Film Audiences Research Articles

Measure audiences' satisfaction through user generated content-satisfaction research in motion picture industry

This work mainly explores the possibility of the measure of film audiences' satisfaction level, which based totally on the content generated by user with PLS-SEM. The result displays certain reliability, validity and predictive relevance. Besides, factors that contribute to audiences' satisfaction are scrutinised in this work. It can supply some meaningful implication to film distributors, exhibitors and future relative research. Conclusions of our research are as follow: external promotion shows significant positive direct effect on audience expectation and has a noticeable impact on connected endogenous variable's predictive ability, which suggests that post-released advertising and online communication have positive impact on audiences' expectation, i.e., ads can expand the scale of potential audiences. Besides, external promotion has significant positive direct effect on audiences' satisfaction and medium effect on its predictive ability, which corroborates the hypothesis that ads and online communication can help audiences appreciate their experience. Finally audiences' expectation shows significant positive direct effect on audiences' satisfaction, which proves the hypothesis that audiences' expectation has positive impact on audiences' satisfaction.

The Big Data Applications in Film Industry Chain

Nowadays, the audiences' consumption attitudes, consumption patterns and consumer groups are all in the great changes, thus it is necessary to improve the film’s revenue by excellent script selecting, accurate market positioning, effective product marketing, and accurate forecasting of the box office. This paper introduced the application and benefit of big data in the film industry chain in terms of film making and investing, film publicity and distribution, film broadcasting and film audience, pointed out many challenges that big data encountered in China’s film industry and finally provided useful suggestions for the practitioners in the film industry of all aspects.

“A Lucid lecturess”: The Voices of New Zealand’s Silent Cinema

This article attempts to record some of the faint echoes left from the days of silent cinema in New Zealand. Sound has been an integral part of cinematic experience in New Zealand since the very first exhibitions during 1895 but the acoustic dimension of film has been little explored by local historians and media scholars. Cinema audiences listened as much as they watched and these sounds were generated by many sources from gramophones to orchestras. This article concentrates on just one aspect of this richly polyphonic cinematic soundscape: the human voice. Through a discussion of the ways in which lecturers, actors, and audiences used their voices as films were played, this article recovers important aspects of how films were experienced in New Zealand before the arrival of synchronised sound and pictures during the late 1920s.

Adentro y afuera del multiplex. Los estudios comerciales de audiencias del cine en América Latina

Las maneras en que son investigadas las audiencias del cine por las industrias culturales asociadas son poco conocidas más allá de los círculos de expertos. Sin embargo, las cifras usadas por los productores, distribuidores y exhibidores tienen impactos contundentes sobre los espectadores, las políticas públicas de fomento de la cinematografía, e incluso, la investigación académica. ¿Cómo se miden las audiencias de cine en América Latina? ¿Son confiables las cifras? Se concluyó que los sistemas de medición de audiencias en América Latina y el mundo solo contabilizan las cifras de taquilla en salas y no tienen realmente en cuenta ni las otras modalidades de consumo cinematográfico, ni las ricas y complejas apropiaciones y relaciones de la gente con el cine.

Appetites and Anxieties: Food, Film, and the Politics of RepresentationCynthiaBaron, DianeCarson and MarkBernard. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2014.

Appetites and Anxieties: Food, Film, and the Politics of Representation Cynthia Baron, Diane Carson and Mark Bernard. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2014.In Appetites and Anxieties: Food, Film, and the Politics of Representation, authors Baron, Carson, and Bernard draw together ideas from film studies, food studies, and anthropology to illuminate the meanings and implications behind portrayals of food in film. They argue that while fictional films' uses of food serve to illustrate characters' relationships, problems, and identities, documentary films dealing with food reveal larger issues such as cultural anxieties and problems surrounding a society's relationships with nature and the environment. Using a foodways analysis, which considers every aspect of food in culture from procurement through presentation, consumption, and cleanup, to disposal of leftovers, can greatly enhance our understanding of the political meanings of food in a society. Applying a foodways analysis to film studies can also, according to the authors, reveal distasteful elements of the food process which are usually kept hidden from members of a consumer society. This concealment is important because it limits the alternatives presented to film audiences, in an attempt to keep them focused on the ease and pleasure and identity-expressing aspects of food consumption, to alleviate consumer anxiety, and to enhance corporate profits. The numerous negative effects of presenting only the attractive parts of the food/feeding process include continued ignorance on the part of the audience to conditions faced by low-power workers in the food industry, the mistreatment and unsafe processing of animals destined to become food, the immense environmental toll extracted by input-heavy agricultural practices, and a lack of awareness that healthier and more sustainable alternatives exist. The authors of Appetites and Anxieties show the film industry's collusion with the food industry in protecting the profits of both. Because the food industry is so immense, it is in a position to offer or withhold lucrative promotional partnerships which can make or break the distribution and earnings chances of films. The size of the food industry also gives it great lobbying power, allowing it to push through seemingly ludicrous legislation such as the veggie libel law and the Animal Enterprise Terrorist Act, neither of which has been successful in gaining monetary awards for the food industry, but both of which have had a chilling effect on the film industry, (and others') willingness to expose portions of the food industry which the food industry would rather keep hidden. …

EVOLUTION OF THE CONCEPT OF «WHITE MAN'S BURDEN» IN THE BRITISH CINEMA OF 20TH CENTURY

The article discusses the features of the evolution on the silver screen so-called "white man's burden" or "civilizing mission" in the British colonies of the British Empire. The means of research were British feature films 1930-1980-ies. Using the author's methods of analysis of the ideological content of tapes and the context of their stories, it became clear that the idea of the "burden of the white" changed not only under the influence of the current socio-political situation in the metropolis and in the world, but also to a large extent transformed under the influence of highly artistic works of British directors each of which sought to bring to the story of the "civilizing mission" own view and vision to such a feature of the existence of the British Empire. The first feature films dedicated to the colonial subjects, by chance came the period of the ideological crisis of the empire in 1930, carried a powerful message of world film audience, the essence of which was the fact that Britain bears colonies only "good and justice" that without imperial province will remain forever languish in "darkness and ignorance." These films have reconciled a few British viewers with the idea of the need to preserve the empire. After the collapse of the colonial system there are films that criticize the cultural expansion of Europeans in the countries of Asia and Africa. The emphasis in these films was placed on the British arrogance and cruelty to the autochthonous peoples. The apogee evolution "burden of the white" reached in 1980, when Britain itself was to form multicultural society. The films of the decade have been devoted to the complete discrediting of the "civilizing mission" and recognize their mistakes in the relationship with the population of the colonies.

Cinema heritage in Europe

The safeguarding, preservation and valorisation of the cultural heritage has increasingly become associated with the process of making cultural heritage assets available online (“Towards an Integrated Approach”). The process of digitisation of cultural assets, while playing a key role in sharing knowledge, still represents a challenge for European and global heritage. While the focus on audiovisual cultural heritage has been characterised by a limited engagement with film and television as cultural products, cinema audiences and their experiences have been virtually neglected. Looking at the cinemagoing experience shifts the focus from the film, as cultural/commercial product, to the audiences, as citizens. The articles included in this special issue of Alphaville demonstrate that research on cinema audiences has the potential to broaden the scope of cultural heritage by including cinema heritage as a new cultural category, which relates to cinemas and the experience of cinemagoing as the social counterpart of film and filmmaking: in this sense the consumption of cultural heritage becomes a cultural phenomenon in its own right.

Transcultural Cinema debated in a Knowledge Network: postcolonial hybrid meanings within resistance cinema

This paper aims to present a Knowledge Network on Transcultural Communication, a work in progress organized in Archives, Knowledge Bases and Virtual Museums. One of its substantive parts, the Knowledge Node Transcultural Cinema, gathers knowledge and sources (Film Studies texts, photos, videos, etc.) about critical cinema and resistance cinema. This node articulates theories and postcolonial concepts to analysis/interpretations based on examples of film images and videos that include postcolonial representations. The “clash of civilizations” is a core idea underlying the debate on dissent and / or consensus among cultures and about postcolonialism. The dissimilarity between colonial / postcolonial societies and cultures, often takes the form of a “conflict of meanings.” And the discursive resistance against colonialism is often based on mobilizing hybridizations. Contemporary cultures are essentially “hybrid cultures”. Such hybrid nature is present in many images and sounds of resistance cinema, and it is urgent to emphasize its characteristics, for example central dichotomies transmitted by authors of this cinema genre: “colonizer / colonized,” “identity / difference,” “power / no power”. Resistance film audiences can see and criticize, in a participatory way, the worldviews and discourses shared by cinema imagination / activism in cinema, contributing to a common, global and critical culture / knowledge.

From Sweetback to Super fly: race and film audiences in Chicago's loop

From Sweetback to Super fly: race and film audiences in Chicago's loop

Cinema audiences reproducibly vary the chemical composition of air during films, by broadcasting scene specific emissions on breath.

Human beings continuously emit chemicals into the air by breath and through the skin. In order to determine whether these emissions vary predictably in response to audiovisual stimuli, we have continuously monitored carbon dioxide and over one hundred volatile organic compounds in a cinema. It was found that many airborne chemicals in cinema air varied distinctively and reproducibly with time for a particular film, even in different screenings to different audiences. Application of scene labels and advanced data mining methods revealed that specific film events, namely “suspense” or “comedy” caused audiences to change their emission of specific chemicals. These event-type synchronous, broadcasted human chemosignals open the possibility for objective and non-invasive assessment of a human group response to stimuli by continuous measurement of chemicals in air. Such methods can be applied to research fields such as psychology and biology, and be valuable to industries such as film making and advertising.

"Look What You Did to Me!": (Anti)Feminism and Extratextuality in the Remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

THE SLASHER FILM GENRE, A SUBSET OF THE larger horror genre, first surfaced in 1974 with the release of genre forerunners such as Black Christmas (1974) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), which were followed by the successful slasher masterpiece Halloween (1978) and its many imitators. Slasher films reached the peak of their popularity in the early 1980s, producing a string of Halloween-inspired projects, such as Friday the 13th (1980), My Bloody Valentine (1981), and Prom Night (1980). Much of the widely cited scholarship on the slasher genre has seen this earliest batch of films, by virtue of the films' narrative traits, as vastly gendered (Clover; Dika) and even indicative of an antifeminist agenda. For example, Vera Dika states that feminists have decried the films as beneath contempt and dangerous, especially because of the high level of violence they portray against women (9). With the appearance of slasher films in the 1970s-80s occurring in tandem with the growth of feminism in the same time period, some critics have alleged that the genre's seemingly misogynistic treatment of its predominantly femal[e] casts of characters (Keisner 412) was part of the backlash against the feminist movement (Kawin 109) and the movement's progressive ideals.Staking a claim on whether slasher films promote antifeminism can be complicated by the fact that many contemporary filmmakers have turned to these early slasher films and remade their stories with bigger Hollywood budgets and enhanced production values for the entertainment of present-day audiences. These audiences, in addition to perhaps holding different views on gender or dis/identifications with feminism than slasher film audiences in previous decades, are immersed in newer extratextual media technology (Brookey and Westerfelhaus) that has significant ramifications on how they view and interpret a film text. Even some of the burgeoning scholarship on slasher remakes (Lizardi) has not adequately considered these dynamics to the films. Scholars should devote more criticism to these films because, for better or worse, the slasher film remake has been a staple of American cinema in the early twentyfirst century. Many of the aforementioned slasher titles have been remade recently, including Black Christmas (2006), Friday the 13th (2009), Halloween (2007), My Bloody Valentine (2009), Prom Night (2008), and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), showing that the genre continues to be profitable with the American public.The 1984 horror classic A Nightmare on Elm Street is yet another slasher tale that has been subjected to this contemporary remake trend. The 1984 Nightmare was the first chapter (followed by seven sequels and a short-lived television anthology) in what could be considered one of the last great slasher series that gave the genre a temporary surge in popularity in the mid-1980s. The 1984 Nightmare has also been one of the most frequently discussed slasher films in recent academic literature (DeGraffenreid; Gill; Kingsley; Shimabukuro), especially by scholars intrigued by how traditional gender or sex roles and identities have been (re)constructed in the film (Christensen; Kendrick; Markovitz; Trencansky). Nearly three decades after the original film was released, the remade version of A Nightmare on Elm Street premiered in theaters nationwide in April 2010. In contrast to the 1984 Nightmare, though, very little scholarship has been written on the 2010 Nightmare remake.1This study aims to bring the 2010 Nightmare into the spotlight in order to enhance scholarly understanding of the intersection between (anti)feminist gender identification and the newer media responsible for presenting these slasher film remakes to the viewing public. This study comparatively analyzes the endings (both the theatrical ending and the alternate ending) to the 2010 Nightmare remake, ultimately arguing that the media used in viewing the film can significantly influence how, and if, the viewer is exposed to (anti)feminist outlooks within the film. …

Streaming from stage to screen: its place in the cultural marketplace and the implication for UK arts policy

Live streaming of stage performances by opera and theatre companies into cinemas, and increasingly into the home, continues to grow rapidly. What the cinema audience hears and sees differs qualitatively both from what is seen in the theatre and also from what is normally available in cinemas. The ‘real-time liveness’ offered by leading companies appears to be an important attraction, though may diminish as the novelty of streamed performances wears off. The cinema audience is both socio-demographically and in cultural experience more similar to the theatre audiences than to typical cinema audiences, giving rise to suggestions that streaming might cannibalise the live audiences of the transmitting theatres, but there is no evidence of this, nor, at least in the UK, to support speculation that streaming reduces audiences for regional arts companies. Streaming should therefore be welcomed as broadening the number of consumers who can benefit from arts subsidies.

The Impact of Hollywood Film Imports in East Germany and the Cultural Surrender of the GDR Film Control in the 1970s and 1980s

When the first and only Film Week of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was held in New York City in 1975, East Germany saw it as another major success on the road to normalization and international recognition. However, trouble was already brewing under the surface of the GDR film sector, and this was indicative of larger political and cultural trends. Western film imports were becoming ever more important to the yearly cinema programme in the GDR, especially in order to attract the predominantly young film audiences. As the 1970s progressed and East Germany’s economic situation worsened, Western film imports, and especially Hollywood blockbuster movies, became increasingly indispensable to the economic survival of the GDR film sector as a whole. By the early 1980s, the SED officials in charge of cultural affairs and movie selection eventually lost control over GDR film policy. Because of complex and multiplying cultural, political and economic pressures, ideological priorities were relegated to the back seat while economic profit and the financial survival of the East German film sector took centre stage. By the mid to late 1980s, the West and East German film markets, and their lists of top-rated films, increasingly converged as the two countries were dominated by an international and US-dominated film culture. In little more than ten years, East Germany was forced to surrender control of this vital cultural sector and core building block of its socialist identity, and this not only substantially weakened its cultural autonomy but also endangered its political stability and survival.

Urban Wallpaper: Film Posters, City Walls and the Cinematic Public in South Asia

ABSTRACTWhat do film posters on city walls tell us about the relationship between the cinema and the city? In this paper, I rely on the practice and perspective of young men who put up film posters on Dhaka's city walls to explore this question. I argue that the wall is a key site for the production of a cinematic public that does not map onto film audiences; for the experience of newness in the city and of the cinema as analogous experiences; and for an encounter with imagery that is considered luminous and intense, assailing the crowds that pass by the posters in the congested city.

Local specificities, global resonances: contesting representations of violence in African films

ABSTRACTThis article is framed by Adichie's (2010, 2) warning of ‘the dangers of the single story’. It investigates the local specificities and global resonances of the representation of violence projected in two African films. The documentary by Ross Kemp on gangs in Pollsmoor Prison in South Africa (2003) captures and generates distinct cinematic biographies that extend our perceptions of production, exhibition and distribution. In contrast, the fictional film, Dakan, by Guinean producer Mohamed Camara (2001), cinematises the enigma of homosexuality as taboo and an aberration, including the attendant socially constructed homophobia. Both films markedly underemphasise the political and pedagogical imperative of African film producers and audiences, and in this they contest ‘established’ representations of violence that have characterised documentaries about Africa and ‘Third Cinema’ (Solanas and Getino 1996). More critically, this article questions the palpable occlusion of systemic violence that characterises the multiple and complex views of Africa in these two films, to unpack the novel documentation and reformulation of violence, as disseminated by Kemp and Camara.

Not Making a Movie: The Livecasting of Shakespeare Stage Productions by The Royal National Theatre and The Royal Shakespeare Company

This article explores the tension between the announced transparency and the actual intermediality in the live broadcasts of Shakespeare stage productions by the Royal National Theatre (NT Live 2009-) and the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC Live 2013-). While often seen in terms of the practical achievements of reach and access, the broadcasts do not merely reproduce or transmit the stage production to the remote cinema audience, but rather adapt the stage productions on which they are based. I give attention to the process of making the livecasts to situate these intermedial adaptations in their material conditions of production. The apparent transparency obscures the significant creative and technical intervention that the broadcasts make in the live event. The fluent film grammar in the broadcasts, which offers the cinema audience a dynamic, shifting point of view, may account for a market research finding suggesting audiences for the broadcasts found them significantly more engaging than did audiences who saw the same stage production live in the theater. The broadcasts make a complex negotiation with liveness which depends in part on the conditions of reception. The cinema audience’s experience of liveness depends on the livecasting theater companies’ decision-making in determining the conditions of production and reception just as much as temporal co-presence with the live event.

Representations of Middle Age in Comedy Film: A Critical Discourse Analysis

The discourse of middle age includes a commonly-held perception that it is a time of crisis resulting in unusual, atypical, dramatic or extravagant behaviours. The aim of this study was to find out if the discourse of middle age, as depicted in comedy film, supports this stereotype. Three comedy films were reviewed using dispositive analysis to critically-evaluate the actions, objects and language employed to represent middle age on-screen. The findings show that crisis, sparked by a fear of ageing and with some distinct gender differences, is a frequent feature of on-screen middle age. Building on the generally accepted hypothesis that negative stereotyping results in the development of prejudices, the findings suggest that negative representations of ageing start well before old age and therefore contribute to the process whereby film audiences are inculcated with material which engenders ageist views and behaviours.

Documentary Horror: The Transmodal Power of Indexical Violence

This article reevaluates critical distinctions between so-called ‘art-horror’ and ‘natural’ or real-world horror to challenge larger modal distinctions between fiction and documentary film and their ostensibly divergent spectatorial practices. It focuses on images of animal slaughter, which traverse boundaries between fiction and documentary, art-horror and natural horror. The indexical force of animal slaughter may displace or undo the metaphorical in fictional horror film, producing a spectatorial wavering between the registers of the figurative and the literal. Shaun Monson’s documentary film Earthlings (2005) demands of viewers a mode of spectatorial discipline derived from the horror film experience. Earthlings and its viewer reaction videos reinvent the collective performance of terror among theatrical horror film audiences for a documentary context and for online media platforms like YouTube. Earthlings functions as a form of spreadable media in which viewers’ horrified reactions are harnessed in the production of knowledge and political commitment.

Introduction

Cue: Lalo Schifrin's “Theme from Mission: Impossible.” If the return of Tom Cruise, explosions, and fast-paced chases to the screen this summer is any indication, Americans (and the global audience for Hollywood action film) love an impossible mission. Certainly, U.S. music scholars do. Reading the eight reviews of the second edition of The Grove Dictionary of American Music (hereafter, AmeriGrove II), edited by Charles Garrett (with a large and distinguished editorial team and nearly fifteen hundred contributors), as well as dipping frequently into its entries, we were deeply impressed both by the quality and ambition of the eight-volume, 5.4 million-word encyclopedia and by the “gargantuan” task (as Leta Miller puts it) with which the reviewers had been charged.

Whose revenge is it anyway? Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, intertextuality, and America's War on Terror

ABSTRACTThis article argues that Inglourious Basterds constitutes a critique of America's response to 9/11. In adhering to oppositions that accompany representations of the Holocaust in popular culture, criticism of the film fails to account for the socio-political context from which it emerges. This article argues that any pleasure in watching Jews exert retribution against their Nazi oppressors is re-evaluated when considered in light of the abuses committed during the ‘War on Terror’. Central to this critique is the film's audience, and this article discusses how the viewer is encouraged to both accept onscreen depictions of revenge and question this acceptance.