Film Audiences

Recent academic debates within the field of New Cinema History have highlighted a tendency to overlook the role played by the film in historical studies of cinema and its audiences (Aveyard 2011; Biltereyst 2018). Our paper aims to address this gap by moving towards a more film-centric analysis of the cinema-going experience and investigating the place of film in cinema memory. We will draw from and expand previous work on cinema memory (for example Annette Kuhn's typologies of cinema memories, 2011) and focus on the intersection between individual and collective engagement with and reception of films. We will be using the oral history (over 1000 questionnaires and 160 video-interviews) collected in the Italian Cinema Audiences (2013-2016) project which provides the first study of cinema audiences in Italy in the 1950s by analysing film-goers' memories and contextualizing them with box-office figures and film industry data. This project puts audiences at the centre of the cinema-going experience and aims to explore the importance of film in everyday life. In this paper, we will investigate what is remembered about films and how films are discussed by audiences who used to go to the cinema in postwar Italy, a time in which films were one of the most widely consumed and popular cultural products. By examining Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939)-our respondents' favourite film-as a case study, we aim to formulate a new taxonomy of film memory that reflects contents, modalities of recollection, and functions of memories of films in order to re-examine the place of film in cinema memory.

Il contributo analizza le strategie di comunicazione
della Cineriz nella distribuzione del film d’autore
in Italia tra il 1955 e il 1965, sulla base di
materiali d’archivio inediti (flani, press-book,
corrispondenze). Analizzando il cinema d’autore
dalla prospettiva dei nuovi modelli di consumo
che si affermano negli anni Sessanta, il saggio
evidenza una doppia strategia di comunicazione
rivolta da un lato alla nuova borghesia italiana e
dall’altro a pubblici più eterogenei, come nel caso
del cinema dei giovani registi.

The renewal of theoretical and methodological tools, putting the spotlight of film historiography on audiences and their movie-going routines, has meant a significant shift for the study of national and regional cinemas. The New Cinema History signalled the importance of introducing in-depth, data-based studies of exhibition, distribution and programming, considering individual and collective experiences. One trend in this renewal of cinema history are studies relying on oral testimonies of the elderly to reconstruct their movie-going practices, contributing also to the methodological reflection on the use of memories as historical sources. This article discusses the ways spatial and temporal perceptions appear in oral narratives of movie-going experiences in Buenos Aires during the 1940s and 50s. Based on twenty qualitative interviews with elderly people, we explore how through their imaginaries they build a certain place in the past that contrasts with the perceived present. We trace the ways in which memories are intertwined with the emergence of modern routines and the way the cinematographic experience affected the audience's cartography of the different environments of Buenos Aires. Film consumption and its imaginaries allowed the emergence of new sensorial skills related to a changing world.

During the recent lead-up to a Secret Cinema event a compelling conflict played out between the creators and the audience in public social media space. Secret Cinema, founded in 2007 delivers live, immersive, participatory cinema-going experiences and is shaping a new and highly profitable event-led-distribution-model. Prometheus made more money as a Secret Cinema event than at the premiere and Grand Budapest Hotel’s No1 box office position was largely attributable to the £1.1m generated by Secret Cinema. These commercial successes mark a notable shift in both the organization’s approach and the type of audiences they are starting to attract. The events, which have previously been marketed in a highly clandestine way via word of mouth and social media where knowing participants are instructed to ‘tell no one’ are now being launched through high-profile press releases. This has inevitably led to tensions between the expectations of an early adopter ‘hipster’ elite and this much broader public.

These ‘events’ begin their life online via social media channels weeks before the physical event and it is these online spaces that are the key site of our analysis. Crucially, it is these spaces that both the audience members and organisation have sought to shape, control and influence in conflicting ways.The latest Back to the Future event has spawned an unprecedented extension of the fictional world into these online spaces in which the fictional community of ‘Hill Valley’ has been recreated in meticulous detail across social media and in numerous in-fiction websites.

A dichotomy has emerged as Secret Cinema use these spaces to build audience narrative engagement whilst also deploying these same sites to market, sell and instruct their audience in key preparations for the event, as well as issuing requests for audience-generated content to be taken down. A confusing communications strategy which interchanges between fiction and non-fiction registers has manifested in what Phillip’s would refer to as ‘badly-drawn play space’.

Through a close textual analysis of the Back to the Future event and its constituent social media streams, this paper illuminates the conflicts, tensions and re-negotiations of control embedded in both the experience and surrounding anti-fan discourses, in which the event and organization is dismantled in public view and we argue that the audience reclaim both the social media spaces and the filmic text of Back to the Future as their own.

Suç, insanlığın var oluşundan günümüze kadar süregelmiş bir olgudur. Suç en genel anlamıyla, "yasanın cezalandırdığı hareket veya topluma zarar verdiği ya da tehlikeli olduğu, yasa koyucu tarafından kabul edilen eylem ve hareketler" olarak tanımlanmaktadır. Birçok alanda üzerine çalışmalar yapılan bir konu olarak karşımıza çıkan "suç" kavramı, son dönemlerde kitle iletişim araçları perspektifinde kendine yer bulmuştur. Bu araçlardan birisi olan sinema, salonların fiziksel özelliği, teknolojisi vb. gibi özelliklerinden dolayı diğer araçlardan ayrılmaktadır. Bu etkiler göz önünde bulundurulduğunda, tarihsel süreçte sinema, egemen ideolojinin yansıtılmasında ya da inşa edilmesinde önemli bir alan olarak görülmüştür. Böylesine politik bir mekanizmaya dönüşebilme potansiyeline sahip olan sinema, aynı zamanda toplumsal yapıda var olan birçok unsuru da yeniden üreterek meşrulaştırabilmektedir. Bu unsurlardan biri de "suç" tur. 2000 sonrası Türk sinemasında üretilen filmlerde suç unsuru, popüler filmlerde "komedi" öğesi üzerinden meşrulaştırıldığı çalışmanın temel savını oluşturmaktadır. Nitel bir araştırma tekniği olan İçerik Analizi yönteminin benimsendiği bu çalışmanın temel amacı, 2000 sonrası Türk sinemasında popüler komedi filmleri üzerinden suç unsurunun nasıl meşrulaştırıldığını Kolpaçino (2009) filmi örnekleminde saptamaktır. Çalışmanın sonucunda komedi öğesi kullanılarak meşrulaştırılmaya çalışılan suç unsurlarının izleyiciler üzerinde suça sempati ve yakınlık uyandırdığı tespit edilmiştir.

In this paper, we will discuss a spectatorial and sociological model of the average Italian housewife, the so-called ‘casalinga di Voghera’, through the lens of media consumption. In particular, we will focus on the period of ‘the long economic miracle’, following Silvio Lanaro’s definition, which were years of both affluence and contradiction.2 At the same time, it also represented a decisive moment in the redefinition of the role of women within the family. To this end, our analysis will transcend the public/private dichotomy: through the lens of media consumption, we will question both the notion of the public sphere as a site for positive (masculine) values, linked to cultural, economic, and political production, and the conventional idea of the private as a feminine sphere, tied to tradition, care, and reproduction. Media consumption provides an invaluable key to understanding how women transformed their homes into sites of cultural production and resistance, and how they actively negotiated their marginalized condition through the powerful experiences of their everyday life. With this in mind, we have drawn upon various sources in order to portray the multifaceted nature of media consumption by Italian housewives, and to stress the contradictions between institutional representations and everyday experiences. In a preliminary section, we will propose a short historiographical overview of female media consumers, situated within a wider history of audiences. We will offer a brief overview both of the ‘casalinga di Voghera’ label, in order to frame our discussion in relation to the cultural debate on media consumption, and of the relationships between domesticity, feminism and Americanization. Then, we have divided what remains into two main sections: the first will offer a general overview by means of quantitative analysis (audience investigations carried out by the Doxa Institute and Rai in the 1950s and 1960s) and the second will focus on qualitative sources (letters that female readers sent to popular weekly magazines). Adopting this dual yet integrated methodology, we will read these historical sources through an ethnographic approach, which enables us to reinterpret the relevance of cultural consumption for women’s identities in the crucial years of the economic boom.

Peu étudiée, l’œuvre de John Carpenter a marqué de son empreinte la culture populaire. Ce colloque entend se saisir au prisme d’une pluralité d’approches, des multiples enjeux et questions que posent la filmographie du « maître de l’horreur », son parcours professionnel au sein et en dehors de l’industrie hollywoodienne, ainsi que les discours et les usages sociaux liés à sa persona comme à l’ensemble de ses activités. Propositions à envoyer avant le 24 octobre 2018 à jcmasterofhorror@gmail.com

This conference, organised by The Audience Project (TAP) interdisciplinary research group, focuses on academic scholarship and industry practices in film distribution, engagement and consumption. The event takes place at a vital moment in time when physical mobility, competition in the exhibition business and opportunities for access of audiovisual products through new technologies are all rising exponentially. The conference, however, aims to explore not only the contemporary environment of fluctuation but also the historical and future contexts for peoples' movement (local, national and international) and their relation to filmic screens. It features international experts across academia (including sociology, history, media, communication and culture, film and television studies) and industry (media businesses, cultural institutions and government bodies). It provides a unique forum for new and topical scholarly research in the field as well as the opportunity to share research and know-how from a multitude of (inter-)national perspectives, initiating future collaborations across borders, disciplines and sectors. This conference will form part of a series of future events, which aim to foster continued dialogue across academia and the creative industries sector, through the development of CIRCULATE (Creative Industries and Academic Research Collaborative Network).