Rural Cinema Exhibition and Audiences in a Global Context

Daniela Treveri Gennari, Danielle Hipkins, Catherine O'Rawe, Daniela Treveri Gennari, Danielle Hipkins, Catherine O'Rawe

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319663432
• eBook ISBN: 9783319663449
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Although it has only been in the last decade that the planet's population balance tipped from a predominantly rural makeup towards an urban one, the field of cinema history has demonstrated a disproportionate skew toward the urban. Within audience studies, however, an increasing number of scholars are turning their attention away from the bright lights of the urban, and towards the less well-lit and infinitely more variegated history of rural cinema-going.

Rural Cinema Exhibition and Audiences in A Global Context is the first volume to consider rural cinema-going from a global perspective. It aims to provide a rich and wide-ranging introduction to this growing field, and to further develop some of its key questions. It brings together eighteen international scholars or teams, all representatives of a dynamic, new field. Moving beyond a Western focus is essential for thinking through questions of rural exhibition, distribution and cinema experience, since over the relatively short history of cinema it is the rural that has dominated cinema-goers' lives in much of the developing world. To this end, the volume also innovates by bringing discussions of North American and European ruralities into dialogue with contributions on Kenya, Brazil, China, Thailand, South Africa and Australia.

© The Author(s) 2018

Daniela Treveri Gennari, Danielle Hipkins and Catherine O'Rawe (eds.)Rural Cinema Exhibition and Audiences in a Global ContextGlobal Cinemahttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66344-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Rural Cinema Exhibition and Audiences in a Global Context—Not Just a Slower Transition to Modernity

Daniela Treveri Gennari¹ , Danielle Hipkins² and Catherine O’Rawe³

(1)

Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK

(2)

University of Exeter, Exeter, UK

(3)

University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

Daniela Treveri Gennari (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Danielle Hipkins

Email: [email protected]

Catherine O’Rawe

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

In recent years, work on cinema audiences has attempted to challenge the long-held view that cinema and the city are ‘inextricably linked’ (Shiel 2011: 1) and that film is ‘the urban cultural form par excellence’ (Shiel 2011: 19–20). Although it has only been in the last decade that the planet’s population balance tipped from a predominantly rural make-up towards an urban one, it is clear that the field of cinema history has demonstrated a ‘disproportionate skew toward the urban’ (Hallam and Roberts 2014: 1).¹ All too often, ‘the disproportionate economic importance of big-city movie theatres’ has created a ‘discursive hierarchy’ between the city and the country, modernity and tradition, in which patterns in smaller towns and the countryside are read merely as ‘aberrations or the result of a lag in the pace of modernization’ (Allen 2008: 22).

Current trends within audience and reception studies are very much situated within the field of New Cinema History: this multidisciplinary approach, drawing upon history, geography , economics , cultural studies, sociology, and anthropology, is attentive to place-specific and particularized experiences of cinema-going, and patterns of distribution and exhibition, as well as to often overlooked local sources and archives. Understanding cinema as a ‘set of processes, practices, events, spaces, performances , connections, embodiments, relationships, exchanges and memories’ (Allen 2010: 266) is part of the approach taken by this volume, which seeks to add to the increasing number of scholars who are turning their attention away from the bright lights of the urban towards the less well-lit and infinitely more variegated history of rural cinema-going.

The New Cinema History, which moves away from the explanatory primacy of the film text towards an open-ended study of cinema’s flow through places, spaces, cultural, affective, and institutional sites, is also fundamentally connected to the ‘spatial turn’ in film history (Klenotic 2011). Klenotic (2011: 63) notes the need to ‘shift our focus from cinema and the city to the broad examination of the precise locations of cinema within a simultaneous multiplicity of sites (regions, cities of diverse sizes and types, rural villages, small towns, farming communities and so on)’. In this way, reconsidering practices of non-urban exhibition and cinema-going across the globe requires attention to how geographical relations (between cities and countryside , between different parts of the countryside , or between villages and towns) must also be considered in relation to other spatial practices (connected to transport , mobility , migration , trade , settlement, etc.), themselves institutionally and politically determined. As Robert Allen has argued, we need to understand local places of cinema-going as ‘internally heterogeneous nodal points in a social, economic and cultural cartography of cinema: intersections of overlapping trajectories, networks, trails, and pathways’ (Allen 2006: 24).

Rather than considering rural cinema everywhere as lagging behind the experience of metropolitan modernity in which cinema has been understood to be imbricated, understanding the ‘hybrid versions of modernity’ (Fuller-Seeley and Potamianos 2008: 7) that emerge in the uneven rural space might challenge our understanding of the globalizing influence of cinema or indeed, of the hegemony of Hollywood . The lack of glamour often attributed to non-urban cinema-going, with its often-homely spaces of exhibition and sometimes poor print quality, is one reason why the phenomenon has been relatively little studied. Another reason, as Kate Bowles (2008: 86) notes, is that it is ‘harder to define rural culture as politically progressive’. Bowles is referring to Australia, but her point resonates in a wider context, as we see in chapters on rural Czechoslovakia and China under Communism, where the rural is a potentially unruly space in need of constant monitoring and education through film.

Investigating the rural thus often challenges the grand narratives offered by urban audience studies, forcing us also to re-conceive our spatial preconceptions in order to analyse not only how the cinematic space is differently structured but also how the cinema experience is lived. In the rural space, films are more likely to be shown in alternative venues, such as churches , clubs, open -air cinemas, or even from travelling vehicles, which can radically alter the conditions of reception . Spaces of exhibition are therefore crucial to this study, featuring as theatrical, non-theatrical , travelling, improvised, and even reconstructed spaces. The multiplicity of the rural cinematic spaces shifts our understanding of spectatorship, where the ‘rural penalty’—the essential handicap of distance (Hite 1997)—becomes an advantage and contributes to the changes in the way audiences spend their leisure time.²

The difficulty in even defining rural and urban is highlighted in Elisa Ravazzoli’s chapter and echoed across the other chapters in this book. Classifying urban versus rural spaces is significantly different between the United States and Australia or between Sweden and Kenya . A small city in Canada , for example, may be rural not because of its population demographics but for its remote location, as it may suffer from the ‘tyranny of distance’ (Maltby 2011: 16) from major conurbations and from a lack of access to services normally available to towns of the same size.

Rural Cinema Exhibition and Audiences in a Global Context brings together for the first time 19 international contributions, all representative of a dynamic new field of rural cinema-going. The volume is also innovative in bringing discussions of North American and European ruralities into dialogue with contributions on Kenya , Brazil, China, Thailand , South Africa , and Australia. Moving beyond a Western focus is essential for thinking through questions of the rural, since over the relatively short history of cinema it is the rural that has dominated cinema-goers’ lives in much of the developing world.³ Challenging the ‘dominant association of cinema-going with specifically urban modernity’ is the final aim of this volume (Bowles 2008: 87).

Some of the questions we have intended to answer with this volume include the following: how does what constitutes rural cinema-going change across different national contexts? Is there such a thing as a typical ‘rural audience’? Do audiences across the globe seek out the cinema in rural places for similar reasons? To what extent do audiences in the rural context put cinema to different uses from their counterparts in large towns and cities? How do distribution and exhibition patterns change and develop in a rural context? In the face of these challenging questions, do methodologies pertaining to the field of audience studies change when we investigate the rural context?

Methodologies

Many of the contributors to this book draw on a multipronged approach that addresses programming , exhibition, and changing technologies , as well as reception and memory . These approaches draw upon histories specific to those particular locales, from the mining and transport history of Canada to the cultural rituals of the Maasai in Kenya.

The great difficulty of obtaining archival records can lead to a necessary but productive engagement with oral histories and ethnography.⁴ Some research projects, such as those described in the Italian and Belgian case studies in this volume, have taken advantage of oral history not only to reconstruct the traces of cinema-going in post-war rural areas of the countries but also to compensate for the difficulty in accessing programming sources to understand the distribution of films across the most remote regions. In other cases, interviews with the employees of local cinemas are used together with sociological studies of villages conducted at the time under investigation, in order to illustrate rural Czech audiences’ cinematic preference in terms of genre and nationality, for example.⁵

Programming analysis has constituted an invaluable source to identify patterns in film programming and distribution , and compare local differences in programming strategies, and to reconstruct film availability to audiences, as demonstrated by the chapters on Dutch exhibition, on Czech cinema-going, or on the rural encounter with cinema in New Hampshire. This approach informs us of how local film exhibitors accommodate and differentiat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Rural Cinema Exhibition and Audiences in a Global Context—Not Just a Slower Transition to Modernity
• Part I. Space, Place and Cinema-Going Experiences
• Part II. Early Cinema, Itinerant Showmen and the Lure of Modernity
• Part III. Oral Histories and the Social Experience of Rural Cinema-Going
• Part IV. Shaping Cinema Audiences for Educational and Ideological Purposes
• Part V. Film Programming Strategies, Exhibition Practices and Reception
• Back Matter