Film Audiences Research Articles

Polish-Soviet War in Film and Cinema: A New Perspective Based on the Films For You, O Poland (1920) and Miracle on the Vistula (1921)

The Polish-Soviet War, particularly the Battle of Warsaw (13–25 August 1920), soon became a subject of legend and myth. Irrespective of its fundamental political significance, the defeat of the Red Army was glorified as salvation for both Poland and Europe in military, ideological and metaphysical terms. Conducted beyond academia, the narrative was forged mainly by veterans, the Catholic Church and various forms of literature and art. Due to government subsidies, documentary and feature films also conveyed a normative notion of these dramatic events and their participants.
 This article focuses on cinematic works like Dla Ciebie, Polsko [For You, o Poland, PL 1920], and Cud nad Wisłą [The Miracle on the Vistula, PL 1921] produced in order to commemorate the war between the Poles and the Bolsheviks. Taking the iconic turn, this article scrutinises the cinematic self-portrait of the Polish nation that had already been ‘imagined’ as a bulwark of European culture in the East by earlier literary works. Spotlighting protagonists who were given a place in the pantheon of national heroes, it also asks about those who were denigrated or marginalised like women and Jews. Finally, using quantitative methods and Geographical Information System (QGIS) as a tool, the article juxtaposes the maledominated, ethnically and confessional homogeneous ‘imagined nation’ with the film entrepreneurs and actual cinema audiences characterised by their diversity.

Underground Films in Factory Town: The New American Cinema Group Travels to Turin, Italy in 1967

Underground Films in Factory Town:The New American Cinema Group Travels to Turin, Italy in 1967 Giaime Alonge (bio) The topic of this essay is the retrospective of New American Cinema works organized in Turin, Italy, in May 1967, at the Unione Culturale, a left-wing cultural organization, very active at the time (as well as today).1 I researched the papers regarding this retrospective, held by the archive of the Unione Culturale, along with some papers held by Susanna Fadini, the daughter of late Edoardo Fadini, a man who plays a very important role in the story I am about to tell. Moreover, I also interviewed a few people who attended the retrospective—experimental filmmaker Tonino De Bernardi; painter and sculptor Ugo Nespolo, who also made several experimental films; and Paolo Bertetto, who at the time was a young film critic and later became an academic with a specific interest in avant-garde cinema.2 I thank all these people, as well as the archive of the Unione Culturale, for their help and the time they devoted to me. I will start by briefly sketching the context in which the 1967 retrospective was held. Then I will analyze the content of the retrospective and the way it was organized. Finally, I will close with a few remarks on the impact of the retrospective on the Italian film culture. As you can see from Fay Corthésy's essay included in this dossier, the 1967 Turin retrospective was not the very first retrospective of New American Cinema films that took place in Italy. The first one—the first one in the whole world, actually—according to Fay's extensive and very important research, was held in Spoleto, in the Summer of 1961, at the "Festival dei Due Mondi," the Festival of Two Worlds. But even if it was the Ur-retrospective, the Spoleto program had a relatively modest impact on the Italian cultural scene. In all the [End Page 159] documents, letters, and articles regarding the Turin retrospective that I saw, the Spoleto screenings are never mentioned. On the one hand, it is self-evident that the organizers of the new retrospective had an interest in presenting their program as the first one. But on the other hand, even journalists and critics, who had no connection with the organizers, ever mention the Spoleto program. I do not know exactly why the memory of Spoleto was erased. Maybe 1961 was too early. There was no real interest, in Italy, for underground cinema at the time, while in the late sixties a young generation of avant-garde artists and enthusiasts was emerging. Maybe the Festival dei Due Mondi, dominated by non avant-garde figures such as Luchino Visconti, was not the ideal place to present experimental cinema to a film audience whose culture was deeply connected to the notion of realism. On the contrary, the Unione Culturale in Turin, notwithstanding the relative marginality of both the institution and the city, was a good place to start a revolution. I say "marginality" because Turin was—and still is—a "second city." Albeit a very important economic and cultural center, it has always been a much smaller city than Milan, where real economic power rested, while the political power was, of course, in Rome. In the late sixties, Turin was a sleepy, conformist, provincial city, basically owned by FIAT, the main Italian automaker, which was the biggest employer in town. Moreover, FIAT owned the major local newspaper, La Stampa, and one of the two local soccer clubs, Juventus. So, almost nothing happened in town that the Agnelli family, who owned FIAT, did not like. And what FIAT did not control was controlled either by the Catholic Church or the Communist Party, which both had deep roots in the city, playing a big role in its social and cultural life.3 So, from this perspective, Turin seems a very unlikely place to present experimental films made by a bunch of bohemians. But besides being a provincial factory town, or maybe precisely because it was a provincial factory town, Turin could count on small but very active artistic and intellectual groups. During the twentieth century, many...

Audience Study as Catalyst in Sustainable Nollywood Yoruba Film Industry

Nollywood is the representation of the socio-cultural apparatus of Nigeria in the world cinema. Tis paper evaluates generally, film audience’s perspective in Nollywood films, and in particular non-native actors in native films. Most often, stakeholders in the film industry do not access, or are flagrantly ignorant of viewer’s feedback on the state of their production in all media of communication. Some determine this with the profit margins. Tis paper therefore evaluates the audience’s perception of non-native actors in Nollywood Yoruba native films. The area of concentration is on the quality of audience reception on native films by non-native actors. Cluster sample method is the tool of research for this paper, in which questionnaire samples were distributed among film viewers in the Yoruba speaking area in Nigeria. This is done in order to determine the performance ratings of non-Yoruba native actor’s skill of character interpretation in cultured films. Theoretical framework is anchored on Bandura’s Social Learning theory, which concentrates on impact of artistic models on the audience’s psyche. Findings reveal that audience ratings of non-native actors in Yoruba cultured films is poor, compared with their characterization in non-native setting, and this is due to wrong casting by directors who cast them against all odds in order to improve their profit margin. Findings also reveal the importance of audience study as a necessity in pre-production considerations of film shooting.

Toei’s Truck Guys series (1975–79): masculine identity and fantasies of utopia

The Toei Studio-produced Truck Guys/Torakku yarō (1975–79) is a popular domestic genre film series. Consisting of ten films, it is an action-comedy, loosely structured around a buddy-road film genre framework. While rarely canonised within critical or academic discourses, the series’ lasting popularity is still evidenced by its commercial ‘long-tail’. The aim of this article is primarily to shed light on this critically overlooked series, locating it within specific national and cultural contexts, in particular toward the end of the Japanese studio system. Specifically, this article examines how Toei attempted to revitalise the popular cycles of their genre films facing a decline in both mainstream commercial film production and cinema audiences, highlighting a fiercely pragmatic mode of filmmaking in the 1960s and 1970s where serialisation played an important role. By exploring the films from both textual and contextual perspectives, the article will also attempt to highlight and confirm the significance of intra-serial intertextuality, with particular reference to the first and the final instalments of the series: No One Can Stop Me (1975) and Hometown Express Service (1979). Addressing a practice of popular genre filmmaking in Japan also begins to fill a critical gap in Japanese film studies

Kazakhstan: the pandemic as a factor of transformation film watching culture

The article examines the process of transformation of the culture of watching cinema and the relationship of viewers with cinemas in a pandemic. An analysis is made of how the film audience of Kazakhstan will change during and after the pandemic. In the changed conditions created by the pandemic, it is necessary to identify the factors and motivations that lead viewers to watch films in or outside the cinema. In connection with the pandemic situation, the survey used the survey method (WebSurvey). The survey was conducted using an interactive questionnaire posted on the website and filled out from a computer or mobile device in the online survey mode. No restrictions were imposed at the time of the survey, except that the minimum age of the participants had to be 18 years old. One of the main objectives of this study in terms of moviegoer research is to analyze the changing culture of film viewing in Kazakhstan at a time when online platforms and the pandemic have significantly changed the collective viewing experience. According to the study, the coronavirus pandemic is directly and indirectly affecting viewers and movie-watching culture in a variety of ways. Keywords: cinema, pandemic, new media, audience studies, film audience

Tamil Nadu Politics and Tamil Cinema: A Symbiotic Relationship?

From the second-half of the twentieth century, a nascent Tamil cinema became increasingly influential in Tamil society and more prominent in political life. The Dravidar Kazhagam, founded by Periyar E. V. Ramasamy in 1944, morphed into the DMK and AIADMK, two dominant state political parties in Tamil Nadu. Through the medium of film, some of its leading lights, C. N. Annadurai, M. Karunanidhi, M. G. Ramachandran and Jayalalitha, cultivated cinema audiences and the voting public in the political ideologies of the Dravidian movement and subsequently became Chief Ministers of Tamil Nadu. The symbiotic relationship between politics and Tamil cinema has meant that political and social commentaries and the assertion of Tamil nationalistic ideas was commonplace in Tamil films. In recent years, Tamil cinema has become the vehicle for raising a wide range of concerns ranging from caste, class and gender and state/nation politics, marking a shift that focusses on everyday politics in the state. In this article, we present a critical survey of the role of Tamil cinema in disseminating particular realities and politics of identity that speak to an essentialised notion of Tamil cultural and linguistic identity, the concomitant disavowal of broader conceptions of Indian-ness or belonging to the Indian nation, as well as the use of cinema to address everyday politics in the State.

Cold war, hot stuff. The official critical discourse and the desirability of film stars in socialist Romania

This article examines the ways in which Romanian socialist politics and state-sanctioned film journalism intersected around film sexuality and foreign film stardom, in order to reinforce the official discourse on sexual morality in the 1960s and 1970s. The ‘60s represented a decade of political and ideological semi-relaxation in socialist Romania. Film audiences retained some access to Western productions, and foreign film stars carried significant erotic appeal to viewers. The state-funded Cinema magazine aimed to disrupt these tendencies either by arguing that the objects of desire were representative of lower quality cinema, or, in full-on Cold War style, by building the case for the decline of Western capitalism through pinpointing all manifestations of sexuality as a symptom of it. This article looks at the ways in which ideological arguments to “redact” film sexuality, while failing to repurpose it, managed to redirect it and reposition it as alien to socialist culture. The article also explores the continuation of this trend during the 1970s, when film stardom and the seductive appeal of film stars were validated by their conformation to political and historical ideologies directly linked to the concerns of the Romanian Communist Party.

Feature Film Script Writing Quality Issues: KL Vampires Film (2019)

The recent production of feature films in Malaysia has shown positive development in terms of cinemas collection. However, there are some of the feature films made per year that fail on cinemas collection due to poor film script that does not meet the expectation of the local audience. There are a few good film scripts that is also not successful on cinemas. The importance of the research on script writing quality issues is necessary to find a solution to bring Malaysia films to a higher level and international level. The main findings of this study will unravel the reasons why this is still happening when the quality of some of the film scripts is very good. This is due to the acceptance of film audience in Malaysia who are given less exposure to the aesthetics of a film artwork in general. Therefore, successful films in Malaysia are more of mere entertainment and films are not considered as a medium that can change the ideology of a society. The research method used is qualitative through interviews with the director and scriptwriter of KL Vampires (2019) film and descriptive secondary data through articles and books. Studies on feature film scriptwriting in Malaysia in the future should focus more on issues on how history, culture and heritage can be preserved through film with quality film scriptwriting.

Nombrar a los desconocidos. Espectadores de cine en la ciudad de Zacatecas, 1904-1931

This work addresses the conceptual drifts in the study of the first film audiences, around the particular case of the cinematographic event in Zacatecas city, from 1904 to 1931. A methodological line is proposed for the study of them, based on the general concepts about potential audiences, possible viewers and data from local archives. Through these, some profiles of viewers have been defined, for which it is proposed to study, in correspondence with sources of cinematographic information that, can complement them.

Displaying the Magician's Art: Theatrical Illusion in Ingmar Bergman's The Magic Flute (1975)

AbstractIngmar Bergman's The Magic Flute is a film that not only represents a performance of Mozart's opera but also reflects on the experience it generates in the theatrical audience. The opera becomes the means through which Bergman explores the magic of theatrical illusion by displaying the artifice behind it. I examine the film's take on the representation of theatrical illusion from two perspectives. First, with reference to the famous sequence of the overture, I demonstrate the crucial role of the audience's imaginative engagement. Second, I zero in on Bergman's role as omniscient director who not only uncovers the artificiality of the theatrical source but also plays tricks with the film audience. Yet our observing the ‘constructed naturalness’ of the magic flute and Papageno or the theatricality of the Queen of the Night's performance does not hinder the film's ability to engage us. Rather, witnessing the workings of illusion strengthens its grip on us.

Cut to the chase – How multimodal cohesion secures narrative orientation in film trailers

Recent years have seen a growing number of studies explore the narrative, persuasive and multimodal design of film trailers (Maier, 2009, 2011; Wildfeuer and Pollaroli, 2017). While such work has primarily looked at the ways in which trailers realize persuasive functions (Hediger, 2001; Maier, 2011; Krebs, 2020), this paper examines how the (audio-visual) representational choices made by trailer editors can provide narrative orientation for the film audience. Inside a self-compiled corpus of 150 genre-stratified US-American film trailers, recurring audio-visual, cohesive patterns are elicited. It will be shown that the visual effects of this cohesive thrust can be tied to the cinematographic choices editors make in the opening shots of the trailer, by using specific shot scales, (types of) settings and (non-)human represented participants. To capture the verbal dynamics of trailer cohesion, the study explores the key semantic domains to which all lexical expressions in the trailer dialogues can be linked (Rayson et al., 2004). Results of this study confirm that both visual and verbal elements form recurring genre-specific patterns. They unleash their multimodal potential of film trailers by tapping into the previous (genre) knowledge of trailer audiences, facilitating the cognitive uptake of audiovisual information for the audience as the trailer unfolds.

Cinema audience immersion in story worlds through "ouen-jouei"

In Japan, ouen-jouei (cheer screening) events permit novel forms of audience participation, with screened events allowing cheering, glowstick waving, and cosplaying. Fans immerse themselves in story worlds by physically performing at such ouen-jouei events. Ouen-jouei audience members become immersed in the film's story world through a process of negotiation between their physical state as a spectator and their imagined self as a story world character, as is demonstrated by ouen-jouei events associated with the 2016 Japanese animated film King of Prism. Theories associated with audience studies, media studies, and fan tourism are deployed to analyze this novel form of cinema audience immersion. It is impossible to physically integrate audience members and a film's story world, so fans' inner experiences become the primary concern.

Filmgoing or cinemagoing? The role of the film text within cinema memory

Drawing upon original ethnographic research of rural Welsh audiences, this article meets a burgeoning trend within cinema history studies of reconsidering the importance that film texts can have in benefitting our understanding of social or cultural past. Arguing a perceived separation between the approaches of the New Film History and New Cinema History, the author highlights the benefits of incorporating text-based foci into his research, prompted by a notable separation between those that recalled the social environment of the cinema and those who discussed films, with little crossover between the two. With a dataset that largely recollects the late-1950s and 60s, these fresh textual considerations prompt modifications to existing scholarship pertaining to Britain’s previous generation of cinema audiences, highlighting a particularity of period that primarily revolves around the emergence of pop-stars and the teenage subculture. Equally, cultural factors such as a rising sentiment of Welsh nationalism are explored through film centred memories and textual analysis, highlighting the vivid semiotics and structures of Welsh national identity. These nuances of Welsh national identity and strengthened feelings of nationalism from the recollected period are explored through analysis of How Green Was My Valley, a US production, and its somewhat counterintuitive popularity with respondents as a “Welsh” film.

A digital toolkit to detect cinema audiences of the silent era: scalable perspectives on film exhibition and consumption in Amsterdam neighbourhoods (1907-1928)

ABSTRACT In this article, we demonstrate and argue that one way to acquire a better sense of cinemagoing in the silent film era is to investigate the relations between cinema locations, the socio-economic and demographic profile of their surroundings, and film programming. Driven by the centrality of space as one of the defining traits of new cinema history, we operationalise this inquiry through a data-driven toolkit of interconnected scalable approaches, in order to establish a multilayered contextualisation of Amsterdam’s early cinema landscape. We analyse Amsterdam’s historical cinema market both on the meso level of the city’s overall surroundings and on the micro level of two neighbouring film venues within a specific urban district. By switching between different levels of scale to analyse the cinemas’ programming profiles, we highlight the venues’ positioning within the socio-spatial structure of the city and their neighbourhood community in particular. In the future, the multifaceted analytical exploration enabled by our digital toolkit can be further enhanced by an increased availability of more fine-grained archival and contextual data.

Film Censorship and Identity in Kenya

The postcolonial government in Kenya has embarked on a sustained war against identity by banning locally and internationally produced motion pictures that depict LGBTQ themes in the ongoing national discourse on gender identity. In 2014 and 2018, the government effectively banned two films by local directors (The Stories of Our Lives and Rafiki) for including the LGBTQ community in this discourse. Within the same period, officials banned The Wolf of Wall Street and Fifty Shades of Grey, both by international directors, for their explicit sexual content. The bans attracted public attention and triggered a debate over the country’s censorship laws in particular and gender identity in general. However, while paying specific attention to postcolonial censorship laws that aimed to retain the status quo, the debaters failed to ground their arguments in their proper historical context. To better understand censorship in Kenya, we must first understand its history during the colonial period (1895-1963), a period that saw the colonizer attempt to construct for the colonized a morally acceptable identity. This construction saw the British colonial government shield African cinema audiences from films that they thought would teach them undesirable behaviors. To achieve this goal, censorship officials censored films with “questionable” scenes. This study connects the present and the past, broadens present censorship and gender debates by deepening our collective imagination of real and imagined laws, and incentivizes the debaters to think broadly about continuity without change in Kenya. It vacates rigid chronologies and does not purport to provide a definitive history of censorship and identity during the two historical periods, even if such a history were possible to produce. Broadly, the study situates censorship within a long history of framing and re-framing identities and, consequently, contributes to a more complex understanding of the chaotic interplay among power, art, and identity.

Screen Choice: The Relations, Interactions and Articulations of Watching Film

People watch films on televisions, laptops, tablets, smartphones, and cinema screens. As technologies, each of these screen types provide different opportunities to select particular films, and to choose when and where to watch them. This raises questions about how and why people choose particular screens and the viewing experiences they gain from doing so. To address these questions, we draw on 200 semi-structured interviews with film audience members in England. We use Livingstone’s (1998, 2013) notion of interactions and relations and Hartmann’s (2006) notion of a ‘triple articulation’ of media to approach screens as technologies that carry a particular range of films. Here, films are understood as texts, and each screen a medium that provides opportunities to watch films in specific temporal and spatial contexts. We find that people tend to: (1) watch films at the cinema, either to socialise or to feel part of an temporary auditorium-based community – whilst immersing within the text; (2) on television sets in the living-room to relax or socialise; (3) on laptops or tablets in the bedroom for personalised engagement; and (4) via smartphones for convenience and to pass time when away from home. Overall, we argue that people’s film-watching is embedded within specific contexts and that people choose particular screen types for the opportunities they offer for watching particular films in particular times and places. In this, people choose screen types and configure various temporal and spatial aspects of their film-watching environments to seek out specific viewing experiences.

Review: Girl Head: Feminism and Film Materiality, by Genevieve Yue

Review: <i>Girl Head: Feminism and Film Materiality</i>, by Genevieve Yue

The era of baokuan films: How Chinese social media creates box office successes

Exemplified by Wolf Warrior 2 (2017), Dying to Survive (2018), and The Wandering Earth (2019), a group of popular Mainland Chinese films labelled baokuan (爆款) has emerged since the mid-2010s. These baokuan movies are known in China for their extremely high domestic box office takings and overwhelmingly positive online word-of-mouth from audiences. Using a combination of Internet studies, film marketing studies, and audience studies, this article focuses on why these baokuan films enjoy great popularity assisted by the Internet and social media in China. It argues that social media has brought two major changes: new strategies for film marketing, which predominantly rely on online promotion, and the blurring of the roles of film audiences and marketers. These changes jointly enable a film’s prestige to be continuously escalated and circulated.

A Tale of Two Prints

ABSTRACT When Bernard Shaw adapted his 1912 play Pygmalion for the British film version in 1938, his screenplay was not always faithfully represented in the resulting adaptation. What has gone largely unremarked, however, is that there were two quite different prints of the 1938 film: one for British cinema audiences and a truncated and censored version for the American market. While Shaw saw, and publicly approved of, the British print, in all likelihood he was unaware that the widely seen American print, which ironically earned him an Academy Award for his screenplay, was a much inferior version of the film. This essay examines the changes foisted on Shaw's screenplay during the process of its translation to film and then compares the British print with its American counterpart, underlining the considerable differences between the two versions.

Data Analysis Method of Intelligent Analysis Platform for Big Data of Film and Television

Based on cloud computing and statistics theory, this paper proposes a reasonable analysis method for big data of film and television. The method selects Hadoop open source cloud platform as the basis, combines the MapReduce distributed programming model and HDFS distributed file storage system and other key cloud computing technologies. In order to cope with different data processing needs of film and television industry, association analysis, cluster analysis, factor analysis, and K-mean + association analysis algorithm training model were applied to model, process, and analyze the full data of film and TV series. According to the film type, producer, production region, investment, box office, audience rating, network score, audience group, and other factors, the film and television data in recent years are analyzed and studied. Based on the study of the impact of each attribute of film and television drama on film box office and TV audience rating, it is committed to the prediction of film and television industry and constantly verifies and improves the algorithm model.