Beyond the Screen

Emerging Cinema and Engaging Audiences

Sarah Atkinson

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781501308659
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781623569242
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Runner-up for the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies Best Book Prize 2015

Beyond the Screen presents an expanded conceptualization of cinema which encompasses the myriad ways film can be experienced in a digitally networked society where the auditorium is now just one location amongst many in which audiences can encounter and engage with films. The book includes considerations of mobile, web, social media and live cinema through numerous examples and case studies of recent and near-future developments.

Through analyses of narrative, text, process, apparatus and audience this book traces the metamorphosis of an emerging cinema and maps the new spaces of spectatorship which are currently challenging what it means to be cinematic in a digitally networked era.

1

Introduction

1.1 Emerging cinema

Cinema has not yet been invented!

André Bazin, 19671

Cinema is and always has been in a perpetual state of becoming. Cinema as a concept, construct and social activity is in need of constant revision, as are its frameworks for understanding, analysis and study.

There are now more ways to produce, view, explore and experience films than ever before. The expansion of cinematic and spectatorial spaces through the pervasion of portable networked screens means that the traditional auditorium is just one of the many viewing and experiential conditions of a film. In times of rapid technological and industrial change, opportunities to creatively and critically explore the affordances of new cinematic modalities and outlets are in abundance.

Many have long since declared the death of cinema. Peter Greenaway famously proclaimed, ‘Cinema’s death date was 31 September 1983, when the remote-control zapper was introduced to the living room, because now cinema has to be interactive, multi-media art’.2 By tracing the current contours of the re-birth and re-formation of new forms of cinematic expression and experience, this book attempts to revisit Bazin’s fundamental question, ‘What is cinema?’ which has recently been augmented with the question, ‘Where is cinema?’3

The concept of a unitary cinema is being questioned by heterogeneous constellations of digitally networked and intertextual spaces within the context of the recent digital turn in which, as David Bordwell attests, ‘films have become files’.4 This renders the defining of cinema as both a form and a province with exactitude challenging. A multitude of new delivery channels, which according to Barbara Klinger, ‘weave movies firmly into the audience’s routines, rituals, and experiences’,5 has led to a diffusion of both cinematic space and audience modes of spectatorship. By framing these forms as ‘emerging cinema’ within the book’s title, I attempt to harness the currency of the projects encompassed within; many are new, recently released, or still in development and production. Multiplatform, online, non-screen based, touch-screen tablet experiences, transmedia, live exhibition experiences, social films and networked stories across both the mainstream and the para-cinematic are all herein assigned to the category of emerging cinema.

1.2 The fourth factor

We are all subjects formed in the wake of cinema, citizens of the cinematic heterotopia which is today the condition and site of a variety of extra-cinematic practices.

Victor Burgin, 20126

The dual inference of the term ‘engaging audiences’ of the book’s title denotes the simultaneous status of the audience member as both subject and object; that is, to engage an audience and to be engaged by an audience. It indicates the myriad of ways in which audiences are integrally shaping emerging cinema, and is indicative of the new satellite social formations that exist around emerging cinematic forms. The cinematic audience was validated as an object of study in the 1970s when Thorold Dickinson identified the audience as the ‘fourth factor’,7 arguing that ‘the diffusion of cinema as a science which requires as much study as production’.8 There has been an upsurge in interest around audiences initiated in 1991 by Ien Ang’s seminal study ‘Desperately Seeking the Audience’,9 which spawned a growing body of literature and research. Recent and emerging studies into audiences of media,10 including those of Karina Aveyard and Albert Moran, seek to address ‘the significant gaps in knowledge that exist around the experience of film screening and viewing in spaces outside the cinema’.11 Audience studies into new media and online spaces have also proliferated.12 In a recent study of transmedia television, Elizabeth Evans states that ‘There is a need to continue to ask questions about the impact of transmedia texts on audience engagement with television drama (along with other televisual and cinematic genres)’.13

Audiences are increasingly centralized in cinematic discourses and rhetoric as illustrated by the 2012 report published by the Department of Culture Media Sport in the UK into the Future of British Film, entitled ‘It begins with the audience’.14

To develop understandings of cinema spectatorship is to understand the behaviours of digitally networked citizens. The discursive construction of the viewer within digitally networked spaces has often been reduced to the 90/9/115 rule which is defined by Jakob Nielsen as thus: ‘In most online communities, 90 per cent of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9 per cent of users contribute a little, and 1 per cent of users account for almost all the action’. This rule and the ‘1 per cent’ will be frequently referred to, evaluated and contested throughout this book within the consideration of new and emergent audience behaviours.

This book is concerned with how new modes of viewing change the nature of the spectatorial relationship with the cinematic text. It explores how narrative comprehension in audiences is becoming more sophisticated within new frameworks for cinema engagement which capture the physical, the cognitive, the corporeal, the visceral and the haptic.

1.3 The current context

I believe we need to get rid of the proscenium. We’re never going to be totally immersive as long as we’re looking at a square, whether it’s a movie screen or whether it’s a computer screen. We’ve got to get rid of that and we’ve got to put the player inside the experience, where no matter where you look you’re surrounded by a three-dimensional experience. That’s the future.

Steven Spielberg, 201316

Within the commercial arena, advertising and branding imperatives have driven new cinematic forms, and have dictated particular aesthetics and audience engagements. In the emergent period of the advent of any new media, there is a tendency to showcase the technological capabilities of a form by presenting story as spectacle. This lineage originated with the introduction of sound and The Jazz Singer in 1927, of technicolour with The Wizard of Oz in 1939, and with the third wave of stereoscopic storytelling17 with Avatar in 2009. The ‘show-case’ imperative in which explorations of the form are embedded into the features and diegesis of the story is redolent of Tom Gunning’s theory of the ‘Cinema of Attraction’, in which the spectacle ‘is interest in itsel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Extending Cinema
• 3. Mobile Cinema
• 4. Socially Layered Cinema
• 5. The Ethics of Emerging Cinema
• 6. The Business of Emerging Cinema
• 7. The Grammar of Emerging Cinema
• 8. Epilogue
• Filmography, Appography, Gameography, Platformography
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint