Film Audiences Research Articles

Programming Brazilian music for a global film audience

Music is one of the most cherished topics in Brazilian documentary filmmaking. Vinicius (Miguel Faria Jr., 2005), Raul: O início, o fim e o meio (Raul: The Beginning, the End and the Middle, Walter Carvalho, 2012) and Chico: Artista brasileiro (Chico: Brazilian Artist, Miguel Faria Jr., 2015) feature among the most successful Brazilian documentaries from the last twenty years, which makes clear their appeal to national audiences. However, to better articulate their significance it is also crucial to understand them from an international context. The In-Edit – International Music Documentary Film Festival, an event solely devoted to the screening and discussion of music documentaries, allows us to do so. First organised in Barcelona in 2003 and swiftly exported and adapted in multiple countries, the current In-Edit occurs annually in Chile, Brazil, Greece and the Netherlands. Throughout the years, it has also been celebrated in Argentina, Mexico, Germany, Colombia and Peru. In-Edit Brasil was first organised in São Paulo in 2009 and showcases a wide variety of music documentaries both from Brazil and abroad. At the same time, some Brazilian music documentaries are screened in other In-Edits, such as Chile and Spain. In effect, In-Edit organisers hold a privileged perspective on the role that Brazilian music and Brazilian music documentaries play within the international scene. Cristian Pascual (Barcelona, 1980) was the director of In-Edit Barcelona from 2007 to 2019, and he is still part of the organising committee. We met him in São Paulo in 2017, and he provided us with a programmer’s view of music documentaries from all over the world. Despite how political events have altered the country’s international influence in global politics (most notably Jair Bolsonaro taking over as president at the beginning of 2019), we believe that Pascual’s views present a rich reflection on Brazilian specificities regarding the production and reception of music documentaries today.

SINEMA PASCANASIONAL: REPRESENTASI INDONESIA DALAM FILM-FILM GARETH EVANS

The emergence of Indonesian films lately is not only initiated by Indonesian directors, but also foreign directors. Gareth Evans who is a director from Wales managed to attract the attention of Indonesian film audiences with his films. The phenomenon of foreign directors who created Indonesian films to become representations in the world of international film is something that needs to be studied further. This research is descriptive qualitative because the data, words and sentences, are analyzed based on meaning relations. In analyzing the data, researchers used representation theory and the theory of postnational film, namely by searching for Indonesian representations of what is contained in the film and identifying the condition of postnational films in Evans's films. From the results of the analysis, it was found that there was a representation of Indonesia in films by Evans. The aspect of representation that appeared consisted of several aspects: aspects of the language of communication used in the film, aspects of settings that were raised as the background, aspects of characters based on the names of characters, backgrounds of figures, and the use of silat as a fighting style. It also found the condition of postnational films in Evans’s films. Key word: films, representations, postnational

How We Talk about the Movies: A Comparison of Australian, British and American Film Genre Terms

ABSTRACT Vocabulary or terminological control has been an issue of critical information practice for Australian information professionals for many years. In the 1970s Australian libraries began to supplement Library of Congress Subject Headings with their own List of Australian Subject Headings, and today there remains the bibliographic need to cover uniquely Australian terms and concepts, including those about Indigenous Australian culture. The library world is not the only domain, however, to have developed vocabularies to describe and make sense of information resources. Comparison of film genre vocabularies is of particular interest because film studies have often assumed a fixed set of categories, regardless of geography, culture or time. Although much of today’s film industry is ‘global’, with a strong Hollywood influence on genre to sell movies, this does not mean that filmmakers, nor film audiences, use a set vocabulary. This paper looks at whether similar geographical biases may be discerned in vocabularies used in the domain of film curation by examining the variation in terminology and the classification of film genres used by film institutes based in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Audience Readings and Meaning Negotiation in the Film Viewing Space: An Ethnographic Study of Nollywood’s Viewing Center Audiences

This research aims to investigate the social experiences of Nigerian film audiences in viewing centers to examine the possibility that social experiences are a potent influencer of the meaning construction process in the film viewing space. This study was conducted among other existing studies of the Nigerian film audience and it took on a performative approach. It involved the use of ethnography and unstructured interviews. The study examined Nollywood viewing center audiences during their shared practice of film viewing. Observing these audiences revealed several ways in which audiences negotiate meanings within the viewing center space from film texts based on their social identity and actual social experiences. It majorly revealed that viewers develop interpersonal understanding of each other’s similar relevant social situations through self-identification and then use this understanding in the interpretive process of meaning production.

CONFLICT, COMMUNITY AND THE ‘NATIONAL’ AUDIENCE: REMEMBERING TURKISH CYPRIOT CINEMAGOING IN 1950s NICOSIA

Drawing on oral history interviews, contemporary newspaper sources and the archives of the British colonial administration, this article examines the experiences of the Turkish Cypriot cinema audience in Nicosia, the capital city of Cyprus, during the 1950s. This period was marked by rising anti-colonial and intercommunal conflict, but film exhibition nevertheless flourished and the cinema played a substantial role in the social, economic and political lives of many Turkish Cypriots. Memories of cinemagoing in Nicosia are marked by the experience of British colonial power, but they also reflect commercial interactions with the city’s more dominant Greek Cypriot community. The encounter with Turkish culture through the viewing of films imported from Turkey also contributed to the development of nationalist political aspirations. As Nicosia’s Turkish and Greek communities became increasingly polarised, cinemagoing experiences were influenced more and more by external political events. Nevertheless, the cinema of the 1950s is remembered as a communal, egalitarian and romantic space which provided the means to escape from everyday tensions.

Chinese Blockbusters and Culture Self-Confidence

Along with the market-oriented development of the Chinese economy in the reform-era, the country’s once highly-political revolutionary arts and cultural realm has been transformed into commercialised mass culture. Specifically, the accelerated market-oriented restructuring of the Chinese film industry since 2000 has turned China into the world’s second largest film market. At the same time, it has also led to the recent emergence of domestic commercial blockbusters that both bolster official values and enjoy successful market returns. Encompassing titles such as Wolf Warrior II (2017), Operation Red Sea (2018), The Wandering Earth (2019) and My People, My Country (2019), these films, not short of spectacular Hollywood-calibre visual effects, express the culture self-confidence of a rising Chinese nation as they reflect the cultural taste of a rapidly expanding new Chinese film audience.

‘The skailing of the picters’: The Coming of the Talkies in Small Rural Townships in Northern Scotland

Like that of many other nations, Scotland's film history has been characterised largely by its focus on its great metropolitan centres. The occasional studies which do look outside the ‘Central Belt’ stretching between Scotland's two greatest cities, Glasgow and Edinburgh, are likely to concentrate on two of its other sizeable cities, Aberdeen and Dundee. This article will consider cinemas north of Inverness (Scotland's most northerly city), including those in Wick, Thurso and the islands of Orkney and Shetland. The talkies arrived late to all of the townships considered. Cinema audiences dwindled as silent films fell out of favour with local audiences well aware of the ubiquity of the talkies elsewhere in Britain. When sound finally did arrive, the return of audiences to local picture houses had a great impact on the small rural townships, forcing councils to deal with the ‘problem of the talkie queues’ and the ‘skailing of the picters’ (the audiences spilling out into the town after a film). Using a variety of archival sources – local newspapers, council reports, oral histories and diary entries – this article focuses on the various economic and social impacts resulting from the arrival of sound.

The Two Faces of a Bamiléké Woman and Chez Jolie Coiffure, Rosine Mbakam

Reviewed by: The Two Faces of a Bamiléké Woman and Chez Jolie Coiffure Danny Hoffman FILM REVIEW of The Two Faces of a Bamiléké Woman (2016) and Chez Jolie Coiffure (2018), directed by Rosine Mbakam. Icarus Films. At a double screening in Seattle of Chez Jolie Coiffure (2018) and The Two Faces of a Bamiléké Woman (2016), filmmaker Rosine Mbakam fielded an awkward, if well-intentioned, question. Is the poetic voice in The Two Faces uniquely hers? Or is there just something inherently poetic about “the Cameroonian people?” Mbakam’s answer was both kind and disingenuous. “I don’t know where it comes from,” she replied. “I just write what is in my heart.” It is no surprise that audiences look for ethnography in Mbakam’s films. As Mbakam herself put it in a question-and-answer session following the Seattle screening, stories of Cameroonian womanhood are virtually unknown to international film audiences. And for audiences in Cameroon, the films can be a surprising entrée into the mysteries of life as a migrant, especially a migrant woman. Both films, moreover, are styled as filmic ethnography. Chez Jolie Coiffure is shot in the venerable tradition of observational cinema, long a hallmark of visual anthropology. The Two Faces uses the essay-film format to explore the rituals—everyday and extraordinary— that make up a cultural life. The desire for a filmic passport to “the Cameroonian people” is clearly misplaced, but the instinct to mine Mbakam’s films for big themes and insights about the social world of Cameroonian women today is not. The question of what, exactly, Chez Jolie Coiffure and The Two Faces are the ethnographies of, and the expert craftsmanship with which Mbakam puts them together, undermine her claims to naiveté. The films are very different, but both are unusually sophisticated looks into the worlds of their subjects, masterfully constructed by a filmmaker with a deft and sophisticated knowledge of cinema and how it works. The Two Faces of a Bamiléké Woman, Mbakam’s first feature-length film, is the most accessible for general audiences—certainly for undergraduate classes in African, gender, or migration-and-diaspora studies. The premise is straightforward. After leaving Cameroon to study film in Belgium, she returns to her mother’s house with her white European husband and their first child in tow. Mbakam becomes participant-observer in a world that is familiar from her childhood but alien to her as an adult. Her mother is the main subject and frequent interviewee, but Mbakam also moves through the worlds of the women that surround her mother—at the market, [End Page 133] in the neighborhood, and most powerfully, at her financial cooperative, the tontine. Mbakam herself is always powerfully present through handheld, first-person camerawork; by physically appearing at times before the camera; in voiceover, off-camera conversations, and interview questions; or by proxy, through shots of her child. What the camera captures is the stuff of many “village ethnographies”: the rituals of naming and bathing a newborn, healing a new mother, marking a death, and preserving the memories of the deceased. But for Mbakam, this is the ethnography of a cultural life largely missed. A network of women, for example, helped her mother through childbirth; when Mbakam herself gives birth in Belgium, she is alone with her husband. When her breastmilk will not flow, no one has ideas for what to do next. The film becomes the vehicle through which she connects with the lives from which she was separated in Europe, including, in a sense, her own. The Two Faces’ brilliance as ethnography is that it does not fall into easy romanticism about what life for Mbakam might have been. Whatever she may have missed when she left Yaoundé, what she left behind was often painful. She experiences that pain physically when her mother rubs her with a steaming cloth, enacting the postpartum bathing procedures meant to help new mothers heal. She sees it in the stoic expressions of women in the photographs her mother keeps and hears it in the stories of arranged teen marriages and polygamous households in which spouses do not get along. Filmmaking becomes the...

Developing a computational ontology to understand the relational aspects of audience formation

In this article, we discuss an innovative audience research methodology developed for the AHRC-funded ‘Beyond the Multiplex: Audiences for Specialised Film in English Regions’ project (BtM). The project combines a computational ontology with a mixed-methods approach drawn from both the social sciences and the humanities, enabling research to be conducted both at scale and in depth, producing complex relational analyses of audiences. BtM aims to understand how we might enable a wide range of audiences to participate in a more diverse film culture, and embrace the wealth of films beyond the mainstream in order to optimise the cultural value of engaging with less familiar films. BtM collects data through a three-wave survey of film audience members’ practices, semi-structured interviews and film-elicitation groups with audience members alongside interviews with policy and industry experts, and analyses of key policy and industry documents. Bringing each of these datasets together within our ontology enables us to map relationships between them across a variety of different concerns. For instance, how cultural engagement in general relates to engagement with specialised films; how different audiences access and/or share films across different platforms and venues; how their engagement with those films enables them to make meaning and generate value; and how all of this is shaped by national and regional policy, film industry practices, and the decisions of cultural intermediaries across the fields of film production, distribution and exhibition. Alongside our analyses, the ontology enables us to produce data visualisations and a suite of analytical tools for audience development studies that stakeholders can use, ensuring the research has impact beyond the academy. This paper sets out our methodology for developing the BtM ontology, so that others may adapt it and develop their own ontologies from mixed-methods empirical data in their studies of other knowledge domains.

Developing a computational ontology to understand the relational aspects of audience formation

In this article, we discuss an innovative audience research methodology developed for the AHRC-funded “Beyond the Multiplex: Audiences for Specialised Film in English Regions” project (BtM). The project combines a computational ontology with a mixed-methods approach drawn from both the social sciences and the humanities, enabling research to be conducted both at scale and in depth, producing complex relational analyses of audiences. BtM aims to understand how we might enable a wide range of audiences to participate in a more diverse film culture, and embrace the wealth of films beyond the mainstream in order to optimise the cultural value of engaging with less familiar films. BtM collects data through a three-wave survey of film audience members’ practices, semi-structured interviews and film-elicitation groups with audience members alongside interviews with policy and industry experts, and analyses of key policy and industry documents. Bringing each of these datasets together within our ontology enables us to map relationships between them across a variety of different concerns. For instance, how cultural engagement in general relates to engagement with specialised films; how different audiences access and/or share films across different platforms and venues; how their engagement with those films enables them to make meaning and generate value; and how all of this is shaped by national and regional policy, film industry practices, and the decisions of cultural intermediaries across the fields of film production, distribution and exhibition. Alongside our analyses, the ontology enables us to produce data visualisations and a suite of analytical tools for audience development studies that stakeholders can use, ensuring the research has impact beyond the academy. This paper sets out our methodology for developing the BtM ontology, so that others may adapt it and develop their own ontologies from mixed-methods empirical data in their studies of other knowledge domains.

UAE Filmmaking beyond Arabization, Cosmopolitanism, and Exceptionalism

More than 60 feature‑length narrative films have been produced in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) since the first in 1988. Few, however, have generated an excitement to suggest Emirati filmmaking may become popular culture. The first supported by the state‑owned media company, Image Nation Abu Dhabi, was Djinn (2013), staged local folklore of a female djinn under the direction of a Hollywood filmmaker. It was lampooned by critics and largely ignored by audiences. This article considers how and when Emirati filmmaking might become part of a UAE film culture by revaluating frameworks that define UAE film audiences and by comparing two films that feature Emirati citizens, alongside Arab, European, and South Asian expatriates to move discussions beyond Arabization, cosmopolitanism, and exceptionalism.

Wirtualne sale i globalne sieci. Partycypacja w kulturze filmowej w kontekście pandemii

Virtual Screens, Global Networks. Film Culture Participation in the Wake of Pandemic The article discusses the subject of virtualization – the process of partial transmission significant discursive fields into the Internet – of the film culture, which is defined as the group of practices and discourses accompanying cinema, which connect it with the socio-cultural environment. According to the author, the virtualization process is specifically exposed during pandemics and social isolation, what is presented in the text from the perspective of film audience. Pandemic is treated here as liminoidal moment, in which, due to the disorder of cinema’s functioning, its social networks happen to transform in certain manner. By interpreting results of his own fieldwork, author points at general dynamics of virtualization as an element of contemporary film culture, highlighting both the possibilities opened by such situation and dangers it brings.

Bridging the digital divide: Older adults’ engagement with online cinema heritage

Abstract Is there a way to ensure older adults can bridge the digital divide and engage with online cultural heritage? How can cinema-going memories encourage cross-generational engagement? This article proposes to address these issues by using the Italian Cinema Audiences research project as a case study, and specifically cinema-going memories as intangible cultural heritage (Ercole et al., 2016, Cinema heritage in Europe: preserving and sharing culture by engaging with film exhibition and audiences. Editorial. Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, 11(Summer): 1–12. Web. ISSN: 2009-4078). It aims to tackle the difficulty of engaging the older generation with the digital world, by proposing and testing new ways to resolve it. Through a mixed-methods ethnographic approach, this article investigates different strategies: the use of social media platforms; a cross-generational activity involving Historypin, a digital, user-generated archive of crowdsourced historical material; an online dedicated archive built in collaboration with the older adults involved in the project. These different solutions aim not only at increasing digital engagement among older adults, but also at furthering younger generations’ involvement in shared cultural heritage in an online context. By focusing on the memories of cinema-going in 1950s Italy, the article explores the implications of the advantages and disadvantages of these different approaches. It also tests Anja K. Leist’s research findings (2013, Social media use of older adults: a mini-review. Gerontology, 59(4): 378–84) on the key role of moderators (the younger generation) to help novice users (the older generation) in the ‘continuous engagement’ in digital environments. We conclude that in order to bridge the digital divide two components are necessary simultaneously: the creation of digital platforms in which the older generations are both curators and users, and the support of and interaction with younger generations.

Sharing the filmic experience - The physiology of socio-emotional processes in the cinema.

As we identify with characters on screen, we simulate their emotions and thoughts. This is accompanied by physiological changes such as galvanic skin response (GSR), an indicator for emotional arousal, and respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), referring to vagal activity. We investigated whether the presence of a cinema audience affects these psychophysiological processes. The study was conducted in a real cinema in Berlin. Participants came twice to watch previously rated emotional film scenes eliciting amusement, anger, tenderness or fear. Once they watched the scenes alone, once in a group. We tested whether the vagal modulation in response to the mere presence of others influences explicit (reported) and implicit markers (RSA, heart rate (HR) and GSR) of emotional processes in function of solitary or collective enjoyment of movie scenes. On the physiological level, we found a mediating effect of vagal flexibility to the mere presence of others. Individuals showing a high baseline difference (alone vs. social) prior to the presentation of film, maintained higher RSA in the alone compared to the social condition. The opposite pattern emerged for low baseline difference individuals. Emotional arousal as reflected in GSR was significantly more pronounced during scenes eliciting anger independent of the social condition. On the behavioural level, we found evidence for emotion-specific effects on reported empathy, emotional intensity and Theory of Mind. Furthermore, people who decrease their RSA in response to others’ company are those who felt themselves more empathically engaged with the characters. Our data speaks in favour of a specific role of vagal regulation in response to the mere presence of others in terms of explicit empathic engagement with characters during shared filmic experience.

Cinema as Prosthesis: Errol Morris’s Use of the Interrotron in <em>Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.</em>

Cinema as Prosthesis: Errol Morris’s Use of the Interrotron in <em>Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.</em>

Anomalus dan Brand Aura Karakter Superhero Pada Film Gundala: Analisis Struktur Naratif

This research or analysis uses Vladimir Propp's narrative structure analysis of the genre of superhero film titled Gundala, which is based on Indonesian comics. Gundala is a superhero character or hero who has supernatural powers that come from the energy of lightning. Through the power of his lightning energy, Gundala as a hero is able to defeat villain as a criminal. This is the narration presented from the film Gundala. Thus, the use of the concept of narrative structure aims to reveal the role and position of each character in the frame of binary opposition. Next, an understanding of his supernatural powers was analyzed using the concept of anomalous categories from Claude Levi-Strauss. Furthermore, the film Gundala has its appeal in presenting the narratives of the characters. Both superhero and villain characters. Related to that, the use of the concept of brand aura aims to find an element of attraction for the characters of the shop for the cinema audience.

The Problem of Film Theatre Intermediality in Jesus of Montreal

My paper resorts to the recently theorized notion of intermediality in order to examine the representation of theatre in Jesus of Montreal (Denys Arcand, 1989) Far from being a stopgap term called into being by the ever more numerous instances of border violation between media, intermediality comes with a prestigious pedigree. It is a member of the ‘inter’ family (alongside terms such as intertextuality and interdisciplinarity) and a descendant of a comparative approach which extends far back in time, encompassing genres such as the apology and the paragone. Despite the fact that in film studies intermediality is still to a certain extent impending, it is highly applicable to instances where film quotes or references another medium. A focus on intermediality in Jesus of Montreal authorizes questions such as: Which are the prioritized connection points between film and theatre? How is the relation of the two media formulated by Arcand? How does a filmmaker stage a theatrical event for a cinema audience? My paper seeks to demonstrate and exemplify the sophisticated nature of the film’s involvement with theatre. To this effect, I shall use ideas drawn from intermediality studies, narratology and drama theory in conjunction with close analysis of chosen sequences.

Cinema Attendance and Cinema-Going Audience in Malaysia

Cinema audiences’ behavior interests both industry professionals and academics. Cinema-going is still indisputably popular form of entertainment in Malaysia. This study discusses cinema-going in the era of omnipresent screens. It aims to verify Malaysians’ cinema going behaviors and the sustainability factors contributing to the Malaysian film industry. The various factors affecting cinema and movie-going behavior would include encouragement, theme, motivation, perception, gratification, and genre. The local filmmaking industry fell into a decline after 2014 based on observation of annual film production. In the context of westernization, this small market presents a challenge for the government in promoting local popular films. With the influx of genre films from abroad, Malaysian cinema is struggling to the hilt to survive. To understand this situation from the perspective of the audiences, this study, using data from surveys conducted in Malaysia in 2018, discusses the fandom of Malaysian cinema, their cinema-going behavior, and the association with their identities.

German surveillance of the Swedish film market during World War II

This article approaches the subject of German film policy in Sweden during World War II from a new perspective. While several film scholars have mapped the connections between the German and Swedish film industries in the past, less is known about the German surveillance of Swedish film criticism, Swedish cinema audiences and Allied newsreel competitors. Drawing on previously overlooked archival material from the German film company Ufa’s Swedish subsidiary, digital newspaper archives and previous research on German film strategies abroad, this article offers new insights into the ways Ufa monitored the film market in neutral Sweden.

Estranged from the World: The Film Audience as the Flâneur

Stanley Cavell considers the modern stroller, or the flâneur, as foreshadowing the emergence of films. Film theorists have argued that the emergence of film and the flâneur can be attributed to the alienation and estrangement that modernism brings to society. This form of estrangement encourages a distanced view of the world along with a desire to view the world as a child. Despite the fact that the flâneur shares a lot of characteristics with the film audience, they are fundamentally different in how they understand the form of alienation endemic to modernity. In this paper, I examine the origins of the flâneur and film to better understand the similarities and differences between the flâneur and the film audience, arguing that while the flâneur deliberately alienates himself in order to participate in this form of estrangement, the film audience is conditioned to participate in this estrangement.