Audiences : defining and researching screen entertainment reception

Abstract

That the audience is essential for film seems to have been understood for over a century. One of the earliest and best known accounts of attending a picture show, published by Maxim Gorky in 1896, spoke of visiting “the kingdom of shadows” and described the effect upon him of seeing those silent, gray ghosts.1 Something more provocative than street scenes and baby’s breakfast would be needed, he predicted, if this was going to find “its place in Russia’s markets thirsting for the piquant and the extravagant.” Using oral history and other sources, Luke McKer- nan’s account of the development of London’s cinemas before 1914 turns on the discovery of viewers starting to “seek out films for their own sake” around 1905- 06.2 One hundred and fifteen years later, a report commissioned by the UK government on A Future for British Film was subtitled “It begins with the audience,” although some critics suggested that this was more paying lip service than taking seriously the interests of consumers.3 The problem has always been how to define such an ambiguous concept as “the audience.” Is it conceivably the specific audience for one screening – those present at the Nizhny Novgorod fair with Gorky one July day in 1896 – or, more commonly, the aggregated audience over time for a cinema or a film, as in the “the Theater Tuschinski audience,”4 or “the audience for The King’s Speech...”? Arguably, two concepts of audience have dominated the history of cinema: one is an imagined audience of “they” and “we,” often credited with prefer- ences and responses which are mere hypotheses, or projections of the author’s assumptions and prejudices; and the other is an economic or statistical audience, re- corded in terms of admissions or box-office receipts, which has become the dominant concept of “audience” for the film industry.