Making Sense of Cinema Empirical Studies into Film Spectators and Spectatorship

by Reinhard, CarrieLynn D.; Olson, Christopher J.

• ISBN13: 9781501302947
• ISBN10: 1501302949
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2016-02-25
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

There are a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches to researching how film spectators make sense of film texts, from the film text itself, the psychological traits and sociocultural group memberships of the viewer, or even the location and surroundings of the viewer. However, we can only understand the agency of film spectators in situations of film spectatorship by studying actual spectators' interactions with specific film texts in specific contexts of engagement.

Making Sense of Cinema: Empirical Studies into Film Spectators and Spectatorship uses a number of empirical approaches (ethnography, focus groups, interviews, historical, qualitative experiment and physiological experiment) to consider how the film spectator makes sense of the text itself or the ways in which the text fits into his or her everyday life. With case studies ranging from preoccupations of queer and ageing men in Spanish and French cinema and comparative eye-tracking studies based on the two completely different soundscapes of Monsters Inc. and Saving Private Ryan to cult fanbase of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy and attachment theory to its fictional characters, Making Sense of Cinema aligns this subset of film studies with the larger fields of media reception studies, allowing for dialogue with the broader audience and reception studies field.

Author Biography

CarrieLynn D. Reinhard is an Assistant Professor in Communication Arts and Sciences at Dominican University, Illinois, USA, where her research focuses on sense-making in media reception. She completed her Ph.D. in Communication at Ohio State University, USA, and was a post-doctoral research fellow for the Virtual World Research Group at Roskilde University in Denmark.

Christopher J. Olson is a graduate student in the Media and Cinema Studies program at DePaul University, Illinois, USA. His Master's thesis explores depictions of masculinity in the films of Nicolas Winding Refn. He previously worked as a research assistant for the Virtual World Research Group at Roskilde University in Denmark.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction: Empirical Approaches to Film Spectators and Spectatorship
CarrieLynn D. Reinhard (Dominican University, USA) and Christopher J. Olson (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA)

Chapter 2: Spectatorship in Public Space: The Moving Image in Public Art
Annie Dell'Aria (Graduate Center CUNY, USA)

Chapter 3: The Festival Collective: Cult Audiences and Asian Extreme Cinema
Jessica Hughes (University of Queensland, Australia)

Chapter 4: Transnational Preoccupations: Representations of Aging in Spanish and French Queer
Cinemas and their Reception
Darren Waldron (The University of Manchester, UK)

Chapter 5: Preferred Readings, Subject Positions and Dissociative Appropriations: Group Discussions
Following and Challenging the Tradition of Cultural Studies
Alexander Geimer (University of Hamburg, Germany)

Chapter 6: "Legolas - He's Cool...and He's Hot!": The Meanings and Implications of Audience
Attachments to Fictional Characters
Martin Barker (Aberystwyth University, UK)

Chapter 7: In Search of the Urban Child Spectator in the Late Silent Era
Amanda Fleming (Indiana University, USA)

Chapter 8: Seeing, Sensing Sound: Eye Tracking Soundscapes in Saving Private Ryan and Monsters
Inc.
Sean Redmond (Deakin University, Australia), Sarah Pink (RMIT University, Australia), Jane Stadler (RMIT University, Australia), Jenny Robinson (RMIT University, Australia), Andrea Rassell (RMIT University, Australia) and Darrin Verhagen (RMIT University, Australia)

Chapter 9: Seeing Animated Worlds: Eye Tracking and the Spectator's Experience of Narrative
Craig Batty (RMIT University, Australia), Jodi Sita (Australian Catholic University, Australia), Adrian Dyer (RMIT University, Australia), and Claire Perkins (Monash University, Australia)

Chapter 10: The Effect of Focalization and Attachment on Film Viewers' Responses to Film
Characters: Mixing Experimental Design with Qualitative Data Collection
Katalin Bálint (University of Utrecht, The Netherlands) & András Bálint Kovács (University of ELTE, Hungary)

Chapter 11: Making Sense of the American Superhero Film: Critical Engagement and Cinematic
Entanglement
CarrieLynn D. Reinhard (Dominican University, USA)

Chapter 12: Applying a Model for Comprehension of Texts in the Comprehension of an Art Film
Sermin Ildirar (Istanbul University, Turkey)

Chapter 13: Guiding Imagination by Narrative Contextualization: Exploring Cinematic Moving Images via Eye Tracking Experiments
Thorsten Kluss (Bremen University, Germany), Heinz-Peter Preusser (Bremen University, Germany), John Bateman (Bremen University, Germany), and Kerstin Schill (Bremen University, Germany)

Chapter 14: Conclusion: Considerations for Future Directions
Christopher Olson (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA)

Index