Film Audiences Research Articles

Hollywood's Ancient Worlds (review)

Jeffrey Richards Hollywood's Ancient Worlds London: Continuum, 2008 Illustrated, x+227 pp. ISBN 1847250076; 978-1847250070 Thanks to the unexpected success of Gladiator (2000), antiquity, whether classical (if not always classy), biblical, Egyptian, or imaginary, is back on our screens. Books by film historians and classicists alike have attempted to assess the portrayals of the ancient past in the cinema, primarily in studies of individual films but also in general surveys. To the latter, Richards, foundereditor of and contributor to Cinema and Society, a highly regarded series of monographs, now adds his own concise but informative overview of the subject. Using the term Hollywood loosely enough to include British films and some American-European co-productions, Richards surveys epic and notso-epic cinema and television from Intolerance (1916) to Rome (2005, 2007). As a self-confessed melancholic (ix), he omits comedies and, more justifiably, several biblical and other U.S.-ltalian co-productions. There is no mention of the 1897 and 1898 passion-play films by Walter Freeman, produced by Klaw and Erlanger of soon-to-follow Ben-Hur fame, and by Rich Hollaman, although these are the origin of narrative cinema about antiquity. The omission of all classic and modern Mummy films or, e.g., The Scorpion King may be a disappointment to some. The Last Legion presumably came too late to be included. The first and introductory of Richards' six chapters deals with the cultural and artistic background of historical cinema: nineteenth-century novels, plays, and paintings. This chapter is the book's strongest, and eager readers may wish that it - and the whole book, whose main text comes in at under 200 pages - had been more detailed. Richards returns to this aspect of film history in subsequent chapters by identifying particular paintings as inspirations of specific settings or buildings that film audiences could admire or recognize. His second chapter covers the silent era and the 1930s. It is followed by the heart of the book, three chapters on the 1950s and 1960s, the time when epic filmmaking reached its height with color and widescreen cinematography, giant sets, huge casts, stereophonic sound for symphonic scores, extreme running times, and, in retrospect, self-destructive costs. Richards' emphasis on film music is especially welcome here. One chapter each deals with the Romans and the Bible; ancient Greece and Egypt sensibly share a chapter. Richards brings things up to date in his last chapter, the revival of ancient epics on our screen with and after Gladiator. This chapter's first part offers a useful history of antiquity on the small screen since the mid-1960s. Throughout, Richards provides a judicious balance of information about plots and production histories and of his own analysis, although he devotes too much space to quotations from early critical reactions, chiefly in British newspapers. Time has made most of these superfluous, and they become rather tedious in their toffy predictability. Richards, by contrast, rides to the rescue of many, even less than stellar, films and usually reaches positive assessments that are well-founded but may surprise jaded readers or viewers. Only rarely, but quite rightly, is he severe in his judgments, as with Caligula (this tawdry effort had the effrontery to appropriate Prokofiev ... and Khachaturian ... scores for its soundtrack, 158), The Passion of the Christ (a technically accomplished but hideous and virtually unwatchable sadomasochistic fantasy, 173), and 300 (probably the most Fascistic film to come out in cinemas since the fall of the Third Reich, 184). His low opinion of The Fall of the Roman Empire, however, is particularly regrettable to this reviewer, editor of a collection of essays on this underappreciated film (The Fall of the Roman Empire: Film and History [Oxford: Blackwell, 2009]). …

Jamming civilizational discourse: Nadia El Fani's Bedwin Hacker

This essay analyzes how El Fani's 2003 feature-length film engages and counters Tunisian cultural politics. For international film audiences, Tunisian film is characterized by often visually stunning, feature-length films focusing on social struggles, particularly those of Tunisian women, in the pre- and post-independence eras. After exploring how these films have been co-opted by a state-sponsored civilizational discourse that allies Tunisia with western modernity, my essay examines how Bedwin Hacker resists similar recuperation on both visual and narrative levels. Adapting the popular genre of the hacker film, El Fani offers viewers a glimpse of innovative Tunisian self-fashioning to re-engage Tunisian audiences at home and reach out to international spectators beyond the festival circuit. Her border-crossing heroine, who hacks the airwaves to insert playful, cartoonish messages about the existence of alternate realities on French television, elaborates a feminist activism that exceeds the roles assigned to Tunisian women by the state. At the same time, the film challenges the limited roles available to women from the South even within an allegedly globalizing world. Thematically, El Fani's film draws upon only to unsettle the tropes of otherness on which the popular, global media in both the West and the East depend, while visually it represents the formerly taboo in ways that break with the conventional techniques of representing women and men in Tunisian cinema and beyond. Thereby removing the veils that condition northern views of the Arab South, Bedwin Hacker also re-envisions contemporary Tunisia.

Closely watched viewers: A taxonomy of Chinese film audiences from 1949 to the Cultural Revolution seen from Hunan

ABSTRACTWho were watching films in China from 1949 to the Cultural Revolution? Research on this question has been patchy and frustrated by the kinds of sources available. Box office statistics, viewers' polls and commentaries, and even fandom were open to manipulation to put a positive spin on the growth of audiences and the appropriate popularity of particular films. This article uses a provincial film distribution list of all Chinese and foreign films distributed nationwide in these years to tease out indirect indications of the nature of film audiences. The number of prints struck in 35-mm and 16-mm formats, the language used (in the case of foreign films) and the timing of release all indicate the importance of a differentiation of audiences. Not all film-goers were expected to watch all films: particular titles suited particular viewers. Comparisons are made with a useful profile of the readership of literature in these years.

““To Sustain Illusion is All That is Necessary””: The Authenticity of Song Performance in Early American Sound Cinema

In musical shorts, song performances were rendered through a set of stylistic techniques emphasizing performative authenticity and synchronicity. By contrast, the integration of song performances into feature-length films of the same period led to the use of non-synchronous recording practices, such as voice-doubling, for dramatic actors who did not possess musical talent. Newspaper clippings in the Richard Barthelmess scrapbooks (Special Collections, Margaret Herrick Library) indicate that film audiences generally accepted voice-doubling as a necessary element of cinematic artifice.

The Inner Space Project, Review Essay, <i>Afterimage: Film and Politics</i>, 1970

This review essay appeared in the first issue of Afterimage: Film and Politics (April 1970). When Peter Whitehead began to shoot The Fall he was a man behind a camera, looking at events through the peephole of its viewfinder to make a documentary record of Protest. But the events he witnessed called in question his human right to remain merely an observer. He began to feel increasingly the fraudulence of claiming that in making a film about protest he was in fact protesting. His own impotence, hate, and isolation began to supplant external events in his consciousness to the point where there seemed no resolution but his own death. It was at this point that he found himself inside the buildings held by the students in revolt at Columbia University: he became a participant, making his own act of protest in common with them, his camera empty. Here was something to record that was more than a mere cata logue of events. He resolved his conflict in terms of film by trying to show his own reaction to events and embroilment in them: subject, object, and subjectperceiving object become identified as one. He made a film which would simultaneously show himself making the film. At the beginning, he says Sometimes outsiders see us in a much clearer light than we see ourselves, and sets out to film New York in 1967 because he saw it as the exemplary environment of modern frustration. He is the Outsider, indulging his senses, detached from concern. But he is forced to realise that even if an outsider can see clearly (which is questionable), it doesn't follow that the media can communicate that clarity of vision, and that perception in any case is not enough. The nature of the sickness of these people, of this world, is that they are all outsiders too: to feel alive, he has to be of these people, of this world, not just see them. This realization did not come easily to him, either in fact or on film. Its awakening, and the extreme difficulty of finding means to demolish the wall between his own fragmented selfhood and the external world; and then the means to communicate the whole pro cess through a medium poisoned with cliche and anaesthetized by accepted conventions of film audience response, are the most important substance of The Fall. The first two sections of the film record the struggle to annihilate self as an entity in order to emerge from alienation, and in effect pose the question must we do to be saved- a question not answered in the final section, which is mostly straight documentary of the Columbia revolt. Although he may have seen his participation in violent protest as an answer at the time, the foregoing sections of the film have raised questions of a profundity which reveals this protest as being merely the resolution of the first stage of his dilemma and misery- and that of all of us- not their conclusion. But it's what he has bitten offthat matters more than whether he can chew it. We have been made aware of problems and their consequences that we have all agreed to forget for some centuries passed, yet which underlie our present condition, and are essential to the alleviation of it. Setting out to explore the motive forces of revolution, Whitehead leaves aside the economic level as already understood, expecting to strike gold on the strata of psychology and sociology. But the attempt, in itself, takes him deeper: into questioning the very nature of Self and of Being, onto a level of ontology with implications for beyond simple motives for revolution in this time and place. It is in the light of this that the film's subtitle A Film as a Series of Historical Moments Seeking Synthesis is to be understood, not as an academic exercise in drawing together the threads of events. This is not fashionable. It is much too unsettling, showing the armour of freudenschafte, and indignant confliction of the radical groups to be made of cardboard, and not without a patina of sanctimoniousness. …

Transitional tastes: Teen girls and genre in the critical reception of Twilight

Reviews of Twilight (2008), Catherine Hardwicke's enormously popular screen adaptation of Stephenie Meyer's teen vampire romance novel, reveal a focus on both the gender and age of the film's audience. The teen, tween or adolescent girl, her tastes and affective response, are evoked in different ways by many reviewers to denigrate the film. However, the adolescent girl is also used in positive reviews to legitimate Twilight and its pleasures. This article asks: what can the adolescent girl, her different connotations, and the ways reviewers position themselves in relation to this figure, reveal about Twilight's cultural resonance, and the ongoing dynamics of distinction in the contemporary cultural field more broadly?

Melancholy Empress: queering empire in Ernst Marischka's Sissi films

This essay highlights the convergences between ‘queer’ and ‘straight’ affective responses to Ernst Marischka's popular Sissi trilogy. Sissi (1955), Sissi: the Young Empress (1956), and The Fateful Years of an Empress (1957) detail the young adult life of Elisabeth of Bavaria, who married the Habsburg Emperor, Franz Joseph, in 1854. ‘Sissi’ is both a cherished queer icon and a beloved heroine to mainstream German and Austrian film audiences. While the popularity of the Sissi films is often attributed to the redemptive quality of the positive representation of the ‘marriage’ between Germany and Austria (in contrast to the disastrous union between these countries during the Nazi years), I argue that the mood of these films is rather melancholic than celebratory. The films resist linearity and heteronormative closures. Instead, they feature frustrated desires and romantic triangulations on a narrative level and excessive performativity and tableaux vivants of royal ‘display’ on an aesthetic one. The narrative interruptions via triangulations and royal spectacle disallow a nostalgic pleasure that would repress the unsavoury recent histories of Germany and Austria. Rather, I suggest that the Sissi films reveal the correlations between a queer affect of melancholy that is unable to properly mourn its repressed history and a particularly German mode of melancholy that cannot mourn its past due to the guilt of the nation's fathers.

Fabric in Film and Film as Fabric: Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon

Maya Deren's films employ still and moving fabric in order to articulate the changing relationships among viewer, actor, and director. Deren's use of fiber-based material is an overlooked aspect of her cinematic work. In this essay I explore the parallel between the medium of film—the screen, as well as the representation of fabric on film—and fabric in several of Deren's films, primarily her well-known 1943 film Meshes of the Afternoon. This is a generative parallel because a comparison with fabric introduces the idea that film could be conceived of as, simultaneously, a tactile material and a legitimate art form to mid-century film audiences. Film's relation to the body is traditionally distanced: the audience sits far from the screen in order to view it; the actors’ bodies exist only as intangible arrangements of light and shadow. Reading film with an awareness of the characteristics and connotations of moving fabric recasts cinema in light of the screen's status as fabric, a potentially tactile medium.

Some annotations on the film festival as an emerging medium in India

Organized around an interview with the curator of the 2009 Ahmedabad International Film Festival in India, this article inventories a number of issues germane to future discussions of the film festival as an emerging exhibition venue in India. I examine some of the existing theoretical and critical models for analyzing film festivals, and argue that the film festival should be considered as a ‘medium’ that behaves as a productive constraint on both film production and spectatorship. Finally, I consider the unique relation between the spectatorial behaviors encouraged within festival settings and the narrative strategies of Indian popular films, so as to interrogate their impact on the cultivation of a critically-oriented Indian film audience. I conclude by evaluating the promises and challenges of the infrastructural limitations faced by Indian film festivals for the emergence of alternative cinema publics.

Who Killed Brigitte Bardot?: Perspectives on the New Wave at Fifty

Who Killed Brigitte Bardot? Perspectives on the New Wave at Fifty Vanessa R. Schwartz (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. A bloodied and lifeless Bardot sprawls across a red Alfa Romeo in Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (Le mépris [Les Films Concordia, 1963]). Let us begin by contemplating an image of Brigitte Bardot, the most famous woman in the world when the New Wave was taking shape fifty years ago. The image comes from Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (Le mépris, 1963) and is of a bloodied and lifeless Bardot sprawled in a red Alfa Romeo (Figure 1). This image of her violent death not only reminds us of the New Wave’s deep discomfort with Bardot’s celebrity at the time, but also serves as a marker of a greater historiographic unease with Bardot more generally within Film Studies. Her career and films have been largely sidelined in favor [End Page 145] of a narrative that has overplayed and privileged the history of the New Wave; Bardot becomes important only insofar as she starred in the films of directors such as Jean- Luc Godard who then self-consciously offered visual unpackings of her enormous celebrity while (perhaps unwittingly) contributing to furthering it. Louis Malle, in A Very Private Affair (Vie privée [1962]), explicitly treats the issue of celebrity by having Bardot play a character so trapped by her own fame that she even suffers one of the earliest paparazzi “death by flashbulb” murders depicted on the screen. Now that the New Wave is by some accounts “officially” fifty, perhaps, like a wise middle-aged person, it can be sober and mature enough to admit its excesses and exaggerations, its partis pris, and, finally, come to terms with who “it” murdered to get ahead. In particular, I am interested in bringing together recent feminist reevaluations such as Geneviève Sellier’s in Masculine Singular: French New Wave Cinema (which has recently underscored the New Wave’s troubled relationship to women, gender, and sexuality) with broader historical contextualizations that shed light on certain aspects of the marketing of French film about which we ought to know more—marketing that made the New Wave possible in the first place—and in reintegrating film audiences when we are thinking about the New Wave’s history.1 The first step in coming to terms with middle age is to stop lying about it. We now accept that, while the term “nouvelle vague” was first used by Françoise Giroud in the pages of L’Express in 1957 in relation to an article about the youthful postwar generation, it had nothing to do with the cinema. Critic Pierre Billard coined the term in relation to film in the pages of Cinéma 58 when he made a list of forty filmmakers under forty. The year 1959 has become the benchmark date for the birth of the Nouvelle Vague because Claude Chabrol released Le beau Serge and Les cousins in February/March of that year, and because during the Cannes Film Festival, Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups) won for Best Director, Marcel Camus’s Black Orpheus (Orfeo Negro) won the Palme D’Or, and Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour played then as well, making it seem as if something was happening in French cinema. But 1959 has also been pinpointed because it was in that year, during the Cannes festival, that UniFrance Film (the French Film Export Association) gathered a group of filmmakers and critics at La Napoule, near Cannes, hoping they would proclaim that they collectively stood for a new and unified vision of film. They could agree on nothing more than that films should be an act of personal creation and that filmmaking was a vocation rather than a profession. In some measure, these two points of agreement have stuck as vital aspects of the New Wave’s notion of “auteurism,” although the problem of whether there is any unified artistic expression in the French New Wave seemed then, as much as now, to be a hopeless cause. Yet, despite all historical evidence to the contrary, ever since its “declaration,” the New...

Is anyone watching? War, cinema and bearing witness

War-on-terror-themed fictional films, particularly those focused on the war in Iraq, have largely failed at the box office and have been subjected to stinging criticism by right-wing political commentators and film reviewers. Critics on the political right have been upset by a perceived lack of patriotism in the films, often arguing that they are dangerous incitements to new acts of violence. However, unlike many earlier war films, including those made about the conflict in Vietnam, directors of films about the war on terror are quite self-consciously making political films that question United States (US) policy and practice, that focus on the effects of war on US service personnel and civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan and that, significantly, attempt to rehabilitate Arabs, Muslims and Islam from decades of Hollywood demonization. Moreover, the films are being made and released into a media environment in which quality news reporting has declined even as the intensity of feeling about ‘otherness’ has sharpened. This article argues that war on terror film directors are themselves bearing witness to the tragedy of war and thereby inviting film audiences to see the effects of war.

Making fictions sound real - On film sound, perceptual realism and genre

This article examines the role that sound plays in making fictions perceptually real to film audiences, whether these fictions are realist or non-realist in content and narrative form. I will argue that some aspects of film sound practices and the kind of experiences they trigger are related to basic rules of human perception, whereas others are more properly explained in relation to how aesthetic devices, including sound, are used to characterise the fiction and thereby make it perceptually real to its audience. Finally, I will argue that not all genres can be defined by a simple taxonomy of sounds. Apart from an account of the kinds of sounds that typically appear in a specific genre, a genre analysis of sound may also benefit from a functionalist approach that focuses on how sounds can make both realist and non-realist aspects of genres sound real to audiences.

The Cultural Politics of Celebrity

[Extract:] Celebrities are a ubiquitous aspect of contemporary Western culture. Although the phenomenon of celebrity itself predates the twentieth century, the rise of the modern mass media – popular newspapers, cinema, radio, and television, and more recently the Internet and other digital communication technologies – has done much to promote and circulate public knowledge of celebrities during the last 100 years. The presence of multi-channel digital television, radio, and the World Wide Web in Western households at the turn of the twenty-first century has not only increased the number of places in which celebrities can be seen and heard, but has also required media producers to compete with each other and with alternative leisure activities for the attention of fragmented audiences, an increasingly precious commodity. The rise of celebrity culture is inextricably linked to developments in media systems that operate within capitalist systems of commodity exchange. Most obviously, celebrities provide a well-proven route to attracting and retaining audiences, helping to offset the risks inherent in cultural production. They also play out a fantasy of the individual simultaneously performing within public and the private spheres. As P. David Marshall neatly puts it, celebrities might be seen as a “production locale for an elaborate discourse on the individual and individuality” (1997: 4). However the ubiquity of celebrity culture does not mean that its considerable diversity can be ignored. A cursory glance through the prime-time television schedules, for instance, reveals how one might choose between shows featuring celebrity hosts and guests, contest-based reality television shows that participate in the construction of celebrity, personality driven lifestyle programming, sports shows featuring star athletes and commentators, and even political shows with celebrity journalists. All of this is indicative not just of the pervasiveness of modern celebrity culture but also its diversity and breadth.

Explaining Global Box-Office Tastes in Hollywood Films: Homogenization of National Audiences’ Movie Selections

This study examines the cross-country homogeneity of audience tastes in theatrical consumption of Hollywood films. It constructs empirical schemes to measure and explain similarities between national cinema audiences in box-office acceptance of common sets of Hollywood movies, using annual 2002-2007 panel data of ticket-sales receipts worldwide at the country-by-film level. The results show that countries more culturally like the United States tend to have box-office tastes more closely resembling those of American audiences for the same Hollywood titles than other countries do. The similarity in movie taste is also positively related to an importing country’s cinema market size. Moreover, the tastes of individual countries have converged with those of American audiences over the years. Also, correlational statistics calculated from the country-by-film cross-tabulations of box-office sales uncover the trend that the world’s tastes have become increasingly homogeneous.

From the Editors

From the Editors James H.Daniel Heath CoxJustice It is my good fortune to have as a colleague at the University of Texas at Austin Professor Loriene Roy. Professor Roy teaches in UT's School of Information and recently completed a term as president of the American Library Association. She also runs "If I Can I Read, I Can Do Anything," a reading club for Native American children (http://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~ifican/). On April 15, 2010, representatives of "If I Can Read, I Can Do Anything" and readergirlz, GuysLitWire, and the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) will deliver thousands of donated books to Native American teens at reservation schools. "Operation Book Drop 2010" is spotlighting sixteen Native American authors, including some of ASAIL's favorites: Sherman Alexie, Joseph Bruchac, Louise Erdrich, Patricia Grace, Joy Harjo, Winona LaDuke, Larry Loyie, Dimi Macheras, Lurline Wailana McGregor, Joseph Medicine Crow, Simon Ortiz, Cynthia Leitich Smith, Chad Solomon, Robert Sullivan, Luci Tapahonso, and Tim Tingle. For information about the event, please go to http://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~ifican/otbd_index.html. The Web site lists the schools that are already enrolled in the program and, at the bottom, provides instructions for nominating other schools. This issue again brings together a rich collection of texts from multiple Indigenous worlds. These worlds are geographically distant but united by the creative writers and scholars who honor the Indigenous artistic and political expression that emerge from each one. Keith Camacho brings us a Chamorro voice from 1521 in his poem "romanticizing warriorhood." This eyewitness to the arrival [Begin Page vii] of Magellan watches as Antonio Pigafetta, a member of Magellan's crew, walks away assuming, incorrectly, that the poem's narrator and his family and friends have suffered fatal spear wounds. Renate Eigenbrod argues in her essay that Aboriginal literatures must have a place in Native Studies programs in Canada. Native Studies disciplinary perspectives, in turn, have much to teach about methodology and pedagogy to departments of English. Chanette Romero's article on Hopi photographer Victor Masayesva's film takes us to the Hopi Nation. Romero considers Masayesva's ambivalence about, his desire for but suspicion of, filmic representations of the Hopis as well as his reclamation and recontextualization of non-Native images of the Hopis. Mareike Neuhaus discusses ancestral languages and discourse conventions in Indigenous writing in English with a specific focus on Maria Campbell's Michif (Cree and French) English, while Blake M. Hausman responds to Quentin Youngberg's recent SAIL essay on Sherman Alexie's interpenetration of queer and Native spheres in his film The Business of Fancydancing by reading the film's additional interpenetration of the Shakespearean sphere. Hausman describes specifically how Alexie's riffs on Hamlet catch the conscience of the film's audience. We hope, as always, that you enjoy the articles and creative work in your new issue of SAIL. [Begin Page viii] Copyright © 2010 University of Nebraska Press

Unstable Celluloid

This article tracks the exhibition of a single Bangladeshi action film through the cinema halls of different provincial towns in Bangladesh. The ethnographic case shows that film projection undermines the narrative coherence of a film by changing its form from one screening to the next. Unstable celluloid refers to such practices of including, excising or re-editing during the screening of a film. Audiences can urge such changes and once changed, a single film can gather many different audience responses, effectively creating unstable celluloid, or a de-standarized film product. On the basis of this case, I argue that the study of cinema audiences and film reception in South Asia needs to pay closer attention to the relationship between empirical audience and practices of exhibition.

Approaches to Cinema Audience: From Spectatorship to Context of Consumption

Approaches to Cinema Audience: From Spectatorship to Context of Consumption

Foregrounding Public Cinema and Rural Audiences: The USDA Motion Picture Service as Cinematic Modernism, 1908–38

There are multiple “modernities” in the context of early cinema in the United States. While there has been a great deal of scholarship on the “modern” commercial film culture of early-twentieth-century urban America, historians have paid less attention to patterns of rural audiences from that period who viewed many noncommercial films by U.S. federal agencies, especially the Department of Agriculture. This article draws on Marx and Engels' German Ideology, which argues that “the rural” and “the urban” are to be understood dialectically, to posit that one way to grasp “modernity” is through an examination of the USDA film agency.

Willing Suspension of Disbelief: Poetic Faith in Film (review)

Reviewed by: Willing Suspension of Disbelief: Poetic Faith in Film Richard A. Kallan Willing Suspension of Disbelief: Poetic Faith in Film Anthony J. Ferri. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007, 103 pp. It is commonplace for film scholars to talk about the “willing suspension of disbelief ” when discussing the role of audience and the nature of the film viewing process. Yet little attention has been given to placing the concept in historical context or considering how it might further inform film theory and criticism. Anthony J. Ferri’s Willing Suspension of Disbelief: Poetic Faith in Film offers an antidote to this void in the literature. A short, but cogently written book of fewer than 100 pages, Ferri’s work is organized into seven chapters: Chapter 1 explores the historical context that gave rise to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, published in 1817, which introduced the phrase “willing suspension of disbelief.” A poet and critic, Coleridge sought to explain how readers experience poetry and the hypnotic process whereby they willingly allow themselves to be transported from story spectator to story participant. Coleridge, notes Ferri, “could not have imagined that the concept would be applied by so many for so many years to describe what happens to audiences in movie theaters throughout the world.” After summarizing various theoretical approaches to film viewing from the perspective of how they shed light on Coleridge’s concept (chapter 2), Ferri compares films that effectively engage the audience’s willingness to suspend their disbelief with those that seemingly violate the audience’s poetic faith (chapter 3). In the latter case, “the film viewer becomes aware of his or her incredulity. It’s as if the lights have been brought up and the magic in the theater has ended. . . . They are aware that they are watching.” To illustrate his point, Ferri turns his attention to some notable contemporary films, offering short but perceptive critiques that nicely support his argument. Chapter 4 discusses empirical approaches to film viewing. It includes the author’s attempt [End Page 65] to empirically map what happens when viewers watch a film. Ferri’s study, a survey of 222 viewers as they exited eight different theaters in Las Vegas, demonstrates that it is possible to document the audience’s willingness to suspend disbelief—a process “composed of emotions, beliefs, and behaviors”—but such documentation remains a complicated undertaking, further layered by the convergence of media technologies and the rise of newer-type viewing experiences (the focus of chapter 5). In chapter 6, Ferri proposes a broad model for mapping how audiences process film. The model, Ferri concedes, becomes worthwhile to the extent that “scholars and industry members explore the territory through empirical, historical, and critical research.” Ferri posits three questions for future researchers: “What elements of the willing suspension of disbelief can be measured? What differences occur between single viewers and coviewers (couples, groups)? What differences in viewing presence occur under developing technologies?” The last chapter restates and amplifies Ferri’s argument that Coleridge continues to offer key insight into how audiences experience film today, as well as how they will tomorrow, because “while viewing varies according to culture,” Ferri concludes, “the basic act of viewing remains the same.” Just as Coleridge envisioned a reader wanting to be cognitively transported to another world, Ferri affirms that the film audience welcomes the same. Willing Suspension of Disbelief is impeccably researched, the author excelling at synthesizing relevant literature. Although at times I would have preferred less summary and more analysis, the book still emerges as a useful work that raises intriguing questions and research possibilities about the nature and function of viewer imagination. It will appeal to readers interested in how audiences experience film and how that process gives film its meaning and import. Richard A. Kallan California State Polytechnic University, Pomona Copyright © 2009 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Re‐Viewing a Lost Civilization: Sergei Loznitsa's Revue (2008)

W hile there has been a flood of English-language publications on Soviet (and then Russian) cinema since 1985 covering the entire history of that state's film production, with the exception of Dziga Vertov, Soviet and Russian documentary films and filmmakers have remained virtually ignored by both film scholars and film audiences.1 Received wisdom has it that Soviet documentary films became moribund during the Stalin years, as well as during the Thaw and Stagnation periods, and were briefly resuscitated only during the campaign to reclaim the past?the reexamination of Soviet history under Gorbachev.2 Yet as significant as the documentary films of the glasnost-era were, the significance was to be found exclusively in their content; the formal features of most of these films retained all of the hallmarks of earlier Soviet documentaries: a totalizing and tendentious off-screen male voice-over, extended (overly long) shot takes, an absence of nuance and ambiguity, and unimaginative editing.3 With the passing of the Soviet Union, the aesthetics of Soviet