Audiences and Moviegoing

Abstract

Observers—sociologists, reformers, inspectors, journalists—have been interested in cinema's audiences virtually since the medium's emergence. Their observations constitute a rich source base for scholars that gives us access, however oblique, into the experiences of moviegoers. As these sources show, motion picture exhibition has been a dynamic social space for subjects marked by gender, race, class, national or regional identity, and age. These various vectors of identity, quite often in concert, shaped how audiences responded to what they saw on the screen, the performative milieu of the theater, and the discursive space of fan magazines and other print venues that published news and advertisements about motion pictures. Around the world, women's filmgoing became a particularly vexed topic, and women emerged as savvy observers of cinema's role in modern society.1 In this short essay, I trace a genealogy (not the genealogy) of feminist scholarship on audiences, sometimes referred to as historical spectatorship, and suggest the generative possibilities of a feminist orientation in historicizing cinema's audiences. In early scholarly accounts of cinema audiences, most of which focused on the nickelodeon, the contours of women's engagement with cinema were initially subsumed by concerns with class and ethnicity. In their considerations of American cinema, for example, Lary May and Robert Sklar argued that moviegoing became the site of a struggle for control over American mass culture, as the middle classes sought to exert control over the nickelodeon's working-class, ethnic …