AUDIENCES - a wonderful new book from Amsterdam University Press and a bumper new issue of PARTICIPATIONS!

Frame grab from Le Voyage dans la lune/A Trip to the Moon (Georges Méliès, 1902). Read Dan North's great blog entry about the audience-oriented 'attractionist aesthetic' of this film', and Frank Kessler's chapter on this film in the collection Audiences: Defining and Researching Screen Entertainment Reception

This timely volume engages with one of the most important shifts in recent film studies: the turn away from text-based analysis towards the viewer. Historically, this marks a return to early interest in the effect of film on the audience by psychoanalysts and psychologists, which was overtaken by concern with the 'effects' of film, linked to calls for censorship and moral panics rather than to understanding the mental and behavioral world of the spectator. Early cinema history has revealed the diversity of film-viewing habits, while traditional 'box office' studies, which treated the audience initially as a homogeneous market, have been replaced by the study of individual consumers and their motivations. Latterly, there has been a marked turn towards more sophisticated economic and sociological analysis of attendance data. And as the film experience fragments across multiple formats, the perceptual and cognitive experience of the individual viewer (who is also an auditor) has become increasingly accessible. With contributions from Gregory Waller, John Sedgwick and Martin Barker, this work spans the spectrum of contemporary audience studies, revealing work being done on local, non-theatrical and live digital transmission audiences, and on the relative attraction of large-scale, domestic and mobile platforms. [Publisher's blurb for Audiences: Defining and Researching Screen Entertainment Reception, ed. by Ian Christie (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012)]

Film Studies For Free is delighted to pass on news of the publication of an open access version of a wonderful new book from Amsterdam University Press. Audiences: Defining and Researching Screen Entertainment Reception is an extremely high quality collection edited by Ian Christie, Professor of Film and Media History, at Birkbeck, University of London. This great tome has, of course, been added to FSFF's permanent listing of Open Access eBooks. Please support its generous publisher and author by ordering a copy for your university library!


Since we're on the subject of audiences, it seems a brilliant moment to reproduce, below, links to the incredibly rich contents of the latest, just published, issue of PARTICIPATIONS, the excellent online journal of audience research. Not all items are directly film studies related, but they should be of interest to all researching issues of reception in film and media culture.

Audiences: Defining and Researching Screen Entertainment Reception, ed. by Ian Christie (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012)

CONTENTS

• Editorial; Acknowledgments
• Introduction: In Search of Audiences Ian Christie

PART I: Reassessing Historic Audiences

• “At the Picture Palace”: The British Cinema Audience, 1895-1920 25 by Nicholas Hiley
• The Gentleman in the Stalls: Georges Méliès and Spectatorship in Early Cinema by Frank Kessler
• Beyond the Nickelodeon: Cinemagoing, Everyday Life and Identity Politics by Judith Thissen
• Cinema in the Colonial City: Early Film Audiences in Calcutta by Ranita Chatterjee
• Locating Early Non-Theatrical Audiences by Gregory A. Waller
• Understanding Audience Behavior Through Statistical Evidence: London and Amsterdam in the Mid-1930s byJohn Sedgwick and Clara Pafort-Overduin

PART II: New Frontiers in Audience Research

• The Aesthetics and Viewing Regimes of Cinema and Television, and Their Dialectics by Annie van den Oever
• Tapping into Our Tribal Heritage: The Lord of the Rings and Brain Evolution by Torben Grodal
• Cinephilia in the Digital Age by Laurent Jullier and Jean-Marc Leveratto
• Spectator, Film and the Mobile Phone by Roger Odin
• Exploring Inner Worlds: Where Cognitive Psychology May Take Us by A dialogue between Tim J. Smith and Ian Christie

PART III: Once and Future Audiences

• Crossing Out the Audience by Martin Barker
• The Cinema Spectator: A Special Memory by Raymond Bellour
• Operatic Cinematics: A New View from the Stalls by Kay Armatage
• What Do We Really Know About Film Audiences? by Ian Christie

• Notes; General Bibliography; Notes on Contributors; Index of Names; Index of Film Titles; Index of Subjects

PARTICIPATIONS, 9.2, 2012

Contents

• Editorial - Turnbull, Sue (Joint Editor): 'Editorial introduction'

Articles

• Bore, Inger-Lise Kalviknes:'Focus Group Research and TV Comedy Audiences’
• George, Kelly C.:'Self-Help as Women's Popular Culture in Suburban New Jersey: an Ethnographic Perspective'
• Redfern, Nick:‘Correspondence Analysis of Genre Preferences in UK Film Audiences’

Special Section: Comic-Book Audiences

• Sabin, Roger:'Special Section Introduction’
• Barker, Martin:'The Reception of Joe Sacco's Palestine’
• Berenstein, Ofer:'Comic-Book Fans' Recommendations Ceremony: A Look at the Inter-personal Communication Patterns of a Unique Readers/Speakers Community'
• Burke, Liam:‘"Superman in Green": An Audience Study of Comic-Book Film Adaptations Thor and Green Lantern’
• Gordon, Ian:‘Writing to Superman: Towards an Understanding of the Social Networks of Comic Book Fans’
• Patrick, Kevin:‘"Phans", not "Fans": The Phantom and Australian Comic-Book Fandom’
• Sabeti, Shari:‘"Arts of Time and Space": the Perspectives of a Teenage Audience on Reading Novels and Graphic Novels’
• Woo, Benjamin:‘Understanding Understandings of Comics: Reading and Collecting as Media-Oriented Practices’

Special Section: Music Audiences

• Bennett, Lucy:'Special Section Introduction’
• Anderson, Lauren:'"That's how it's supposed to make you feel": Talking with Audiences about 'Both Sides Now' and Love Actually’
• Anderson, Tonya:'Still Kissing Their Posters Goodnight: Female Fandom and the Politics of Popular Music'
• Avdeeff, Melissa:‘Technological Engagement and Musical Eclecticism: An Examination of Contemporary Listening Practices’
• Baym, Nancy K.:‘Fans or Friends? Seeing Social Media As Musicians Do’
• Duffett, Mark:‘Boosting Elvis: a Content Analysis of Editorial Stories from One Fan Club Magazine’
• Kaun, Anne & Fredrik Stiernstedt:‘Media Memories: The Case of Youth Radio DT64’
• Potts, Liza:‘Amanda Palmer and the #LOFNOTC: How Online Fan Participation is Rewriting Music Labels’
• Zaborowski, Rafal:‘Simple Unchanging Stories about Things We Already Know’: Japanese youth and popular songs’

Special Section: Audience Involvement and New Production Paradigms [COST Action]

• Noguera, José-Manuel, Francesca Pasquali & Mélanie Bourdaa:'Special Section Introduction’
• Hills, Matt:‘Torchwood's Trans-transmedia: Media Tie-ins and Brand “Fanagement”’
• García-Avilés, José Alberto:‘Roles of Audience Participation in Multiplatform Television: from Fans and Consumers, to Collaborators and Activists’
• Boccia Artieri, Giovanni:'Productive Publics and Transmedia Participation’
• Vobic, Igor & Ana Milojevic:‘Societal Roles of Online Journalists in Slovenia and Serbia: Self-Perceptions in Relation to the Audience and Print Journalists’
• Cordeiro, Paula:‘Radio becoming R@dio: Convergence, Interactivity and Broadcasting Trends in Perspective’’
• Bennett, Lucy:'Transformations through Twitter: The England Riots, Television Viewership and Negotiations of Power through Media Convergence'
• Horváth, Dóra, Tamás Csordás & Nóra Nyiro:‘Re-written by Machine and New Technology: Did the Internet Kill the Video Star?’
• Grandío, María del Mar & Joseba Bonaut:'Transmedia Audiences and Television Fiction: a Comparative Approach between Skins (UK) and El Barco (Spain)’
• Berriman, Liam:‘Negotiating Proximity: The Co-Existence of Habbo and its Fansites’
• Lin, Yu-Wei:‘The Emergence of the Techno Elite Audience and Free/Open Source Content: A Case Study on BBC Backstage’
• Villi, Mikko:‘Social Curation in Audience Communities: UDC (User-distributed Content) in the Networked Media Ecosystem’

Special Section: Multi-Method Audience Research [COST Action]

• Schrøder, Kim Christian, Uwe Hasebrink, Sascha Hölig and Martin Barker:'Special Section Introduction’
• Aveyard, Karina:'Observer, Mediator and Empiricist: an Account of Methodological Fusion in the Study of Rural Cinema Audiences in Australia’
• Barker, Martin & Ernest Mathijs:'Researching World Audiences: the Experience of a Complex Methodology'
• Biltereyst, Daniël, Kathleen Lotze & Philippe Meers:‘Triangulation in Historical Audience Research: Reflections and Experiences from a Multi-Methodological Research Project on Cinema Audiences in Flanders’
• Courtois, Cédric:‘When Two Worlds Meet: an Inter-Paradigmatic Mixed Method Approach to Convergent Audiovisual Media Consumption’
• Dhoest, Alexander:‘Mixed Methods, Bifocal Vision: Combining Quantitative and Qualitative Data to Assess Public Service Performance’
• Hasebrink, Uwe &Hanna Domeyer:'Media Repertoires as patterns of behaviour and as Meaningful Practices: a Multimethod Approach to Media Use in Converging Media Environments’
• Nyiro, Nóra:‘Nested Analysis-based Mixed Method Research of Television and Video-recording Audiences’
• Schrøder, Kim Christian:‘Methodological Pluralism as a Vehicle of Qualitative Generalization’

Reviews

• Gelly, Christophe & David Roche (eds.):'Approaches to Film and Reception Theories / Cinéma et Théories de la Réception’ (Reviewed by Martin Barker)
• Miller, Daniel:'The Comfort of Things, and Stuff' (Reviewed by Phil Ramsey)
• Thumim, Nancy:‘Self-Representation and Digital Culture' (Reviewed by Justin Battin)