영화관객 연구

Approaches to Cinema Audience: From Spectatorship to Context of Consumption

Even though the presence of audience is an essential part of the film, actual film audiences get very little attention. This paper offers an examination of the historical approaches to understanding cinema audiences and focuses on understanding audience consumption of film texts, and suggests new ways of looking at the relationship between film as a textual form and those who receive, interpret and consume them. There is no single definitive cinema audience, although it has always been an essential feature of a film text. Therefore, audience, as a key concept, remains deeply problematic as we can never really know. They are often an elusive group of people. Cinemagoing experience is about far more than the watching of a film. The semiotic and psychoanalytic 'screen theory' of the 1970s represented a particular development of the spectatorship in accordance with its text-centered conventions. In 'screen theory' there can be no struggle at the site of the interface between subject and text, since contradictory position have already been predetermined at the psychoanalytic level. The 'screen theory' may be assumed to justify its neglect of the interplay of other discourses on the text/reader encounter. Drawing on Freud and Lacan, Mulvey argued that the conventions of Hollywood narrative and its voyeuristic and fetishistic approach to the female form conspired to control woman as image and to privilege the male spectator. Alternative challenge came from the developing academic discipline of cultural studies. Cultural studies approaches were overt rejections of models of spectatorship associated with 'screen theory'. They demonstrated that different audiences decoded and consumed texts in different ways, and proposed more dynamic audience than passive spectator of 'screen theory'. Even the concept of 'pleasure', which is often characterized as 'escapism', was offered. These studies still remain focused on relationship between audiences and texts rather than the activities of film consumption itself. The need to define audiences has been driven by commercial prerogatives. From a film business perspective, audiences need to be measured. As we know, film industry makes films and it needs audiences to pay to watch them. Now, considerations of wider social context of viewing and intertextuality, the way in which a single film might require knowledge of several other films to grasp all of its meaning, are growing concerns. Also, the contemporary phenomenon of convergence and 'overflow' transforms the audience relationship with the text from limited, one-way engagement. In addition, the distribution side becomes more important in another way today because the distribution of culture has increased and continues to increase, giving more people more choices. Distribution companies are more like other corporations. Age, gender, race may be becoming more important factors than they were in the past. Now, people do not limit their choices to one culture.