Making Sense of Cinema: Empirical Studies into Film Spectators and Spectatorship - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1501320211 ISBN 13: 9781501320217

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Authors

CarrieLynn D. Reinhard is an Associate 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 PhD student enrolled in the Media, Cinema, and Digital Studies program of the English Department at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, USA.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1501320211
• ISBN 13: 9781501320217
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 314
• Editor: Reinhard D.Carrielynn