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The question of how audiences form to watch specialised and mainstream films within regional film provision goes to the heart of current debates in audience studies. Audience reception studies have made audiences increasingly visible, while audience surveys track trends and film policy makers gather information about audience preferences and demographics. Little attention has been paid to the specific contextual relationships and interactions between films and individuals that generate and sustain audiences. Online film consumption and an increasing array of cultural events mean that the nature and formation of film audiences is changing and that film watching is a diverse and extensive experience. This has sharpened the debate about how to conceptualise audiences and their formation. This monograph extends and develops the conceptualisation of audiences as being interactive and relational by introducing three innovative concepts: ‘personal film journeys’, five types of audience formation, and five geographies of film provision within new theorisation of audiences that sees them as a process. A challenge of audience research is how to capture the richness of people’s social and cultural engagement with film that materialises in broader audience trends within contexts of provision; to achieve this, an innovative mixed-methods research and computational ontology approach is used. The book is significant because it develops new, ground-breaking theory and concepts and an innovative research methodology based on an extensive dataset derived from empirical research in the under-researched area of regional film audiences.
Introduction This chapter reviews the knowledge and literature about audiences generally, and film audiences in particular, and assesses the strengths and limitations of current conceptualisations of the audience. The chapter discusses the development of a new framework and underpinning theoretical approach that can address the limits of previous research and scholarship on audiences. In doing so, it provides the overall framework of analysis used throughout this monograph to consider how audiences form and the different
Being a historian of eugenics in Denmark, I have never been in want of an audience. 1 Writing in the 1990s, it seemed that the mere mention of the concept of eugenics was enough to create a strong interest in what I had to say about this – at the time – forgotten chapter of Danish history. German Rassenhygiene and its relationship to the Holocaust were well known, but it was a
both attracted and scandalised audiences and reviewers alike – for instance, Penny Perrick of the Sun commented ‘Let’s hope that plastic people with horrible habits like the Mansons are banished from the screen forever’, 3 whereas Times reviewer, Michael Church, assigned the series ‘a curious magic’. 4 Also telling of the drama’s 1970s’ contexts was Times reviewer, Michael Ratcliffe’s comment that, ‘bright
Preaching, audience and authority Chapter 2 Preaching, audience and authority T he ‘matter of the ministry’, as Thomas Horton described it, exercised the minds both of preachers and the Restoration establishment.1 In 1661, Cavalier politicians framing the Treason Act had publicly laid the blame for the late rebellion ‘in very great measure’ upon seditious preaching.2 Perversely, instead of neutering the pulpits, the Act of Uniformity served to emphasise the continuing centrality of preaching in public debate. Most of the individuals the Cavalier
she has to say includes a determination not to add padding in order to make up required length. As she said to interviewers at the Glasgow Film Festival in 1996: ‘If you feel you’re expressing something which is not worth more than ten minutes, why use more?’ Some of her films have met considerable public acclaim and gained an international audience, perhaps most strikingly Sans toit ni loi/Vagabonde ; some remain difficult to see even in France
-authors might publish content with a range of different audiences in mind, for whom they might communicate different messages – sometimes simultaneously. While Bernard held a position fundamentally opposed to Catholicism throughout his career, his publications began centring anti-Catholic content c. 1617 and continued that way for roughly a decade: clearly to 1626, and in certain ways into
Introduction One of the key challenges currently facing audience studies is to identify and understand the characteristics of audiences. The various ways in which individuals can view film have widened and diversified with the development of the creative industries and in the digital era. Both of these offer choice in how audiences can access and engage with culture, including film. These opportunities to choose more widely and frequently have coincided with a rise in consumerism (including cultural consumption) and the
Introduction To address BtM's aim of fostering inclusive access to a diverse range of films and enhancing film and audience experience there is a need to develop new conceptual and theoretical insights about audiences – especially in regard to how they form. There are two main reasons for this. First, as discussed in Chapter 1 , the characteristics of audiences and their dynamics have changed over time, so concepts about audiences that were forged in earlier historical periods do not fully capture the current types of film
Introduction This chapter discusses the methodology of Beyond the Multiplex, which examined the ways in which film audiences form in English regions. The methodology was designed to address BtM's central research question, which was: ‘How do audiences engage with, and form in different ways, around specialised and mainstream films?’ The specific design of the methodology was based on the theoretical framework described in Chapter 1 , which addresses both agency and structure in the ways audiences form. To do this, the