Cinema, Modernity and Audiences: Revisiting and Expanding the Debate

Daniel Biltereyst

I was struck by how little the audience or even exhibition featured in the received film history ... film history had been written as if films had no audiences or were seen by everyone and in the same way.

(Allen 1990: 348)

Introduction: audiences and the institutional turn

In his frequently cited Screen article on audiences and film history, written in the early 1990s, Robert C. Allen makes an appeal for a more thorough and empirically oriented inquiry into film audiences and reception. Hoping that 'no film scholar would write a serious film history with the near elision of the audience', Allen perceived reception to be more than merely including references to audience figures or exhibition contexts (1990: 348). Reception encompassed the confrontation between the semiotic and the social – or, in a similar phrasing, the tension between the film text on the one hand and the historical conditions and mechanisms of reception on the other. For Allen, this dichotomy implies that film historical scholarship requires the acknowledgement of 'what generalizable forces help to account for the unstudiable and for any individual investigator, incomprehensibly numerous and diverse instances of reception' (1990: 355–56). Likewise, scholars such as Janet Staiger (1992) and Michèle Lagny (1994) compellingly voice this necessity for a more ambitious research agenda on historical audiences, and their interrelationship with broader societal forces. Lagny insists on the importance of conceiving cinema as an open field, 'where different forces (economic, social, political, technical, cultural or aesthetic) come into being and confront each other' (1994: 41). Although film is 'an essential tool' for understanding the 'period ranging from the end of the 19th century and the time in the 20th century during which it had been the most important form of visual mass entertainment', Lagny argues that 'political and social conflicts, economic structures and circumstances leave institutional traces which are more relevant than film' (1994: 26). Lagny's ideal conception of film history, which leaves ample space to wider institutional histories, includes 'an articulation among three types of analysis, dealing with cultural objects, with the framework of their creation, making and circulation, and finally with their consumption' (1994: 27).

Two decades later, one might assert that this call for a more zealous and empirically grounded research curriculum on audiences and reception has been heard. Over the past 15 years, a wide range of studies on historical film audiences appeared in journals, monographs and edited volumes, all explicitly aiming to get beyond the screen and textual interpretations of films in order to understand cinema as a more complex social phenomenon (e.g. Biltereyst et al. 2012; Fuller-Seeley 2008; Kuhn 2002; Stokes and Maltby 1999). In the introduction to a recent volume on 'new cinema history', Richard Maltby argues that in recent years a shared effort has engaged 'contributors from different points on the disciplinary compass, including history, geography, cultural studies, economics, sociology and anthropology, as well as film and media studies' in order to examine the circulation and consumption of films, or cinema 'as a site of social and cultural exchange' (2011: 3). Other recent volumes, which aim to display ways of conducting film history and film historiographic methodologies, now clearly contain sections on audiences, reception or consumption (e.g. Chapman et al. 2007; Lewis and Smoodin 2007).

This emerging international trend of historical film audience and reception studies encompasses the usage of a wide variety of methods, theoretical underpinnings, temporal and spatial limitations. In an attempt to grab the historical audience, scholars make quantitative analyses of box-office revenues (e.g. Sedgwick, 2011); they use corporate reports or other recordings and testimonies on the audience coming from the industry (e.g. Sullivan 2010); researchers turn to programming analyses in order to understand what cinemagoers saw in what kind of theatres in what kind of locations (e.g. Biltereyst et al. 2011); they examine letters and other traces left by historical film fans; they use questionnaires or started to interview older cinemagoers (e.g. Taylor...