smiling and blinking before pursing their lips to unleash cooling streams of water. In the production of each video, Plensa, video artist John Manning, and a number of students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago asked the thousand participants to “blow a kiss,” an action that is itself a gesture of tactility across a distance. The portraits’ diversity reflects the demographics of Chicago and the images are to be edited every twenty years to reflect changes in the population of the city. Taken on their own, the videos would be a perfect example of slow cinema, which languishes in long takes, lack of movement, and lacks narrative cinema’s editing and pacing. In a theatrical setting, slow cinema is understood as challenging its viewers, but in a public space, the choice to view or not to view is open and fluid. In Crown Fountain, however, there is a tension between this mode of distracted viewing and an engaged sense of expectation similar to cinematic suspense. In both the daytime and nighttime visits I conducted in the summer of 2014, I noted the viewers were overwhelmingly children, mostly around age ten and younger. In terms of the children’s interaction with the screens, their attention was marked alternately by its absence and its intensity. In many instances, the children were running and playing—interacting with

28

Making Sense of Cinema

Figure 2.1 Crown Fountain at night. August 2014. Photo: Annie Dell’Aria.

each other and the water more than the screen. In others, however, this manner of play was facilitated by an intense engagement with the screens’ images. As the monumental faces blinked, moved their mouths, or slightly smiled, the children physically and vocally expressed their anticipation. One child I observed even shouted “come on!” at the screen when he was tricked into thinking a flinch was an oncoming spout of water. When the faces began to spurt, children signaled each other, yelled, and ran toward the refreshing stream of water. Based on my observations across two days and one evening, the primary function of Crown Fountain’s two displays is not to screen content, but rather to generate a new space for social play between them. As the kids play in the water—some splashing each other, lying down to mimic swimming, or anxiously awaiting the gargoyle’s spit—parents sit along the ample seating lining the work’s periphery. Seating here is less directed at screens, and more at the space between screens, where the action really happens. This is especially true during the day, when the video images are less striking than in the evening (the screen in direct sunlight is barely even visible from some angles). The screens, rather than transporting the viewer to an elsewhere, generate a ludic space for social and physical play in the here and now. I noticed in my discussions with people that fewer comments were made about the videos themselves during the daytime than the evening. A handful of those I spoke with even suggested being open to having the video content rotate or change; although they all answered with strong affirmation to the question:

Spectatorship in Public Space

29

“Would you miss it if it were gone?,” citing the work’s now-iconic place within Chicago’s public spaces. During a warm day, the most striking things about experiencing the fountain in person are the nonvisual elements, especially the smells and the sounds. Were you to close your eyes, you’d think you were at a public pool or water park. The smell of chlorinated water and the sounds of children rambunctiously playing are overwhelming, despite the fountain’s proximity to noisy Michigan Avenue. When you open your eyes, there are many visual elements that reinforce this pool-like setting: orange safety cones at the edges of the pool of water, signs cautioning against running, adults lining the surrounding seating armed with towels and sunscreen, and many children clad in swimsuits and pool shoes. Public pools have long had a connection to public social life in the United States, and were an integral part of the public initiatives funded by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s (Wiltse 2010). Plensa maintains that his concept connects to longer, historical uses of water as a connector between people and the fountain as a site of civic identity (Patrick 2008). On visiting Crown Fountain, however, the atmosphere constructed by spectators is decidedly more playful, rambunctious even, more like a public pool than classical fountain. In the evening, children similarly make up the majority of active participants in the ludic space created between the two screens, but there are also a number of teenage and adult viewers entering the water or its periphery, most often to take pictures. Like Kapoor’s Cloud Gate, Crown Fountain’s interactivity does not stop at the interactions between spectator and site, but is interwoven into social media networks through mobile photography, and viewers can frequently be spotted photographing themselves inside both works. The work’s visually seductive video and lighting elements are more striking in the evening, when both screens are more visible and the alternating colored lighting of each tower’s other three sides illuminates the inner structure of the towers. Though around a quarter of the commenters (both in the evening and night) suggested they didn’t quite “get” the video, they all suggested they liked it, however “quirky” they found it. Over half the commenters specifically mentioned the diversity of the faces as a reason for liking the work, citing it as a great reflection of the United States, Chicago, and the diversity of people who enjoy the fountain. Interestingly, when commenters discussed things they’d like to change about the work, all of their comments were directed at the content of the video, not the architectural or sculptural elements. Two commenters, who both loved the work’s interactive properties, even suggested there could be a more interactive component to the production of videos: one discussed an on-site

30

Making Sense of Cinema

studio where people could sit and instantly see their faces on the screen, another suggested a hashtag or mobile uploading platform to place “selfies” from people near and far up on the screens.7 The vertical form of Plensa’s screens even lend themselves to comparison with smartphone screens. Another commenter suggested that the images could be supplemented with scenes from around the city, saying “not everyone can get around.” In this way, commenters were thinking very seriously about this work as part of the fabric and identity of the city of Chicago. Nearly all commenters, whether they were tourists or natives, reflected on how the fountain, the nearby “Bean” and Millennium Park in general were landmark sites for the city, with many remarking particularly about interactivity and open access as hallmarks of Chicago’s public art. Respondents defined the city as being “crazy about art,” “interactive,” and “the greatest city for architecture in the world.” Overall, the people I interacted with responded differently to the media-based and the permanent architectural aspects of the work, suggesting audiences anticipate and expect change in screen content, but absorb architecture and sculpture into their permanent environment.

Case Study 3: BBC Big Screens and Creating a Sense of Place Aside from projects explicitly labeled “public art,” many other civic and public initiatives seek to bring experiences with art into the public realm through moving images, particularly the performing arts. In New York, both the NYC Ballet and the Metropolitan Opera have made public screens part of the iconic public space at Lincoln Center through both ambient installations and public screening events. In the United Kingdom, the BBC embarked on a very ambitious initiative with their Big Screens program, a network of large, permanent LED screens in city centers throughout the UK with the expressed purpose of providing a variety of informational and arts content, and generating interest for the 2012 Olympic Games. The Big Screens were a fragile collaboration of local and national bodies (city councils, the BBC , and the London Organizing Committee for the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG )) that was, in the end, untenable, as the project ended in 2013. The screens’ ability to weave between local and national identities, however, made them an interesting instance of public space broadcasting. Furthermore, they afforded a variety of viewing strategies and manners of spectatorship, including an innovative content wheel

Spectatorship in Public Space

31

that varied content throughout the day, casting aside televisual “flow” (which keeps viewers locked into one channel) to create a sense of “flux” (an everchanging platform that keeps a mobile, distracted audience from ignoring a screen). Unfortunately, when I traveled to the United Kingdom in 2013, the Big Screens program was in a state of dismantling (it was just two months before the BBC left the partnership altogether), and the screens I visited in Leeds, Birmingham, Bradford, and Plymouth were either switched off when I was there (Leeds and Birmingham) or being used for static bulletins or live sports during the day (Bradford and Plymouth). Though unable to observe the interweaving of public video art into the fluctuating screen programming firsthand, I was lucky enough, however, to attend a special event at the Plymouth screen: a live broadcast from the Royal Opera House in London. These broadcasts, which are quite noticeably sponsored by British Petroleum, link up the entire network of screens through the “liveness” of simulcast—part of the screens’ original function in relationship to the Olympic Games. Before, during intermission, and after the broadcast, there are hosts that provide both

Figure 2.2 Plymouth screen with live broadcast of Tosca from London. July 17, 2013. Photo: Annie Dell’Aria.

32

Making Sense of Cinema

backstage access to the actors and coverage of the social scene at a temporary screen set-up in London’s Trafalgar Square. Also during these segments, viewers across the country are invited to document their experiences using Twitter and Instagram hashtags to be put up on the national broadcast, using social media to connect local and national experiences. The Plymouth event was very well attended by approximately 180 to 200 people, and nearly all of the seating (both individual chairs specially set up by the city council and permanent benches and picnic tables) was occupied. The three-hour program spanned the early evening to night, so the square changed in appearance from late afternoon to dusk to night as the program continued. In addition to the powerful voices projecting from the sound-system, the sounds of teenage passersby, cars, the cappuccino machine at the snack bar, and the sea town’s many seagulls could also be heard during the program. This made me think of how audiences at other screens, seeing the same live broadcast, would experience the opera with differing background noises and distractions, perhaps a nearby train or bar instead of seagulls or a busy intersection instead of a mostly-closed shopping district. Given that the opera had subtitles, it was possible to still enjoy the music and understand the narrative despite these auditory distractions. Overall, attendees (mostly age fifty and up) watched the broadcast in rapt attention, and there wasn’t nearly the amount of chatter and socializing I’ve witnessed at movies in the park nights in New York City. I think both the perceived cultural value of opera and the established liveness of the broadcast afforded these codes in combination with the very particular arrangement of temporary furniture and obstacles in relationship to permanent structures. The screen, elevated off the ground with two posts, usually allows people to walk underneath, but for the opera, a temporary barricade was placed there, forcing passersby to go around. The chairs set up by the city council faced the screen directly and were a comfortable viewing distance away from the screen, discouraging anyone from standing or walking directly in front of the screen. Passersby, most often teenagers and some cyclists, would frequently stop to view the screen momentarily (on average between 30 and 120 seconds) and a select few remained for longer. Wanting to understand how audiences responded to this broadcast beyond observing them as I watched the opera, I set about interviewing people during the intermission. This was a rather limited amount of time as it definitely would have been frowned on had I disturbed people when the curtain was up. Some

Spectatorship in Public Space

33

even declined to speak during the interview, indicating they wanted to devote full attention to the backstage content. I was, however, able to meet with about five tables of people, all of whom had a very positive response to the opera broadcasts, noting especially that the event provided free access to culturally significant events. Many remarked that travel to London and the price of opera tickets were prohibitive for people in Plymouth, and saw this as a valuable opportunity. About three-fourths of the people I spoke with lived nearby and frequented the screen either as a daily source for information or for events like sports, and others drove from other towns explicitly to catch the opera, one even driving from over twenty miles away specifically to attend the screening. In this way, the screen forged its own community by both bringing people together, and temporarily bridging the spatial, economic, and cultural gap between Plymouth and London through free access to culture. Both the content and the permanent and temporary aspects of the physical screen situation afforded a devoted audience engaged in the opera’s story.

Conclusion Moving images in public spaces generate visual, spatial, and social economies that viewers navigate via new and established paradigms for viewing moving images. To understand how a work operates in public space, it is not merely a matter of bringing content to an out-of-home audience, but rather analyzing the screen situation with a consideration of real spectators as well as generic ones. To look at public projects without taking into account their exchanges with real members of the public would be to reinforce perceived cultural divisions between the art world and the general population, and would furthermore alienate any analysis or criticism of public art from public art’s primary audience. Relying too heavily on first-person, ground-level data also poses potential issues: namely the selection of works analyzed. Many public projects that engage with moving images are temporary, and the ability of the researcher to attend or even know about them before they’re over is often out of her hands, as was the case with my visit to the Big Screens in 2013. Furthermore, relying too heavily on on-site spectator response marginalizes historical projects that should also be analyzed in terms of their particular screen situations. What is needed is a balanced approach that acknowledges the shortcomings and limitations of the research at hand, but factors in knowledge and findings from studies of similar

34

Making Sense of Cinema

projects, seeks out archival documentation and accounts, and is attentive to an understanding of moving image spectatorship that is both spatial and embodied. Looking at spectatorship of moving images in public places beyond the success/ failure parameters of engagement employed by advertising and design researchers, and outside of the pessimistic rhetoric that surrounds the “society of the spectacle,” allows us not only to understand how artists can generate meaningful exchanges in public spaces, but also potentially redirects our understanding of spectatorship in general. By looking beyond a film and media theory that relies heavily on “the text,” we can begin to apprehend the act of viewing moving images in all contexts more completely, by understanding the diverse possibilities each screen situation presents for us and how we, in turn, respond.

Notes 1 Catrien Schreuder’s (2010) study makes important strides to seriously look at public moving image art projects, but relies too heavily on sticking to the concept of “video art” in its rather broad overview of many diverse projects. 2 My use of the term situation here is informed by the Situationist International’s spatial understanding of the contingency of experience in the city, but as indicated by my critique of Debord’s negative view of spectacle, is not in keeping with the movement’s politics. 3 This is the topic of my dissertation, The Moving Image in Public Art: U.S. and U.K., 1980–Present for my PhD at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. 4 This economical understanding of the function of images has also been posited to be the very root of visual culture and the cultural imaginary in the contemporary world (Mondzain 2004). 5 For analyses of two highly publicized public art controversies in New York, both of which ended with the work of art being removed (and in a sense destroyed), see Harriet Senie’s (2001) work on Richard Serra and Jane Kramer’s (1994) work on John Ahearn. 6 The public space was funded through corporate sponsorship, whose names adorn every feature of the park. Despite this, scholars such as Cher Knight (2008) still find the space to be highly successful in terms of its ability to generate meaningful engagement with members of the public. 7 Digital interaction was actually part of the initial concept for the piece as Plensa had envisioned a website where participants could change the colors of the three sides of the faces by popular vote online, though this component of the project was eventually scrapped for financial and logistical reasons (Patrick 2008).

Spectatorship in Public Space

35

References Bishop, C. (2012), Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, London: Verso Books. Bogart, M. H. (1999), Artists, Advertising, and the Borders of Art, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Brignull, H. and Y. Rogers (2003), “Enticing People to Interact with Large Public Displays in Public Spaces,” in Proceedings of the IFIP International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction INTERACT 2003, 17–24. Brougher, K., B. Hoskyns, D. Kuipers, and D. Aitken (2012), Doug Aitken: Song 1, Washington, DC : Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Bruno, G. (2002), Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film, London: Verso Books. Casetti, F. (2013), “What Is a Screen Nowadays?,” in C. Berry, J. Harbord, and R. O. Moore (eds), Public Space, Media Space, 16–40, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Crimp, D. (2012), “Epilogue: Warhol’s Time,” in “Our Kind of Movie”: The Films of Andy Warhol, 137–46. Cambridge, MA : MIT Press. Debord, G. (1967/1994), The Society of the Spectacle, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith, New York: Zone Books. Dell’Aria, A. (2014), “Cinema-in-the-round: Doug Aitken’s Song 1 (2012), the Hirshhorn Museum and the pleasures of cinematic projection,” Moving Image Review and Art Journal, 3(2): 208–221. Friedberg, A. (1993), Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern, Berkeley : University of California Press. Gilfoyle, T. J. (2006), Millennium Park: Creating a Chicago Landmark, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gunning, T. (2009), “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)credulous Spectator (1989),” in L. Braudy and M. Cohen (eds), Film Theory and Criticism, 7th edn, 736–50, New York: Oxford University Press. Hansen, M. (1991), Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film, Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press. Huhtamo, E. (2009), “Messages on the Wall: An Archaeology of Public Media Displays,” in S. McGuire, M. Martin and S. Niederer (eds), Urban Screens Reader, 15–28, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures. Knight, C. K. (2008), Public Art: Theory, Practice and Populism, 1st edn, New York: Wiley-Blackwell. Koshalek, R. (2012), “Director’s Statement,” in K. Brougher, B. Hoskyns, D. Kuipers, and D. Aitken (eds), Doug Aitken: Song 1, 117, Washington, DC : Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Krajina, Z. (2013), “Domesticating the Screen-Scenography: Situational Uses of Screen Images and Technologies in the London Underground,” in C. Berry, J. Harbord, and

36

Making Sense of Cinema

R. O. Moore (eds), Public Space, Media Space, 220–47, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kramer, J. (1994), Whose Art Is It?, 1st edn, Durham, NC : Duke University Press. McCarthy, A. (2001), Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space, Durham, NC : Duke University Press. McQuire, S. (2008), The Media City: Media, Architecture and Urban Space, Los Angeles: Sage Publications. Mitchell, W. J. T. (2006), What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mondloch, K. (2010), Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mondzain, M.-J. (2004), Image, Icon, Economy: The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary, 1st edn, Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press. O’Hara, K. and M. Glancy (2009), “Watching in Public: Understanding Audience Interaction with Big Screen TV in Urban Spaces.” in P. Cesar, D. Geerts, and K. Chorianopoulos (eds), Social Interactive Television: Immersive Shared Experiences and Perspectives, 254–68, Hershey, PA : IGI Global. Patrick, K. (2008), Jaume Plensa: The Crown Fountain. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag. Schreuder, C. (2010), Pixels and Places: Video Art in Public Space, Rotterdam: NA i Publishers. Senie, H. (2001), Tilted Arc Controversy: Dangerous Precedent? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Senie, H. (2003), “Responsible Criticism: Evaluating Public Art [electronic version],” Sculpture, 22 (10). Available online: http://www.sculpture.org/documents/scmag03/ dec03/senie/senie.shtml (accessed 19 April 2015). Sobchack, V. (1991), The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience, Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press. Staiger, J. (1992), Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema, Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press. Taylor, K. (2006), “Programming Video Art for Urban Screens in Public Space,” First Monday Special Issue #4 February. Available online: http://firstmonday.org/ojs/ index.php/fm/article/view/1555 (accessed 19 April 2015). Wiltse, J. (2010), Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America, 1st edn, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Yi, E. (2012), “When a Museum’s Exterior Becomes a Canvas for Video Art,” The Atlantic, March 27. Available online: http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/ archive/2012/03/when-a-museums-exterior-becomes-a-canvas-forvideo-art/255125/2/ (accessed 19 April 2015).

3

The Festival Collective Cult Audiences and Japanese Extreme Cinema Jessica Hughes University of Queensland

Introduction Young film enthusiasts file into Montreal’s Concordia Hall to find seats before the lights go down. Excited chatter continues as a festival programmer introduces the director of the film, Noboru Iguchi. Iguchi enters from the back of the theater, decked out in a yellow jogging suit, a costume immediately recognizable to any viewer who had watched the trailer for the film they are anxiously waiting to see. The crowd cheers, applauds, and then quiets down to listen to Iguchi (and his translator) introduce his latest film, Live (2014). A few minutes later, as he exits the stage and the room goes dark, the audible excitement returns. One audience member meows like a cat, and several other members join in. Soon the meowing turns into a range of animal sounds and the whole room is in stitches before the film even begins. Though the noises fade as the advertisements end and the movie starts, active participation continues as spectators join together to cheer on lead characters or applaud scenes of excessive violence. Such is the experience of being part of the audience at Fantasia International Film Festival. This chapter uses a phenomenological approach to interpret this kind of viewing experience by concentrating not on how individual spectators react to the films in question, but on how the audience as a collective does. Julian Hanich pioneered this approach to film reception studies, arguing: “Phenomenology does not want to explain how specific viewers respond to specific scenes. The question is rather: if a viewer is affected by a horror, shock, dread or terror scene, how does he or she experience it?” (2010a: 40, italics in original). Following this interpretation, the purpose of this chapter is to show how phenomenological research can be used to understand how film viewers respond to a film text when part of a collective audience.

38

Making Sense of Cinema

Two key terms define the experiences I focus on throughout this chapter: Japanese Extreme (the type of film being analyzed) and cult spectatorship (the type of interaction being analyzed). Japanese Extreme is a film movement that developed as a branch of Japanese Horror (J-horror). However, where J-horror typically relies on the supernatural to incite fear in its viewers, Japanese Extreme uses over-the-top portrayals of violence and gore to provoke reactions, two features qualifying these films as cult. Cult cinema is not one specific type of film, but something defined by its audiences based on possessing possible qualities marking it as “other.” These films are typically seen as being alternative, transgressive, camp, or even “trash.”1 This chapter interprets how four Japanese Extreme films—Live, Why Don’t You Play in Hell (Shion Sono, 2013), Zombie TV (Yoshihiro Nishimura, Maelie Makuno, and Nayoa Tashiro, 2013), Gothic Lolita Battle Bear (original Japanese title: Nuigulumar Z; Noboru Iguchi, 2013)—and their filmmakers have achieved cult status through the participatory actions of festival audiences at Brisbane International Film Festival (BIFF ) and Fantasia. Through this interpretation, I add to the field of audience studies by providing an analysis of how a particular group of cult audience members reacts as a collective to on-screen portrayals of excess and otherness.

Critical Approaches to Japanese Extreme and Audience Reception Studies Although the shift from the supernatural focus of J-horror to the more graphically violent Japanese Extreme cinema came with Tetsuo: The Iron Man (Shin’ya Tsukamoto, 1989), it was Audition (Takashi Miike, 1999) that spurred film theorists to really start taking Japanese Extreme seriously as its own film movement. Still, several more years passed before literature began to be published on this film. Oliver Dew’s analysis of marketing strategies of Asian Extreme films in Britain, which uses Audition as a case study, was not published until 2007. This study was followed by Robert Hyland’s (2009) writing on Asian Extreme, which also focuses on Audition. Hyland’s work offers a broad approach to Asian Extreme as a genre, by arguing for a political background to the extreme content being portrayed as a reflection of the “closed, vertically integrated studio systems of Japan, Hong Kong and Korea” (200). Beyond Audition, however, very little has been written about specific Japanese Extreme films. Rather, the works of

The Festival Collective

39

Chi-Yun Shin (2009) and Daniel Martin (2009) take a broader approach, as both explore Asian Extreme as a commodity of UK distributor, Tartan Films. Only two empirical studies consider Asian horror/extreme viewing practices, and both are in the context of British audiences. Emma Pett’s (n.d.) article on British audiences and Asian Extreme films analyzes the results of a survey she distributed predominantly online, to collect data on the “potential viewer” (n.p.). Whereas Pett focuses on the reception of extreme content among British audiences, Aimee Richmond’s (2014) dissertation on the transnational UK reception of J-horror concentrates more on the cultural appeal of Japanese cinema. Both Pett’s and Richmond’s studies address issues similar to my research, posing questions such as: What kinds of people are perceived to watch Asian Extreme films? How do Asian Extreme audiences define themselves as fans? How do viewers respond to representations of Japanese culture on screen? Yet, Pett’s large-scale qualitative survey and Richmond’s individual participant interviews take a limited approach to answer the very specific questions being asked. My phenomenological approach not only opens up empirical research on Japanese Extreme audiences to Western countries beyond Britain, including Canada and Australia, it also relocates the data collection to the cinema, where first-hand observations of the viewing experience provide a context beyond the audience-text relations described in these two existing studies. This unique approach to empirical data collection also expands existing literature on audience reception studies more broadly. In place of the more traditional historical approach used by Janet Staiger (2000; 2005) and Barbara Klinger (1989; 2006), which uses film reviews, fan magazines, and mass media to look at reception contexts of the past, I instead concentrate on developing the more ethnographically-oriented area of reception studies that has been referred to as “new audience research” by theorists such as John Corner (1991) and is used to describe work done by researchers such as David Morley (1980). New audience researchers value qualitative data collection over quantitative, preferring to rely on fieldwork rather than wide-spread questionnaires that tend to take a less personal approach and do not provide room to tailor research questions to suit the viewing context. Ethnographic work has been criticized for its use of participant observation, which allows researchers to communicate directly with participants and can therefore influence their actions, thus taking away from the intended natural setting (Kirk and Miller 1986; Marchetti 2008). However, my use of ethnography, in the traditional sense of studying people and cultures, is done without the knowledge of the audience members involved. Studying

40

Making Sense of Cinema

viewers’ reactions in a defined film festival setting, my research originates from the point of view of the subjects, but at the same time allows me to make observations about cultural phenomena anonymously and unannounced. By designing this study specifically around festival audiences at Japanese Extreme screenings, I offer a distinctive perspective of film audiences. Klinger (2006) describes the cinephile as a “film devotee [who] enters the theater not just to encounter a particular film but to take ardent, fetishistic pleasure in the viewing condition themselves” (54). The festival audiences I examine fit this definition of cinephiles, given the nature of the films they see. Japanese Extreme cinema would appeal more to cinephiles than mainstream viewers, which allows me to develop empirical data evidencing the ways this fetishistic pleasure might be displayed. Hanich’s phenomenological studies on different types of viewing contexts (e.g., horror films, thrillers, comedies, multiplex theaters, adult-only theaters) demonstrate a useful method for examining audiences by observing the way they respond not only to the film, but also to those around them (2009; 2010a; 2010b; 2012; 2014a; 2014b). Unlike Hanich, however, my consideration of the horror genre does not involve only terror, as the Japanese Extreme films in question use excessively gory scenes to evoke a range of emotions. This chapter therefore broadens existing work on the cinephilic viewer by considering a wider scope of audience responses rather than focusing on a single type of reaction. In doing so, it is necessary to look not only at how viewers react, but also the setting in which they react. The principle interest for cult cinema scholars is spectatorship and how audience members identify themselves and other fans (Kawin 1991). This identification often occurs in special circumstances: not simply a new release at a multiplex theater, but a film screening as part of a distinct event, such as a film festival or midnight movie.2 Analysis of cult cinema tends to concentrate on the ways these films are considered separate from “mainstream” film culture, whether through online self-representation and other fan activities, as seen in the work of Matt Hills (2004; 2008), or by focusing more closely on subcultures and political implications, as Mark Jancovich (2002) does. This chapter considers both approaches in its analysis of the audience members attending screenings of Japanese Extreme films at the festivals in question. Not only have these spectators chosen to watch films often thought to be too extreme for the mainstream, but also they do so in a public viewing space, where there are likely to be other “alternative” audience members to share the experience with. Finally, by concentrating on film festival audiences in particular, I demonstrate how our awareness of the film experience is affected by not only what happens

The Festival Collective

41

on-screen, but also by those around us in the theater. Film festivals offer a different viewing experience than multiplex theaters due to their more exclusive reputation; while we tend to feel like part of the general public during multiplex screenings, film festivals provide us with a sense of being among the elite, or at least a particularly well-knit community. While film festivals are still a relatively new area within film theory, Marijke de Valck (2007) offers a useful example with her analysis of International Film Festival Rotterdam’s different types of attendees. Her skeptical feelings about Rotterdam’s exponential growth seem to be shared by Mark Peranson in his report on his Rotterdam experiences over the five years leading up to 2004, where he observes: “the films at the bottom of the audience polls are generally the best” (quoted in de Valck 2007: 99). This also reflects the opinion of film critic Dana Linssen, who is concerned with the declining number of festival attendees who share any interest in the Tiger Awards Competition, which is given for a first or second feature film (de Valck 2010: 99). These critics’ opinions are not just judgments of taste regarding distinctions between their preferred films and the audience’s preferences; de Valck and Peranson’s disparagement is also indicative of what kinds of film experiences may be important to different sectors of the festival audience. By observing the experience of festival audiences, the phenomenological approach may help festival organizers understand their audiences and their preferred movie-going experiences.

Phenomenology as Empirical Approach Gina Marchetti’s (2008) analysis of subcultures argues for the value of the urbananthropologist, who “not only observes and records the behavior of the group under study, but also participates in the community” (417). Likewise, as a researcher and a Japanese Extreme fan, my own position in the audience is something that must be acknowledged in my study. While there is no way of avoiding my preconceived notions about Western audiences of Japanese Extreme cinema based on my personal experiences, I believe it would have been difficult for me to collect this data without becoming a part of the audience I was examining. In this sense, the “reduction” step of the phenomenological method described below is reframed: though it is necessary to recognize any awareness or assumptions I may have about film theory, symbolism, or conventions with regard to extreme cinema, my approach to phenomenology accepts this

42

Making Sense of Cinema

preconceived knowledge and instead focuses on refraining from judging spectator’s actions as good or bad reactions to the extreme content on screen. Rather, I concentrate on interpreting and analyzing the audience’s visceral and bodily reactions. Phenomenology is a philosophical methodology pioneered in the early 1900s by Edmund Husserl (1970), who analyzed phenomena as they present themselves to human experience and consciousness. Husserl’s method of transcendental phenomenology was further developed by French philosopher Maurice MerleauPonty in the 1940s as existential phenomenology. Reduction, which I have introduced above, is part of a four-step approach to phenomenological research: description, reduction, thematization, and interpretation. This methodology has been taken up in film studies by influential theorists such as Vivian Sobchack (2009), who have used it to analyze film texts and how they produce an affective response in film spectators. Rather than using phenomenology to examine individual audience members, as has been done in other recent studies, my study reads the audience as a collective. Richmond’s (2014) research uses phenomenology to focus on “what contemporary Japanese horror film means and represents to [each participant] rather [than] treating it as an object with a firm definition” (52, italics in original). Not only does my research concentrate on a group rather than individuals, it is also significant that the subjects under examination are typically unaware of my presence as a researcher. The only other phenomenological work to take this approach to film studies is that of Hanich, which also situates the researcher (himself) among audience members who, in a more natural setting, are unlikely to know they are being studied. This method allows for a less structured collection of data. While there is potential for less data to be collected without asking direct questions in interview form, this approach offers a type of data that is less likely to be provided in a situation where a participant self-consciously tries to describe their film-viewing experience. Working through the four steps of phenomenology, then, this study begins by describing the viewing context of each of the four films and their audiences being examined. Rather than trying to define what exactly Japanese Extreme or cult cinema is, my study analyzes experiences and meaning-makings of the collective audience. As such, the viewing situation (i.e., where the film is screened and who is watching it) is just as important as the film being screened. While the empirical object of this study is the festival audience’s relation to extreme cinema, my description takes into account moments of the text that cause these reactions,

The Festival Collective

43

namely moments involving shock and disgust as well as intertextual references. CarrieLynn Reinhard refers to this as “interaction analysis” in Chapter 11 of this collection. The process of reduction in this study, as described above, is more about refraining from judgment of good and bad reactions than bracketing my existing knowledge about Japanese Extreme and cult audiences. Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984) interpretation of taste judgments is significant to this aspect of my research because it describes how easily we imply our own views and opinions on others, which he argues is related to social position rather than simply individualistic choices. According to Bourdieu, a symbolic hierarchy is socially conditioned to reinforce distinction from other classes. By identifying my own preferences, the reduction stage of my research requires me to set aside my own ideas about extreme and cult cinema, and open my perspective to different types of viewers and experiences. Next, this study thematizes by contemplating the different ways audiences experience what Hanich (2010b) calls affective interrelations in the cinema. My analysis goes beyond simply identifying the emotions evoked by the films being examined to consider how these emotions connect us to the collective audience of which we are a part. Sobchack (1999) describes how thematization follows an “undoing of hierarchies” (436), much like those suggested by Bourdieu above. She describes the exercising of thought experiments “to test the ‘horizons’ of the phenomenon and its modes of appearance so as to reveal the object’s possibilities beyond its initial (or ‘naïve’) appearance” (436). My phenomenological approach to collective audiences analyzes situations where spectators have an increased awareness of their surroundings in the cinema (i.e., when spectators call out or applaud), how they express this awareness (i.e., joining in with the audiences’ response), and address why this interrelation between audience members has occurred (i.e., something intentional within the film, like shock or disgust, or something unrelated, such as a viewer disrupting the film by talking on their phone). To observe these collective interrelations, it was necessary to have a research assistant sitting in a separate area of the theater, so as to cover a wider ground. For each of the four films in question, we were able to position ourselves on opposite sides of the cinema, where, collectively, we could observe the majority of the audience members. Though this type of research allowed both of us to become a part of the collective audience, it was necessary to also be disengaged from the film to a certain degree to concentrate on the responses around us.

44

Making Sense of Cinema

Overall, we found consistent responses among spectators in different parts of the room. Going beyond mere reactions to the film text, my method of thematizing described here follows the framework Hanich (2010b) has set up to emphasize the importance of emotions and affects within the collective viewing experience. Finally, my discussion unravels the significance of the empirical object (i.e., audience reactions) by interpreting the relationship among the key points of my study set up in my analysis: cult fandom, extreme content, and collective audiences. Unlike media effects research that uses scientific measures to quantify the audience’s physiological reactions to screen texts in a laboratory environment, or quantitative studies that use survey instruments to directly ask audience members to describe their experience, my approach studies the audience in its natural setting: the theater. This study focuses on how audiences are perceived by outsiders to respond to extreme content, rather than how they perceive themselves to respond, which can be found in most participant interviews.

Case Studies: Japanese Extreme Screenings at BIFF and Fantasia The following four case studies took place across two film festivals with very different settings and audiences. First, the 2013 Brisbane International Film Festival (BIFF ) had much higher attendance rates for more mainstream films. While the festival reported that more than 800 people attended the closing screening of 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013) (BIFF 2013), few people were interested in the much lower budget Japanese Extreme films. Second, the 2014 Fantasia International Film Festival (Fantasia) screened Japanese Extreme films to near-full cinemas: There were around two dozen attendees at a Saturday midnight screening of Why Don’t You Play in Hell at BIFF, compared to more than 600 attendees at Live on the first Friday night of Fantasia. While this discrepancy may have been in part due to director Iguchi’s presence at the Live screening,3 the venue is likely to have been an equally significant contributing factor: BIFF tends to draw a more mainstream audience, whereas Fantasia typically attracts audiences drawn to the genre and cult films it offers. Below, I provide a brief synopsis of each examined film’s narrative as well as a description of the viewing context, including the venue and the audience demographic. This description is followed by an analysis of audience reactions to these films in the

The Festival Collective

45

next section of this chapter where I work through the phenomenological process of reduction by concentrating on audience responses and acknowledging that their experiences with cult and extreme cinema may be distinct from my own. Why Don’t You Play in Hell follows a group of aspiring filmmakers who call themselves the Fuck Bombers. The Bombers are depicted at the start of Play in Hell as young students fantasizing about making a yakuza (organized crime) film, and then the rest of the film depicts them as adults stumbling upon the opportunity to fulfill their dream. Parallel storylines follow the antics of two yakuza gangs and Mitsuko (Fumi Nikaido), the daughter of yakuza boss, Muta (Jun Kunimura). The storylines collide when Muta’s attempt to shoot a film starring his daughter ends up in the hands of the Fuck Bombers. The rest of the film is a self-aware gorefest, critiquing the naïve desire to make the perfect film, while at the same time containing more than a few glorified bloodbaths. This film screened at BIFF as a Saturday midnight screening, indicating a cult cinema approach to both its excessive violence and Sono’s tribute to filmmaking. The festival predominantly took place at Brisbane’s two Palace Cinemas, an Australian theater chain known for hosting many film festivals, and Play in Hell screened in a 200-seat theater. With only a couple dozen attendees, however, the movie theater felt empty and without assigned seats, audience members could separate themselves from other viewers, mostly choosing empty rows and corners of the cinema. There was an even mix of Asian and Caucasian spectators, predominantly between the ages of twenty and forty, with half of the audience members sitting by themselves, while the rest were in small groups of two to four. Like Play in Hell, Live offers a narrative that almost entirely revolves around scenes of gratuitous violence. Based on the novel of the same name by Japanese author Yusuke Yamada, it starts out like a horror/thriller, with protagonist Naoto (Yuki Yamada) receiving a mysterious package in the mail, followed by a phone call threatening the life of his mother. As instructed, Naoto arrives at the local fitness center to participate in a “death triathlon,” which he must win in order to rescue his mother. Anyone familiar with Iguchi’s previous work (Machine Girl, 2008; RoboGeisha, 2009), however, will not be surprised to learn that the serious tone is short-lived. In true Iguchi fashion, Live concentrates on his token boob and butt shots, as the triathlon participants compete in a comically gory race to the finish. Live was screened in Concordia Hall, the larger of the two main Fantasia theaters at Concordia University in Montreal. Despite its substantial 692 seats,

46

Making Sense of Cinema

the room overflowed with predominantly French-speaking Caucasians, and only slightly more males than females. Though there was an evident mix in ethnic representations, the film seemed to draw a relatively small Asian demographic. It should be taken into consideration that, according to the 2011 census, Montreal recognizes just over 30 percent of its population as visible minorities, with only 0.1 percent Japanese.4 Still, it is no secret that Fantasia was not established to attract Asian audiences, but rather to introduce Western viewers to Asian genre cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival, n.d.). In Zombie TV, a group of three Japanese filmmakers, including Tokyo Gore Police’s (2008) Yoshihiro Nishimura, present a collection of zombie narratives arranged to create the feeling of flipping through television channels. While most of the segments are fairly far-fetched, they deserve credit for being bizarre (and short) enough to prevent the viewer from getting bored. Taking a “they’re just like us” approach, Zombie TV offers zombie instructional and workout videos, zombie romances, and even zombie pornography to give audiences a sense of watching televesion in a zombie dominated world. The result is gory and offensive, but also good for a chuckle, albeit an uncomfortable one. Despite showing in the same theater, the Saturday midnight screening of Zombie TV drew a much smaller crowd than Live. Still, the large venue was just under half full, though this time the percentage of males was greater at about 70 percent. Finally, the screening for Gothic Lolita Battle Bear also had Iguchi in attendance to introduce the film and answer questions at the end. Gothic Lolita follows two protagonists: a middle-aged Japanese woman named Yumeko (Shoko Nakagawa), who embraces the cosplay lifestyle, dressing as a Lolita and also behaving like a young girl; and a pink teddy bear named Buusuke, who comes to life with a male voice (Sadao Abe) early in the film. Once Buusuke comes alive, Yumeko also displays superhuman powers, as she transforms into a superhero and works together with Buusuke to fight evil. Like Live, this screening was packed. Its Sunday afternoon time slot did not appear to inhibit audience enthusiasm and involvement; a couple Caucasian girls even celebrated the film’s portrayal of Japanese cosplay culture by arriving decked out in Lolita dresses and accessories. Yet, despite Iguchi’s description of the film as more feminine than Live, this did not deter male audiences; much like Live, the audience was a relatively equal split between male and female, mostly in small, mixed groups of predominantly white Canadians. Having presented the description phase of my research above, the following section reflects the reduction phase of my research. For this step, I refrain from

The Festival Collective

47

looking at any experiences as good or bad, and instead focus on the visceral and bodily reactions of this particular audience for my analysis. This section also demonstrates how I have thematized my interpretations by elaborating on my descriptions of these narratives and screening environments to interpret the different ways Western audiences react to the Japanese Extreme films in question. Key to this stage is watching for shared reactions from the collective audience, rather than observing individual viewing experiences. Three important characteristics tie together the four experiences described above: cult status, reactions to portrayals of excess, and connection with ideas of otherness.

Analysis: Cult Audience Interrelations and the Collective Viewing Experience In a YesAsia.com article describing the “New Wave of Japanese Splatter Films,” James Mudge (2011) explains how “[b]oth The Machine Girl and Tokyo Gore Police met with an extremely enthusiastic response from exploitation fans at home and overseas, wowing audiences at genre festivals and finding instant cult status and pop culture success” (n.p.). My phenomenological approach offers a glimpse of how audiences perform their roles as cult fans, and in turn, how these films and filmmakers have achieved the cult status described by Mudge. Whereas some cult films, such as Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, 1968) and El Topo (Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1970), achieved their status after their release due to an often-unexpected following, others such as Pink Flamingos (John Waters, 1972) and The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Jim Sharman, 1976) were selfconsciously made to be cult films (Jancovich 2002: 159). In the case of Japanese Extreme, it tends to be the films’ content that encourages participation, and often audiences can determine the status of the films as cult while watching. Hills (2008) explains: “Texts can be designed as cult, and targeted at a cult audience, given that the term now has a cultural history of its own, but movies, whether blockbusters or sleepers, can also still be articulated with discourses of cult by niche audiences” (n.p.). Hills emphasizes the multiple ways of defining cult, adding that different fans may consider a film as cult for different reasons. Prominent cult website, Cultographies.com, lists the key cult film techniques as “intertextual references, gore, loose ends in storylines, or the creation of a sense of nostalgia” (n.d.: n.p.). In this section, I refer to these techniques and work through the four steps outlined in my methodology to

48

Making Sense of Cinema

elaborate on the three main factors that have contributed to these films’ cult status: intertextuality and recognition of symbols of Japanese popular culture, and over-the-top portrayals of violence. One aspect that distinguishes the audiences described above as cult is their recognition of intertextual references, particularly from other (cult) films. For example, throughout Play in Hell, Sasaki (Tak Sakaguchi) is referred to as “Japan’s Bruce Lee” and wears a yellow jumpsuit reminiscent of the one featured in the Bruce Lee film, Game of Death (Robert Clouse, 1978). Throughout the film, this Bruce Lee homage, complete with exaggerated sound effects, 1970s music, slow motion and freeze frames whenever he is shown in action, delighted the audience, generating appreciation for Bruce Lee’s inimitable brand of cool. The knowing laughter in response to these scenes indicates not only the appeal of a tribute to this respected Hong Kong icon, but also of recognizing the reference. Live audiences also reacted positively to intertextual references, particularly following the director’s introduction, which referred to the film as a new version of Battle Royale (Kinji Fukasaku, 2000). Features of his film that recalled this precursor, such as typing out the details of each death on the screen, triggered chuckles from the audience, and rather than take these gruesome killings seriously, the majority of the audience cheered in unison as each participant was brutally eliminated from the “game.” One particular character, Akari, with chainsaw arms as her chosen weapon, received more cheers than the rest; the audience evidently recognized this explicit reference to Iguchi’s earlier film The Machine Girl. Likewise, the loudest expression of disgust was conveyed when Iguchi’s recurring star Asami (The Machine Girl, Dead Sushi [2012]) has her face shaved off. For both Play in Hell and Live, audible expressions of recognition among a collective audience allows viewers to assert their membership as part of the cult fan base watching the film. The far less offensive Gothic Lolita relies on the appeal of Japanese culture and recognizable symbols such as the Lolita, the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, and even a touch of anime for audience response. A society famously obsessed with all things cute, Japan’s pop culture embraces the cosplay lifestyle and it is not unusual to find girls walking the streets of Tokyo dressed like they have just stepped out of the Victorian era (Richie 1991; 2003). While this fashion is no longer limited to Japan, with girls in Western countries also taking part in the cosplay trend now (Lamerichs 2013), it remains a uniquely Japanese trait and audience members are likely to consider a film based on a Lolita as very “Japanese-y.” Furthermore, when Yumeko transforms into a fighter, her costume

The Festival Collective

49

is not unlike 1990s Japanese superhero team Super Sentai, who were adapted as the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers in the United States. The film attempts to appeal to Western audiences by combining American and Japanese popular culture. For example, the character Kill Billy (Rina Takeda) references Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill: Vol.  1 (2003) and Kill Bill: Vol.  2 (2004). Yet, while the responses to these symbols of Japanese culture at Fantasia screenings were animated and passionate, self-conscious portrayals of recognizable Japanese figures such as yakuza and samurai in Play in Hell received less audible appreciation from its audience. Another defining feature of these films as cult is their screening times. Both Play in Hell and Zombie TV were shown as midnight movies at their respective festivals, and Play in Hell also won the 2013 People’s Choice Midnight Madness Award at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF ). The reactions described above indicate an audience appreciation for the films being shown at midnight, as the after-hours screening time suggests a welcoming of alternative behaviors. Because midnight movies have a history of eliciting collective audience participation through dressing up and calling out, spectators attending Zombie TV in particular followed this tradition with especially loud, exaggerated responses to the film’s extreme content. The cult status of these films was recognized by the festival programmers, who designated these time slots, likely due to the films’ content, which could be considered too extreme for daytime or evening audiences. Furthermore, filmmakers Sono and Nishimura have both previously released extreme films that gained cult followings, such as Sono’s Suicide Club (2001) and Nishimura’s Tokyo Gore Police. Both filmmakers have become associated with the midnight movie scene due to their excessively violent films, with Sono’s most recent film Tokyo Tribe (2014) also featuring on TIFF ’s Midnight Madness program. Morally and viscerally shocking scenes have come to be identified as defining features of Japanese Extreme cinema. A particularly graphic scene in Play in Hell depicts the lead female character Mitsuko putting broken glass in her mouth and kissing her ex-boyfriend as a form a revenge for sleeping with another woman. Other excessive scenes include extended yakuza fight scenes, which come across as comical in their over-the-top depictions of clumsy men as well as a projectile vomiting scene. Yet, the shock value seemed lost on a small audience like BIFF ’s. Few audience members even flinched for most of these gory scenes, and chuckles were usually muffled rather than embraced. On the contrary, Fantasia audiences reveled in the gore of Live and Zombie TV. The first participant to be killed off in Live died from an open pair of scissors

50

Making Sense of Cinema

accidentally falling out of a tree and landing on his head like a pair of bunny ears; the audience responded with applause and cheers as he hobbled away with blood spraying everywhere. Likewise, the violent death of the film’s token “hot chick” was met with an uproar of booing, followed by a collective “aww” in disappointment. Whenever an audience member expressed the slightest reaction to a moment of shock during Zombie TV, this would only provoke the rest of the audience, which joined in with clapping, cheering, or even cursing loudly as if to remind the other viewers they are not alone in their shocked responses. For example, when one spectator exclaimed “Fuck!” in response to a particularly gory scene with zombies and a bloody carcass, the rest of the audience laughed and applauded, knowing their response to this over-the-top sequence was being shared. Although spectators familiar with Japanese Extreme films are likely to expect such outrageous depictions, rather than hide their shock, Fantasia audiences exaggerated it by joining together to call out with approval. Shock effects are not always a result of terror or violence. Rather, Gothic Lolita uses over-the-top cuteness for its shock effects. Instead of being horrified, Fantasia audience members seemed to be in greater shock over the ridiculous character portrayals: From the excessively kawaii (cute) Lolita protagonist Yumeko to the talking teddy bear-turned battle hero Buusuke, the Fantasia audience never seemed to stop clapping and cheering as yet another surprising character was introduced. It seems, in this case, it was the excessive silliness that shocked spectators; just when they thought it could not get any more ridiculous, out comes Kill Billy, the androgynous evil sidekick. Scenes that seemed entirely random and unnecessary to the plot development, like when the anime “lazybones” skeletons start to break dance, provoked even more clapping and cheering; it seems the audience could not help but applaud Iguchi for his ability to shock through appalling creativity. Perhaps the most shocking aspect of the film, however, was its lack of gore. With audiences most likely expecting an Iguchi film with excessive splattering of blood and guts the likes of RoboGeisha and Dead Sushi, it was no doubt more of a shock to see CGI love hearts and flowers flying around during the fight scenes in place of the regular ketchup-like blood fountains. The contrast between the more toned-down chuckles of the BIFF audience and the exaggerated responses of Fantasia audiences to similarly excessive scenes can be explained through the function of the collective audience. Distinguishing between an antagonistic “I-you-relationship” and a mutual “we-connection” at the two ends of the audience interrelations spectrum, Hanich (2010b) suggests

The Festival Collective

51

that we connect with other viewers based on shared emotions. For example, if other spectators laugh when you do, it draws you closer in a collective bond, strengthening the audience’s we-connection. If another spectator laughs during a moment you find particularly sentimental in the film, however, audience members may become distanced, increasing the I-you separation (2010b: 11). While this is certainly a significant factor in the phenomenological research of collective audiences, I propose a second variable: audience numbers. The active participation of Fantasia audiences can be attributed in large part to the unique setting drawing vast numbers of cult cinema fans. BIFF’s two dozen spectators were no doubt quiet and generally unresponsive because there was a smaller chance someone would join in with their responses. Meanwhile, Fantasia audiences were excited and rowdy from the time they entered the theater, thus increasing the chances of a “we-connection” through sheer number of people to bond with. With this in mind, BIFF attendees were unlikely to get past the I-you-relationship from the start because of the lesser opportunity to create a bond.

Discussion: Collective Audiences, Extreme Content, and Transnational Reception This study adds to this emerging field of Japanese Extreme cinema by using phenomenology to analyze the collective audiences of cult cinema by introducing unique conditions: a diverse festival setting and a more specific kind of film audience. First, using the phenomenological approach, I present data showing how audiences respond more enthusiastically when watching Japanese Extreme films in a large group than when the theater is nearly empty. Furthermore, by anonymously observing spectators firsthand within the theater rather than using interviews and film reviews to determine how audiences engage with each other during a film screening, I am able to analyze collective experiences rather than individual interactions with film texts. Branching out from Hanich’s method, I introduce a more specific viewing context, interpreting the film festival audience as unique due to the elite status provided to special event ticket holders. Audience members for Live and Gothic Lolita were particularly vocal and enthusiastic, likely due to the presence of the director at the screening, and larger crowds as a result. Director Iguchi’s request for audiences to call out certain phrases (e.g., Danger! Oshiri! [buttock] Kawaii!)

52

Making Sense of Cinema

throughout his two films encouraged participation, suggesting that festival audiences are more interactive due to an earlier established we-connection among spectators. This specific viewing context allowed for analysis of a type of spectator that was potentially more aware of the audience around him or her because of his or her shared exclusive festival experience. Inspired by Pett’s evidence that British audiences are more likely to watch Asian Extreme films via store purchase, online purchase or downloading than at the movie theater, I framed my research around actual Japanese Extreme film festival audiences as it occurred to me that a possible reason for a much lower percentage of participants watching Asian Extreme films on the big screen would be due to the lack of theaters showing them. Indeed, two of the screenings I attended at Fantasia had more than 600 attendees. Because Pett’s survey method does not allow the researcher to follow up on questions, it is possible participants considered film festivals to be separate from the cinema, or did not think to include them as a means of consuming Asian Extreme because they are not available year round. Although some female participants in Pett’s study commented that they would rather watch extreme films privately, most of the Japanese Extreme screenings I attended had a significant number of women, making up between 30 to 50 percent of the audience demographic. While anonymous surveys offer a useful method of collecting data from a wide-range of participants with relatively little effort, I have found audience observation to be a more effective way to test audience responses to extreme content in a more realistic setting than filling out a form online. Finally, Richmond’s study takes a more qualitative approach to the British reception of Japanese horror to concentrate on audience perceptions of these films. Her research analyzes British consumption of Japanese culture by interviewing participants to learn more about their impressions of Japan after watching J-horror films. Interviewing participants tends to be a lot more personal than online questionnaires, allowing the researcher to adjust follow-up questions to suit the participant’s responses. This method has still been criticized, however, for using leading questions to persuade participants to respond in a certain way. Close observation of audience reactions to on-screen portrayals of Japanese culture has provided evidence that spectators tend to smile or even knowingly laugh when a familiar reference is made, such as with the Lolita protagonist in Gothic Lolita or the yakuza/samurai battle in Play in Hell. Revelations of such reactions may not have been willingly given in an interview for fear of how they would have been received by the researcher.

The Festival Collective

53

Conclusion Hanich’s phenomenological approach to audience studies has proven a valuable addition to the field. Whereas earlier phenomenological approaches have been limited to audience-text studies and individual interviews, Hanich’s method of firsthand observations of the audience as a collective within the actual movie theater provides information on spectatorship to which film studies researchers have not previously had access. This approach helped my analysis of Japanese Extreme audiences in their natural setting by branching out from previous empirical research done on this type of cinema, which surveyed or interviewed individuals in a domestic or facilitated environment. Unlike these previous empirical approaches, my observations were made without the awareness of the participants. This approach allowed for less restricted and more candid data collection as the spectators being studied interacted with their fellow audience members through active participation. Naturally, this type of research relies on meticulous observation and carefully written recording skills, as video recording devices are not permitted within the cinema. As a result, the impossibility of observing all spectators at the same time represents the major challenge of this approach. Nonetheless, as Hanich (2010a) highlights in his writing, this approach is not about interpreting how individual audiences respond to the film-going experience, but how the audience interacts as a collective. My observations of the collective experience were made possible by being a part of the experience myself, while temporarily disengaging with the film to concentrate on audience responses. This was a second challenge to my data collection, as it is necessary to find a balance between engaging with the film’s content to provide evidence for what the audience was reacting to, and concentrating on describing exactly how the audience was reacting. As the field of film reception studies expands, it is imperative for researchers to begin opening up to new methods. This phenomenological approach to empirical data collection requires accurate and detailed observation, and one way of refining this approach is to conduct group research, with researchers occupying several areas of the theater to present more specific examples of audience interrelations. Beyond the festival experience, studying collective audiences is a practical method of collecting more natural data in the fields of reception studies and cultural studies by using evidence from spectators who are unlikely to suspect they are being observed. This approach allows the film studies researcher to become a part of the viewing context, to directly comprehend the

54

Making Sense of Cinema

unique experience of audience participation, and ultimately, make audience reception scholarship more accessible to anyone who has ever visited a movie theater.

Notes 1 For more on “trash” or “paracinema” as part of cult cinema studies, see the scholarship of Jeffrey Sconce (1995), Hills (2004; 2008), and Ernest Mathijs and Xavier Mendik (2008). 2 The midnight movie phenomenon began in the early 1970s as a means of showing films deemed unsuitable or too risky to screen during regular cinema hours. For more on the midnight movie, see J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum’s Midnight Movies (1991). 3 Although the Fantasia program does not indicate when directors will be in attendance, regulars at this festival would have known that Iguchi always attends Fantasia to present his films. 4 This can be compared to Canada’s other two largest cities, where 49 percent of Toronto’s population and 52 percent of Vancouver’s population are recognized as visible minorities, marking Montreal as the most white/European.

References Bourdieu, P. (1984), Distinction: A Social Critique on the Judgment of Taste, Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press. Brisbane International Film Festival (2013), “Brisbane International Film Festival Wraps for 2013 (Amended).” Available online: www.BIFF.com.au (accessed 1 May 2014). Corner, J. (1991), “Meaning, Genre, and Context,” in J. Curran and M. Gurevitch (eds), Mass Media and Society, 267–84, London: Edward Arnold. Cultographies (n.d.), “Cultographies’ Definition of Cult Film.” Available online: www.cultographies.com (accessed 4 Feb 2015). de Valck, M. (2007), Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Dew, O. (2007), “ ‘Asia Extreme’: Japanese Cinema and British Hype,” New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film, 5 (1): 53–73. Fantasia International Film Festival (n.d), “History.” Available online: www. FantasiaFestival.com (accessed 4 Feb 2015). Hanich, J. (2009), “Dis/liking Disgust: The Revulsion Experience at the Movies,” New Review of Film and Television Studies, 7 (3): 293–309.

The Festival Collective

55

Hanich, J. (2010a), Cinematic Emotion in Horror Films and Thrillers: The Aesthetic Paradox of Pleasurable Fear, New York and London: Routledge. Hanich, J. (2010b), “Collective Viewing: The Cinema and Affective Audience Interrelations,” Passions in Context. The Journal for the History and Theory of Emotions, 1 (1): 1–18. Hanich, J. (2012), “Cinematic Shocks: Recognition, Aesthetic Experience, and Phenomenology,” American Studies, 57 (4): 581–602. Hanich, J. (2014a), “Laughter and Collective Awareness: The Cinema Auditorium as Public Space,” NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies. Hanich, J. (2014b), “Watching a Film with Others: Towards a Theory of Collective Spectatorship,” Screen, 55 (3): 338–59. Hills, M. (2004), “Defining Cult TV: Texts, Inter-texts and Fan Audiences,” in R. C. Allen and A. Hill (eds), The Television Studies Reader, 509–23, London: Routledge. Hills, M. (2008), “Cult Film: A Critical Symposium,” Cineaste, 34 (1). Available online: http://www.cineaste.com/articles/cult-film-a-critical-symposium (accessed 9 Jan 2015). Hoberman, J. and J. Rosenbaum (1991), Midnight Movies, Boston: Da Capo Press. Husserl, E. (1970), The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, Chicago: Northwestern University Press. Hyland, R. (2009), “A Politics of Excess: Violence and Violation in Miike Takashi’s Audition,” in J. Choi and M. Wada-Marciano (eds), Horror to the Extreme: Changing Boundaries in Asian Cinema, 199–218, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Jancovich, M. (2002), “Cult Fictions: Cult Movies, Subcultural Capital and the Production of Cultural Distinctions,” Cultural Studies, 16 (2): 306–22. Kawin, B. (1991), “After Midnight,” in J. P. Telotte (ed.), The Cult Film Experience: Beyond All Reason, Austin: University of Texas Press. Kirk, J. and M. L. Miller (1986), Reliability and Validity in Qualitative Research, Beverly Hills: Sage Publications. Klinger, B. (1989), “Digressions at the Cinema: Reception and Mass Culture,” Cinema Journal, 28 (4): 3–19. Klinger, B., ed. (2006), Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies, and the Home, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Lamerichs, N. (2013), “Cosplay: Material and Transmedial Culture in Play,” Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association: Defragging Game Studies. Marchetti, G. (2008), “Subcultural Studies and the Film Audience: Rethinking the Film Viewing Context,” in E. Mathijs and X. Mendik (eds), The Cult Film Reader, 403–18, Maidenhead, UK : Open University Press. Martin, D. (2009), “Asia Extreme: The Marketing and Critical Reception of Cult Asian Cinema in the UK ,” PhD diss., East Anglia University, United Kingdom. Mathijs, E. and X. Mendik (2008), The Cult Film Reader, Maidenhead, UK : Open University Press.

56

Making Sense of Cinema

Morley, D. (1980), The Nationwide Audience: Structure and Decoding, London: BFI . Mudge, J. (2011), “Sushi Typhoon and the New Wave of Japanese Splatter Films.” Available online: www.YesAsia.com (accessed 4 Feb 2014). Pett, E. (n.d.). “ ‘People Who Think ‘Outside the Box’: British Audiences and Asian Extreme Films,” Cine-Excess E-Journal. Available online: http://www.cine-excess. co.uk/british-audiences-and-asian-extreme-films.html (accessed 2 Sep 2013). Richie, D. (1991), A Lateral View: Essays on Culture and Style in Contemporary Japan, Berkeley, CA : Stone Bridge Press. Richie, D. (2003), The Image Factory: Fads and Fashions in Japan, London: Reaktion Books. Richmond, A. (2014), “Transnational UK Reception of Contemporary Japanese Horror Film,” PhD diss., University of Sheffield, United Kingdom. Sconce, J. (1995), “ ‘Trashing’ the Academy: Taste, Excess, and an Emerging Politics of Cinematic Style,” Screen, 36 (4): 371–93. Shin, C.-Y. (2009), “The Art of Branding,” in J. Choi and M. Wada-Marciano (eds), Horror to the Extreme: Changing Boundaries in Asian Cinema, 85–100, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Sobchack, V. (2009), “Phenomenology,” in P. Livingstone and C. Plantinga (eds), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, 435–45, New York: Taylor & Francis. Staiger, J. (2000), Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception, New York: New York University Press. Staiger, J. (2005), Media Reception Studies, New York: New York University Press.

4

Transnational Investments Aging in Les Invisibles (Sébastien Lifshitz, 2012) and Its Reception Darren Waldron The University of Manchester

Introduction This chapter examines responses to a critically acclaimed French documentary about older queer people—Les Invisibles/The Invisibles (Sébastien Lifshitz, 2012)—among 120 viewers at LGBTQ film festivals in Barcelona, London, and Manchester.1 It discusses one aspect of a project on the reception of LGBTQ films from France and Spain, which I am undertaking in collaboration with a specialist in Spanish cinema, Chris Perriam. The larger study develops work with LGBTQ viewing groups by probing the reception of LGBTQ films across cultural and linguistic borders. The study asks broadly: how translatable are values, identities, lifestyles, tastes, and desires portrayed in films produced in one language and country for viewers who reside in another? Of specific concern in this chapter is whether and in what ways the existences of a group of older French queer people, presented in Les Invisibles, resonate with audiences at LGBTQ film festivals in Spain and the United Kingdom. Representations are clearly inflected by local contexts; however, audiences located “abroad” often claim affinity with these images. Such assertions can derive from a sense of recognition and/or a desire to declare alignments with the assumed values of the culture in which the film is produced and set. These claims are investigated in this chapter, informed by work on taste, community formation, and documentaries. The research presented in this chapter reveals the importance of emotional and political investment as modes of engagement with Les Invisibles among our respondents. Before addressing these responses, the discussion provides an outline of the conceptual framework of the project and the methodology

58

Making Sense of Cinema

adopted. While the project triangulates methods by including questionnaires, focus group discussions, and follow-up emails, this case study focuses on data generated by our questionnaires.

Contexts and Methods of the Study LGBTQ spectatorship of Anglo-American LGBTQ visual culture constitutes an established field within academia, even if much of this work does not engage with actual audiences (see Waldron 2009: 76–83). Audience responses to non-AngloAmerican LGBTQ films have received little, if any, critical attention. Through its focus on the cross-border reception of films from France and Spain, our project aims to address this gap in knowledge. It builds on my previous work, which probed French queer films and their audiences in France and Britain (Waldron 2009), in its inclusion of Spanish LGBTQ cinemas and viewing groups located in Spain. France and Spain furnish ideal case studies because they have historically featured among the most prolific producers of LGBTQ films in Europe. Given our specialties in French and Spanish cinemas, France and Spain are taken as sites of production, while France, Spain, and Britain are taken as spaces within which the reception encounter unfolds. My interest in this subject stems from my experiences as a resident in southern France in the 1990s. Rather than look to French or American films as resources for understanding themselves and their sexuality, the people I knew would often express affinities with the characters and themes of Pedro Almodóvar’s cinema. Through their acts and behavior, they affiliated themselves with what they characterized as a “Spanish” or “Latin” mode of queer identity (broadly associated with defiance, excess, and exuberance, and in which sexual desire exceeds homogenizing labels and binaries). In Britain, Almodóvar’s light and irreverent touch drew new audiences to foreign-language films and often prompted feelings of proximity and empathy. Pleasure and recognition, the impression of a collective worldview, cut across national and linguistic borders in such encounters, and class and education, though still important, were not the only factors that predispose such audiences to watching foreign-language films. Almodóvar’s films have a particular reach beyond LGBTQ festivals, and indeed, LGBTQ viewing groups. Though we include his 2011 release La piel que habito (The Skin I Live In) and his 2013 film Los amantes pasajeros (I’m So Excited) in our corpus, our principal focus on festival audiences has led us to encompass other, arguably less

Transnational Investments

59

commercial films, which present serious considerations of pressing themes, including the material realities of transgender/sexual existence and aging. Les Invisibles is a key example of the second of these trends. Building on existing work with audiences (Buckingham 1993; Thomas 2002), our aim is to probe the role of foreign-language LGBTQ films in enabling viewers at LGBTQ film festivals to construct their social identities, make transnational community affiliations and political allegiances, and affirm the specificity of their cultural tastes. Given its sociological premise, our approach is broadly underpinned by the work of Pierre Bourdieu (1979) on taste and distinction and its application within qualitative audience research (see Thomas 2002). However, we probe how the values, allegiances, and sensibilities acquired as a result of identifications and affiliations in adulthood and with regards to sexuality and gender feed into and are invoked within the reception of foreign-language LGBTQ films. Moreover, conscious that an overemphasis on sociological methods may lead us to ignore or downplay the ways in which our respondents affirm an emotional connection with our films, we also consider what Martin Barker describes as less “routinised” reception practices such as investment, and to a lesser degree, surprise (2006: 39). Our aim has been to maximize our potential of eliciting the “natural vocabulary” (Barker and Brooks 1998: 24) of our respondents. We are aware, however, that accessing pure, unmediated reactions is extremely difficult, given that responses tend to be expressed within the frames of available discourses, which might be influenced by the film and the contexts in which the film is seen. These contexts include the venue and any prescreening notes and publicity, the film’s theme, the common vernaculars generally deployed in approaching that theme, similar films viewers may have seen, or texts on its subject, and so on. Moreover, respondents can mold their answers in certain ways when participating in a research project in order to provide what they think the researcher wants to read/hear (see Waldron 2009). Mindful of these constraints, we chose open-ended questions, and because of the dangers of ambiguity (see Bertrand and Hughes 2005), kept them as simple as possible. We formulated them along the lines of what we thought people would “instinctively” discuss after watching a film, such as whether they liked or disliked it and why, and whether they found it “true to life.” Our contact with the respondents was minimal given that they quickly collected the questionnaires as they filed into the auditorium and then swiftly returned them to us once the film had finished. The questionnaire was translated from English into Catalan, Spanish and French, and linguistic and idiomatic accuracy was assured by having native speakers verify the

60

Making Sense of Cinema

wording. Former and current postgraduate students were employed to input the responses into a spreadsheet. The responses we select in our publications reflect the most recurrent topics, and we have anonymized our data by using pseudonyms. From 2012 through 2014, we gathered more than 400 completed questionnaires from nine festivals in France, Spain, and the United Kingdom: BFI Flare, the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival; Mostra-Fire in Barcelona; the Festival Internacional de Cine Gay y Lesbico de Catalunya (FICGLB) in Barcelona; POUTFest in Manchester; the Festival des Images aux Mots in Toulouse; LesGaiCine in Madrid; Ecrans-mixtes in Lyon; Zinegoak in Bilbao; and Chéris-Chéries in Paris. MostraFire and Flare/LLGFF generated the highest number of completed questionnaires: 97 for the former and 111 for the latter. The least productive were the Festival des Images aux Mots (2), the FICGLB (11), Ecrans-mixtes (13), and Zinegoak (18). We have received numerous follow-up emails, conducted one Skype conversation, and facilitated five focus group discussions in Lyon, London, Barcelona, Salamanca, and Manchester. The research present in this chapter comes from the 120 questionnaires collected at Mostra-Fire, Flare, and POUTFest.

Approaching LGBTQ Film Festival Audiences Since the inception of our project, we have aimed to work with audiences likely to identify with one of the categories brought together under the LGBTQ banner. Mindful of the dangers of predefining participants, however, and of preinterpreting their responses, we decided not to ask them to declare their sexuality, and instead, chose to focus our recruitment on outlets we thought would boost our chances of reaching our intended audience, hence why we turned to LGBTQ film festivals. Our strategy of recruiting respondents at LGBTQ festivals might be criticized for restricting our sample in terms of the type of viewers we are likely to attract, as having a strong sense of community allegiance and—because of the historical significance of festivals within LGBTQ activism—specific, if various, political sensibilities. Creating LGBTQ communities has been one of the key functions of these festivals. Martha Gever (1990) remarks, for example, that they are conceived “with a presumption of community, no matter how fictional,” and she acknowledges the role of attendance at the events within the kind of self-formation they facilitate: “our identities are constituted as much in the event as in the images we watch” (201). For Patricia White (1999), LGBTQ film festivals “constitute a counter

Transnational Investments

61

public sphere, providing a collective experience and a literal site of critical reception. What they exhibit and make visible, alongside their programming, is an audience” (74, italics in original). Julianne Pidduck (2002) adopts a similar approach, arguing that “in many parts of the world” LGBTQ film festivals provide “safe” zones for “the critical viewing of queer works” and “are part of a concerted political project to seize the means of self-representation in the face of widespread cultural invisibility and stereotyping” (267). More recently, though, the purpose and audiences served by LGBTQ film festivals have evolved, partly because the Web and subscription TV channels have made images of LGBTQ issues and concerns more available, and partly due to a general perception that queer lifestyles are now more accepted, at least in Western societies. The remit of the bigger festivals has broadened, which has also been facilitated by the involvement of cultural institutions that cater to the general public, and possibly, the support of corporate sponsors. There is, of course, a danger of over-exaggerating audience diversification at contemporary LGBTQ festivals. Some greater diversity is inevitable, however, as the attention of the critical establishment and broader population increasingly turns to films with queer content, and as those same films are selected to headline at LGBTQ festivals held in mainstream institutions.2 Consequently, while we believe our method of recruiting our respondents among festival attendees has succeeded in reaching mainly LGBTQ viewers, our sample also includes non-LGBTQ identifying respondents. Encounters with foreign-language films have played an important role in the identity construction facilitated and reinforced by LGBTQ festivals, partly as a necessity given the paucity of representations of LGBTQ issues and concerns in any one national visual culture before the advent of the Web and subscription TV channels. LGBTQ film festivals foster a “cross-fertilisation of international images, ideas and people” (Pidduck 2002: 268). Such cross-cultural exchange could be described as transnational in a formative sense; if some LGBTQ community and individual identities are (partly) constructed in and through attendance at festivals, the encounters those festivals encourage with foreignlanguage films play a role in that construction. Some care is required when using the term transnational, because of the risks of overlooking what Will Higbee and Song Hwee Lim (2010) refer to as the “specific cultural, historical and ideological contexts” in which films are produced and received (11–12). Foreign-language films obviously draw on local geographical, social, cultural, and political realities and contexts, and for this

62

Making Sense of Cinema

reason, can elicit the curiosity of the nondomestic viewer seeking encounters with exotic and unfamiliar cultures from the safety and comfort of the cinema auditorium (see Nichols 1994). And yet, they often prompt feelings of empathy, (self-)recognition and (self-)revelation among nondomestic audiences. Moreover, they can be read as offering what is perceived to be lacking from the domestic culture of the viewer who watches them by furnishing alternative resources for self-making and social identity construction. In such cases, allegiance to one national domestic culture can be superseded by an alignment with worldviews associated with another, transmitted through its cinema. The discussion that follows explores the extent to which such viewing/subject positions emerge from the responses to our questionnaires.

Emotions and Identifications in Responses Our approach to our collected responses is to interpret them in close connection to the film on which they are based. We take care, however, to avoid falling into the trap of textual determinism and pay attention to what Celeste Michelle Condit (1999) refers to as the “polyvalence” of audience viewing positions in relation to films. Like any film, Les Invisibles may well elicit a range of different reactions, yet it nonetheless attempts to present its audience with an overridingly optimistic depiction of aging among queer people living in the provinces. According to its director, Les Invisibles highlights the courage, freedom, and happiness with which its interviewees (which he refers to as heroes) have lived their homosexuality, despite the challenges and traumas they faced (in Odicino 2013). The documentary broadly traces a trajectory from past oppression to present emancipation. Though the general mood is reflective, Les Invisibles is mainly light and jovial. Realist cinéma-vérité aesthetics are rejected for a more romantic style: a fixed camera and a wide-angle lens are preferred over handheld filming equipment. The interviewees are resilient, amiable, and effervescent. Their familiar and humorous style of delivery softens the more radical aspects of their pasts, recounted and referenced in archival footage. The filmmakers never intervene directly, thereby creating the impression of an immediate relationship between interviewee and viewer, although their presence is implied in the film’s formal/stylistic qualities. One way of mitigating the prejudicial influence of our readings of the film on our interpretation of the responses we collected is by incorporating extracts

Transnational Investments

63

from the synopses/write-ups provided by the festivals within our analyses. Some of our respondents are likely to have consulted versions of these, as in the case of Andrew, a 66-year-old white British retired NHS manager from St Albans, who cites extracts from the film notes provided at Flare in his answers to our questions. The synopses share the aforementioned view of Les Invisibles as uplifting. Each one differs, however, with regards to whether they promote the film as specifically French or whether they emphasize its universal and/or transnational qualities. For instance, the writer of the summary for Mostra-Fire seems careful to emphasize the peculiarly French aspects of Les Invisibles by invoking a central tension in discourses about sexuality and difference in France: Sébastien Lifshitz tells the history of eleven French men and women over seventy years old who decided to have an open gay life when they were young and public opinion was against homosexuality. . . . All shown testimonials make us understand that the French were mostly free to live as they wanted; the scandalous back then was not being gay, but to talk about it. (Casal lambda 2013: n.p.)

Dominant French approaches to social integration are broadly understood as actively discouraging public displays of difference in favor of a collective allegiance to a neutral, universalized construction of the French citizen (see Martel 1999). It is therefore not difficult to see why the reviewer above locates the trauma depicted in Les Invisibles in its interviewees’ supposed inability to be publicly open about their sexuality. The notes accompanying the streaming of Les Invisibles on the BFI website, connected to Flare, partially speaks to a nostalgic image of France often mobilized in Britain: French gay men and women in their 60s and 70s talk about their lives and loves. While some tell stories of repression, family estrangement and catholic guilt, all are out, proud and inspiring, from the infectiously enthusiastic lesbian activist to the octogenarian bisexual shepherd unrepentantly recalling his many sexual conquests. (British Film Institute 2012: n.p.)

By mentioning “Catholic guilt” and the “shepherd” (Pierrot), alongside the “lesbian activist,” this reviewer nods to the image of France, portrayed in the film, as abidingly bucolic, popularized in the Marcel Pagnol adaptations, Jean de Florette and its sequel Manon des Sources (Claude Berri, 1986), and Bertrand Philibert’s documentary about life in an infants’ school in rural Auvergne, Être et

64

Making Sense of Cinema

avoir (2002). Neither synopsis picks up on the film’s potential resonance across borders. By contrast, the text for POUTfest emphasizes its transnational features by avoiding any mention of France. In fact, the author even opts for the Englishtranslation over its French title: The Invisibles explores the lives of men and women born between the World Wars who have nothing in common, except their sexuality and decision to live openly at a time when society rejected them. They’ve loved, struggled, desired, made love. Today they tell us about their pioneering lives and how they navigated the desire to remain ordinary with the need to liberate themselves in order to thrive. (HOME Cinema 2013: n.p.)

Aspects deemed “universal” are highlighted: sexuality, defiance, love, desire. It is this view of the film—as an intervention on aging among queers in general as opposed to a portrayal of older queer people in France—that is most commonly expressed by our respondents. In fact, the vast majority identify the film’s upbeat approach to its subject as the reason for their appreciation. Few mention its more somber moments, with almost all of them focusing their attentions on its “feelgood” story of defiance, self-affirmation, and healthy, positive aging. Most convey how much they care about Les Invisibles and its interviewees, and thus, project intensified investments in its subject matter. Barker (2006) defines investment as drawing “attention to all the ways in which the audience care about the experience they seek [and] treats as crucial variables how much they care, and the manner of their caring” (39, italics in original). Care precedes the reception encounter for many of our respondents, with many stating that they chose Les Invisibles precisely because it was about older lesbians, gay men and bisexuals. The care many of our respondents display thus transcends the imagined and real borders that separate and distinguish peoples. Their investment might be described as a politically-informed commitment to the film’s values, but it is via their enthusiastic and candid projections of their affective attachment to the film and its interviewees, and their emphatic endorsements of what they characterize as the director’s sensitivity, that the respondents align themselves with its perceived message about the need to give older lesbians, gay men and bisexuals a voice in visual culture. The most common qualifiers used to describe the film’s affective impact are “moving,” “sad,” and “funny.” Emotional attachment is projected as having been

Transnational Investments

65

facilitated by the aforementioned ways in which the documentary approached its subject. Here, the recurring adjectives highlight its “sensitivity,” “empathy,” “humor,” “respect,” and “sympathy,” and qualify it as “nonjudgmental” and “humanist.” Peter, a 50-year-old white British costumer/artist in London enthuses “I loved it, so gentle, caring, visually pensive, music perfect, and essentially endearing humanity.” Gaynor, a 52-year-old white British-Welsh entrepreneur, also in London, writes that it was “uplifting,” while Janet, a 26-year-old white British PhD student from Manchester, describes it as “life affirming.” Kirstie, a 33-year-old Canadian-Greek festival organizer from Halifax, Nova Scotia, affirms that it “had endearing and very interesting characters, something to say, lots to leave and think about.” The notion that the film prompted reflection was echoed by Ana, a 36-year-old white Catalan-Spanish psychologist, who also underlines its emotional impact on her: “me ha gustado mucho . . . porque ha hecho sentir y pensar” (“I really loved it . . . because it made you feel and think”). Rupah, a 27-year-old British-Indian social worker from London wrote that the documentary addressed its subject “with clearly a lot of affection, empathy and care. And it was funny too.” The key terms the respondents utilize in their acclaim for the film’s sensitivity refer to its “rawness,” “sincerity,” “honesty,” “authenticity,” and “frankness.” Catriona, a 28-year-old white British-Scottish PhD student living in London described Les Invisibles as “very moving” and Caroline, a 64-year-old white British-English multimedia tutor, endorsed the fact that it handled its subject “very sympathetically” and that it was “energising and created a desire to go back there.” A marker of the intensity of this transnational investment in the film is the alacrity with which the respondents affirm their proximity with the interviewees and their experiences. Most, though not all, of these declarations were in response to our question addressing identification. The inclusion of this question could be criticized for being leading, but we felt identification commonly featured in spontaneous and nonspecialized discussions about films among friends and acquaintances (see Gaut 1999), and this is no less the case with documentaries that focus on minority experiences as in Les Invisibles. As Martin Barker carefully outlines in his chapter in this volume, the concept of “identification” is highly contested within work on audience reception. We approach expressions of identification from a sociological perspective; that is, not as psychological processes, but as means of articulating pre-existing social affinities and/or spontaneous affiliations with particular personality types, communities, and values. Barker asserts in his chapter for this volume that as

66

Making Sense of Cinema

audiences we bring “interpretive frameworks” to our encounters with films and make associations with those elements that are “salient and powerful” (2016: 100) to us owing to their coming from our relevant experiences, connections and communities. Barker (2006) argues elsewhere that when we watch films we “carry in” with us a “sense of belonging to different discursive communities, some real, some imaginary, even as [we] may watch, listen, read alone” (28). Such affinities inform our readings of films, including foreign-language and documentary films, and how we evaluate them in front of our peers. For the respondents in this investigation into the reception of Les Invisibles, the expression of identification can serve as the outward affirmation of their allegiance to an imagined membership of a transnational LGBTQ community. Spontaneous affirmations of identification arise, predictably, more often among older respondents. Caroline states that she chose the film because she struggles “with facing [her] age.” Ashley, an 84-year-old white British respondent who left the question on gender blank, is more emphatic: “it was about older gay people because I am one of them.” Jorge, a 55-year-old white Catalan-Spanish male from Barcelona isolates the impact of discrimination and desire for acceptance as the reasons why he experienced feelings of proximity: “sóc homosexual i tenim molts apsectes en comú. El dolor de la repressió social, la necessitat d’amor i de respecte, de formar part integral de la societat” (“I’m gay and have many aspects in common. The pain of social repression, the need for love and respect, to be an integral part of society”). The articulation of common concerns and shared experience is not hindered by the fact that the documentary’s interviewees are mainly located in rural southern France or that their native language is French. Anxiety about aging and being older, as well as a common self-identification as gay, surpass national identity as the declared drivers that inform the selection of films and what audiences do with them. Sarah, a 42-year-old white British security worker, affirms the power of community affiliation in transcending national, cultural, and linguistic boundaries in answer to the question about whether the director did a good job: “he presented ‘us’ as normal, and our experiences as normal. We are passionate, eloquent and aware of our experiences.” Sarah’s use of the plural pronouns “us” and “we,” and the possessive “our,” implicates her within the community that she claims is depicted in Les Invisibles. She exemplifies how films can be watched and consumed from an already-existing collective viewing position, even if the quotation marks that hang around the term “us” convey some awareness of the porosity of that collective. Sarah’s affirmation of community pride is neither impeded nor qualified

Transnational Investments

67

by the film’s setting, language, nor the nationality and personal experiences of its interviewees. Transnational and transcultural LGBTQ community allegiance is the bond claimed as binding this British viewer to French film. Janet articulates a similar view, describing the film as portraying a “history and community [she feels] so close to.” In other cases, those elements characterized as having prompted feelings of self-recognition are more intimate and less community-based. Shared personal experiences and romantic/erotic attractions are highlighted as reasons for the feelings of self-similarity and recognition among some. Andrew recalls “I was born in 1946 and my (deceased) life-partner of 34yrs in 1921 [so I] could identify with much of the ‘good-feel-factor’ in the film as well as some of the negative aspects of growing up gay in 1960/70s.” Although he subtly criticizes the film’s positive portrayal of aging among queers as unrepresentative, he nonetheless affirms identification with the elderly male couple: “one stated that as a young man he was only attracted to older men with grey/white hair . . . my partner was 25 years older who, in his 80s, needed help attaching his braces to trousers, which made me chuckle as that scene was played out in the film.” Intergenerational desires and relationships, and their impact for lived experience later on in life, are thus framed as the nodes of identification that, once again, supersede any sense of national affiliation. In one instance, Les Invisibles is portrayed as triggering an unanticipated encounter with a very intimate aspect of a respondent’s own character and identity: I have never heard someone talking about falling in love and felt it could be me talking. I saw myself in these people. Whenever my parents would try to talk to me about sex I got embarrassed, but when these people spoke it felt natural, comfortable, and I wanted to hear them speak! I hated straight people trying to tell me what love would feel like one day.

This respondent declined to give a name, did not define themselves in gender terms or identify their occupation, although the respondent did state they were 24, American, and living in London. As this intensely personal account reveals, it is the candor with which the interviewees approach and recount their romantic and sexual lives that is pinpointed as having driven the respondent’s feelings of (self-)recognition. That this respondent chose to write “n/a” to the question on gender conveys their refusal to be categorized according to the binary form or normative gender identities (hence my use of neutral pronouns), although it could also be read as care not to reveal personal information about themselves

68

Making Sense of Cinema

due to continued feelings of unease around sex and sexuality (the lack of name and email address would corroborate this). What is most striking here is that, for this viewer, the frankness with which the film’s interviewees approach their sexual desires and romantic experiences was unexpected. In his discussion of surprise as an emotional reaction to films among audiences, Barker (2006) observes that it can be “happy or unhappy” and “can occasionally be life altering—an experience gained that breaches boundaries, opens new perspectives, wanted or not” (39). The “breaching of boundaries” and “opening of new perspectives” are welcomed by this respondent, who recognizes in this French-language film a crucial facet of themselves that they claim to have repressed while growing up. A French film is thus heralded as distinct from those coming from respondents’ culture of origin, but that difference is highlighted as the factor that facilitates their feelings of self-similarity/recognition. This viewer thus illustrates precisely how foreign-language films can offer people from “elsewhere” alternative resources for understanding themselves, and indeed, their most intimate selves. Some respondents opt for a less emotional tone in their response to the question on identification, preferring to frame it in rational, objective terms by accentuating the “universal” resonance of the film’s themes. Roberta, a 32-year-old white Swiss youth worker and theater founder, writes “They didn’t speak of anything I haven’t felt or thought myself—a universal understanding,” while Kirstie notes that “other than the cultural climate of the different generations we grew up in, the feelings underlying the doc (love, desire, partnership) seem universal.” A few uphold the focus in Les Invisibles on French people and rural lifestyles as tempering their capacity to express affinity with the interviewees. Ute, a white German volunteer living in London, for instance, writes that “since it was in France, it had a particular cultural setting.” Others, however, pinpoint the perceived cultural specificity of Les Invisibles as the feature that attracted them. Paul, a 50-year-old white British IT worker states that he chose it because it was “French and [a] documentary.” Nathan, a 60-year-old white British retired lecturer claims that he selected it because of his “interest in French life.” Abigail, a 70-year-old white British retired community worker from London states that she loves “French films’ style.” Caroline affirms that she is “English, studying French, and attracted to French films.” On the surface, these responses might illustrate the lure of the “foreign,” that is, the appeal of France as the home of specific cultural values and of a peculiar film culture. And yet, France and French cinema do not emerge from these responses

Transnational Investments

69

as categorically “other” because, while these viewers seek out French films to encounter a different reality from the one they experience in their day-to-day lives, it is one that both represents a particular attraction for them, and in some cases, aligns with their own sense of self. Such responses illustrate how the lines between the domestic and the foreign can be blurred in the reception of foreignlanguage films.

Approaching and Receiving Community Histories A measure of the apparent intensity of the audience’s emotional and political investment in Les Invisibles is the fact that the vast majority (90 percent) engage in what Ramaswami Harindranath (1998) has termed “transparent-uncritical readings” (285). For some, including Maria, a 35-year-old employed white Catalan-Spanish self-declared lesbian, and Carlos, an 18-year-old white Spanish student of medicine with an “apariencia de hombre, con rasgos femeninos e interior de ambos” (“appearance of a man, with female origins roots and an interior that combines both”), the fact that Les Invisibles presented “real” and “honest” testimonies was sufficient justification for its categorization as “true to life.” For others, including Ignasi, a 31-year-old white Spanish male teacher, its genre was proof of its realism. Most (77 percent) stated that they watch documentaries often precisely because they present “real life” issues. In many ways, these respondents overlook what John Corner (2008), drawing on Bill Nichols (1976), has characterized as the “illusionism” with which documentaries tend to address audiences (16), mobilized in Les Invisibles via Lifshitz’s subjective, romantic style and its narrative arc that traces a linear emancipation trajectory. Hue, a 20-year-old female Vietnamese university student declared, for instance, “there is a sort of comfort in knowing that these stories and people are real,” and Aina, a 31-year-old white Catalan-Spanish journalist from Barcelona wrote that she enjoys documentaries because they enable her to encounter “distintes realitats” (“distinct realities”). The high frequency of “transparent-uncritical” responses seems surprising given the status of the majority of our participants in terms of education and occupation: 76 percent have a university degree;3 59 percent declared they are employed in the human service professions, mainly education, health, and social services;4 86 percent live in large cosmopolitan cities.5 Bourdieu’s (1979) concept of aesthetic disposition outlines how a high level of education and exposure to

70

Making Sense of Cinema

art provides consumers with the tools necessary to discern cultural products from a distance and to privilege form over content. It may be assumed then that these viewers are sufficiently endowed with the cultural capital to interpret this French documentary from a critical vantage point. And yet, while a few imply distance by appraising the film’s universal appeal in rational terms or by affirming their difference from the interviewees, they tend to take the evidence presented by the documentary as truth. While some convey a degree of skepticism, they nonetheless temper their criticisms. For instance, Karl, a 24-year-old white Danish student who volunteers for Copenhagen’s queer film festival, raises questions about the “scenic pauses” that he found “too contemplative,” but he qualifies the film as a whole as “beautiful” and confesses, somewhat ironically, to aspirational transgender and transgenerational affinities: “[I] even wish to be a lesbian in French Provence countryside when I grow old.” In one case, the strength of investment is such that it results in a toning down of a highly valid critique. Rupah is surprisingly the only participant to question the film’s exclusive focus on white LGBTQ interviewees: “I wonder perhaps if there were a similar doc about older, queer people of color, would I have identified more?”6 However, she praises the director’s bravery for “tackling the subject” and adds that she wishes “there were more docs like this.” Nevertheless, it would be misguided to presuppose that those who imply a belief in the documentary’s “truth claims” express what Bourdieu (1979) qualifies as a popular and naïve mode of cultural consumption. In fact, the responses alert us to the dangers of over-emphasizing education, occupation and class, in addition to national identity, as dominant factors that determine reception. As in Thomas Austin’s (2007) study of the reception of Être et avoir, such audiences do not necessarily have a more “facile notion of truth” (45), but their bracketing out of critical evaluation can arise from their emotional and/or political investment in the film and its interviewees. Perhaps they suspend their critical faculties because of the importance they attach to the subject of Les Invisibles and their willingness to believe, and be reassured by, its optimistic depiction of aging for queer people. More explicitly critical readings are rare. Richard, a 51-year-old white British business developer from Manchester, brings attention to form by asking whether, “as an edited film can it ever be [true to life]?” Rachida, a 29-year-old FrenchAlgerian customer care adviser who lives in Manchester and claims not to identify as LGBTQ, stated, “I thought it was very realistic but I’m not sure whether every story was actually true.” Like Richard, Rachida implies some awareness of the discursive and interpretive qualities of the evidence presented

Transnational Investments

71

by documentaries (Nichols 2008), but she differentiates between the film (which she qualifies as “realistic”) and the stories recounted by the interviewees (which she questions). Elsewhere, Miguel, a 36-year-old white Spanish teacher, whose “girlfriend chose [the film]” for him, questions the authenticity of its depiction of LGBTQ history and activism, which he described as “a bit too reassuring,” adding “I assume the gay movement went through much more hardship.” This aspect of Les Invisibles otherwise receives almost blanket praise, which might be because it chimes with the prominent concerns in appraisals of LGBTQ identity and lifestyles from within LGBTQ communities, in which recollections and representations of past hardships are attributed urgency. Indeed, Lifshitz declares that leaving a historical trace of past LGBTQ existences and struggles in France was one of his aims in making Les Invisibles (Odicino 2013). The dangers of forgetting the traumas of past repression and the struggles of previous generations to secure the freedoms enjoyed today are recurrent concerns within community debates. Implicit within such views can be found a form of ageism, in which younger LGBTQ people are framed as living for today, and lacking the political awareness and commitment of their community elders. Steve, a 49-year-old white British town planner from Manchester, strongly articulates such an opinion, praising the fact that Les Invisibles “made older LGBTQ people visible in a society that often marginalises older people and where the commercial gay scene is focused on the ‘young and beautiful.”’ He commends the film as a “reminder of the struggle by older LGBTQ people that has resulted in freedoms today, which are so often taken for granted by many.” Steve’s reading of the film evokes local tensions around the lifestyles and perceived priorities of LGBTQ people in his home city. He watched Les Invisibles at POUTfest, one of the few cultural events that constitute Manchester’s annual gay pride celebrations, which culminates in a three-day “festival/party” involving the biggest gay bars, but for which patrons must pay a high entrance fee. Here, then, we have a further example of how a film about queer identities and lifestyles from “abroad” is taken up by a viewer “elsewhere” as offering something they imply is unavailable to them in their home culture when they watch it. Through his tenor and choice of vocabulary, Steve claims the issues Les Invisibles raises—the invisibility of older queer people and need to record and recognize their pioneering advances and achievements—have significance well beyond France. His use of the term reminder nods to the perceived universality of the struggle; both the past and need to represent it are characterized as affecting all LGBTQ people.

72

Making Sense of Cinema

Unsurprisingly, it is the personal history of coming to terms with being gay and the journey to social acceptance that some of our respondents pinpoint as the motivators for their feelings of recognition and proximity. For instance, Jaume, a 31-year-old white Catalan-Spanish secondary school teacher, declared, “m’he sentit identificat en els personatges que ha fet un procés d’acceptació” (“I identified with the characters that had undergone a process of acceptance”). Jordi, a 30-year-old white Catalan-Spanish man from Barcelona, was less specific, but nonetheless observed that “la meva infancia ha estat com al de alguns personatges del docu i en les seves histories hi he vist reflexades les coses que he viscut” (“my childhood was like those of some of the characters in the documentary, and their stories reflected the things that I have experienced”). Despite the four decades separating the respondents from the interviewees in Les Invisibles, the experiences are framed as similar. Another participant, Jane, a 25-year-old white British-English woman from Manchester, related this to the question of gender, and particularly, of women’s liberation. She declared that she identifies with “the woman who thought ‘is this it?’ in regards to children/a life as a stay at home mother.” That Jane lives in a completely different physical and cultural environment, and is a young woman at a completely different time period from Thérèse, does not hinder her expressed feelings of self-similarity.

Discussion Foreign-language films can still play an important role in enabling audiences at LGBTQ film festivals to negotiate their social identities and social relationships, and to claim community affinities and allegiances. That Les Invisibles is set within specific geographical, cultural, social, and linguistic contexts does not act as a barrier to affirmations of identification, recognition, and self-similarity among the respondents cited here. More than mere instances of the “cross-fertilization” of ideas, people, and images, the interviewees and their experiences are brought to bear on the respondents’ own accounts of their engagement with the world, ranging from the general and political to the more intimate. Moreover, only a few frame their lives and experiences as inherently different, while others seek out that difference as a manifestation of values and sensitivities deemed unavailable to them in their home cultures. Within such encounters, the “foreign-language film” is no longer framed as “foreign,” but rather as something that resonates with the respondents’ own view of the world.

Transnational Investments

73

Conclusion As mentioned, our focus on festivals in some ways leads us to a certain kind of viewer, and can therefore only be seen as a reflection of how some LGBTQ viewers engage with foreign-language films. It is important to remember that for a large population of LGBTQ -identifying people today, subtitled foreign language films constitute a niche cultural taste. Moreover, care is required in describing what the audience does with such films. Audiences can and do respond in a multitude of different ways. In this particular case, however, the film rhetorically encourages a certain reading from the viewer. Maintaining awareness of this while at the same time recognizing the agency of the viewer, within the parameters of available discourses, is a challenge for the audience researcher. On the one hand, there is a danger of textual determinism while, on the other, we risk losing contact with the film, over-emphasizing the sociological in our analysis of responses, and thus, by extension, downplaying more affective connections. The capacity to reach such emotional reactions is perhaps not best served by questionnaires, which can elicit fleeting responses and may not “help to establish thick description or to understand process or social context” (Bertrand and Hughes 2005: 69). The affective impact and intensity of a film or scene can be diluted within such brief written accounts of past feelings and opinions. Yet, they can allow researchers to reach more respondents (see Bertrand and Hughes 2005) than other methods, and as this chapter reveals, they can still convey an idea of the emotional intensity with which respondents describe their attachment to a film and its values. As such, though doubtlessly limited, questionnaires still have their place within the field of qualitative audience research, particularly when combined with other methods. The outcomes of such triangulations will be seen in the project’s forthcoming book (Perriam and Waldron 2015).

Notes 1 While queer can be criticized for being an Anglo-centric term with a particularly political resonance, its relevance here is illustrated by the fact that, in addition to those who identify as lesbian and/or gay, Les Invisibles also includes interviewees whose sexuality is portrayed and qualified as—to quote one of them (Thérèse) — “polymorphous.” The acronym LGBTQ is used when referring to the broader project and the festivals: London’s Flare describes itself as an LGBT festival as does

74

2

3

4

5 6

Making Sense of Cinema Manchester’s POUTfest, which has also marketed itself as a showcase for new queer films, while Mostra-Fire simply qualifies itself as a lesbian and gay event. On the impact of staging such events in non-queer institutions, see Juan Suárez (2006). On Flare, see Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover’s (2014) review of the 2014 edition. They note the prominence given to high-profile films within the festival’s program, which benefit from enhanced funding and broad distribution channels because they appeal to critics and followers of art-house cinema. Thirty-three have also completed or are completing postgraduate studies, including four who have been awarded or are studying for a PhD. Two have vocational qualifications, seven left education after secondary school, and nine wrote “n/a” or left the question blank. Ten of the attendees of the Mostra-Fire festival construed the question as probing whether they had attended religious or secular establishments. Of the remaining respondents, eleven work in the service sector and twelve are students, ten wrote “work,” four stated that they were retired without describing their previous occupations, four stated that they were “at home” or “unemployed.” Based on the International Standard Classification of Occupations. These include: London (33), Copenhagen (4), Newcastle (1), Manchester (and conurbation) (24), Barcelona (and conurbation) (40), and Montreal (1). The sample is mainly constituted of respondents who describe themselves as white (101). Additional ethnicities declared include: South East Asian (1), Sri Lankan (1), North African (1), Irish/Jewish/Indian/Jamaican (1) and white/North African (1). The remaining respondents either avoid identifying their ethnicity or define themselves in regional terms (especially the Spanish participants).

References Austin, T. (2007a), Hollywood, Hype and Audiences: Selling and Watching Popular Film in the 1990s, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Austin, T. (2007b), Watching the World: Screen Documentaries and Audiences, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Barker, M. (2006), “On Being Ambitious for Audience Research,” in I. Charpentier (ed.), Comment sont reçues les œuvres, 27–42, Versailles: Créaphis. Barker, M. (2016), “ ‘Legolas, He’s Cool . . . and He’s Hot!’. The Meanings and Implications of Audiences’ Favorite Characters,” in C.D. Reinhard and C.J. Olson (eds), Making Sense of Cinema: Empirical Studies into Film Spectators and Spectatorship, 97–118, New York: Bloomsbury. Barker, M. and K. Brooks (1998), Knowing Audiences: Judge Dredd—Its Friends, Fans and Foes, Luton, UK : University of Luton Press.

Transnational Investments

75

Bertrand, I. and P. Hughes (2005), Media Research Methods: Audiences, Institutions, Texts, London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Bourdieu, P. (1979), Distinction: Critique Sociale du Jugement, Paris: Broché. British Film Institute (ed.) (2012), “Les Invisibles.” Available online: http://player.bfi.org. uk/film/watch-les-invisibles-2012/ (accessed 8 April 2015). Buckingham, D. (ed.) (1993), Reading Audiences: Young People and the Media, Manchester, Manchester University Press. Casal lambda (2013), “Official Section: Documentary Films: Les Invisibles.” Available online: http://www.lambda.cat/cinema/2013/13_eng.html (accessed 8 April 2015). Condit, C. M. (1999), “The Rhetorical Limits of Polysemy,” in J. L. Lucaites, C. M. Condit, and S. Caudill (eds), Contemporary Rhetorical Theory: A Reader, 494–511, New York: Guilford Press. Corner, J. (2008), “Documentary Studies: Dimensions of Transition and Continuity,” in T. Austin and W. de Jong (eds), Rethinking Documentary: New Perspectives, New Practices, 13–28, Maidenhead, UK : Open University Press and New York: Oxford University Press. Galt, R. and K. Schoonover (2014), “Mind, Bodies and Hearts: Flare, London LGBT Film Festival 2014.” Available online: http://www.necsus-ejms.org/minds-bodieshearts-flare-london-lgbt-film-festival-2014/ (accessed 10 March 2015). Gaut, B. (1999), “Identification and Emotion in Narrative Film,” in C. Plantinga and G. M. Smith (eds), Passionate Views: Film, Cognition and Emotion, 200–216, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Gever, M. (1990), “The Names We Give Ourselves,” in R. Ferguson, M. Gever, T. T. Minh-ha, and C. West (eds), Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, 191–202, New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge, MA : MIT Press. Harindranath, R. (1998), “Documentary Meanings and Interpretive Contexts: Observations on Indian ‘Repertoires’,” in R. Dickinson, R. Harindranath and O. Linné (eds), Approaches to Audiences: A Reader, 283–97, London: Arnold. Higbee, W. and S. H. Lim (2010), “Concepts of Transnational Cinema: Towards a Critical Transnationalism in Film Studies,” Transnational Cinemas, 1 (1): 7–21. HOME Cinema (2013), “The Invisibles.” Available online: http://homemcr.org/film/ the-invisibles/ (accessed 8 April 2015). Lifshitz, S. (2014), The Invisibles: Vintage Portraits of Love and Pride, New York: Rizzoli. Martel, F. (1999), The Pink and the Black: Homosexuals in France Since 1968, Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press. Nichols, B. (1976), “Documentary Theory and Practice,” Screen, 71 (4): 34–48. Nichols, B. (1994), “Discovering Form, Inferring Meaning: New Cinemas and the Film Festival Circuit,” Film Quarterly, 47 (3): 16–30. Nichols, B. (2008), “The Question of Evidence, the Power of Rhetoric and Documentary Film,” in T. Austin and W. de Jong (eds), Rethinking Documentary: New Perspectives,

76

Making Sense of Cinema

New Practices, 29–38, Maidenhead, UK : Open University Press and New York: Oxford University Press. Odicino, G. (2013), “Entretien avec Sébastien Lifshitz,” from Les Invisibles, DVD extras. Perriam, C. and D. Waldron (2016), French and Spanish Queer Film: Audiences, Communities and Cultural Exchange, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Pidduck, J. (2002), “After 1980: Margins and Mainstream,” in R. Dyer (ed.), Now You See It, 2nd edn, 265–94, New York and London: Routledge. Suàrez, J. A. (2006), “Surprise Me,” in “Queer Film and Video Festival Forum, Take Two: Critics Speak Out,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 12 (4): 600–602. Thomas, L. (2002), Fans, Feminism and Quality Media, London: Routledge/UCL Press. Waldron, D. (2009), Queering Contemporary French Popular Cinema: Images and Their Reception, New York: Peter Lang. White, P. (1999), “Introduction: on Exhibitionism,” in “Queer Publicity: a Dossier on Lesbian and Gay Film Festivals,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 5 (1): 73–78.

5

Preferred Readings and Dissociative Appropriations Group Discussions Following and Challenging the Tradition of Cultural Studies Alexander Geimer University of Hamburg

Introduction Audience and reception studies in cultural studies have primarily focused on how Hollywood movies or mainstream television serials may, in academic contexts, be critically deconstructed or, in everyday contexts, subversively received. Spectators’ idiosyncratic readings are seen as reception processes that emancipate themselves from or remain unimpressed by the identified preferred reading. A preferred reading is the one that the film provides via multiple aesthetic devices as the easiest access to the film’s narration. Although many studies on the film/spectator interaction, especially in the realm of cultural studies, stress the multilayered, polysemous, indeterminate, or indeterminable nature of films as media texts, little attention has as yet been given to critique-of-ideology preferred readings and their reception. With this term, I refer to such preferred readings that do not follow the dominant codes of the culture in which the film is produced but instead oppose them. Along with that comes the film’s potential to irritate the spectator since such films allow or even encourage taking a critical subject position. A very obvious case would be a critical documentary about the connections between political, economic, and educational systems that directly criticizes the indoctrination of the values of the merit-based, achievement-oriented society in schools. Such critique-of-ideology preferred readings and their reception are the focus of this chapter.

78

Making Sense of Cinema

More specifically, I will deal with a genre that, demarcating itself from classical Hollywood cinema by its narrative style, is a specific variant of postmodern cinema, the reception of which has gone unstudied. A differentiation among genres allows me to describe a film’s novel narrative structure, and thus, trace back its potential to irritate to radical plot changes. I rely on the example of the film Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999), with its unique narrative style, to represent the genre of so-called mindfuck films, as defined below, which prompts viewers to adopt a decidedly critique-of-ideology subject position. A group discussion explored the reception and appropriation of Fight Club among Berlin youths who watched it together. Based on the documentary method as a methodological framework, an analysis of the interaction showed that the critical subject position suggested by the film in terms of how its preferred reading was adopted and rejected simultaneously by the young viewers, a mode of reception I will describe by the term of dissociative appropriation. The use of this term, however, should not be construed as a dramatizing act. My conclusion rather is that given the multiple representations of social difference in today’s media culture, dissociative appropriation, and the contradictions and ambivalences that go along with it, are normal rather than exceptional. Thus, this simultaneity of accepting and rejecting the preferred reading of a film highlights the need for media and audience studies to reconsider their understanding of the empirical objects and the methodology of their research.

Fight Club, the Mindfuck Genre, and Its Irritation Potential The mindfuck genre. Filmmakers as well as film spectators rely on genres as heuristics that provide guidelines for classifying movies and contribute to the “routinization and ritualization of movie and TV communication” (Mikos 2003: 253) Once a movie’s genre is identified, a spectator applies to it the “genre schemata” (Schwan 1995: 35) that have been developed over the course of a spectator’s experiences with media; these schemata then frame the spectator’s expectations concerning the narrative content (Schwan 1995), the dramatic composition (Eder 2000), and the conventions of cinematic narrative (Mikos 2003). Drawing on Erving Goffman’s concept of “frame,” Rainer Winter (1992) refers to genre frames as offering “a definition of what is going on the screen and, in doing so, [organizing] the recipients’ experience” (38). In film studies, genre theory relies on different methods of classifying movies. Andrew Tudor, for instance, distinguishes four ways

Preferred Readings and Dissociative Appropriations

79

of assigning movies to a genre (see Staiger 2000: 63): inductive assignment of a specific movie, deductive sample-based procedure, theoretical specification of defining features, and recourse to conventionalized audience expectations. In the following, highlighting the overlaps found in the narrative structure (such as the choice of main themes and the typing of heroes), I describe the mindfuck film as a genre that systematically breaks with the viewers’ expectations. Popular movies are typically structured to make it as easy as possible for viewers’ to reconstruct the plot. Over time this process leads to the emergence of what Jens Eder (2002) refers to as a “canonical story schema” (26), in this case, the schema of “exposition-conflict-solution” (36). The protagonists, having been introduced along with the place and time of the plot (exposition), encounter at least one problem they need to solve (conflict), which they eventually do, in most cases, with tricky means and utmost effort (solution)—a principle that relies on the pattern of “getting into trouble and out again” (Horkheimer and Adorno 1944/2001: 152). In recent years, however, many movies have offered solutions that are quite different from the problem-solving type, namely, solutions by deconstruction: exposition and conflict turn out to have served as a distractor from the real problem, as a way to produce a shift in meaning that is grounded in the protagonist’s distorted perception. Some examples illustrate this narrative style. In Carnival of Souls (Herk Harvey, 1962), Jacob’s Ladder (Adrian Lyne, 1990), The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan, 1999), The Others (Alejandro Amenábar, 2001), Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly, 2001), The Jacket (John Maybury, 2005), and Stay (Marc Forster, 2005), the protagonists appear to be alive and “normal” until the end of the story when they actually are already dead but in denial of this fact, or dying and hallucinating a different life for themselves. In The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920), A Tale of Two Sisters (Jee-Woon Kim, 2003), and Identity (James Mangold, 2003), the plot turns out to be a figment of the protagonist’s imagination, with the apparent heroes existing only in the delusional mindscape of the real protagonist. In Session 9 (Brad Anderson, 2001), High Tension (Alexandre Aja, 2003), Secret Window (David Koepp, 2004), and The Dark Hours (Paul Fox, 2005), the heroes flee from or search for a murderer they are themselves. In Spider (David Cronenberg, 2002), The Machinist (Brad Anderson, 2004), and Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese, 2010), the protagonists trail a crime or a conspiracy that never existed in the first place, being a construction of their own making and serving to shield them from an awareness of their own action and guilt. In all these cases, the film is highly unreliable in

80

Making Sense of Cinema

presenting a story: what is shown onscreen is in stark contrast to what is actually occurring. This contrast builds on the suppression of what really happens, on the temporal nonlinearity of what is shown (such as flashbacks, anticipations), and most of all, on the narration being presented from the hero’s distorted perspective. Thus, due to a narrative structure that reproduces the protagonist’s confused state of mind, the film represents a dysfunctional experience for the viewer. The real problem—the protagonist’s distorted/distorting perception and the reasons for it—remains, for the most part, explicitly untold. In an online discussion forum addressing the characteristics of mindfuck films, the mindfuck genre is defined as follows: The protagonist has identity doubts. —She/he does not know who he is or who he’s supposed to be. The protagonist has reality doubts. —She/he doubts the reality of the world she/he lives in or she/he questions certain aspects of the world she/he lives in. Plot twists. —The whole story is turned upside down by a major plot twist which is often made in the end of the movie.1

American film scholar and screenwriter Jonathan Eig (2003) deals with the category of mindfuck and discusses relevant films from a film studies perspective. In line with critics and fans, he credits the mindfuck film with a specific structure unprecedented in film history: “The hero in question does not know the true nature of his identity and so is not simply keeping a secret from us. And the audience does not know the backstory either. We are not let in on a secret the hero does not know” (n.p.). What the mindfuck does is play games with the viewers by revealing wrong cues and hiding the right ones. Arguably, the best known example showing all the required mindfuck characteristics is Fight Club, by now a canonized classic of the genre. In Fight Club, the mindfuck principle is even verbalized in the very moment the dissociation of the protagonist’s identity into two distinct persons is brought to light: “It’s called a changeover. The movie goes on, and nobody in the audience has any idea.” This moment of dialogue summarizes Eig’s critique precisely. The irritation potential. Having reception studies take into account the semiotic-discursive structure of films represents perhaps the decisive achievement of cultural studies. Accordingly, two methodological strategies have emerged in cultural studies media research: a mostly ethnographic exploration of the reception of media products in life-world contexts, and a textual analysis of media products in terms of semiotic structuralism or discourse analysis (Ang 1995; Condit 1989; Fiske 1987; Geimer 2011; Nightingale 1993).

Preferred Readings and Dissociative Appropriations

81

The first impulse for a triangulation of these perspectives was given by Stuart Hall’s (1980; 1994) encoding/decoding model, the founding stone of cultural studies media analysis. Hall believed that the interpretation of a media message was mediated by various decoding, or reading, positions that implied a classspecific positioning against a dominant (in most cases, hegemonic) code. He distinguished among three—by now famous—decoding positions: dominant, negotiated, and oppositional. This rather rigid schema of the early encoding/ decoding model and its basis in a sociocultural theory of classes was enhanced by David Morley (1992), who stressed the need for a more comprehensive analysis that included the contexts in which media reception occurred, taking into account not only classes, but also any kind of social units whose members shared a number of cultural orientations. In the media/viewer interaction thus defined, the decoding process relies on the discourses offered by the media as well as on those contributed by the viewers themselves (Winter 2003). From this perspective, the viewers’ constructions of meaning are neither arbitrary nor totally open, nor are they the result of a specific subject position imposed by the media text. This means that every media text is characterized by polysemy, or a multiplicity of meanings, as deconstructed in cultural studies (Winter 2003). This polysemy, however, is a structured one. That is to say, media texts are characterized by their openness and at the same time by the ideological framings that suggest certain readings more strongly than others. While the assumptions of cultural studies resemble those of the early critique-of-ideology screen theory in this respect (Wren-Lewis 1983), they do not subscribe to the latter’s focus on psychoanalysis to explain the effect ideologically structured media products have on the receiving subjects. Rather, cultural studies draw on Antonio Gramsci’s (1992) concept of ideology, holding that everyday actors are unwittingly complying with the hegemonic power of the state as upheld by its social agents, such as the press and the media; however, this complicity is fragile due to its built-in contradictions. In principle, there exists a possibility for recipients to withhold consent to the prevailing social conditions, refuse subjection, and in doing so, create subjectivity by alternative means (Winter 2003). From a cultural studies perspective, because this cultural order is fragile due to the actions of its subjects, ideological unity in media products can never be achieved without the resistant and nonsubmissive elements being suppressed. Hall’s encoding/decoding model. Hall differentiates among the three decoding positions, showing that media products are open to the discourses of the viewer/reader. Hall also discusses forces of closure that try to establish a certain

82

Making Sense of Cinema

understanding of media products. If these forces are successful, then the recipient watches from a dominant decoding position. For Hall, as well as other subsequent cultural studies scholars, this forced decoding position means the recipient receives and appropriates the dominant moral codes of the culture in which the film is produced. The preferred reading of a film, then, is always in line with dominant moral standards. In contrast, a negotiated decoding position involves the viewer partly departing from such hegemonic values, while in an oppositional decoding position the viewer strictly disagrees with hegemonic values. Fight Club departs from these supposed relations between preferred reading and dominant values, however, and therefore offers more complex decoding positions. In Fight Club, an unnamed insurance employee (Edward Norton) believes himself to be a friend first, and then an enemy of the leader of a global terror organization (Tyler Durden, played by Brad Pitt) that actually is he himself. The preferred reading suggests an oppositional decoding position against dominant cultural values; that is, it offers a critical subject position as the dominant decoding position for making sense of the film. This dominant critical position is indicated by the fact that in the first half hour of the film, the protagonist’s lifestyle is more than once radically put into question while he himself is frequently exposed to ridicule. For example, he insinuates himself into various self-help therapy groups to experience the emotions denied by him in everyday life. At first, the hero actually engages in critical introspection, and through selfhelp group participation, manages to come to terms with his life, the consumerism of which bores him and wears him out. When this opportunity breaks away because another (female) “misery tourist” competes with him for the group’s attention they both desire, he strikes up an acquaintance with his friend and mentor (Tyler), who again, is actually himself. Together with this imagined counterpart he creates the Fight Club: initially an organization in which members may act out raw emotions and basic drives by engaging in controlled fights. Over time, however, the context becomes increasingly institutionalized, evolving into a global terror organization with fascist hierarchical structures that conspires to abolish capitalism and defies control even by its founder. Only at the end of the film is it made clear that the nameless and identity-less hero created the persona of Tyler in an effort to experience a life beyond consumerism and materialism. Up to this point, the audience has been fooled by the narrative style into following the hero in his distorted perception and implicit—at least in the beginning—dissociation of parts of his personality; that is, the audience believes

Preferred Readings and Dissociative Appropriations

83

Tyler to be an individual completely separate from the nameless protagonist. The subject position offered by the film via its mindfuck structure, that is, the preferred reading, is that of a critique of the capitalistic lifestyle and its orientation to experience life through consumption so common in contemporary Western civilizations. The preferred reading becomes a critique-of-ideology, of the dominant hegemonic values of the social and cultural order. Thus, if the dominant position encoded in the film is a critical one, which could potentially irritate the film’s spectators, then the key question becomes: How do viewers respond to the critical subject position suggested by the preferred reading in a film with unreliable narration? Additionally, in terms of an empirical study: How can this irritation potential of the mindfuck be accounted for in a methodically controlled way? In the following, I try to cast some light on these issues through the analysis of a group discussion.

Group Discussions and the Documentary Method The short analysis of Fight Club was able to demonstrate that a distinction has to be made between the preferred reading of a film and the dominant hegemonic codes in a given discourse community. The preferred reading may well be in opposition to these codes and, as a consequence, adopting the preferred reading is not necessarily congruent with the hegemonic codes of the discourse community. This possibility was not sufficiently addressed by the original encoding/decoding model, as Hall (1994) himself notes in retrospect: it treats the institutionalization of communication as too one-dimensional, too directly articulated to a dominant ideology” (263). This failing could also be the reason why cultural studies have failed to address responses to the mindfuck genre, critique-of-ideology preferred readings, and the respective subject positions. Authors such as John Fiske (1987) and Morley (1996) who draw on Hall— as well as Hall (1994) himself in retrospect—have highlighted that media representations are not completely univocal in their makeup and come with various forms of ambivalence due to their “diversity, lack of clarity, sketchiness and inconsistency” (Winter 1995: 99ff.). Therefore, “a preferred reading is never fully successful, but it is the exercise of power in the attempt to hegemonize the audience reading” (Hall 1994: 262; see also 2009: 62). Accordingly, studies have typically only examined how preferred readings that correspond to the

84

Making Sense of Cinema

dominant hegemonic code of the environment in which the film was produced are subversively perceived. Surveys represent a particularly useful method in this context, but just as in the case of the relation between preferred readings and reception processes, no efforts have been made to systematically enhance and further develop them. In his seminal study on the reception of the television news show Nationwide (Morley 1980; 1981) and following an analysis of the show itself (Brunsdon 1978), Morley, drawing on the triad of decoding positions, joins Hall in assuming that this structuring of the audience is determined by social situations. Therefore, in this first empirical study that enhanced Hall’s model, Morley included a range of recipients categorized as upper middle class, lower middle class, and lower class. Unlike effects studies, his focus was less on the “changes in the people caused by the media, and more on the question of cultural participation and its meaning in a mass-media environment” (Nightingale 1996: 69). Because Morley (1980) recognized that “much individually based interview research is flawed by a focus on individuals as social atoms divorced from their social context” (33), and hoping to obtain a contextualization that was closer to everyday life, Morley used focus group discussions, with groups being sampled according to their occupational background. As recommended in the early works of Robert Merton (1987), the groups were constituted by “homogeneous strangers as participants” (Morgan 1997: 34). Here, Morley departs from the notion of group discussions in terms of the documentary method (Bohnsack 2004; 2010; 2014) discussed below as well as the “contemporary uses of focus groups” that “take more seriously the group character” (Lunt and Livingstone 1996: 5). Following Hall’s assumption about the relation of decoding position and class position, the occupational groups sharing a common class position in Morley’s model were expected to produce similar readings. This, however, was not the case. In the working class, for example, widely differing readings were found: “The apprentice groups, the trade union and shop stewards groups and the black college students can all be said to share a common class position, but their decodings of a television programme are inflected in different directions by the discourses and institutions in which they are situated” (Morley 1983: 117). Rather, all three decoding positions were found, suggesting that the contextualization of media reception needed to be more comprehensive and could not be reduced to aspects of social positions in terms of a class or stratum theory. This insight became groundbreaking for reception research even though some methodological aspects of the analysis were not systematically worked out by

Preferred Readings and Dissociative Appropriations

85

Morley. Little or nothing is said about the categories and concepts that guided the interpretation. Also, there is no discussion of alternative ways of composing the groups and of the impact this might have on the findings. Here, the documentary method becomes useful. The documentary method has been primarily developed by Ralf Bohnsack (2004; 2010; 2014) in the context of his interpretations of group discussions. Its core feature is the reconstruction of orientation patterns that, unlike situational attitudes or spontaneous statements, are action-guiding bodies of knowledge. These bodies of knowledge that provide fundamental guidance for everyday practice are conceptualized as an implicit knowledge to which people have only limited reflective access. It is this kind of knowledge that is reconstructed via the analysis of group discussions comprised of people who know each other from everyday life (such as friends, families, neighbors, peers, colleagues). The documentary method is especially interested in the relation between selfpresentation (i.e., reflexive knowledge staged in front of a group) and the logic of everyday practice (i.e., nonreflexive knowledge in terms of Bourdieu’s habitus). While focus groups could be structured to focus on these same types of knowledge, the documentary method and its production of discussion groups make this approach the specific goal of this group interviewing method. Unlike most approaches in focus group research (Morgan 1997; Morgan and Spanish 1984; Stewart and Shamdasani 2015) or the standard approach in audience and reception research (Morisson 2003), by using the framework of the documentary method group discussions, we “are more concerned with the way that active audiences contribute to negotiation and construction of meanings” (Lunt and Livingstone 1996: 8). Therefore, the character of the group is taken seriously, and shared collective knowledge structures as well as individual contributions for meaning-making are reconstructed. Thus, group composition is not based on theoretically assumed commonalities, but on everyday interactional relationships. Typically, such “pre-existing groups” (Hennink 2007: 117) and their “private conversations” (Stewart and Shamdasani 2015: 108) are treated as marginal in focus group research.

Reception of the Mindfuck Film Fight Club The following are extracts from such a group discussion about Fight Club. The group consisted of four youths, regulars to a Berlin youth club in a “problem

86

Making Sense of Cinema

district,” who chose this film and volunteered to watch it together.2 They talk about movies and also watch them at the youth center on a regular basis. A research team from the Free University of Berlin composed of three students and the author had three meetings with the group in their club. At the first meeting, we delineated our research interest which, at the time, was the question of how young people in a problem district deal with violence in movies; at this meeting we recruited the juveniles for two group discussions. At the second meeting, we conducted a group discussion about experiences with violence in their everyday practice and in movies. At the end of that meeting, they decided to watch Fight Club together, which appeared to be a film they all liked and depicted lots of violence. In the third meeting, the second group discussion starts right after the screening in the youth club. In contrast to our expectations, they did not talk about the violence in the film, but about what is “behind the depicted violence” (Af).3 The first question they were asked was “Let’s start immediately with the film, what is your first reaction, which moments in the film did you enjoy especially?” Instead of referring to the issue of violence in the film and their everyday lives, they drew on the theme of “social criticism” (Af). Accordingly, there was a long discussion, initiated by the young viewers themselves, on the critique-of-capitalism in Fight Club. Two of them (Af, Am) particularly subscribed to and elaborated on this aspect by referring to scenes in the film, thus reproducing its preferred reading, that is, its critique-of-capitalism and consumerism. The interviewer then asked whether they thought this critique also applied to them; that is, whether they would adopt this critique-of-ideology position when reflecting on their own everyday lives. Am: Oh, well, seeing my own life, I don’t know, I do think about all this, sort of; (. . .)4 this guy, he’s really down (. . .) at the beginning, I mean, (. . .) he’s so totally depressed. And then he sort of starts to live (. . .) it’s a kind of life that he’s creating for himself even if it’s going in a rather queer direction. I find that fasc—coming to question all that a bit; because normally you don’t really think about it when you buy, say, an expensive mobile phone, whatever (. . .) you don’t think about who’s been working to produce it, why it’s exactly this size and where they economize and who’s being exploited; and at some points the film really shows that quite clearly, I think, and at others, well, it makes you think about it yourself, somehow; it makes you think, I makes you think about these things.5 Af: Yeah, that’s it, it makes you more aware.6

Preferred Readings and Dissociative Appropriations

87

Prompted to consider their own way of life in the light of this critique-of-capitalism, Am responds rather vaguely by saying that they do think about it, “sort of.” But he at once steers away from himself again, refocusing on a character in the film that is so terribly “down” and “depressed.” When their own practice is finally evoked, reflections are once more relativized (“coming to question all that a bit,” “I do think about all this, sort of”). These reflections are largely dissociated from the participants’ actual practice, having no part in the very situations in which decisions are made (such as buying a mobile phone without reflecting on how it was produced). Nor is there any uneasiness arising from this discrepancy between the subject position—as a critique-of-capitalism—and the logic of everyday action; rather, the questioning that does occur seems at the same time to provide a justification for their actual behavior. Accordingly, Af (validating Am and referring to her previously proposed interpretation of the film as a “social criticism”) responds to the film as something that makes you more aware. The implicit suggestion is that the film only acts as a reminder of a critical awareness that has always been theirs. No confusion arises from the fact that this knowledge is quite dissociated from the logic of their everyday action. Evidence for this is also provided by the following extract, again initiated by a question of the interviewer regarding the links between the participants’ critique-of-capitalism and their everyday life: I:

So I might say to myself, okay, that’s where I might act differently? Might I act differently? Am: Well, I do know how my clothes are produced and I buy them anyway; that’s all I can say. (. . .) well (. . .) now, it may not be quite correct to say so, not quite politically correct, but after all I was in a politics honors course at school and we had all those endless discussions about the inhuman conditions of the workers who produce the clothes for H&M and Co.; (. . .) but (. . .) well, it didn’t change my consumer behavior for all that. (. . .) it doesn’t make me fixate on buying only bio clothes, either. I do know what’s behind all that when it’s shown in a film; then I get to think about it for a day or maybe even a week, but in the end it’s, well, it’s as if consumption just wins again, sort of, and I go and get myself a treat, some luxury, sort of, and well I sort of don’t give a dam about it at all (. . .) because, after all, I’m not that directly concerned. (. . .) so, even if it’s not what I should think, it’s not like that, but in the end, I get the luxury and, well, the misery, I don’t see it, and that’s that. (. . .) I: What do the others think? Af: Hmm: the (knowledge), um: well, it’s a conscious choice then.

88

Making Sense of Cinema

Being prompted, Am once more refers to the discrepancy between critical reflection and the logic of everyday practice in the case of “clothes.” Subject positions in terms of a critique-of-capitalism (targeting, in this case, production conditions for H&M clothes) are familiar since they were also offered in a politics honors course at the youth’s school. On the level of reflective awareness, Am clearly knows how these clothes are produced, that is, under “inhuman conditions.” But this knowledge fails to become action-guiding because “consumption wins again.” Af, again prompted by the interviewer, once more validates Am’s argument by referring to a gain in awareness: Reflection allows you to deliberately choose to live the capitalist way, even though you don’t agree with it. This contradiction implies a paradox that must remain unresolved since it is the very condition for eluding a crisis: you can opt for something, on the one hand, against which you cannot opt, on the other hand. This paradox, while irrelevant for action, is highly relevant for a demarcation from others. Accordingly, Af goes on to say that “most folks are not interested at all in this, I think, they just go on with their lives, accepting everything.” Whereas they do not just accept things but can choose to accept them. Knowing about injustice, being aware of it, serves to legitimize their choice, as it were, or allows them to construct it as a choice in the first place. Therefore, it cannot be said that irrelevant aspects of situational attitudes are discussed. Rather, these reflections and patterns of social criticism are dissociated from the bases (i.e., from the action-guiding orientations as conceived of by the documentary method) of everyday practice. Adopting a critique-of-capitalism subject position is reframed as “being informed” and becomes an end in itself, or a marker of distinction, largely dissociated from the everyday practice targeted by this critique—or, as Af argues a little later: Af: Well, at any rate, I think it’s good to be informed, it’s then you can make a choice; before that it’s not a real choice, now I choose, um, I choose this lifestyle, he hadn’t done that before, I think; that guy in the film; that Jack; right. Cm: Yeah, that’s what he’s done now, with his other self, (. . .) unconsciously. Am: The question now is what will his life be after that (. . .)7 Cm: Open.

In the course of the discussion, the open-endedness of the film (i.e., the fact that it merely proposes, rather than imposes, a critique-of-capitalism subject position) is seen as an important quality attribute. In a first step, participants argumentatively adopt the critique-of-capitalism subject position, elaborate on it in detail, and

Preferred Readings and Dissociative Appropriations

89

(when prompted by the interviewer) negotiate their way of establishing a link with their everyday practice by rejecting, and at the same time, validating it (“it’s good to be informed”). The subject position is reflectively appropriated in terms of a dissociation that implies the above-mentioned paradox, that is, that you can opt for something you cannot opt against. Here, the paradox involves a lifestyle that will not go without its habitual—luxury, consumption, cultural—goods. Being “informed” about something (here: capitalism) becomes a value in itself whose links with everyday practice are so weak that the critique-of-capitalism (as elaborated in line with the preferred Fight Club reading) may even serve to help participants reproduce their habitual, uncritical consumption orientations. This resolution to the paradox is particularly evident when the two main proponents of this critique (Am, Af) demarcate themselves from the other two participants who disliked the first half hour of the film precisely because of its pervasive suggestion of a critique of consumerism and capitalism.

Discussion: Dissociation as the New Normal? Attempts to establish the form of dissociative appropriation by analyzing the participants’ responses result in the following observations. First, subjects are aware of the preferred reading and adopt the subject positions offered (here: critique of consumerism and capitalism). Second, in so doing, they mark an identity-relevant distinction and establish a reflective self-concept. Third, at the same time, habitually ingrained orientations remain unchallenged. Thus, there is an irritation potential of the postmodern mindfuck movie and its offer of a critical subject position. This irritation potential is realized but also harmonized away by referring to the merits of “being informed” and to the subjects’ imagined decision-making abilities. The core element of dissociative appropriation is the subject’s construction of myths about the self that remain dissociated from his or her everyday practice, or rather, from the knowledge that structures it. That is, spectators may appropriate critique-of-ideology meanings from a mindfuck film as a way to understand themselves, but not to influence their everyday practices. This interpretation is further validated by the discussion about the end of the film, where the participants project the paradox of being informed but failing to act accordingly onto the protagonist. In the following extract, Am argues that the protagonist, having turned into a terrorist, enacts a critique of society without even realizing it:

90

Making Sense of Cinema Am: (. . .) but, at the end, what about him; is he or isn’t he still in the dark, sort of, about this critique-of-capitalism and all that (.) I’ve no idea; I think the film doesn’t really show that, that he has really understood this; it’s all about him fighting his own self, sort of, starting to . . . um . . . to plant bombs; it’s not so much about this . . . this . . . criticism of society, I think; (.) I mean, it’s made plain for the viewer, but it’s not made plain for himself; if you know what I mean.

Af elaborates on this statement by emphasizing that the open ending of the movie works perfect for her; it is like the open question whether they are “changing anything in our consumer behavior after watching and discussing the movie, is it going to change him, has he really realized? And this is open as we are.” The young viewers are critical without being critical; like the protagonist, who due to his dissociative state of mind, has no insight into his own actions; they have no insight into their dissociative appropriation of the film. The question, then, is whether they project the paradox of their dissociative appropriation onto the film or whether the film actually represents a subjectification process that is quite common in contemporary Western civilizations. As Winter (1995) notes with respect to Jean Baudrillard, the subject itself becomes simulacra “in the dramaturgic and cinematic society of modernity” (34). When signs, assuming an independent reality, become simulacra and are dissociated from fixed referents, there is no authority to give certainty to the subjects’ sense of self and warrant the authenticity of their identity: “In this sense, what Baudrillard analyzes as the deletion of the referential universe results in our deleting our own identity” (Eig 2003: n.p.). Even though these theory-ofculture diagnoses are of a very speculative nature, “as cultural studies tend to be” (Winter 2012: 57), they nevertheless serve to call into question the naïve and rash celebration of the postmodern film as highly educational and critical. While the postmodern film can enable viewers to reflect on and practice the very dissociations it represents and criticizes, in doing so, it at once offers and neutralizes its critical potential. Given the prevalence of such postmodern media and this simultaneity of both critiquing and seemingly normalizing the process of critiquing and being a critic without being an activist, such dissociation appropriation seen in the reception of Fight Club might not be a special case at all. Through film, television, and the Internet, individuals in contemporary societies and cultures are confronted with multiple and sometimes contradictory positions and perspectives to take on in relation to themselves. Referring to this state of affairs, Andreas Reckwitz (2010) notes that today’s media have enormously increased the “likelihood that the logic of cultural combinations will

Preferred Readings and Dissociative Appropriations

91

initiate a hybrid confrontation and symbiosis of cultural elements from different times and spaces” (748). As a result, the referents of media representations and the way different subject positions relate to each other will have to be permanently renegotiated in terms of “identification as a construction, a process never completed” (Hall 1996: 2). In contemporary media culture, the “nomadic and multiple selves” are permanently engaged in an effort “to reconstruct his or her self in dialogue with different discourses” (Torfing 1999: 222). The decisive question is to what extent these dialogues will induce transformation processes. Given the mass diffusion of media representations of cultural difference (Hall 1997) it can be assumed that subjects will be (increasingly) unconcerned with transforming their relations to their own self, the world and their habits and values. If a multiplicity of subject positions is justified, adopting them may become an activity that serves to create an identity-relevant distinction, whereby individuals can appropriate the media representation to position themselves in relation to others. However, such activity to distinguish themselves would not necessary involve reflecting on and transforming their relation to the world as their habits and values go largely unchallenged. In this way, a critique-of-ideology position accepted by the spectator would not necessarily result in the ultimate transformation of the ideology being critiqued as the spectator undertakes no actions to do so. The spectator is allowed to critique the ideology as presented in the film without having to act against the ideology, which may require significant changes in the spectator’s everyday practices and require processes of coping when challenging the dominant hegemonic values of the social and cultural order. Against this backdrop, a dissociative adoption of subject positions (Geimer 2012; 2014) that makes transformative processes an unlikely occurrence may be seen as a solution to the problem posed by the multiple and increased potentialities of media-based self-experience and self-description.

Conclusion In this chapter, the irritation potential of the mindfuck genre of postmodern film was, first, analytically described from a narrative and genre point of view, and then, illustrated using the example of Fight Club. A critique-of-ideology preferred reading of Fight Club was presented, and a group discussion was used to contrast this preferred reading with the reception practice of a group of Berlin youths. The analysis showed that the film’s critical potential, while highly identity-relevant for

92

Making Sense of Cinema

the distinction from others (being not in the know) is irrelevant for everyday action. This reception was conceptualized as a dissociative appropriation in the sense that subject positions that imply a critique-of-capitalism and consumerism are simultaneously adopted and rejected. Such a complexity of preferred readings and their relation to reception processes is not adequately taken into account in Hall’s early encoding/decoding model, does not merge in the triad of decoding positions, and was also not considered by Hall’s successors. In contrast to cultural studies that illustrate, among other things, that even uncritical entertainment may elicit critical modes of reception, such as an oppositional construal of preferred readings, it was shown that the critique-of-ideology mode of reception as offered by the film Fight Club was mainly used to highlight an identity-relevant distinction while the level of everyday practice, or of the orientations that structure it—the habitus in terms of Pierre Bourdieu (1977)—remained largely unchallenged. In the light of cultural theory reflections on the pluralization of societal semantics and the ubiquity of the media representation of social difference (Hall 1997), the dissociative appropriation of media propositions could be a normal rather than special case. As an enhancement of cultural studies, group discussions suggest themselves as an adequate procedure for observing dissociative appropriations. Employing the documentary method as an additional analytical tool allows observers to reconstruct action-guiding knowledge structures or, in the case of the dissociative appropriation of films, to ascertain the co-occurrence of an identity-relevant adoption of the critique-of-capitalism subject position and a habitus-based irrelevance of this very position. The documentary method has a specific focus on analyzing the reflexive and nonreflexive knowledge of the participants. The focus on nonreflexive knowledge in the context of the documentary method was developed via the analysis of group discussions with groups of peers (e.g., families, friends, colleagues, etc.) sharing a habitual knowledge, which is not typically addressed by focus group research that encourages group discussion among strangers and does not include such a distinction between these two types of knowledge. Thus, as a specific type of focus group, this approach to group interviewing promoted a discursive space where the dissociative appropriation could be seen. Further research would primarily have to conduct comparative analyses addressing the questions raised in this context. For example, further studies should examine other mindfuck genre films for their relationship in any

Preferred Readings and Dissociative Appropriations

93

dissociative appropriation. However, as the proposed research program will not allow for an observation of personal and individual perception and interpretation processes with respect to films (and mindfuck films in particular), it remains an open question whether, or in what form, dissociative appropriations can also be reconstructed on the sheer individual level. A methodological approach for individual interviewing would need to be adopted or developed to thoroughly appreciate both reflexive and nonreflexive knowledges.

Acknowledgments Translated from German by Hella Beister

Notes 1 Definition of user YKL , 8.2.2005: http://ykl.vs161100.vserver.de/phpBB 2/ viewtopic.php?t=26. 2 The group consists of four juveniles who are not friends but are acquaintances based on the daily contact in the youth club where they hang out, watch movies, play table tennis and other games, do athletic sports, and talk with social workers. The last activity is the main goal of the institution, besides getting the young people away from “the street.” 3 A or C stands for forename; f, for female; m, for male. 4 Word that is not understandable. 5 Paused for one second. 6 It is Am who elaborates at this point of the discussion but he is in accordance with Af, who asks the question: what stands behind the violence and names the social criticism as the central message of the movie? 7 Word that is not understandable.

References Ang, I. (1995), Living Room Wars: Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World, London: Routledge. Baudrillard, J. (1995), Simulacra and Simulation, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Bohnsack, R. (2004), “Group Discussions and Focus Groups,” in U. Flick, E. V. Kardoff and I. Steinke (eds), A Companion to Qualitative Research, 214–20, London: Sage.

94

Making Sense of Cinema

Bohnsack, R. (2010), “Documentary Method and Group Discussions,” in R. Bohnsack, N. Pfaff and W. Weller (eds), Qualitative Analysis and Documentary Method in International Educational Research, 99–124, Opladen: Barbara Budrich. Bohnsack, R. (2014), “Documentary Method,” in U. Flick (ed.): Handbook of Qualitative Data Analysis, 217–33, London: Sage. Bourdieu, P. (1977), Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brunsdon, C. (1978), Everyday Television: Nationwide, London: BFI . Condit, C. M. (1989), “The Rhetorical Limits of Polysemy,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 6 (2): 103–22. Eder, J. (2000), Die Dramaturgie des populären Films: Drehbuchpraxis und Filmtheorie, Hamburg: LIT. Eder, J. (2002), “Die Postmoderne im Kino: Entwicklungen im Spielfilm der 90er Jahre,” in J. Eder (ed.), Oberflächenrausch: Postmoderne und Postklassik im Kino der 90er Jahre, 10–60, Münster: LIT. Eig, J. (2003), “A Beautiful Mind(fuck): Hollywood Structures of Identity,” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 46. Available online: http://www.ejumpcut.org/ archive/jc46.2003/eig.mindfilms/ (accessed 20 May 2015). Fiske, J. (1987), “British Cultural Studies and Television,” in R. C. Allen (ed.), Channels of Discourse: Television and Contemporary Criticism, 254–89, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Geimer, A. (2011), “Das Konzept der Aneignung in der qualitativen Rezeptionsforschung: Eine wissenssoziologische Präzisierung im Anschluss an die und Abgrenzung von den Cultural Studies,” Zeitschrift für Soziologie, 40 (4): 191–207. Geimer, A. (2012), “Bildung als Transformation von Selbst- und Weltverhältnissen und die dissoziative Aneignung von diskursiven Subjektfiguren in posttraditionellen Gesellschaften,” Zeitschrift für Bildungsforschung, 2 (3): 229–42. Geimer, A. (2014), “Das authentische Selbst in der Popmusik—Zur Rekonstruktion von diskursiven Subjektfiguren sowie ihrer Aneignung und Aushandlung mittels der Dokumentarischen Methode,” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Soziologie, 39 (2): 111–30. Gramsci, A. (1992), Gefängnishefte [Vol.4], Hamburg: Argument. Hall, S. (1980), “Encoding/decoding,” in S. Hall (ed.), Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies 1972–1979, 128–38, London: Routledge. Hall, S. (1994), “Reflections upon the Encoding/Decoding Model,” in J. Cruz and J. Lewis (eds), Viewing, Reading, Listening: Audiences and Cultural Reception, 253–74, Boulder: Westview. Hall, S. (1996), “Who Needs Identity?,” in S. Hall and P. du Gay (eds), Questions of Cultural Identity, 1–17, London: Sage. Hall, S. (1997), “The Centrality of Culture,” in K. Thompson (ed.), Media and Cultural Regulation, 208–38, London: Sage.

Preferred Readings and Dissociative Appropriations

95

Hall, S. (2009), “The Work of Representation” in S. Hall (ed.), Representation: Cultural Representation and Signifying Practices, 15–69, London: Sage. Hennink, M. M. (2007), International Focus Group Research: A Handbook for the Health and Social Sciences, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Horkheimer, M. and T. W. Adorno (1944/2001), Dialectic of Enlightenment, New York: Continuum. Lunt, P. and S. Livingstone (1996), “Rethinking the Focus Group in Media and Communication Research,” Journal of Communication, 46 (2): 79–98. Merton, R. K. (1987), “The Focused Interview and Focus Groups: Continuities and Discontinuities,” Public Opinion Quarterly, 51 (4): 550–56. Mikos, L. (2003), Film- und Fernsehanalyse, Weinheim: UTB . Morgan, D. L. and M. T. Spanish (1984), “Focus Groups: A New Tool for Qualitative Research,” Qualitative Sociology, 7 (3): 253–70. Morgan, D. L. (1997), Focus Groups as Qualitative Research, London: Sage. Morley, D. (1980), The Nationwide Audience: Structure and Decoding, London: BFI . Morley, D. (1981), “The Nationwide Audience: A Critical Postscript,” Screen Education, 39: 3–14. Morley, D. (1983), “Cultural Transformations: The Politics of Resistance,” in H. Davis and P. Walton (eds), Language, Image, Media, 104–17, Oxford: Blackwell. Morley, D. (1992), Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies, London: Routledge. Morley, D. (1996), “Populism, Revisionism and the ‘New’ Audience Research,” in J. Curran, D. Morley and V. Walkerdine (eds), Cultural Studies and Communications, 279–93, London: Arnold. Nightingale, V. (1993), “What’s ‘Ethnographic’ about Ethnographic Audience Research?,” in G. Turner (ed.), Nation, Culture, Text: Australian Cultural and Media Studies, 164–77, London: Routledge. Nightingale, V. (1996), Studying Audiences: The Shock of the Real, London: Routledge. Reckwitz, A. (2010), “Aspekte einer Theorie des Subjekts in der Kultur der Moderne: (Anti)Bürgerlichkeit, soziale Inklusion und die Ethik der Ästhetik,” in H.-G. Soeffner, K. Kursawe, M. Elsner and M. Adlt (eds), Unsichere Zeiten: Herausforderungen gesellschaftlicher Transformationen, 739–50, Wiesbaden: VS . Schwan, S. (1995), “Love or Crime or Something Else? Schematische Wissensstrukturen und Filmrezeption,” Rundfunk und Fernsehen, 43 (1): 26–40. Staiger, J. (2000), Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception, New York: NYU Press. Stewart, D. W. and P. N. Shamdasani (2015), Focus Groups: Theory and Practice, London: Routledge. Torfing, J. (1999), New Theories of Discourse, Oxford: Blackwell. Winter, R. (1992), Filmsoziologie: Eine Einführung in das Verhältnis von Film, Kultur und Gesellschaft, München: Quintessenz.

96

Making Sense of Cinema

Winter, R. (1995), Der produktive Zuschauer: Medienaneignung als kultureller und ästhetischer Prozess, München: Quintessenz. Winter, R. (2003), “Polysemie, Rezeption und Handlungsmöglichkeit: Zur Konstitution von Bedeutung im Rahmen der Cultural Studies,” in F. Jannidis, G. Lauêr, M. Martínez, and S. Winko (eds), Regeln der Bedeutung: Zur Theorie der Bedeutung historischer Texte, 431–53, Tübingen: Niemeyer. Winter, R. (2012), “Das postmoderne Hollywoodkino und die kulturelle Politik der Gegenwart: Filmanalyse als kritische Gesellschaftsanalyse,” in C. Heinze, S. Moebius, and D. Reicher (eds), Perspektiven der Filmsoziologie, 41–59, Konstanz: UVK . Wren-Lewis, J. (1983), “The Encoding/Decoding Model: Criticisms and Redevelopments for Research on Decoding,” Media, Culture and Society, 5 (2): 179–97.

6

“Legolas, He’s Cool . . . and He’s Hot!” The Meanings and Implications of Audiences’ Favorite Characters Martin Barker Aberystwyth University

Introduction How do audiences choose favorite characters in a film? What does this choosing mean to them? And how do their choices intersect with people’s wider ways of engaging with other components in their media interests and their wider cultural repertoires? In this essay, I tackle these questions by revisiting the database of responses to The Lord of the Rings (henceforth, LotR) film series. These films provide an excellent resource to answer these questions, not the least because of the variety of characters they proffered, but also because of the time that audiences had to build their relations with them. The LotR project consisted of a twenty country collaboration to gather responses to the films. Its questionnaire, available in fourteen languages, included a series of quantitative questions: some gathering Likert-scaled responses on how enjoyable and important the films were to people, and others gathering information about age, sex, occupation, and knowledge of J. R. R. Tolkien’s books. The questionnaire also contained a series of open-ended questions, asking respondents to put into their own words the thinking behind their quantitative answers, and to discuss how they watched and evaluated the film. Ultimately our questionnaire attracted 24,739 completions from across the world. One open question asked: “Who was your favorite character and can you tell us why?” This question was added following piloting, where many called for an opportunity to talk about favorite characters. Initially, I was skeptical about its benefits. Later, I realized that, carefully used, the question could allow a critical examination of claims embedded in the concept of “identification.” The results of

98

Making Sense of Cinema

that investigation (Barker 2005) remained, however, primarily negative: how not to understand character-choices. In this chapter, I hope to go further and explore the positive reasons for choosing favorite characters.

Other Research Traditions and Identification This research is hardly unique in addressing audiences’ engagements with fictional characters. The topic of “character” has, in fact, recently come more to the fore in film studies, notably through the work of Murray Smith (1995) and Jens Eder (2010), but with a powerful textualist flavor, deriving probable responses of the audience from close attention to filmic construction.1 The predominant empirical tradition belongs elsewhere, within an experimental psychology tradition, dating back to the 1930s. I do not have the space here to tackle this adequately, but I need to make some key points, since my own work so radically departs from that tradition. The difference is between one predicated on an individualized model, and one which approaches audiences through their historical, social, and cultural milieu. To see what difference this makes, compare two descriptions of audiences dressing up as characters: “In a study of online fans of the television show My So-Called Life, Murray (1999) found that teen girls frequently attempted to emulate the lead character, Angela, by dressing like her, dyeing their hair red (like hers), or acting in similar ways” (Hoffner and Buchanan 2005: 327). “Cosplayers are creatively and joyfully involved in collectively dressing up as characters and in carefully documenting their performances. The Cosplay zone is a performative context of artistic pursuit and social cooperation, and also a transitional zone between art and private desires” (Jacobs 2013: 42). The first’s language of individual emulation is replaced in the second with a language of community choices, and artistic and political practices. The former aligns more with the experimental tradition, while the latter reflects the cultural studies tradition that arose to challenge the former. The general problems with this kind of experimental work have been long rehearsed. Its results are hard to replicate outside the laboratory; research subjects are asked to respond to artificial materials in ways which deny their responses to any social or cultural placement; and responses are reduced to checklists of researcher-devised measures, without any reference to audiences’ understandings of situation, materials, or meanings. Besides these general issues,

“Legolas, He’s Cool . . . and He’s Hot!”

99

however, this particular tradition has its own problems when considering the concept in focus here. For a long time, the key concept deployed within this tradition was “identification.” Although its roots are much older (Barker 1989), this concept took form between the 1930s and 1950s (see Maccoby and Wilson 1957), when popular Freudianism combined with emergent commercial research and public scares over “media influence.” Identification proposed that in the act of engaging, audiences might surrender to materials like films, becoming less self- or contextaware, and—by associating with the “point of view” of characters—taking on their feelings, attitudes, and evaluations, and in extremis repeating their actions. Identification remained the concept of choice until the 1980s when, as part of the wider turn against Freudianism within American academic life, some key people sought to retheorize the domain. In 1980, Dolf Zillman had been a key source for theorizing identification; by 1994, he had renounced the concept, instead proposing “empathy.”2 The key difference was that empathy did not presume adoption of the specific point of view of a character; important instead were the emotions experienced.3 Alongside empathy many proposed a second concept, “transportation,” to capture the ways in which people become absorbed in what they are reading, watching, or listening to—thus virtually reintroducing identification. Other researchers sought to defend and maintain identification, trying to separate it from transportation (see Tal-Or and Cohen 2010). But what all these approaches have in common is an interest in “narrative persuasion” (e.g., Appel and Richter 2010). The same is true of a new strand of research arising with studies of presence, such as experiments on the persuasive effectiveness of different kinds of digital characters (e.g., Lin et  al. 2010). No matter the concepts’ names, there has always been the problem that they are essentially invisible processes. Researchers cannot see a person identifying, empathizing, or being transported. The history of this research is therefore marked by repeated attempts to construct checklists and scales for processes where the only real check—what the people think and say they are doing—is refused as a source of evidence. Thus what unites these concepts is a dependence on a working model with several parts that make assumptions about the nature of people when engaging with film. First, this model is premised on an implausible ideal, revealed in the way its proponents explain the motives of their research through paradoxes, such as illustrated in these two examples:

100

Making Sense of Cinema

Many viewers of film melodrama report that they cannot help crying when witnessing a lost child returning home, or a couple being reunited after a long series of misunderstandings. What is puzzling in the response is that, on the one hand, it shows signs of genuine emotion, but on the other hand, we must assume that viewers are aware that they are watching a staged scene rather than a real event. (Tan 1994: 7–8)4 The intensity of such emotional reactions [to dramas] has baffled uncounted scholars. Why is it that people exposed to drama lose or, at any rate, abandon their cognizance of the artificiality of the situation? Why don’t they continue to recognize the contrived, make-belief nature of the setting and respond to it as an interesting retelling or enactment of an actual, liberally modified, or totally imagined occurrence? How can so-called rational beings fall prey to the actors’ personas and respond to them as if they were real persons in their immediate environment—either friend or foe? (Zillman 1994: 33–34)

The argument is that responding emotionally to imaginary events is not genuine, and therefore needs special explanation. But this requires two seriously implausible assumptions: (1) that people in their ordinary, everyday lives are not all the time using their imagination; and (2) that the world of drama is in principle cut off, sui generis, so that when we cross into it we are doing something radically distinct from the rest of our lives. I would simply counter that we use our imaginations when we see someone upset, and we try to “see inside them” so we can help as when we observe someone and sense what they must be going through. All the stories we encounter—formally (in news, documentaries, and fictions), and informally (in everyday conversations)—provide us with the resources we need to do these things. We are learning (how) to imagine others all the time, and the processes involved are not reducible to supposedly simple and singular mechanisms such as identification or empathy.5 Another problem emerges from the way theorists split identification into components. Lisa R. Godlewski and Elizabeth M. Perse (2010), for instance, distinguish three: absorbed attention, heightened emotions, and reduced awareness of one’s environment. Such supposed steps constitute identification and how we become vulnerable to messages. But again, this is simply counterintuitive. To be absorbed can mean that one is fully engaged in bringing to bear on a film the interpretive frameworks which viewers have built up. To have heightened emotions can mean that one makes associations with those constructs

“Legolas, He’s Cool . . . and He’s Hot!”

101

that are most salient and powerful to a person. To lose awareness of one’s immediate environment can simply mean that one is engaged with the built-up body of remembered environments, connections, and communities relevant to the current experience.6 These remembrances would be activations of the self, not diminutions, as is commonly supposed in theorizations of identification. Thus, the whole approach to understanding identification turns on a model of a “rational individual”—self-monitoring, detached, and above emotions— against whom aberrant, paradoxical responses are then measured. This investigation will hopefully show the potentials of a very different way of conceiving and researching this topic.

Methods The Lord of the Rings questionnaire gathered a combination of quantitative and qualitative responses. For practical reasons, I limited my searches to the 11,637 English-language responses. Of course, not everyone chose a favorite character. A sampling of 200 responses showed a quarter making no clear nomination. Some distinguished book and film preferences, preferred actors over characters, or named collectives (i.e., hobbits, Ents, elves). With this complexity in mind, a search for major characters located this top eight for a total of 9,484 mentions: Sam (2,191), Aragorn (1,936), Frodo (1,624), Legolas (1,119), Gandalf (1,086), Pippin/Peregrine (550), Gollum (537) and Eowyn (441). Sometimes, however, one character is mentioned because of their relations to another (e.g., “Sam, because of his complete loyalty to Frodo”). Even allowing for this, these characters clearly rose well above all others. Restricting my sampling to those giving the highest (“Excellent”) rating to their experience (on the principle that such people were more invested in the film and its storyworld), I randomly selected 100 responses for each character, following the principle that the first salient word in their answer should be their name. This effectively eliminated all mentions-by-relation. Storing each as a searchable group, I mapped the respondents’ main demographic and orientation responses, whose outcomes are summarized in a sentence at the head of each of the character-accounts.7 I developed a coding of “reasons for liking” favorite characters, and applied this to each set. Codings sufficient to encompass all salient talk proved to be these:

102

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Making Sense of Cinema

[The character’s] “Personal qualities” [The actor’s] “Looks” “Acting” “Embodiment of a known role [for prior expectations about a character, usually from the books]” “Narrative contribution” “Wider associations” [for references external to the films] “Relations with self ” “Can’t say” [for declarations of inexplicability].

Table 6.1 tabulates the outcomes for these codes for each character. I selected for each three “ideal-typical” cases; that is, individuals who came closest to matching the features emphasized in their sample. Here, I deliberately accentuated the differences, by selecting for features the sample swung toward, and against opposite features. My aim was not to produce statistically representative cases, but rather possible ideal-typical cases, in which we might see in emphasized form what might be less clearly present in other cases (see Barker and Mathijs 2012). Finally, privileging the longest answers simply on the principle of having more to analyze, I explored the interrelations across all their answers in the questionnaire to see what additional insights these give to people’s favorite character choices. Table 6.1 Coding of reasons given for choosing favorite character. Aragorn Eowyn Frodo Gandalf Gollum Legolas Pippin Sam 1. Character’s 45 qualities 2. Actor’s qualities 9 3. Acting skills 9 4. Relations with 6 book 59 5. Narrative role journey 6. Extra-narrative 20 associations 7. Relations with 6 self 8. Exceptional 3 9. Total words 2438

35

31

83

78

93

26

65

3 3 14

1 11 4

0 6 9

1 28 8

42 14 6

3 15 6

1 4 6

42

60

29

11

12

66

53

34

25

8

7

10

0

29

23

19

13

8

2

16

17

25 2 3409 2123

2 2526

16 2208

2 3390

0 2762

1 3107

“Legolas, He’s Cool . . . and He’s Hot!”

103

Results There are many stand-out differences, from variations in overall word counts to widely separated emphases. But what needs emphasizing is just how uniform and internally coherent each set of 100 responses proved to be. In every case, recurrent expressions suggest a common core to responses. Of course, some answers are more explicit than others; and particularly, in the more fleshed-out responses, it is possible to see how an audience relation to characters is revealed. One way this shows is in the formation of either combinatory oppositions (“A yet also B”) between characteristics, or surprising additives (“A and its apparent opposite B”). These generate a set of subtle cultural registers. Where words or phrases are directly repeated or slightly rephrased, I have left them “unnamed”; where respondents seem to go further—expressing an idea more explicitly or building links between ideas—I have given their identifying number. At the end of the general profiles and individual portraits, I have suggested a phrase that comes closest to an overall summary of responses. Aragorn: skewing slightly for age (higher in 36–45s), but not for sex, reading or occupation (apart from a small high among unemployed); quite high on Epic and Fairytale storyworld/genre choices. The most repeated expression is “true hero.” For some, this is expressed through a list of qualities: for Respondent #4734, this encompasses “strength, courage, grace, humor, responsibility, fidelity, swordsmanship, duty,” appending as a bonus (as do a number of women) “plus, he’s hot.” Others, more typically, use opposed pairs: “noble yet modest”; “aware of a destiny but making a choice for this”; thus “becoming who [he] is meant to be.” This makes him a “mythic leader become real,” a “natural leader,” an “ideal man.” These responses suggest a sense of looking up to someone who embodies how you would like to be, and to be seen. #22532 encapsulates this: “King Aragorn because he is noble yet humble. While he could sit back like other leaders and watch others die for him he doesn’t do that. Instead he confronts evil and fights it like any ordinary man.” #7768 agrees: “He reminds me of other people I know and other people in history. He’s a reluctant hero destined for greatness but wary of how to get there and what it may cost him.” He is, as several say, “inspiring.” What can the ideal-typical portraits add? There is a recurrent sense here of loving LotR as a complete mythos, a world in which one can get totally lost. #5825, an under-16 American female repeat-reader, situates LotR within her wider fascination with fantasy worlds, calling them her “only religion.” She describes Aragorn thus:

104

Making Sense of Cinema

. . . intelligent and wise, he uses these to protect and give counsel to the hobbits; he is a skilled leader in battle but fights only when necessary; he is heir to be king but does not seek nor desire the trappings of power. He is a model to aspire to, someone we’d all desire as friend, but believable in his flaws. Plus he’s handsome.

#17789 is similar in some ways, but different in details. This 16–25 British male repeat-reader loves the “other-worldiness” and “immensity” of the filmic world, especially loving the scale of Minas Tirith. His knowledge of Tolkien’s war experiences intensifies his sense of mythic disconnection: “Aragorn—highly respected brave good fighter shrouded in mystery and folklore.” #18775, an Australian student and repeat-reader, was moved throughout, and cried at the ending: “I don’t believe that any movie will ever move me in the same way. The world is a better place for having it.” These were for her life-changing experiences. “Middle-earth is where I and lots of other people would like to be. It inhabits our minds at many levels but it also extends out into our very lives.” Aragorn fits here: “Apart from the fact that he’s attractive (always a consideration) I love the journey he goes on and what he stands for. He’s the reluctant hero.” Aragorn here is a character who, by belonging within this mythic world, provides ideal models for our own. Overall: Fantastical Admiration. Eowyn: very high among (mainly younger) females; very high on Epic. Again a combination, but this time mainly an additive one: being “beautiful and brave,” a “gorgeous woman pulling her weight,” a “strong female who really comes into her own.” For her choosers this is a form of feminism, one built around being beautiful, falling in love, and “kicking butt.” She can be a “strong fighter and a woman at the same time.” Her choosers show the highest levels of repeat-reading of the books—suggesting a hunger for fantasy featuring women. Many of her choosers see elements of themselves in her and her situation. For instance, #8518: “Eowyn because she’s a strong female character who longs to do something besides sit around. She’s torn between longing and duty and I feel the same much of the time.” Sometimes these are strikingly nuanced, as with #9373: “Eowyn because I am exactly like her. OK maybe not exactly but I share her complex issues. Whenever I read or hear about her, I feel like there’s somebody out there who understands me. I feel less alone.” For all three ideal-typical Eowyn-choosers, seeing the film was an intensely social experience and the core of their pleasure was simply the films’ epic scale. For #5738, a French 26–35, repeat-reading professional woman, the battle scenes were the most memorable: “The final seconds before the battle begins at Helms Deep: everybody knows it’s going to kick off and the whole cinema was holding

“Legolas, He’s Cool . . . and He’s Hot!”

105

its breath. Stunning.” The choice of favorite character feels quite incidental to the epic film-making: “Eowyn. Always good to see a strong, forceful and gorgeous woman pulling her weight.” The same was true of #6748, an American clerical/ administrative woman 26–35 who had read the books once. She loved the emotional impact: “I haven’t cried at a movie since I was 6!” The experience was “thrilling on an epic scale.” Yet having called the films “epic,” her account shifts: “it’s a world smaller and more fantastical than ours.” And once again, characterchoice is an “extra”: “Eowyn—strong female character who really came into her own.” #9918, a female Swedish student and repeat-reader, found the experience only “Reasonably Important.” First and foremost a reader of the books, she wanted to see how they would adapt them to screen. That left her choice of Eowyn as quite personal: “I am a girl and she is the one I identify the most to. I love her courage and strength despite all the sadness around her.” Overall: Welcoming Recognition of a Rare Character. Frodo: high among older females, and among service and creative workers—but no home/childcare at all; highest on Allegory and Spiritual Journey. Frodo is an “everyman” (a much-repeated expression) who finds hidden strength to carry on: “a small person doing his best against overwhelming odds.” He is “self-sacrificial,” in extremis a “Christian martyr” (#4974). His choosers watch someone heading into pain, loss, and perhaps death. They may know he will survive, but at a cost: Frodo “carried the Ring even though he knew it would be the death of him.” #5530 expresses this clearly: “As in the books, the tragic and noble nature of his character appeals to me. He who sacrifices everything to protect his home, who becomes a shattered shell of a person he once was, only to realize that his home is now denied to him. I ache for his suffering, but I know that the ending is inevitable.” His choosers know Frodo’s doom better than he does: “he didn’t really know what he was taking on,” he “never had a hope that he would succeed.” Many comment on Elijah Wood’s embodiment of a “perfect” Frodo, but there is only one reference to self, that “he looks like me, physically.” One other marks the difference, saying Frodo “takes on struggles I cannot take on myself.” It is tempting to conceive a connection with a service orientation profession hinted at by the demographic pattern. All three ideal-typical Frodo-choosers emphasize imagination. #4756, a 46–55 repeat-reading creative female, builds a “world” through Tolkien: I felt like the characters and events that they were part of were real. Tolkien’s characters were perfectly cast, the era and lands perfectly as I imagined them as I had read the books. I found it difficult to simply think of it as a movie or a book because it seemed like a history of a land to me.

106

Making Sense of Cinema

These expressions “to me” and “how I mentally pictured” recur. #8642, a 35–45 Canadian repeat-reading woman again in a creative occupation, again emphasizes imagination: “There are many parallels to our world at different times but Middle-earth exists for me as a wonderful richly realized imaginary world.” So does #18370, a 26–35 American student male repeat-reader: “Almost miraculously Peter Jackson brought to life my imagination of what Middle-earth should look like, feel like, sound like.” #4756 is unsure about one change between books and films: “I’m still undecided about Frodo sending Sam away. It played well but it played up Sam’s loyalty at the expense of Frodo’s integrity making Sam more heroic than Frodo.” Tolkien’s world is about ideal ordinary relationships. This lively imagining connects with her choice of Frodo: “I simply worship this character. He gave up everything, his life was ruined, and he received no praise or honor from his own people for being their savior.” Choices of Frodo combine imaginative realization with an honoring of “small” people who reach inside themselves to do the impossible. Overall: Astounded Acknowledgment of Imagined Unstinted Self-sacrifice. Gandalf: high among (mainly older) men, with high repeat-reading and a strong presence of professionals and executives; strongest on Fantasy, but lowest on Quest. His choosers look up to him; he is “wise,” “august,” “authoritative,” and “fascinating.” His magical capacities and almost god-like presence make him “mysterious” (a recurrent motif) with “hidden powers” and depth and breadth of knowledge: “he knew what was going on all of the time.” A contradictory combination comes out of this: “he supplies so much history yet is still quite a mystery;” he is “august yet human” (#5806). But his extraordinary powers mean that there are effectively no references to, or comparisons with, our world: Gandalf provides the point of entry into fantasy, the world of Middle-earth, and all it implies. What Ian McKellen, in particular, adds to this is the spark of kindness (but also a capacity for anger), along with an acknowledgment that others are not as strong as he is. Awe best describes this. In terms of the ideal-typicals, #4878, a 26-35 American repeat-reading professional woman, was an active follower of theonering.net. She emphasized the social nature of viewing: “I think NOT seeing this movie in a theater with the rest of the public misses out on participating in the strong and wonder [sic] audience reactions at many points during this movie—cheers AND complete silences.” This was about sharing in a vast public event. #5045, a Danish, 36–45, repeat-reading executive male, also emphasizes the “eventness” of the films; he saw them on their opening days, across three special years. His choice of Gandalf

“Legolas, He’s Cool . . . and He’s Hot!”

107

is summed up in just a few words: “He stands for wisdom and is a noble person.” Gandalf embodies these qualities as a type of character. Gandalf is the point of the films, their purpose writ large. #6226, an American 46–55, repeat-reading, executive male, emphasizes something particular to himself: “These films have been a family event. Tolkien’s books and the movies are common ground for us as an extended family. These movies have had a strong unifying effect in our family.” For #6226, “nobility” was a wider issue: “Gandalf . . . was just like I imagined him from the books. Wizards with their wisdom and powers and magic have always fascinated me.” It is the accessing of powers in pursuit of noble, significant objectives that perhaps links all these elements together. Although I must be cautious, because these responses were shorter, there is a recurrent emphasis on Gandalf as an extraordinary person nobly committing to play a large public role. Overall: Awe at a Perfectly Noble Leader. Gollum: demographically strongly older males, high repeat-reading, no strong occupational skew; highest on Myth/Legend. In many answers from Gollumchoosers, there is a sense of surprise that he is so “deep,” “real,” “believable,” “complex,” even “the only ‘human’ character in this world of heroes and villains” (#5869). This can be a simultaneous honoring of the production behind making Gollum real and of the character: “although he is CGI he has the feel of a real person” (#5296); the outcome was “humane, moving, gripping, and technically stunning.” This doubling delights his choosers: “a villain yet you can sympathize with him”; “hypnotically repellent” arousing “sympathy and disgust,” managing to “rarely evoke two opposite feelings at the same time.” Gollum becomes a “microcosm of the eternal struggle between good and evil within us all” (#10861); “there’s a Gollum/Smeagol type hidden deep in our subconscious” (#6056). In others, this comes out as acknowledgment of split emotions, for example #5879: “I pitied him, despised him, and wanted him to find some peace all the same time.” The link between the ideal-typicals is a complicated orientation to “sharing visualizations.” #4867, a 26–35 British executive, repeat-reading male, welcomes his ambiguity: “Gollum: he’s so complex. You can’t say he’s good and you can’t say he’s evil as we don’t appreciate the torment the Ring has put him under.” To admire Gollum is not just to admire the achieved combination of special effects and acting; it is to wonder at a “real” character. There is an interest here in what people are like “underneath,” what complexes of opposite tendencies operate. #5427 shares much of this. This 56–65-year-old, clerical/administrative American female choice of favorite character generates her longest answers:

108

Making Sense of Cinema

“Gollum—very accurate portrayal of dissociation where any one of us could be after 500 years of addiction to the Ring.” She returns to this in describing her most memorable aspect: “Gollum: the most interesting and complex character. Simply AMAZING to see him alive.” #8261, a British, 36–45 clerical/ administrative, repeat-reading male is aware that for fans like himself this has been a long wait: “It is a genre fan’s equivalent of the World Cup in that sharing the experience is somewhat of a tribal/religious thing.” This kind of collective viewing again emphasizes the achieved visualization, which now includes the achievement of depth and insight: “Gollum. His character had more depth than many of the other characters, a depth which I do not think was present in the original source material. For a CGI character to produce this reaction in an audience is a stunning achievement.” Something is at work here about the meaning and significance of visualization which I have explored elsewhere (Barker 2006). Visualization is more than simply creating a viewable version—it has to do with a sense of a completed understanding. Overall: Sympathetic Visualization of a Common Dangerous Mixture. Legolas: heavily skewed particularly to young females, with the lowest levels of repeat-reading; no obvious occupational skew, but highly skewed toward Fairytale, Good vs. evil, Quest, and War story. The strongly female tendency is shown in the erotic charge in many answers: “hot,” “totally turns me on.” But this links with his elf-nature. He is a “gorgeous elf,” and that brings in ethereal beauty, grace, powers, quiet nobility, “close to perfection—I crave perfection” (#10402). He “sells the entire idea of the elves.” This is a case of an additive combination, the various parts mutually reinforcing. He calls up the most actor-references: Orlando Bloom. But a good number of younger men also choose Legolas. For these, erotic charge is replaced by admiration for his skills—“invincible and an elf ”—and maybe part of the appeal is that he is a nonthreatening man, because of his magical nature. Legolas is an “other,” and he attracts the fewest relations with self, from either men or women. The key word with individuals is amazed. #5824, a 16–25 British female student once-reader, emphasizes startled emotions throughout. She loved the films’ scale, citing the Battle at Helm’s Deep for its “amazing proportions.” Legolas fits here, since “his ability is amazing which adds to his amazing fighting skill.” The films’ ability to move her with amazement is everywhere, suggesting the meaning of her choice of Fairytale. On the surface, #11290 is different. An under-16 female student from Singapore, she almost celebrated not finishing the books (“I was too lazy to read the books . . . LoL”). To watch the films was to find

“Legolas, He’s Cool . . . and He’s Hot!”

109

out how they ended, but mostly to “see Orlando Bloom aka Legolas.” She “drools” over him. Middle-earth is where she can see him in action; it has no other meaning to her. Bloom is named as her focus in eight of her separate answers: “He’s such a hot elf with stunning good looks, blue eyes and blonde hair!! LoL! He’s brave, loyal to his friends . . . and almost every other positive adjective you can find to describe him!” Bloom’s embodiment of a brave, loyal elf just makes his good looks more magical. #18241, a 16–25 American student, is one of the male choosers. He too uses the word amazed with its connotation of an unexpectedly overwhelming experience. Something of the significance of his choice of Fairytale shows here: “To me Middle-earth is in a completely different universe from ours. Its origins and history remain distinct from Earth’s.” Overall: Amazement at Prowess, Multiplied by Magical and Erotic Appeal. Pippin: The highest gender skew of all—to young females; average on reading; highest on students, lowest on professionals; highest on Threatened Homeland. A different sense of a major journey inhabits these people’s accounts. Pippin does not discover a destiny, or sacrifice himself—he grows up. Beginning as a naïve, foolish, funny hobbit, he has to learn that the world is hard. This means that he “makes mistakes,” is “brave, funny, caring, carefree,” the “most emotionally open,” and “personifies lost innocence.” A curious doubling occurs in the Pippin answers. First, there is a strong sense of knowing he was at risk all the time; #5072: “He was the one you had to watch because he might do something stupid.” Yet his character also produces one of the higher levels of self-reference; #5200: “He reminds me of me” and #10904: “Merry and Pippin are like me and my twin sis Jen (Merry is her favorite), we do everything together.” A small number of women acknowledge attraction to the actor but stress it as a bonus. What characterizes these respondents is their young age: Pippin invites big sisterly protectiveness. For the ideal-typicals, #4946, a 16–25 American female student, was active online, a writer of fan fiction, and a cosplay enthusiast: “I love this story so much I want to share it with other people whenever I can.” She is a classic fantasy enthusiast, but her choice of Pippin speaks to something else: “I love the hobbits in general. And I identify with Pippin most of all. When Gandalf told him ‘You probably shouldn’t say anything at all’, I laughed because I tend to stick my foot in my mouth a lot. Pippin also does things without thinking—I do that a lot. He’s just kind of cute too.” This intense feeling of self-in-relation-to-others in a fantastical world is shared by #5670, a 16–25 Australian repeat-reading female student. Aragorn’s “You bow down to no man” moment was her most memorable,

110

Making Sense of Cinema

because “it showed how much the Hobbits’ quest had affected the citizens of Gondor.” This is little people making a big difference. Pippin takes center-stage because he is the most characterful: “I loved [Pippin] because at the start of the series he was a fun-loving Hobbit who was thrown out of his element by strange circumstances. But over the course of the movies he evolved into a courageous and strong being.” #6509, an under-16 American female repeat-reading student, shares this: “I love the hobbits but Pippin surpasses them all. I loved watching his character evolve throughout the movies and books. He started out as a young naïve mischievous hobbit. But by the end of the stories he is a brave, wonderful, full character who has seen war and hardships and has survived things he never even knew existed.” Her most memorable moment does not involve Pippin; it is Frodo’s and Sam’s journey into Mordor. Her wording is striking: they “show you the glory of humans. They show you the values of freedom, will-power, and friendship.” But of course it is not humans, it is their story-surrogates, hobbits, who prove their deeply human capacities, and from whom “lessons can be learned.” Overall: Protective Regard for a Child Growing Up in a Dangerous World. Sam: relatively even gender split, but definitely older; quite high repeat-reading; highest on clerical/administrative, and high on professionals; no especial skew on Storyworld choices. The common phrase here is “unsung hero.” He is the “great best friend,” “honest, true, kind, compassionate, loyal, and with an inner courage that pulls him through” (#5414). He is “selfless,” “dedicated,” shows “quiet determination,” and remains “optimistic.” He is someone who produces hardly any yet combinations, only to mark off what he isn’t. It is his “simplicity” that appeals. For #4798: “He is no swordmaster, no warrior, he is even not very intelligent. He is just a normal man growing with his task.” Sam is a “simple gardener not a trained warrior” (#4806). Yet his very ordinariness makes him ideal. Personal references are few, and either idiosyncratic (#10037: “That I should find a man with the qualities of Sam!”), general (#8005: “We all need someone like that for the things we face in our own lives”), or wishful (#5414: “embodies what I strive to be”). Regarding the ideal-typicals, for #4960, a 36–45 American professional repeat-reading male, the story is simply “a classic story of fellowship and good vs. evil” that had everything in it: “emotional impact interspersed with jaw-dropping battle scenes as well as the portrayal and acting for Gollum.” Within this, his reason for choosing Sam is clear: “He is the true hero who supports his friend until the end.” Loyalty is the key virtue. #5424 expands on this. This 46–55

“Legolas, He’s Cool . . . and He’s Hot!”

111

American, repeat-reading, professional female summarizes her response thus: “It is a microcosm of mankind’s moral dilemmas and shows us the benefits of wise choices . . . those based on friendship, loyalty and love. I found the movie morally and spiritually compelling.” Her choice was driven by Sam’s embodiment of high ideals: Samwise Gamgee has been for me the pivotal character ever since I first read the book more than four decades ago. He embodies what I strive to be in my own life: honest, true, kind, compassionate, loyal and with an inner courage that pulls him through whatever life has to throw at him. I don’t see him as heroic in the mythic sense; what Sam does we are all capable of doing.

#10648, a 36–45 American repeat-reading professional male, conveys a different, but still heightened sense of the films—not as morality, but as art: “Such things as the music, the artwork, and the visual and sound effects mean a lot and help to make this film more of an all-encompassing art experience. Perhaps the greatest in history.” Being art makes it appropriate to look for “underlying themes,” and moments of value, as for instance “the Charge of the Rohirrim. An incredible moment in the film. A turning of the tide. A sign of hope.” From this heightened context comes his choice of Sam: “A true hero. Though he doesn’t carry the same burden as Frodo, he saves Frodo repeatedly and ensures that he carries out his task. Loyalty and the instinct of unconditional love are key strengths of Sam’s—as well as the love and respect of the simple pleasures of life.” Sam here takes on almost allegorical qualities. Overall: Admiration and Desire for Exceptional Simplicity.

Conclusions and Implications What broader propositions might this research support, however tentatively? It should be clear, first, that in place of reductionist searches for variable-driven psychological accounts, what is indicated here is a rich interweaving of cultural (i.e., shared figures, traditions, and genres), personal-historical (i.e., previous encounters and investments), and demographic factors. Additionally, there are many strands of communal influence, from who shares the cinema experience to how people may prepare for it through participating in real or virtual conversations. All these can interconnect, in complex ways. The evidence summarized here illustrates the value of an approach that fully accounts for the

112

Making Sense of Cinema

role and impact of cultural and social differences within people’s involvements with a film. More important are the modes in which the different choices work. All, of course, combine elements of recognition, cognition, and emotion, but they do this in different ways. Some of the figures—Gandalf and Legolas, especially—are more closely tied to their generic source as wizard or elf. To choose these is to align with characters blessed with extra, magical value. But that fact does not detach or insulate them from reality—far from it. Legolas/Bloom gains additional erotic charge from his generic clothing, but with the result that attachment to him partly disconnects from the films’ narrative and themes. Gandalf, by contrast, connects to a perception of the main purposes and drives of Middle-earth. He models leadership to older ages and professional occupations. How exactly this might work into self-perceptions and even actions would need additional research. Other characters seem to generate quite other forms of magnetism. Gollum melds admiration of technical achievement with a sense of depth that touches on universal themes of good and evil. Whether this has implications for how we should look more broadly at animated characters is uncertain, but it is worth asking. Others again were chosen for particular combinations of strengths and weaknesses. People love and worry over Pippen as they recognize in him bits of themselves and others. His innocent, foolish, good nature is accompanied on a journey of self-discovery, where his watchers can see ahead what he cannot. So, he is loved, observed, his mistakes predicted, and people hope for him. Frodo, by contrast, is an ideal-type of self-sacrifice, an ordinary creature we can only fear for, but must follow his dogged refusal to give up. Different modes of knowing and caring are involved in all these cases. They summon up and deploy various repertoires of recognition, which can only be built up through social and cultural experience. What all this suggests is that, in place of talking in terms of identification, choices of favorite character deserve to be explored across several dimensions: for how they generate and connect with an overall interpretive strategy; for the personal/cultural experiences, knowledges, and interests on which they call; and for the resonances with other parts of people’s lives. Many kinds of research could contribute to our understanding of these choices beyond the factorializing tradition that remains dominant. This argument is not an objection to the use of quantitative evidence, but to the importation of psychological models that know in advance how films must be processed.

“Legolas, He’s Cool . . . and He’s Hot!”

113

Methodological Directions and Limits The Lord of the Rings project was framed at the juncture of several research traditions. First, the cultural studies tradition, which insists on placing media and their uses within the wider contexts of cultures and people’s lives, but which also cared about the ideological significations of media forms and practices— with the downside of tending to derive meanings from analysis of textual forms alone. Second, the reader-reception tradition, which emphasizes the relationships between gaps and ellipses in texts and the way audiences’ wider interpretive frameworks allowed them to constitute “wholes”—but which, again, was oddly resistant to actual reader/audience research.8 Third, the tentatively (re)emerging tradition of empirical audience research, which accepts that these are deeply acculturated processes, but insists on the need to hear from the audiences themselves on how this is so. Empirical studies in this mode have taken many forms. Some, of course, have looked back to mass communications and uses and gratifications traditions. Mostly, however, there has been movement toward interpretive approaches, emphasizing the discursive complexity of people’s responses to things like The Lord of the Rings. Hence, the widespread turn to qualitative methods. Some studies have simply delighted in revealing varieties of response. Some have focused in on distinctive groups, asking how their “audiencing” works for them and fits within their lives. Others have sought to challenge widely circulating claims about “harm” to audiences, by giving voice to silenced groups. Still others have attended to new developments, asking how, for instance, new technologies are being embraced and used. All these without question have deepened our understanding of the complex ways in which people find places and uses for media forms and products. But this culturally inspired tradition, I believe, has hit a limit. The distrust of quantitative methods has in part at least arisen from recognition of its deep association with positivistic, policy-driven modes of mass communication research. The turn to qualitative methods arose from a commitment to hear audiences speaking for themselves (giving rise to debates about the best methods for generating and analyzing “ordinary talk”), and out of a conviction that such talk cannot be understood factorially, cut up and counted within researcherdetermined categories. But at the same time, this turn inevitably limited the extent to which researchers would be able to compare, to seek patterns, to map responses across demographic, orientation, cultural, political, and geographical

114

Making Sense of Cinema

contexts. This is where this project began. Tentatively, experimentally, and imperfectly, our development of a quali-quantitative survey—getting patterns, but simultaneously getting inside the patterns—has been an attempt to break through to those wider questions. We had to work within quite a number of constraints. International networks were few and weak. There were few shared theoretical, methodological, or design protocols. Money for conducting the project was limited. The opportunities for recruiting responses varied hugely from country to country. But there were larger and wider issues pressing on this project. For example, the question of whose responses we should try to recruit. This could not be a “sample survey” because it simply is not clear what such a “sample” would be. It is not that we do not have stable information on the range of people who watched the Lord of the Rings films in all countries. Instead, we could not prejudge what would count as watching them. Would seeing just two out of the three films count? Would watching them only because you were taking a child count? Would watching some on television count? These queries are potentially endless. But even more than this, we hoped to move away from an essentially marketing question (i.e., who goes, why, and will they come back again?) to a cultural meanings perspective: what array of meanings is made from these films, and how do the parts of the array relate to each other? For such a perspective, a minority position can be every bit as important as a more widely-adopted one. Our solution, for both practical and theoretical reasons, was to recruit opportunistically, and we would know if we had recruited effectively if we had well-populated all the categories in our survey. I recognize that that notion of “well-populated” awaits unpacking. In an ideal world, this would be looked at by people with greater statistical understanding than I have. Awaiting that, our solution was to work sequentially. We used the large numbers within the structure of the questionnaire to locate patterns, on the back of which we then sampled linked qualitative answers. This sequential approach was made possible by the structured links between its quantitative and qualitative aspects. This linking within one implement is unusual (see Bryman 2006), but has great potential. Among other strengths, this approach sidesteps some of the classic problems of triangulation: that different methods produce incommensurable materials, and the more precise the separate methods, the greater the problem of incommensurability.9 By gathering them in a structured database, our discursive materials were already associated with people’s multiple-choice responses.

“Legolas, He’s Cool . . . and He’s Hot!”

115

The other great advantage of this method is that it allows for an indefinitely expandable range of questions, as opposed to classic quantitative research that tends to be tied and restricted to initiating hypotheses. When first conceived, we had no notion of being able to explore choices of favorite characters in this fashion. It emerged as a possibility out of discovering the paradox that people choosing favorite characters did not necessarily remember favorite moments in which their character actually appeared. But that puts the onus back on the researchers’ persistence and imaginativeness. There are likely to be potentials for exploration in our database that have simply never occurred to us. For this reason, we put the database in the public arena, and hope that others will ask questions of its structured resources that have not entered our wildest dreams!

Notes 1 An illustration of this “textualism” can be seen in Eder’s (2010) assertion that “characters direct our emotions” (35). 2 Compare his (1980) “Anatomy of suspense,” with his (1994) “Mechanisms of emotional involvement with drama.” The latter appears in a special issue of Poetics, significant in bringing together researchers from several domains, to lay the foundations of what would become known henceforth as “media psychology.” 3 Much really needs to be said about the ways in which “emotions” (or “affects”) are characterized in this kind of research. I note only the overwhelming preference for thinking about basic, or primary emotions (“fear,” “desire,” etc.) as against the whole array of emotions which immediately signal their cultural operation (“suspicion,” “contempt,” “frustration,” “admiration,” “bemusement”). 4 See also Zillman 1994: 33–34. 5 I am not alone in making this kind of argument. Very recently, Emily Keightley and Michael Pickering (2012) have argued that theories of memory have artificially excluded the role of imagination in our ways of recalling the past. 6 For an exploration of this way of seeing engagement, see Victor Nell (1988). 7 We had gathered information on sex, age, how often the books had been read, and what kind of occupation (choosing the closest from a list with twelve options). We also asked people to pick up to three from a list of twelve kinds of story that best applied to the LotR films: Allegory, Epic, Fairytale, Fantasy, Game-world, Good vs. Evil, Myth/Legend, Quest, SFX film, Spiritual Journey, Threatened Homeland, War story.

116

Making Sense of Cinema

8 Reception research has taken empirical form most strongly within film studies, particularly under the stimulus of Janet Staiger (1992), but with a penchant for using already-created responses such as reviews or other commentaries for its materials. 9 On this, see Yvonna Lincoln and Egon Guba (1985).

References Appel, M. and T. Richter (2010), “Transportation and Need for Affect in Narrative Persuasion: A Mediated Moderation Model,” Media Psychology, 13 (2): 101–35. Barker, M. (1989), Comics: Ideology, Power and the Critics, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Barker, M. (2005), “The Lord of the Rings and ‘Identification’: A Critical Encounter,” European Journal of Communication, 20 (3): 353–78. Barker, M. (2006), “Envisaging ‘Visualisation’: Some Lessons from the Lord of the Rings Project,” Film-Philosophy, 10 (3): 1–25. Barker, M. and E. Mathijs (2012), “Researching World Audiences: The Experience of a Complex Methodology,” Participations, 9 (2): 664–89. Bryman, A. (2006), “Integrating Quantitative and Qualitative Research: How Is It Done?” Qualitative Research, 6 (1): 97–113. Eder, J. (2010), “Understanding Characters,” Projections, 4 (1): 16–40. Godlewski, L. R. and E. M. Perse, (2010), “Audience Activity and Reality Television: Identification, Online Activity, and Satisfaction,” Communication Quarterly, 58 (2): 148–69. Hoffner, C. and M. Buchanan (2005), “Young Adults’ Wishful Identification with Television Characters: The Role of Perceived Similarity and Character Attributes,” Media Psychology, 7 (4): 325–51. Jacobs, K. (2013), “Impersonating and Performing Queer Sexuality in the Cosplay Zone,” Participations, 10 (2): 22–45. Keightley, E. and M. Pickering (2012), The Mnemonic Imagination: Remembering as Creative Practice, Basingstoke, UK : Palgrave. Lin, T., S. Morishima, A. Maejima, and N. Tang (2010) “The Effects of Virtual Characters on Audiences’ Movie Experience,” Interacting with Computers, 22 (3): 218–29. Lincoln, Y. S. and E. G. Guba (1985), Naturalistic Inquiry, Beverly Hills: Sage Publications. Maccoby, E. and W. Wilson (1957), “Identification and Observational Learning from Films,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 55 (1): 76–87. Nell, V. (1988), Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure, New Haven: Yale University Press. Smith, M. (1995), Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion and the Cinema, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

“Legolas, He’s Cool . . . and He’s Hot!”

117

Staiger, J. (1992), Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema, Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press. Tal-Or, N. and J. Cohen (2010), “Understanding Audience Involvement: Conceptualizing and Manipulating Identification and Transportation,” Poetics, 38 (4): 402–18. Tan, E. S. H. (1994), “Film-induced Affect as a Witness Emotion,” Poetics, 23 (1–2): 7–32. Zillman, D. (1980), “Anatomy of Suspense,” in P. H. Tannenbaum (ed.), The Entertainment Function of Television, 137–63, Hillsdale, NJ : Laurence Erlbaum. Zillman, D. (1994), “Mechanisms of Emotional Involvement with Drama,” Poetics, 23 (1–2): 33–51.

7

In Search of the Child Spectator in the Late Silent Era Amanda C. Fleming Indiana University

Milan, Italy, 24 March 1952 (A.P.) Experts on children from 25 nations say that comic books and cowboy movies affect children, but they admit they don’t know how much or in what way. —Philippe Bauchard, The Child Audience Motion Pictures are not understood by the present generation of adults. They are new; they make an enormous appeal to children; and they present ideas and situations which parents may not like. Consequently, they wonder about the effect of the pictures upon the ideals and behavior of children. —W.W. Charters, preface to Motion Pictures and the Social Attitudes of Children

Introduction Throughout the history of cinema, many individuals, institutions, and disciplines have attempted to theorize and understand the child spectator. In the United States, the late 1920s and early 1930s showed a surge in interest among academics who were deeply concerned with mass media’s effect on children. While many parties were interested in the child spectator, those who poked and prodded him or her were mostly sociologists who were unconcerned with what kinds of films children preferred to watch for leisure if left to their own devices. In that sense, the empirical data collected on the juvenile spectator at that time paid little attention to how children chose which film texts to interact with, unless it was to prove that they should be barred from viewing certain films (e.g., gangster movies).

120

Making Sense of Cinema

In his 1990 article, Richard deCordova argues that “[a]lthough groups other than children occasionally fell under the researcher’s gaze, the child’s encounter with the moving picture constituted the primal scene of early audience research” (92). As the epigraphs above suggest, it was commonly believed that films had the power to influence children in undesirable ways: the goal of research into child spectators was to prove that very questionable supposition. Ethical problems riddled early statistical studies on the child audiences as some researchers approached their work under the assumption that film had a direct and often negative impact on children and then designed their studies to substantiate such a priori assumptions. For example, the oft-discussed “hypodermic needle” theory of transmission, developed by political scientist Harold Lasswell to analyze World War I propaganda, suggests that the intended message is injected into passive audiences who receive the messages directly, and are thus influenced by them. Much early reception and audience studies were clouded by such theories and assumptions. DeCordova (1990) suggests that contemporary film scholars have neglected to study this primal scene of film spectatorship due to the “disreputable forms of research it engendered” (92). Garth S. Jowett, Ian C. Jarvie, and Kathryn H. Fuller (1996) argue the Rev. William H. Short’s influence on the Payne Fund Studies was problematic, as he hoped they would prove “movies directly, and detrimentally, influenced children” (59). Short had helped found the Motion Picture Research Council, and was part of the movement to push social science’s role as being the arbiter for answering moral questions and providing proof of the harmful nature of movies. With this era of research perceived as clouded by such problematic approaches to study design, contemporary scholars may be more likely to dismiss all studies conducted at the time as being tainted by such assumptions, and thus of no use in helping to understand the actual spectator and actual spectatorship. This chapter aims to take a closer look at that primal scene to better understand some of the first research conducted on the child audience. In the process of searching for any information on the child spectator in the early part of the twentieth century, I discovered moral panic surrounded most inquiries into media effects on minors, who were seen as a very susceptible and vulnerable public. One study stands apart from early sociological research, however, in that it offers special insight into the feelings and views of actual child spectators in the late silent era. Children and Movies, written by Alice Miller Mitchell and funded by the Weiboldt Foundation, was published in 1929 by the University of Chicago Press.

The Child Spectator in the Late Silent Era

121

Mitchell’s project predated the well-known Payne Fund Studies (PFS ) and is best described as a proto-ethnography of the urban child spectator of the mid-1920s, which can be characterized as the late silent era before movies became “talkies.” Mitchell administered two surveys to 10,052 children from Chicago to ascertain how frequently they went to the cinema, what films they attended, with whom they saw these films, and which films they preferred. By inviting children to answer unprompted, open-ended questions, Mitchell strove to allow the children to speak to their taste in their own words. The results were rather enlightening. She found children’s taste in films was not too divergent from adults’ tastes, and that minors went to the cinema frequently without adult supervision, and often in the evenings. In this chapter, I examine Mitchell’s findings on the child spectator to grapple with her methodology, and to begin to parse out the problems and pitfalls surrounding the use of found data analysis when studying historical spectatorship. My project will serve two functions: It will bring to light important and somewhat forgotten data regarding the child spectator of the mid-1920s as well as offering possible strategies of how to ethically interpret found data on historical spectators. Before examining Mitchell’s study, it is important to touch on the legacy of the Payne Fund Studies, which were published a few years after Children and Movies; although they received their fair share of criticism, the PFS were some of the earliest studies into film’s effect on spectators and reflect the common trend of researching film reception at the time.

The Payne Fund Studies The Payne Foundation funded and published eight volumes under the series titled “Motion Pictures and Youth” from 1933 to 1935.1 Working with the University of Chicago, the PFS were early attempts at making sociology a science. These studies relied heavily on empirical data to answer such questions as: “Did movies teach? Did movies affect attitudes? Did movies affect conduct? Was there a cause-and-effect relationship between movies and crime?” (Jowett, Jarvie, and Fuller 1996: 5). They used questionnaires, “open-ended interviews,” standardized tests, content analysis, autobiographies, and machines such as the psychogalvanometer and the “wired bed” to gauge the child’s response to individual films (Jowett, Jarvie, and Fuller 1996: 5).

122

Making Sense of Cinema

Jowett, Jarvie, and Fuller’s (1996) book is devoted to reconstructing the history surrounding the PFS and situating it within the context of social science communication research. The authors argue, “The Studies help us to historicize the subject of mass communications research, to demystify it by studying its painstaking and halting construction” (10). This book critically examines the methods and importance of the PFS . One of the goals of the work was “to restore the PFS to a place of honor in the history of communications research” (1) because “the PFS are important both as ground-breaking works in a new field and as examples of sophisticated social science” (2). While they portray the PFS as gems of early social science research in action, the authors acknowledge that, because there were so few precedents in the field, “the PFS pioneers and research designers were far from flawless in their use of these new means, but it was from their errors and oversights that more cautious and reliable methods were developed” (Jowett, Jarvie, and Fuller 1996: 5). Indeed, the PFS cast a long shadow and helped future scholars refine the sorts of methods we continue to use today. Many of the PFS strategically screened films to prove that children responded to films in specific emotional, physical, and psychological ways. In one PFS , Motion Pictures and the Social Attitudes of Children, Ruth C. Peterson (1933) used questionnaires to gauge whether or not a child changed his or her beliefs about things such as capital punishment and war after screening The Valiant (William K. Howard, 1929) or All Quiet on the Western Front (Lewis Milestone, 1930), respectively. In one of the more famous experiments included in the volume, Peterson sought to prove The Birth of a Nation (D. W. Griffith, 1915) changed children’s opinions of black people. The following is a transcription of the instructions to the questionnaire, along with the first three questions asked of the children before and after the screening as well as five months later: ✓ Put a check mark if you agree with the statement × Put a cross if you disagree with the statement. Try to indicate either agreement or disagreement for each statement. If you simply cannot decide about a statement you may mark it with a question mark. This is not an examination. There are no right or wrong answer statements. This is simply a study of people’s attitudes toward the Negro. Please indicate your own convictions by a check mark when you agree and by a cross when you disagree.

The Child Spectator in the Late Silent Era

123

1. I am not at all interested in how the Negro rates socially. 2. You cannot condemn the entire black race because of the actions of some of its members. 3. Under no circumstances should Negro Children be allowed to attend the same schools as white children. (37)

The study evidenced that screening The Birth of a Nation leveled children’s opinions. According to Peterson, before the screening, very few children thought unfavorably about blacks and many thought favorably of them. After screening the film, more children thought less favorably “toward the Negro” and fewer thought favorably of them (37). We can therefore assume that being exposed to negative representations of black people caused children to think less favorably of the entire race. However, some of the results from Peterson and others were negligible. For example, Peterson’s questionnaires were given immediately before and immediately after screening the film, making the child highly susceptible to suggestion; meaning the child believed the film should change his opinion on the matter. Contextualized within a history of social science methodologies, these studies were surely significant, as Jowett, Jarvie, and Fuller (1996) argue. Read from a historical film reception studies standpoint, however, these studies appear to be nothing more than smoke and mirrors, using studies to reaffirm fears rather than understand realities. For the most part, Jowett, Jarvie, and Fuller praise the PFS , saying “They tell us something about the society of the time and its preoccupations, and something of the state of the art in the social sciences” (11). This quotation rings particularly true, given the controversies still circulating around the potential negative effects of video games, television, and the Internet on today’s youth. We appear to be preoccupied with the same concerns now as we were nearly a century ago. But an important piece to remember is that there are some histories that need to be reexamined to help throw into relief the anxieties surrounding new and old technologies. One of the earliest scholarly texts to cite Mitchell’s study is The Child Audience: A Report on Press, Film and Radio for Children, by Philippe Bauchard, which I quoted in the introduction. Funded and published by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO ) in 1953, his study relies on data collected mostly in the 1940s and examines research conducted on mass media’s effect on child audiences around the globe, including Great Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Sweden and other countries.2 The Child Audience is an

124

Making Sense of Cinema

early and sometimes critical survey of the history of international mass communication research. In his twenty-page chapter devoted to film, Bauchard summarizes various studies on child spectators, including Mitchell’s Children and Movies. Bauchard (1953) claims that in the United States most data suggests that “generally speaking, the characters, problems and themes put before young audiences in films are far removed from the actual life they lead” (85). His main criticism of research carried out on children regarding film has to do with the researchers’ fixation on studying the potential link between juvenile delinquency and the cinema. Bauchard believes it is methodologically suspect to focus studies on troubled children: “The fact that the juveniles examined tend to be abnormal or backward rather than normal healthy children usually makes it difficult to draw general conclusions. Too many theoretical a priori assessments have thus led to hasty generalizations, attractive in form but dangerous in practice” (76). He praises research that had wider-reaching conclusions on the kinds of media average children were inclined to consume. In addition, he draws attention to the contradictory theories associated with studying media effects at the time. One theory suggests that the cinema has very little influence on a child’s criminal tendencies; another suggests that it is a harmless “safety-valve” (87); yet another claims films that glorify crime have an immediate and direct effect on young folks. Bauchard was especially suspect of the latter theory, claiming that “any direct influence of films on juvenile delinquency is hard to prove” (88). Indeed, his early survey exposes the criticisms volleyed at empirical work on the child spectator, criticisms that continued through the 1950s and to the present day. In their 1985 article, Ellen Wartella and Byron Reeves survey mass communication research on media effects on children. The authors argue “traditional history of media effects research is biased toward considerations of public opinion, propaganda, public affairs and voting” (118–20). In a sense, then, public debate inevitably shaped the research conducted on children rather than the research shaping public concern or policy. Furthermore, Wartella and Reeves claim the PFS were a tremendous research enterprise that served as “the basis of recommendations for government action on what the authors believed were significant social problems” (121). Not only did public debate shape research questions and study designs, but the results of such studies would be used to determine public policies, which could include industry regulation and censorship. Thus, a considerable amount of finances and energy went into

The Child Spectator in the Late Silent Era

125

research on children film spectators to understand how the cinema influenced them, with the assumption that said influence was harmful, using methodological approaches designed more to affirm this assumption and not to understand the child spectator’s actual film reception. Wartella and Reeves (1985) mention Mitchell’s study twice: first, as predating the PFS as a survey of children’s attendance and reaction to films, and second, as “the best-known early study of children’s film use” (121, 127). This acknowledgment of Mitchell attempting to understand the actual movie-going experience of the child spectator had happened previously. After Mitchell published her findings, various reviews that summarized and then praised her study surfaced in newspapers and academic journals.3 In the article “Children’s Tastes in the Moving Pictures” from the January 12, 1930, edition of the New York Times, the anonymous author states: “This little book by Mrs. Miller seems to be the first attempt yet made to collect first hand facts about the relationship between children and the movies and to study that relationship in a scientific spirit and by scientific methods” (69). A similar sentiment is expressed in an article in the Chicago Daily Tribune; the anonymous author begins by asserting that Mitchell’s was the first “scientific effort . . . to determine the effect of movies on children, and the type of pictures children like” (E2). In both the newspaper and scholarly reviews of the study, each author lauded Mitchell’s scientific methodology and suggested there needed to be more studies like hers, especially given that she found 90.6 percent of children attended the cinema regularly (Mitchell 1929: 19).4 Unfortunately, such evidence of children’s avid consumption of films became the fodder for scientific inquiries into media effects, along the lines described above. The goal of this chapter is to explore how Mitchell’s study aligns with and separates itself from the then typical approach to studying child audiences. My investigation into the methods employed by Alice Miller Mitchell is indebted to and inspired by the field of historical reception studies. Janet Staiger’s (1992) ground-breaking and influential work brought the field into focus, exposing the possibilities and problems inherent to the study of audiences from the past. Ultimately, the study of spectators, audiences, or viewers is concerned with how texts accrue different meanings through their different interpretations; in this field, the text is not a static, ahistorical object that contains one, or possibly a few, preferred readings (see Alexander Geimer’s work in this volume for more on this matter). The field of historical reception studies is a rich site to explore how texts are consumed in different contexts; however, in my case study of the

126

Making Sense of Cinema

child spectator in the late silent era, I am less concerned with the children’s various interpretations of singular films, and more in children’s taste and habits surrounding their consumption of film.

Case Study: Mitchell’s Children and Movies I initially began my research on the historical child spectator with the goal of finding the genesis of what one might call the children’s film. As a scholar interested in genre, narrative, and audiences more broadly, I had two questions. First, what kinds of fictional films were made specifically for children in the early part of the twentieth century? And, when did Hollywood executives regard children as a desirable demographic whose purchasing power was worthy of consideration? I discovered quickly that these initial research questions were dead ends (at least for the silent era); however, they helped me begin to see the child audience for what it was at the time: a conundrum that the social sciences wished to understand better. In 1926, when Alice Miller Mitchell surveyed more than 10,000 children regarding their cinema-going habits, the “children’s film” as category or genre did not yet exist; Mitchell declares this quite plainly in the conclusion of her study. Although it came as a surprise, this breakthrough helped shift my focus away from the production of certain texts potentially aimed at theoretical children to what children actually consumed. The most representative case study of children’s taste in films in the late silent era is Mitchell’s Children and Movies. The work of a historian interested in the spectatorship of an era long since passed is confined by the physical materials available to her. The traces of the material world, the archive, become the data that must be interpreted to draw conclusions about the viewing conditions from whence those materials came. I found a copy of Children and Movies simply by performing a few basic library catalog searches on different keywords and sorting them by date, beginning with the earliest titles. Some keywords I used were children, child, audience, spectator/ship, film, movie, cinema, and viewer/ship. When I performed those searches, I was most interested in when and how the category of the children’s film came into being, as mentioned above. Conducting such primary research now, more than 100 years after cinema’s inception, would be next to impossible. I had to find windows into the past to answer the burning questions on my mind about child spectators. Luckily, the PFS and Mitchell’s

The Child Spectator in the Late Silent Era

127

research, as well as Exhibitors Herald, provided me with such windows. The Exhibitors Herald was a trade journal whose audience was primarily film exhibitors. The issues I studied for this analysis were dated January 1923 to December 1924. Once I compiled the primary research, it became a matter of evaluating the sources and interpreting the findings. Mitchell’s study provided for a found data analysis that allowed me to consider how her study was conducted, and to answer the questions: were Mitchell’s studies ethically conducted, and did her conclusions follow the data she collected? Mitchell’s study also allowed for a historical spectatorship analysis, as I could consider what the findings of her study said about the child spectator of the time. Furthermore, comparing Mitchell’s study to another primary document of the time, the Exhibitors Herald, I could answer the question: did Mitchell’s studies and other primary documents tell a similar story about children’s taste in films? In this way, both found data and historical spectatorship methods could be used to understand the nature of child spectators’ tastes and habits during the late silent era of cinema.

Found Data Analysis Mitchell (1929) created two surveys given to 10,052 children from Chicago schools and correctional facilities that fell into three groups: average publicschool children, juvenile delinquents, and those involved in the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. Ultimately, Mitchell chose the scouts to determine how important the movies were to children who had recreational interests that “average” children did not (10); delinquents were studied to ascertain whether children who had run-ins with the law had a same relationship to the movies as “average” children. Mitchell’s distinctions among the three groups point to the early preoccupation with the potential negative effects of mass media on children described above as she devotes an entire chapter to the delinquent child’s relationship to movies. However, Mitchell was also interested in the more universal tastes of children despite how she divided her findings between gender, age, and the three “categories” of children. To better understand the sample she had gathered, what follows is a closer look at the demographics of the 10,052 children and how those questionnaires were administered to the different groups. The 6,015 boys and 4,037 girls were between the ages of ten and eighteen, and came from “many classes and types of neighborhoods” (Mitchell 1929: 11). The

128

Making Sense of Cinema

4,800 “average” students and 3,833 scouts attended Calumet, Lucy Flower, Hyde Park, and Wendell Phillips High Schools, and Douglas, Garfield, John Fiske, and Wentworth Grade Schools (11, 153–154). The teachers of the “average” students administered these surveys in one school period on different days; when possible, the same teacher administered both questionnaires.5 The scoutmasters and troop captains administered the quizzes to the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, respectively. The remaining 1,419 polled were juvenile offenders committed to correctional facilities in and near Chicago. The institutions utilized for Mitchell’s study were the Chicago Parental School for Boys, the Chicago and Cook County School for Boys, the St. Charles School for Boys, and the State Training School for Girls, with some studied at “the Juvenile Detention Home, an institution where children are held pending disposal of their cases by the Juvenile Court” (12). It was unclear who administered the quizzes to the juvenile delinquents, although Mitchell mentions, “the quizzes were given to the delinquents in the classrooms of the schools that are held at the several institutions. . . . In addition to the written quizzes, personal interviews were held in selected cases” (12). How many delinquent children were granted personal interviews is not included in her data. Moreover, Mitchell reworded the questions in the “quizzes” given to the delinquents since they did not have free access to any film of their choice when they were institutionalized; “It was simply made clear to the [delinquents] that they were to give information based on their contact with the movies before being committed to these correctional schools” (12). Of the 4,037 girls, only 719 surveyed were scouts and 373 were delinquents. Sadly, one of the drawbacks of using found data from so long ago is that I can only speculate why there was such a discrepancy between the total number of girls and boys surveyed. Perhaps there were simply fewer female students, scouts, and delinquents available for her to study.

Found Data and Historical Spectatorship The surveys were titled “Quiz A” and “Quiz B.” As a way to describe their content, Mitchell (1929) stated in regards to the surveys: These questions were formulated in such a manner that they could be answered by one or two words, and great care was taken that no element of suggestion creep into them. For instance, in trying to determine the kind of pictures that

The Child Spectator in the Late Silent Era

129

attracts the child most, no list of motion pictures was furnished him as he has been done in other case studies. (7)

Here, we can see Mitchell’s attempt to dissociate her potential biases about child spectators from the questions she was asking to understand these children’s movie-going tastes and habits. Furthermore, to ensure reliability and validity, the same question was asked in more than one way. For example, the children were asked what kinds of movies they liked best, to describe them, and to list the titles of their favorite films. In the second chapter, “Field of Inquiry and Method,” Mitchell offered details about when and how the surveys were administered: Data were gathered for the most part from children by means of written quizzes which were given in the classroom as regular school routine and under the supervision of the teacher. . . . Utmost care was exercised to formulate the questions clearly and give them under conditions most favorable for accuracy in answer. Written questions were used rather than oral ones. Oral questioning is not only distracting to the child but it introduces a personal element which might cause him to color his answers by what he thinks the inquirer wishes him to say and might interfere with this being perfectly frank. (6–7)

In this passage, Mitchell reflects on her own methods, showing a desire to reduce her and the children’s teachers’ interference in the questionnaires and to create a forum for children to express themselves freely. The process of acquiring the data suggests that her surveys were ethically formed and executed as they were designed to understand the actual child spectator rather than simply test the assumptions of the researcher. Quiz A was the shorter of the two and asked questions regarding the child’s movie-going experience: did they attend alone, how did the student find the money to attend, how frequently did they attend and what time of the day, and so on. The results from Quiz A dispel a myth surrounding the habits of child spectators: It is the general opinion that children usually patronize the movie theaters in the afternoon. For a long time matinees have been regarded as belonging primarily to them. The managers of the theaters would like to feel that this is true. . . . The children, however, have another view on the subject. Even though the matinee is the same as the evening program, to them the show at night has added attractions. (29–30)6

130

Making Sense of Cinema

Mitchell’s study evidenced that roughly 43 percent attended the movies in the evening exclusively, and an additional 25 percent attended both evening and afternoon shows, while 29 percent reported only attending in the afternoon. Mitchell’s study, along with the PFS , constitutes almost all of the contemporaneous, historical information surviving on the frequency of child spectatorship in the early sound/late silent era. The PFS found that children from the ages of eight to nineteen attended the movies approximately once a week (Charters 1933). According to Edgar Dale’s (1933) Children’s Attendance at the Motion Pictures, minors under the age of twenty-one comprised roughly 37 percent of the entire motion picture audience; further calculation suggests twenty-eight million minors attended theaters weekly, and approximately eleven million of those children were under fourteen years of age. For the researcher, attendance numbers helped validate his inquiries into media effects, as filmgoing was an important leisure activity for children. Motion picture producers, distributors, and exhibitors were keenly aware of the children’s drawing power— they were a constituency whose tastes could be monetized. In this way, then, Mitchell’s findings helped form the public discourse around the habits of child spectators as much as other studies of the era. Exhibitors Herald ran a special ten-page advertisement in the February 17 edition in 1923, promoting films that were regarded as suitable for children. At the top of the first page, in large print, it reads: “Pictures Every Child Will Love!” Underneath this promise, in smaller typeface, it states: When you put on extra matinees or special performances for children don’t fail to select from this list of features and short length comedies. Every one is a winner. And remember that while these pictures are especially adaptable to children, they also appeal to grown-ups.

In this short excerpt, it is easy to extract a few assumptions exhibitors perpetuated regarding the kinds of films children might like (e.g., comedies) and when they might attend (e.g., matinees or special performances). This ad stresses the “universal appeal” of the pictures advertised, suggesting that films suited for a general audience is just another way of saying that they are suitable for children, thus corroborating Mitchell’s (1929) argument that films deemed appropriate for children “were made at first for adults and then later edited presumedly [sic] to suit juvenile minds” (37). The child’s film, at that point in history, could be regarded as a construct created by exhibitors and perhaps those organizations or individuals bent on deeming material either appropriate or inappropriate for

The Child Spectator in the Late Silent Era

131

child audiences. And this construct was, at least in part, informed by the research of Mitchell and others like her. Mitchell outlines more of the habits of child spectators in her chapter “Who Takes the Child to the Movie.” Although she separates her findings based on the three different categories of students, as well as by gender and age, broadly speaking, she found children not only preferred to attend without adult accompaniment, but that approximately 75 percent attended either alone or with companions of their own age. The PFS show very similar data (see Charters 1933).7 On the whole, girls in Mitchell’s study were most likely to attend a film with their parents, but even then a majority of girls did not attend with their parents. As a rule, boys were more likely to attend a film alone; roughly 20 percent stated they went to the movies by themselves. There was no significant difference between the ages or categories of boys who attended alone.8 Such data provide a sense not only of the independence of the child spectator in going to the movies, but also the lack of a significant gender discrepancy in doing so. Question 32 on Quiz A asks: “How do you choose the movie you want to see?” The children’s responses showed that no one single factor proved to be decisive or dominant. Among the factors that might affect some part of the child population to choose a particular film were: posters in the lobby, newspapers, trailers or “coming attractions,” recognizable actors, recommendations from friends, and/or the titles of the films (58). Many children responded to the question to the effect of: “It doesn’t make any difference what the show is just so it’s a movie” (59). These results suggest that children didn’t consistently respond to advertisements, regardless of whether or not they might have been targeted at them. Moreover, it insinuates going to the movies was a novelty in and of itself for children. Quiz B, in comparison to Quiz A, is more subjective: It asks the students to list what they liked best to see in the movies and the three kinds of movies they liked best (along with a brief description) as well as to provide a list of their favorite three movies, and three movies they had seen recently, among other things. The open-ended quality of the survey allowed the students to freely express their tastes without prompting. This survey, like some of the data collected by the Payne Fund Studies, asked the students whether they preferred to go to the movies or partake in other extracurricular activities, such as playing football, baseball, going to a party, going hiking, going auto-riding, or reading. Contemporaneous reviewers mentioned in the literature review honed in on the differences between delinquent children and “average” children: Mitchell found

132

Making Sense of Cinema

delinquent children preferred movies over reading or other activities, while high school girls were the only group that preferred to read over going to the movies. This finding therefore supports the reasoning behind the concern the public, policymakers, and researchers had with juvenile delinquency and the cinema; this finding could be interpreted as that going to the movies made children into delinquents. The kind of movies children like, according to Mitchell, fell into ten categories/genres: Adventure, Comedy, Educational, Historical, Mystery, Romance, Sport, Tragedy, War, and Western (104). The “big four” were Western, Comedy, Adventure, and Mystery (105). These categories were the favorites among all groups of children, regardless of their gender, age, or whether they were juvenile delinquents, “average students,” or scouts, although Mitchell believed these categories are more representative of the general taste of boys, as girls also tended to like romances. The large discrepancy in the number of boys studied to the number of girls could account for the significant presence of the “big four,” as the genre preferences for girls may have been underrepresented. The following are a few transcriptions of the answers Mitchell provides from her study in response to question 14 from Quiz B: “1) What kind of movie do you like best? 2) Second best? 3) Third best? DESCRIBE ” (1929: 151). A delinquent girl of sixteen answered “1) I like love movies best. 2) Then I like western movies. 3) Then when there is a movie where there is a murder and they have to trace the murderer” (116). A twelve-year-old grade-school boy answered “1) First I like adventure because I wish some day I could do it myself. 2) I like a mystery second because it gives you a thrill. 3) Third I like a comedy because it cheers you up and makes you laugh” (117). A high-school girl said: 1) I like pictures of historical value that are educational as well as interesting. 2) Pictures that portray human emotions such as love pictures. 3) Pictures with real life in them such as fighting pictures of hate that stir the blood, pictures of crime and the results of crime. (118)

Mitchell presents roughly ten other transcriptions of students’ answers to the same question. I present these few responses to show how Mitchell’s study provided a forum for the child to express his or her tastes. Looking back at Quizzes A and B, it becomes apparent that Mitchell was more of a protoethnographer than a positivistic social scientist; the child could fill in the blank without any kind of prompting and specific films were not screened to prove

The Child Spectator in the Late Silent Era

133

media’s effects on the child spectator. Question 12 from Quiz B asks the children to name three of their favorite movies (Mitchell 1929: 152). Although Mitchell doesn’t give an entire list of all the answers to the question, she offers an interpretation of her findings: From the data gathered from the 10,052 children for the present study it seems apparent that the kind of movie a child likes best and the ones which stand out most vividly in his mind are of two classes: those which he recently has seen and those large, important films which are superproductions, as The Covered Wagon, The Big Parade, The Birth of a Nation, and others. (118)9

The films that children claimed to like, according to Mitchell, oftentimes were successful with more general audiences. Mitchell’s surveys reveal fascinating observations about early child spectatorship by empowering and listening to actual children speak on their own tastes and habits, rather than assume she knows what children do or do not, like or don’t like. This empowering of the child spectator to speak his or her own mind without concern for judgment or focus on negative outcomes is further illustrated by the most open-ended question on Quiz B, question 25: “Write a short composition about a movie which you have seen. If you liked it, tell why and name the things you liked best in it. If you did not like it, tell why. Name the characters you admired most in it and tell why you admired them” (153). One boy of sixteen responded in regards to The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Rex Ingram, 1921), a film he hadn’t seen in years: I liked it immensely. It showed pictures of Purgatory in which the Apocalyptic Beast was shown. I like to see gruesome and awe-inspiring pictures of beasts that breathe fire through their nostrils. I like war scenes because they are exciting and full of action. I like the change of scenery from South America to France. I like to see love making as Valentine made it, although I think it was rotten of him to steal another man’s wife. (119)

Another boy recalled The Birth of a Nation: Perhaps the movie that will last the longest in my memory is The Birth of a Nation. While I saw this picture about five years ago, the thought of it still brings back the remembrance of the thrilling scenes showing the Ku Klux Klan and the actions toward the negroes. One of the most startling features of that show was the grand climax which showed the magnificent assembly of the Klansmen and

134

Making Sense of Cinema

to me it seemed to be one of the most inspiring moments I had ever seen in the movies. No one character stands out as I think over the show but it does not seem right that any one should stand out in such a picture as this affecting as many people as it does. (118–19)

Mitchell’s study gave individual child spectators a chance to express what they enjoyed most about their favorite films. This unique study offers a glimpse into the mind of the child spectator without passing judgment on the child’s taste or attempting to prove that his or her attitudes or beliefs were transformed significantly by the film. The Covered Wagon (James Cruze, 1923) was the first of seven films that Mitchell claimed were favorites among the children given the surveys. To test the veracity of Mitchell’s claims about children’s taste in film, I turned to Exhibitors Herald to ascertain if the periodical described The Covered Wagon as a film fit for a child audience. Trade journals tell a story about film exhibition and contemporaneous spectatorship told from within the business; how did this trade journal view the audience for this particular film favorited by the children of the study? The first ads for the film circulated as early as January 6, 1923. An ad from February 3, 1923, “Facts About the BIGNESS of ‘The Covered Wagon’ ” listed some information regarding the production of the film. It claims: “3,000 actors spent three months on location, eighty miles from a railroad . . . eight truckloads of supplies a day had to be taken over the rough desert roads . . . mile-wide river forded by 300 wagons; men and animals had to swim; this was really dangerous, as bottom was quicksand.” This hyperbolic advertisement draws attention to the “bigness” of the picture, or as Mitchell called it, a “superproduction.” The Covered Wagon was reviewed by John S. Spargo for Exhibitors Herald on March 31, 1923: “ ‘The Covered Wagon’ should prove the biggest box office attraction since ‘Birth of a Nation’ and let it be said that no man, woman, or child of thinking age can sit through it without leaving the theater a better American” (30). The final words of this review suggest that this film, as Mitchell claims, is a superproduction and has universal appeal, much like The Birth of a Nation, another film that many children identified as one of their favorite movies of all time. The explicit mention of children by the reviewer indicates how exhibitors construed this film as fitting the tastes of the contemporary child spectator. The Covered Wagon didn’t make its first appearance in the column “What the Picture Did For Me” in Exhibitors Herald until October 27, 1923, seven months

The Child Spectator in the Late Silent Era

135

after its initial release. The column was written by and for exhibitors, oftentimes alerting other exhibitors of particularly successful films, and sometimes commenting on the age-appropriateness of the film. The reviewer from Muncie, Indiana had very little to say about it—just that it was great and that the theater reached its capacity. The next time the film appeared in the column was August 23, 1924. According to the brief statement, the film “pleased young and old.” In the following month, the column printed one testimony entirely in boldface: “Ran it Saturday and Sunday to the two biggest crowds I ever had. . . . I consider it a masterpiece. . . . So, boys, don’t pass it up.” By October 1924, exhibitors said: “Some picture! Should have played it longer” and “Greatest drawing power.” Many claimed they went beyond capacity, having to employ an overflow tent and allow spectators to stand in the aisles (1924: 75). Although some exhibitors mentioned that children also enjoyed The Covered Wagon, the film bore no inherent characteristics to consider it a children’s film as such. According to Mitchell: Whether movies are old or new, superproductions or mediocre films, they all have an audience. For as many different types of movies exhibited there are as many different tastes to enjoy them. There is a movie for everybody. The children think that every movie is for them, for they like them all—every one. (1929: 121)

By all accounts, The Covered Wagon was a box office hit, possibly because it appealed to children’s taste. However, it seems as though neither the children nor the exhibitors were quite sure what that taste entailed. Mitchell’s study was an important step toward better understanding and demonstrating what those tastes and habits were.

Conclusion Locating Mitchell’s study was, perhaps, the easiest part of my research into child spectatorship in the silent era. Although it provided a wealth of information on the taste of children audiences, as well as their cinema-going practices, her data posed a certain set of challenges. It isn’t enough to regurgitate her findings, however fascinating they may be. I had to let Mitchell’s project shape my project: I wanted to capture the spirit of her work while at the same time offering more context to her methodologies and results. Alice Miller Mitchell

136

Making Sense of Cinema

appeared to care deeply about children’s taste in films and designed her study to allow children to speak for themselves about one of their favorite leisure activities. Her research offered a window into the minds of the children from the past; without it, my understanding of the child spectator would have been sorely incomplete and inaccurate. The challenge offered to those of us interested in historical spectatorship begins with discovering such gems as Mitchell’s study and continues as we situate their work in a specific moment in history and wrestle with findings that may be difficult to verify. Some avenues proved harder to pursue than I anticipated. It was almost impossible to find out how her project developed, how she compiled the data, or if the quizzes or any of the original records of the data survive. Were I to continue research on this topic, it would be imperative to contact the Weiboldt Foundation and see if I could locate the aforementioned records and information. Because the person who conducted the research is deceased and I was unable to examine the original records, I cannot confirm whether or not the examples she provided in the book are representative of the children she surveyed. I also have no record of the interviews or group discussions she held, which could be used to support the results of the surveys. But given her concern with the children offering frank and unprompted answers to her carefully crafted quizzes, I have every reason to believe that her research was an accurate picture of the taste and habits of the urban child spectator of the late silent era.

Notes 1 The titles and authors of the Payne Fund studies are as follows: Motion Pictures and Youth: A Summary by W. W. Carters; Movies and Conduct by Herbert Blumer; The Emotional Responses of Children to the Motion Picture Situation by Wendell Dysinger and Christian Ruckmick; How to Appreciate Motion Pictures: A Manual of Motionpicture Criticism Prepared for Highschool Students by Edgar Dale; and Motion Pictures and the Social Attitudes of Children that also included The Social Conduct and Attitudes of Movie Fans by L.L. Thurston. 2 In the other chapters on radio and print media, Bauchard includes data collected from Italy, the U.S.S.R. (now Russia), Switzerland, Belgium, Mexico, and Uruguay. 3 I could only locate three newspaper articles and four academic journals that reviewed her work. The New York Times featured one article; The Chicago Daily Tribune featured two. Social Service Review (Blumer 1931), The Elementary School Journal (Freeman 1930), The American Journal of Sociology (Young 1930), and

The Child Spectator in the Late Silent Era

4

5 6

7

8

9

137

Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science each reviewed her study as well. It is important to note that only 1.7 percent of children attested they did not attend the cinema; 7.7 percent of children did not report their attendance. The Payne Fund Studies, particularly Blumer (1933) and Peterson (1933), also discuss and analyze children’s attendance at the movies using data they collected in the 1920s. It is also worth noting that Mitchell did not want the students to talk over their answers with each other before submitting the quizzes. Mitchell did not provide any citations regarding the general opinion that children attended the cinema in the afternoons; deCordova (1990) speaks to the history of programming films deemed suitable for children (post-Hays Code) on Saturday afternoons. W. W. Charters (1933) focuses his data on how frequently mothers or fathers take their sons or daughters to the movies. He also offers some statistics on how many brothers and sisters attend together, which is fewer than 15 percent. It was also often the practice of children to stay for longer than one performance; some intentionally came after the program had started to be issued a late check and could watch a program and a half for the price of one (Mitchell 1929). Other films the children named as favorites were: The Phantom of the Opera (Rupert Julian, 1925), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Wallace Worsley, 1923), and The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Rex Ingram, 1921).

References Bauchard, P. (1953), The Child Audience: A Report on Press, Film, and Radio for Children, Paris: UNESCO. Blumer, H. (1931), “Review of Children and Movies,” Social Service Review, 5 (4): 672–73. Blumer, H. (1933), Movies and Conduct, New York: The Macmillan Company. Charters, W. W. (1933), Motion Pictures and Youth: A Summary, New York: The Macmillan Company. “Children’s Tastes in the Moving Pictures” (1930), New York Times, Jan 12: 69. Dale, E. (1938), How To Appreciate Motion Pictures: A Manual of Motion-Picture Criticism Prepared for High-School Students, New York: The Macmillan Company. deCordova, R. (1990), “Ethnography and Exhibition: The Child Audience, the Hays Office and Saturday Matinees,” Camera Obscura, 8 (2 23): 90–107. Dysinger, W. S. and C. A. Ruckmick (1933), The Emotional Responses of Children to the Motion Picture Situation, New York: The Macmillan Company.

138

Making Sense of Cinema

Freeman, F. (1930), “Review of Children and Movies,” The Elementary School Journal, 30 (8): 636–37. Jowett, G. S., I. C. Jarvie, and K. H. Fuller (1996), Children and the Movies: Media Influence and the Payne Fund Controversy, New York: Cambridge University Press. Mitchell, A. M. (1929), Children and Movies, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Peterson, R. C. (1933), Motion Pictures and the Social Attitudes of Children. New York: The Macmillan Company. “A Study of Children and Movies: Results of an Investigation Made by Alice Miller Mitchell in Which 10,000 Young People Were Questioned,” (1930), Chicago Daily Tribune, Jan 12: E2. “Survey Shows Kids Prefer Movies to Books: U. of C. to Print Results of the Inquiry,” (1929), Chicago Daily Tribune, November 29: 29. Wartella, E. and B. Reeves (1985), “Historical Trends in Research on Children and the Media: 1900–1960,” Journal of Communication, 35 (2): 118–33. Young, K. (1930), “Review of Children and Movies,” American Journal of Sociology, 36 (2): 306–8.

8

Seeing, Sensing Sound Eye-Tracking Soundscapes in Saving Private Ryan and Monsters, Inc. Andrea Rassell, Jenny Robinson, Darrin Verhagen, and Sarah Pink RMIT University

Sean Redmond Deakin University

Jane Stadler The University of Queensland

Introduction Visual studies scholars have often suggested that we live in an ocular age organized around the primacy and potency of looking and seeing (Berger 1972; Evans and Hall, 1999). Similarly, in film and cinema studies, the centrality of vision to how spectators engage with the text has been very well documented (Mayne 2002; Mulvey 1975; 1989; Stacey 1994), although its primacy has been challenged through a recognition of the synaesthetic qualities of the moving image (Marks 2000; Sobchack 1992; 2004). Film is a replete visual canvas but every frame, every shot, is accompanied by the poetics of sound, even or especially when the frame falls silent. In this respect, film studies scholars have acknowledged that one only has to turn off the sound while watching a film to understand how its absence impacts the viewing experience (Doane 1980; Whittington 2009). While there exists a body of work that empirically engages with the way spectators respond to a film’s mise-en-scène, narrative, characterization and ideological content, there is also a growing body of research on what the eyes actually attend to, or how sound, voice, dialogue and music impact the way a text is perceived and made meaningful. The empirical research that exists on the qualities and effects of sound largely comes from music studies, social psychology,

140

Making Sense of Cinema

and cognitive science (see Juslin and Laukka, 2004). Historically, audience research within film studies typically either rests on an imagined viewer or involves qualitative research based on memorial work, such as interviews and focus groups. While anthropologists of the senses, human perception and experience have accounted for the relationship between sound and other categories of experience (e.g., Ingold 2000), neither anthropologists nor other scholars whose work focuses on the multisensoriality of experience have tended to apply this approach to the empirical analysis of film spectatorship. An empirical research gap exists around the specifics of viewing and hearing film, and of the complex relationship between the two; this chapter takes a step toward filling this gap. The eye tracking technology employed by authors of this chapter affords the opportunity to generate new empirical data about what viewers actually gaze at, for what length of time, and with what levels of intensity. It has also allowed for quantitatively mapping the relationship between sound and vision, hearing and seeing, and to determine how and where a relationship emerges between what was heard and what spectators gazed at. This chapter explores several questions: Do our eyes follow narrative-based sound cues? Does the soundtrack affect viewer engagement and attention to detail? Is there an element of prediction and predictability in the way a viewer sees and hears? Do viewers’ eyes “wander” when there is no sound to guide them where to look? Ultimately, we have sought to answer the question of how important sound is to the cinematic experience. Drawing largely on cinematic theories of sound, film aesthetics, and neuroscientific understandings of the eye and the gaze, we undertake a comparative analysis of two film sequences to address these questions: the “chase sequence” from the animated film, Monsters, Inc. (Pete Docter, David Silverman, and Lee Unkrich, 2001); and the Omaha Beach landing sequence from Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998). Monsters, Inc. is an animated children’s comedy about monsters, including James P. Sullivan or “Sully” (John Goodman) and Mike Wazowski (Billy Crystal), whose official job is to use magical closet doors to enter the human world and scare children without being contaminated by them. Saving Private Ryan is a World War II action drama that takes place during the Invasion of Normandy in 1944 and follows the quest of Captain John Miller (Tom Hanks) and his squadron to save the life of Private James Ryan (Matt Damon), whose three brothers have been killed by German troops. While we do not seek to make direct comparisons between audience responses to films in these very different genres, it is pertinent that Gary Rydstrom was the lead

Seeing, Sensing Sound

141

sound designer in each film. Additionally, the films were chosen because both involve complex sound designs, strong character identification, moments of perceptual shock and spatial and temporal shifts in sound.

Sounding Cinema Within cinema studies, the exploration of sound has developed through three key frames or approaches. These collectively suggest that the sensory, cognitive, embodied and affective affordances of sound are central to the ways in which viewers experience the moving image. First, there has been the aesthetic and experiential exploration of sound led by writers such as Michel Chion (1994) and Vivian Sobchack (2005). Chion has argued that watching film involves audio-viewing, where seeing and hearing are synchronized and synthesized. This process of synchresis is defined as “the spontaneous and irresistible weld produced between a particular auditory phenomenon and visual phenomenon when they occur at the same time” (Chion 1994: 63). An example of this would be the audio-vision of the rain falling in Pather Panchali (Satyajit Ray, 1955), with each drop registering its own sound wave. Chion (1994) further argues that film sound is bi-sensorial, both “a sonorous figure in the ears, and a vibration felt in the skin and the bones” (221). For Chion, sound not only localizes and animates the moving image but registers at an emotional and embodied level on the viewer. Sobchack (2005), however, suggests that film sound has particularly immersive and co-synesthetic affects, and can lead viewers to create “shapes” out of their hearing and feeling alone. Second, other scholars have explored particular sound elements within film, such as the voice, music, and soundtrack. Both the use of diegetic music within a scene, and the overall musical score, may work to either undermine a film’s narrative or to amplify and render it emotionally meaningful (Bazelon 1975; Kassabian 2001). Parallelism, for example, is understood to take place when the music matches a scene’s mode of feeling, and its rhythm and pace. The speed of editing, camera and character movement can all be aligned in this musical dance, as is the case in the Empire State building scene from King Kong (Ernest B. Schoedsack and Merian C. Cooper, 1933). As Kong climbs the high-rise, the music matches the speed at which he ascends, while the camera swirls in a similarly dramatic fashion. Film music can thus be understood as lessening the spectator’s “awareness of the frame, of discontinuity; it draws the spectator

142

Making Sense of Cinema

further into the diegetic illusion” (Gorbman 1987: 59). Film music can also be used to identify characters, their emotional layers, and their place within a narrative’s binary structure of good and evil. A repeated musical theme or leitmotif becomes associated with a particular person, place, or drama, and hearing it nourishes anticipation and expectation. For example, in Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975), John Williams employs chromatic scales every time the shark appears in the film. Third, there has been the exploration of film sound in terms of genre. Film horror (Brophy 1986), science fiction (Redmond 2011; Whittington 2009), and the musical (Altman 1981; Dyer 2002) have all been examined in terms of their particular soundscapes. In the Hollywood musical, for example, song and dance has been seen as a pretext for expressing joy and happiness, filling the film world with utopian sentiments (Dyer 2002). In both the horror and bug-eyed monster or alien science fiction film, there is the repeated sound of the piercing scream, delivered by a female character when she first hears/sees the killer or alien creature. As we have noted, outside of cinema studies sound has been explored across a wide range of disciplines including music studies, media studies, sound studies, memory studies, and the cognitive and neuroscientific disciplines. In music studies, for example, empirical work has been carried out on why people find music affecting and pleasurable. One study found that people entered one of eight affective states when listening to music: happy, relaxed, calm, moved, nostalgic, pleasurable, loving, and sad (Juslin and Laukka 2004). Another study identified nine common emotional responses to listening to music: wonder, transcendence, tenderness, nostalgia, peacefulness, power, joyful activation, sadness, and tension (Zentner, Grandjean and Scherer 2008). Emotional responses varied greatly according to musical genre and type of response; for example, sad music and its associated acoustic features (e.g., low pitch, slow, quiet, etc.) would activate an area of the brain associated with such an emotional state (Huron 2011: 150). Tom Foulsham and Lucy Anne Sanderson (2013) conducted an experiment wherein participants viewed video clips of four people involved in a discussion. By manipulating the presence of sound, they studied what part of the video content would be attended to the most. The results suggest that when sound is present it “changed the timing of looks—by alerting observers to changes in conversation and attracting attention to the speaker” (939). The presence of sound also led to what they suggest is “greater attentional synchrony” (941) as more observers attended to the same regions in the video at the same time. This

Seeing, Sensing Sound

143

study begins to draw on the approach that we have employed with our eyetracking research into how viewers respond to the presence and absence of sound in the two film sequences that are under analysis. In the sections that follow, we briefly explain our method and outline our findings.

Method Six viewers (four female, two male) had their eye movements recorded using a Tobii X-120 eye tracker (Tobii Technology, Stockholm, Sweden). Tobii Studio 2.3.2 professional edition software was used for presenting the movie scene stimuli and recording eye movements. Prior to data being collected, the eye tracker was configured for each participant. Recording sessions lasted between fifteen and twenty-five minutes, and each subject was tested individually. The data was analyzed through a combination of close textual analysis and the statistical interpretation of collective gaze patterns. The viewers watched each of the sequences twice: once with the normal audio field playing, and once with the sound taken out. The order was a counterbalanced design for two films segments (sound on, sound off ) making it a repeated measures design; thus, any difference can be compared for the same person in the sound-on and sound-off conditions. The aggregate gaze patterns are reported as: a) gaze plot summaries showing the relative fixation duration and path of viewer gaze; b) heat maps, where colors are used to represent areas of more (or less) viewer focus. For this chapter, the heat maps have been converted to contour maps where the central, bold lines highlight areas where collective gaze was most focused. We focus on two major elements of eye movement: fixations and saccades. Fixations are periods of time when the eye rests in one region, and saccades are the movements from one fixation to the next. In terms of attention, a fixation represents a moment where the viewer is engaged with the screen. For Tobii-generated gaze plots, the larger the circle, the longer the participant spent looking at that point. A longer fixation often indicates a “deeper” cognitive focus on the content of the dynamic media (Hawkins et  al. 2005). Sequences of much shorter fixations indicate a scanning or searching activity, with the key shift from monitoring to orienting (exploratory processing) occurring at around 1.5 seconds in length. Another shift to a more substantial attentional engagement occurs at 5 seconds. Previous research has demonstrated that our

144

Making Sense of Cinema

eyes dart to and fro across our environment more frequently and faster than we can perceive, and moves to different points on the screen at the rate of 2 to 5 times per second (Miller 2014; Smith 2013). Eye tracking algorithms and technology distill this movement into meaningful saccades and fixations, which more closely approximate the perceived viewer experience. For that reason, we argue that eye tracking technology is an excellent tool for interrogating the way viewers watch movies.

Case Study 1: The Depths of Sound in Saving Private Ryan The Omaha Beach landing sequence, with its frenetic pacing and complex soundscape, was selected for close examination to assess how the filmmakers’ technical and aesthetic choices regarding the audiovisual design might affect the audience’s gaze patterns, attention, and emotional responses. Our analysis is reported in the aggregate gaze plots and heat maps found below.1 To explore the difference between viewing the sequence with and without sound, we used nonparametric statistical analysis to see whether differences for the same individual were significant. As this is a within-subject comparison, high-quality eye tracking readings for both conditions are required, so the analyses below are based on the four participants (three female, one male) with complete data for both conditions across the whole sequence. To undertake this analysis, two distinct subsequences were selected to test the relationship of gaze patterns to a range of audiovisual techniques, with a particular emphasis on devices that invite alignment with the protagonist’s subjective sensory experience. First, the “shellshock” sequence was selected because of its innovative use of subjective sound and unstable, increasingly intimate framing to invite audience engagement with the affective experience of the protagonist, Captain Miller, when he temporarily loses his hearing in the aftermath of a massive explosion. This shot begins with machinegun fire, located off-screen, and an unsteady hand-held long shot of Miller crawling toward camera out of the bloody surf. He tries to rise but is jolted back onto his knees by the impact of a grenade blast. He crawls forward to take cover behind metal wreckage until he is framed in a close-up that shows him looking off screen to the right as another blast is heard nearby. Initially both the audience and the character hear the loud crashing of artillery; bullets ping off metal and there is muted yelling in the background. In the close-up after the last blast (Figures 8.1a,

Seeing, Sensing Sound

145

8.1b and 8.2a, 8.2b below), the diegetic sound drops out and is replaced with an echoing, muffled wind-like sound effect that indicates Miller’s subjective experience of temporary deafness as a result of shellshock. Second, the “sand dunes” sequence is a single complex shot that lasts for an extended duration of one minute. This long take contrasts with the frenetic pace of editing throughout the remainder of the Omaha Beach sequence, yet it is still charged with panic-stricken energy as the soldiers battle to communicate and rally their forces. To enable fine-grained analysis, we focused on the first thirtyfive seconds of this sequence, which commences with a match on action edit as a body that was flying through the air following a mortar blast in the previous shot now lands in the sand. The handheld camera rapidly tilts down from the long-shot of the falling body, pans left, and travels forward to follow Miller as he drops down onto the dune for shelter, moving in tight to frame his face in close up as the dialogue begins: Miller: (to radio operator on his left) Shore Party! No armor has made it ashore. We got no DD tanks on the beach. Dog One is not open. (Turns and rolls away to the right so he is framed in an over-the-shoulder shot as he shouts to other soldiers who are seen in medium-long shot on the dune.) Who is in command here? Soldier: You are, Sir. Miller: Sergeant Horvath! Horvath: Sir! Miller: Do you know where we are? Horvath: Right where we’re supposed to be, but nobody else is . . .

As these two short sequences demonstrate, this film uses a broad repertoire of audio-visual techniques to represent screen characters’ experiences. For example, objective shots in the “sand dunes” sequence show Miller from a point of view that doesn’t align with that of any character present in the narrative, whereas other shots “focalize” narrative events through Miller’s own aural and visual point of view. Cognitive narratologist Edward Branigan (1992) proposed that: Focalization (reflection) involves a character neither speaking (narrating, reporting, communicating) nor acting (focusing, focused by), but rather actually experiencing something through seeing or hearing it. Focalization also extends to more complex experiencing of objects: thinking, remembering, interpreting, wondering, fearing, believing, desiring, understanding, and feeling guilt. (101)

146

Making Sense of Cinema

While point-of-view editing and over-the-shoulder shots can express a character’s sensory awareness, memories seen in flashback sequences and other forms of subjective imagery can also communicate their subjective experience. Branigan (1992) terms the latter technique “deep internal focalization” (103). Subjective sound is the aural equivalent of subjective imagery, and as a form of deep internal focalization, it can help the audience navigate among different levels of experience that are represented in a screen text (Campora 2009). In Saving Private Ryan’s “shellshock” sequence, the cinematography provides an externally focalized view of Miller, and at times, also shows his optical point of view, but it is the sonic technique of deep internal focalization that offers the audience access to the character’s inner perspective. This sonic device represents the direct subjective aural experience of the character, who functions in this scene as a conduit for the audience’s knowledge; more importantly, this technique enables the audience to share Miller’s experience in a way that sharpens the focus of the audience’s attention and potentially augments affective and empathic responses.

Segment 1: Contour Maps for the “Shellshock” Sequence This sequence uses the sonic technique of deep internal focalization to indicate Captain Miller’s experience of shellshock, and eye tracking software showed no apparent difference in primary gaze location between sound on or sound off. The contour maps indicate a central focus in both the sound-on and sound-off

Figure 8.1a Internal focalization, sound off.

Seeing, Sensing Sound

147

Figure 8.1b Internal focalization, sound on.

conditions where the attention (the thickest white lines in Figures 8.1a and 8.1b) is on Captain Miller’s face in the center of the screen. Notably, the greatest gaze concentration is to the right side of Miller in the direction he is looking, almost as if the viewer is anticipating a move in that direction or expecting action to come from that direction. This correlates with the performative cues given by Miller’s body language as he orients himself and his gaze off-screen to the right, where the enemy forces are located. To explore this observation, we used the eye tracking software to divide the screen into three equal segments across the horizontal dimension (left, center, and right). Each area of interest was the same width and extended the full height of the screen. Our study showed that viewers overwhelmingly spent their time gazing at the center third of the screen (sound on: 81.3 percent of time, 91.5 visits; sound off: 80.8 percent of time, 90.83 visits; F=55.20, p