Film audiences: Personal journeys with film 9781526157843

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Film audiences

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Film audiences Personal journeys with film Bridgette Wessels, Peter Merrington, Matthew Hanchard and David Forrest with the Beyond the Multiplex team

Manchester University Press

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Introduction and Chapters 1, 2, 5, 8 and Conclusion © Bridgette Wessels 2023 Chapters 3 and 4 © Peter Merrington 2023 Chapter 6 © David Forrest 2023 Chapter 7 © Matthew Hanchard 2023 The right of Bridgette Wessels, Peter Merrington, Matthew Hanchard and David Forrest to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN  978 1 5261 5782 9  hardback First published 2023 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover credit: Liyannalee / Wikimedia CC BY SA 4.0 Cover design: Abbey Akanbi, Manchester University Press Typeset by New Best-set Typesetters Ltd

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For Erica Ashton (1940–2019), with thanks for a wonderful friendship and fond memories of sharing our personal film journeys over many years. Bridgette

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Contents

List of figures and tables page viii Acknowledgements ix Glossary xi Abbreviations xxv Introduction: understanding contemporary film audiences 1 1 Understanding audiences: conceptualising and analysing film audiences 16 2 Film audiences in English regions: research context and methodology 38 3 Film provision: film policy and film distribution 62 4 Geographies of film provision: places, venues and screens 81 5 Personal film journeys: engaging with film during the lifecourse 104 6 Finding and sharing meaning in specialised films 124 7 Five types of audience experiences: relations and interactions among audiences, films and screens 145 8 The audience as a process: concepts, relations and interactions 166 Conclusion: audience as a process – personal film journeys, regional film provision and lived film experience 192 Appendix 1 List of analysed industry and policy documents 217 Appendix 2 Socio-cultural index of film consumers 220 Appendix 3 List of questions asked in the three-wave survey 224 Bibliography 265 Index 273

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Figures and tables

Figures 2.1 Overall dimensions of the formation of film audiences 2.2 Dimensions of audience formation 2.3 Overall research design and process 2.4 Indicative outline of the computational ontology 8.1 Dimensions of audience formation

page 42 42 55 58 168

Tables 2.1 Socio-cultural profile measures 3.1 Comparison of film exhibition investment in UK 7.1 Age group of those surveyed and who they watch films with (count and percentage) 8.1 Meta-concepts and concepts of audience formation

49 77 150 171

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Acknowledgements

This monograph would not have been possible without the hard work and dedication of all our project team members, past and present. The monograph is based on the work of a team of researchers from the universities of Glasgow, Sheffield, York and Liverpool. The researchers are: Bridgette Wessels, Peter Merrington and Matthew Hanchard (University of Glasgow), Michael Pidd, David Forrest, Jamie McLaughlin and Kathy Rogers (University of Sheffield), Simeon Yates (University of Liverpool) and Andrew Higson, Huw Jones, Nathen Townsend and Roderik Smits (University of York). Sarah Hargreaves, Rosie Shute and Helen Rana supported the main team by conducting some audience member interviews, and Helen Rana also facilitated the film-elicitation focus groups and did sterling work in proof-reading the entire manuscript. Steven Corbett had an instrumental role in the precursory pilot study ‘How Audiences Form’ (Corbett et al., 2014). Our gratitude also goes to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for their generous funding of the project (Ref: AH/P005780/2), without which the project could never have taken place. The project benefited by working with the British Film Institute (BFI) film hubs in the regions studied, and special thanks go to Ian Wilde and Sally Folkard from Film Hub North, and Anna Kime who worked at Film Hub North in the first year of the Beyond the Multiplex project, and Maddy Probst and Tiffany Holmes from Film Hub South West. Special thanks also to the BFI research team, who engaged with the findings as they emerged and provided useful feedback. The Audience Agency conducted the three-wave survey for the project in each of the project’s regions. The project also benefited from feedback and suggestions from its Advisory Board members, Mark Cosgrove (Watershed Cinema), Elizabeth Evans (University of Nottingham), Sylvia Harvey (University of Leeds), Julia Lamaison (BFI), Anna Kime (freelance film consultant), Andrew Prescott (University of Glasgow) and Philip Schlesinger (University of

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x Acknowledgements Glasgow). Most importantly, we thank all our research participants for their generosity and openness in sharing their thoughts and knowledge about film and film audiences, without whom this research could never have been completed. This book is therefore based on the collaborative work of a team of researchers and others who contributed to the project. Given this, the authors are named together with the Beyond the Multiplex team. In terms of actual writing contribution to the book, Bridgette Wessels is the lead author, crafting the proposal for the book and writing the Introduction, Chapters 1, 2, 5, 8 and the Conclusion, as well as reviewing and consolidating the whole book. Peter Merrington wrote Chapters 3 and 4. Matthew Hanchard wrote the first drafts of Chapters 1, 2 and 5, which Bridgette Wessels then revised and developed further, and David Forrest wrote Chapter 6. Matthew Hanchard wrote Chapter 7 and produced the figures, diagrams and bibliography.

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Glossary

Artworlds Howard Becker’s (1982) framework for examining the collaborations that create different cultural products. This includes various people’s participation in the formation of a cultural product and how people from different social positions and perspectives work together to form a ‘world’ around a particular cultural product or work of art. The framework is composed of interconnections between elements such as conventions, resources, processes of aesthetic judgement and value systems, the role of governments in legislating and providing financial frameworks, and the selective choices of those working in the artworld to shape the final cultural product Audience An interactive and relational construct where people come together to watch film in a similar way: as an individualised audience of one, as a group of people with linked lives, as a venue-specific community or through a sense of a global and digital audiencehood. Audiences are tied to specific experiences of watching film, particular types of engagement and participation and a specific set of film-watching practices Audience development An approach and set of techniques used by film exhibitors, and primarily those associated with public funding, to: (1) increase the frequency of existing audiences attending venues to watch films; (2) increase the scale and size of film audiences, e.g. by building new ones while sustaining existing ones, or by re-engaging lost audiences; and (3) increase or change the diversity of audience composition, e.g. by attracting audiences from different ages or ethnicities, or that live in specific areas with low film consumption rates Audience formation Refers to the process of audiences being brought together as discrete units, i.e. how people come together to form an audience through various relations and interactions

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xii Glossary Audiencehood When people experience and take part in particular types of audience, they are often reflexive in their interactions and relationships with films, places and others, and in the communications that underpin those connections, through which they generate senses of ‘audiencehood’ (see Chapter 9; also Corbett and Wessels, 2017) Audience studies A field of study drawing on literary theory, cultural studies and media and communications theories to examine the ways on which people receive, make sense of, experience and practise their consumption of various media (see Chapter 2). For film, audience studies has largely revolved around interpretation and reception of film texts and/or the effect of films on audiences, or on the ways in which people experience being part of an audience when watching, in particular social, spatial or temporal contexts. In the United Kingdom, key audience studies journals with a focus on film include Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies and the British Journal of British Cinema and Television Boutique cinema Small commercial cinema chains that emerged in the late 1990s in the United Kingdom, hosting two or three screens that primarily market themselves around a luxury film-watching experience, and that screen a mixture of mainstream and specialised films (see Chapter 8) Childhood and adolescence An amalgam of two particular stages in the lifecourse that form the start of an individual’s personal film journey, when they are likely to first be introduced to film. In the research for Beyond the Multiplex this life stage relates to the period from birth up to the age of 17 (inclusive), coming immediately prior to early adulthood Coding The term coding is used in three ways within the monograph: (1) qualitative data analysis involved a three-stage process of open, focused and theoretical coding. Here data are tagged within NVivo under a specific ‘code’, which may be descriptive or conceptual, providing a way of embedded mark-up (XML) with any extracted transcripts (see Chapter 3); (2) quantitative data analysis – both from the Beyond the Multiplex survey and in the use of external data for secondary analysis (see Chapter 3), involved variables being coded to enable that analysis, e.g. in the survey the variable for gender was coded as 1 for ‘Female’, 2 for ‘Male’ and 3 for ‘Identified in another way’; and (3) developing the graph database, website and computational ontology required the use of various programming, scripting and mark-up languages, including XML, HTML, CSS, SQL/MySQL, Javascript, PHP

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Glossary xiii and R. Developing products within these languages is commonly referred to as coding Community cinema A type of cinema that revolves around a group activity rather than a specific venue. It tends to be run and managed by volunteer staff and attended by small groups with shared interests and/or from the same geographically local area, e.g. a pre-existing community. Examples include film societies and film clubs, pop-up and outdoor cinemas; school, college and university student cinemas; set screenings in community centres, village/town halls, arts and multipurpose centres, and local film festivals Comprehension and interpretation Comprehension refers to a process whereby the textual meaning of a film is decoded by a viewer and understood, and is connected to a process of interpretation where comprehended texts (such as film) are made meaningful by drawing on resources that have been gathered over a person’s life through contextual and personal circumstances (cf. Livingstone, 2007). Both processes rely on viewers’ textual knowledge of film techniques, tropes and styles, and extratextual knowledge from personal life experiences. In this, people are not always in agreement with others in their interpretation of texts, e.g. there can be multiple understandings of the same film (see Chapters 1 and 6) Computational ontology See Ontology Conventions See Artworlds Cultural cinema A movement, also referred to as ‘independent cultural cinema’, in which specialised films (those that would not normally be exhibited in mainstream cinemas) are promoted and supported through exhibition, providing audience exposure to greater film diversity Cultural forms A concept developed by Chaney (1983; 1990) in which cultural products and activities are comprised of three interrelated areas of activity: (1) the relations of production, which include the ways in which specific cultural products and/or activities are created, and the various relationships and interactions this involves, including the particular conventions surrounding them; (2) the narratives of the form, which include the themes, stories, genres, styles and narratives of particular cultural forms, including the ways in which they are presented to audiences as well as how they are interpreted and understood; and (3) participation with cultural forms, including the

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xiv Glossary processes by which they are produced and made meaningful. This includes the value systems involved with their production, distribution and exhibition, each of which shapes audiences’ potential for interacting with the narratives of the form in particular ways, including the kinds of social relationships and bonds those interactions revolve around. The notion of cultural forms holds that film is a ‘medium’ that has several different cultural forms. For example, mainstream action films and foreign-language documentary films are two distinct cultural forms for the medium of film (see Chapter 1) Cultural life Refers to a person’s participation in activities that revolve around cultural products or services, e.g. watching films, listening to music or reading a book. An individual’s relationship with those activities and products/services may be personal or social Cultural omnivore/univore Refers to the notion that people may have a wide-ranging set of tastes in terms of the cultural products and services they consume (omnivorousness), or they may prefer to consume a narrow range (inivorousness). Alternatively, they may slip between the two and consume widely but focus narrowly on one set of taste more frequently than others (paucivorousness) – see Chapter 8 Data model In traditional database design a data model provides the base structure that all data are tidied and wrangled to fit. For example, one database table may contain all types of film-watching venues, while another might contain a list of film genres, with a data model dictating the type and format to go into each table and how the two tables relate to one another Data visualisation (dataviz) To make data understandable, data visualisations (commonly referred to as ‘dataviz’) provide easily accessible visual displays. In statistical research this often involves graphs and charts, from basic pie charts through to more complex ones. Dataviz can be static (such as those printed in a book or article) or interactive, where users can manipulate or adjust key settings. In Beyond the Multiplex, the dataviz are interactive. For example, on the map visualisation users are able to add/remove layers from a map and zoom in/out to see places at differing scales Devolved localism A process following the United Kingdom’s Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government’s Localism Act 2011, through which the distribution of monies and responsibilities across various sectors was decentralised away from central government and towards local authorities

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Glossary xv Digital audience A type of audience (and audience experience) that involves people watching online via digital media, discussing or sharing films online or having a digital mediated awareness of others’ film-watching Digital Cinema Package Refers to the set of digital files used to project a film onto a contemporary digital cinema screen, including its visual imagery, audio, subtitles and other assistive features, and detail on their display sequence and timing Disruption/change In the open coding of qualitative data, the term ‘disrupt’ was used to describe a change to a person’s biographical narrative, e.g. divorce, period of illness or relocating home to another town or city. For literary clarity, the term ‘change’ has been used throughout the monograph in place of ‘disrupt’ Distribution systems A concept within Artworlds that refers to the organisational practices and specific relations and interactions involved in the production and distribution of particular cultural services and activities and, in particular, the mechanisms through which they reach audiences Diverse film city A city with a broad ecology of different types of film exhibition, including multiple commercial mainstream and independent exhibitors as well as other film-related organisations such as film archives, filmmakers and producers Diverse film town A town without mainstream or multiplex film exhibition provision, but a thriving independent local film exhibition ecology Early adulthood As the second life stage (third in the WHO (2000) categorisation), early adulthood covers the age range 18 to 24 (inclusive) and is often marked by a period of self-discovery and learning, and of forming new connections. In the United Kingdom, this life stage entails a period when people tend to move out of home for the first time and live independently, go to university, begin to start a career and/or gain new linked lives, e.g. by developing new friendships, intimate relationships, and/or by having children Entity The computational ontology used in Beyond the Multiplex consists of ‘triples’. Entities are one element in triples, which provide a high-level grouping of data points, e.g. the entity ‘Film Genre’ provides a way of grouping together film genres and subgenres across all the data (see Chapter 2)

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xvi Glossary Entity characteristic The computational ontology is composed of ‘triples’, each of which contain a set of tri-part entities, entity characteristics and relationships. Entity characteristics contain useful data about entities at an abstract level. For example, the entity ‘Film Genre’ contains detail on particle genres and subgenres across the data, while the entity characteristic ‘Emotions’ provides an understanding of the emotions and reactions people have when watching films, e.g. ‘being shocked’, ‘being scared’, ‘being made to laugh’, ‘being engrossed’, ‘being uplifted’. The two parts can be connected via relationships, so that the emotions gained from watching particular genres can be seen (see Chapter 2) Film Audience Network (FAN) A network established by the British Film Institute which focuses on audience development Film-elicitation focus group Focus groups typically involve bringing six to twelve people together at the same time and place in a particular setting to discuss a topic, with the researcher acting as a facilitator or moderator. In visual sociology and audience studies, photo-elicitation and film-elicitation have been used to gain meaningful insights into a topic – with participants asked to produce or engage with a particular set of images or film and discuss elements of it. Beyond the Multiplex combined the two methods by screening short clips of specialised films within focus groups and then asking participants to take part in facilitated discussion of their interpretation of those clips (see Chapters 2 and 6) Filmworlds The notion of Artworlds applied specifically to film Global audiences A type of film audience and film audience experience that revolves around a sense of oneness in watching a new release and/or culturally, politically or socially significant film alongside others – who may be geographically dispersed and therefore watching in other places and at different times (see Chapter 7) Graph database A specific structure for a database that relies on triples rather than a preset table structure and is therefore able to be adapted with ease. For Beyond the Multiplex, a neo4j graph database was used to store all research data, so that an ontology could be developed

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Glossary xvii Group audiences A film audience type (and experience) that revolves around watching films with others. This includes small dyadic groups (e.g. couples) through to large social groups, and can include or exclude children. The experience tends to foreground sociality over immersion within film content, with the audience forming around and having a trajectory steeped in activities before and/or after the moment of watching a film Habitus A concept introduced within Bourdieu’s (1984) Distinction, which explains that people are structurally differentiated by their background (e.g. by age, ethnicity, educational level, gender, household income and where they live) and by different levels of cultural, economic and social capital. For Bourdieu, these differentiations are ossified within a person’s dispositions and tastes through early socialisation. He notes that they are obdurate and not fully fixed, but are continually re-enacted in a person’s routines and habits Hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) A form of cluster analysis that goes beyond identifying correlation between two variables based on closeness/proximity and strength of association, by also looking at how different clusters aggregate. In Beyond the Multiplex, HCA has been used agglomeratively (an inductive approach that identifies hierarchies of clusters within the data) rather than divisively (a deductive approach that searches for pre-existing clusters to identify their hierarchy within the data). For example, an agglomerative HCA of secondary data and Beyond the Multiplex survey data provided an understanding of how strongly associated the consumption of particular film genres is with various socio-cultural profile measures (see Chapters 2 and 4) Independent cinema Small-scale cinema venues, often with one or two screens, that primarily show specialised films and offer additional elements such as question-andanswer sessions, and directorial and expert speakers. They tend to be located in purpose-built spaces with distinctive layouts and focus on forging venuebased identities that attract venue-specific audiences Individualised audiences A type of film audience and film audience experience that revolves around watching alone, often in order to engage with and immerse within a film without distractions from others Interactions See Relations and interactions

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xviii Glossary Interpretation See Comprehension and interpretation Latent class analysis (LCA) An exploratory statistical method for identifying unmeasured (and thus not pre-existing) ‘classes’ or groupings within a dataset by comparing similarities and differences between key variables and measures. For example, using LCA to compare people by age, ethnicity, gender, household income and home postcode according to their film genre preferences and participation in a wide range of cultural activities across different datasets provided a set of ‘classes’ around film consumption, e.g. that arthouse and foreign-language film viewers tend to be within a class of graduates in midlife with a household income >£30,000 per year, who like classical, pop and rock music, news and going to pubs and nightclubs (see Chapter 4) Lifecourse The lifecourse is a conceptual set of categories that the World Health Organisation (WHO, 2000) use to cover the trajectory of a person’s life over time, as they pass through stages of birth, childhood and adolescence, early adulthood, midlife and old age. There are a variety of patterns in people’s lives at each of these stages, and the agency people have at each stage is shaped within historical and institutional contexts and by the relationships and interactions they have with various places, technologies and people. As such, the lifecourse is closely aligned to personal biography. Within pluralistic contemporary social life, lifecourse trajectories and transitions between stages vary considerably from person to person. Even though there is variety in trajectories and transitions, people have a sense of their own lifecourse, and of difference from and similarities with others, with the unfolding of their lives often following particular patterns Limited underserved areas Urban and rural areas where there is no or very limited availability of any form of film exhibition available to local populations Linked lives The concept of ‘linked lives’, adapted from Bentson, Elder and Putney (2003), recognises the interconnections that exist among family, friends, colleagues, peers and other people who interact with one another that are embedded through the lived relations of places and within social institutions. These interconnections have cultural, economic and social dimensions. With film, for example, this is notable in who people watch film with, where they do so, how education, social background and discussion with others feature in their film choices, and in the factors that enable people and/or act as barriers for them in watching films in particular ways or at particular venues

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Glossary xix Mainstream film A set of highly popular types and genres of feature films with specific conventions on length, format and content, e.g. a ninety-minute action film in which the protagonist succeeds against all odds Mainstream film town A town with predominantly mainstream, multiplex film exhibition provided by the major national cinema chains, and limited or underdeveloped independent film exhibition Mainstream multiplex city A city with predominantly mainstream, multiplex film exhibition provided by the major national cinema chains, and limited or underdeveloped independent film exhibition Me/I The ‘I’ is the phase of the self that enables a person to act beyond habits and social expectations. This includes being agentic in taking personal risks and in being creative. It is generative, and constitutes the distinctiveness of a person, and is the mechanism by which people reflect on social knowledge and their place within the world. The ‘me’ is the social object of the ‘I’, denoting the self-image a person envisages when they reflect on the ways in which others might perceive and make judgements about them. The ‘I’ and the ‘me’ exist in relation to each other in a mutually processual relationship Midlife As a core stage in the lifecourse, midlife ranges from 25 to 65 (inclusive), following on from early adulthood (WHO, 2000). In Beyond the Multiplex, the analysis saw midlife as ending at 55, covering a stage of most of adult life where a person has various time and energy commitments: raising children and family life, work life and career building, and the various stresses and strains involved Mimesis An approach to consumption studies that focuses on individuals’ experiences to examine agentic forms of exploration and self-development in the accumulation of different personal experiences. It is derived from the psychoanalytical and phenomenological concept of mimesis Mixed-methods research A research project that involves more than one method of data collection, where findings are integrated, synthesised or compared during analysis Multilevel research A type of mixed-methods research in which methods are combined from different levels, and typically from opposing paradigms, e.g. quantitative

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xx Glossary and qualitative. For example, large-scale aggregate data from a survey may be combined with insights from interviews with individuals Multiplex cinema A type of cinema venue that emerged in the 1980s in the United Kingdom, typically offering ten screens or more, showing primarily mainstream films. They are typically situated in out-of-town sites with lots of surface car-parking space and they tend to offer a range of leisure and consumption activities, such as fast-food outlets and computer games arcades Narrative The term is used in four ways throughout this book to refer to: (1) the overarching storyline or plot of a film; (2) people’s personal narratives (biographies) as their trajectories through the lifecourse and through which they gather personal experiences; (3) shared cultural narratives, as the dominant and overarching set of values within a society are expressed within/challenged by films that people measure their social selves against; and (4) policy narratives, as in the particular direction and changes to discourse on film policy over time New cinema histories A subfield of audience studies that emerged in the 1990s that focuses on historicising the experience of watching films in particular social, spatial and temporal contexts. It sought to do so by drawing on empirical data rather than grand theory Old age In the lifecourse, old age is a stage characterised by the period from retirement until death and comes immediately after midlife, typically at age 65 (WHO, 2000). In Beyond the Multiplex analyses led this to be revised, with the old age life stage covering age 55 and upwards, encompassing semi-retirement and the latter stages of midlife when family life and work commitments begin to abate, e.g. careers have been established and children have left home Ontology The term ontology is used in two ways within this book. At times, it refers to social ontologies – the sum composition of all relations and interactions between people, places and things and the process by which it is formed. At other times the term refers to a computational ontology, which is the abstract scheme composed of all the ‘triples’ in the data and their connection (see Chapter 3) Open science Alternatively referred to as open research, this is a process of ensuring that all research outputs including publications, talks, findings, reports, analyses

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Glossary xxi and datasets are made publicly accessible and open for secondary reuse – both in the interests of transparency and to foster greater forms of collaboration Personal The experiential aspects of an individual’s life that are not shared, and are valued as being internalised and private (see Chapter 1) Personal experience The relationship between an individual and wider cultural and social life throughout their development of I/Me over the lifecourse generates a personal experience. Here the cumulative set of relationships and interactions a person has with various technologies, places and people over their lifecourse and their internal reflection on them act as a catalyst that blends individuals and society, creating meaningful experiences that are personal. In this process, knowledge of the personal experiences of others helps individuals to locate themselves within cultural and social life Personal film journey The relationship an individual develops with film over time and through personal experiences throughout their lifecourse, in general and in their personal film journey. This can involve being actively introduced to particular types of film or venue, developing and sustaining a specific relationship with film, and experiences such as learning or teaching through film. Personal film journeys do not necessarily follow a linear process through the lifecourse. Instead, they can be shaped by a person’s relationships and interactions with friends, peers and family, as well as where they live, the professional, educational and cultural resources at their disposal and various social and economic factors Personal relationship The interactions people have with one another through film, and with various film-watching technologies and places, over their lifecourse makes up a ‘personal relationship’ with film. Here, a preference for particular genres, venue types and ways of watching can be shaped by linked lives, the opportunities available (in terms of film provision) and various cultural, economic and social factors. The relationship people have with film can be subject to change both within and between lifecourse stages Platform The term is used in three ways throughout the monograph: (1) to refer to particular media channels, e.g. print, radio, television, social media, websites, Video-on-Demand; (2) to refer to an organisation that offers a particular service, e.g. the Netflix platform provides Video-on-Demand films and television programmes; and (3) as a short-hand term for the platform economy,

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xxii Glossary a mode of organising economic, social and cultural activities through digital technologies and services Pragmatism (classical American pragmatism) A philosophical approach to social sciences in which people are seen as meaning-making in their relations and interactions with others, with texts and with the environments around them (including both material and symbolic objects). It holds that social order is maintained through such meaning-making – which involves personal introspection and reflection on one’s actions Qualitative coding scheme When qualitative data are coded, the sum of all the coding across a dataset can be extracted as a standalone qualitative coding scheme – which can then be used to analyse other datasets (in other projects) or to recreate and/ or evaluate analyses by applying it to the same dataset in the interest of open science Region/English region In this project the term ‘region’ refers to the geographical portion of the country that falls under the remit of a specific British Film Institute regional film hub Regional film hubs The British Film Institute are headquartered in London, but were founded and operate within a model of devolved localism. Rather than monies and responsibilities being distributed centrally, they are distributed through eight regional film hubs, each of which covers a specific geographical area of the United Kingdom Relationship The term is used in two ways within this book. In describing the relations and interactions people have with various screens, platforms, media, places and other people, the term relationship refers to those relations being enacted. Elsewhere, relationships are used as a key element of the ‘triples’ within the ontology, and provide named sets of connections that connect entities with entity characteristics. For example, the entity ‘Film Genre’ contains entries for ‘Comedy’, while the entity characteristic ‘Emotion’ contains an entry for ‘Sad’. The relationships element of the triple contains an entry for ‘WHEN’ to show that people watch comedy films when they are sad, not because they plan to become saddened by them Resources The term is used in two ways in this book: (1) drawing on Becker’s (1982) concept of Artworlds, resources are understood as the financial, technical, material or physical aspects people draw on to produce and exhibit films;

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Glossary xxiii (2) there are also various resources that people draw on to make sense of film. These can be educational and cultural resources, such as particular frameworks and concepts for analysing specific aspects or expert knowledge of filmic tropes and techniques. They can also be the life experiences people drawn on – such as knowledge gained through past employment, intimate relationships or parenting – that can be drawn on as resources for comprehending and interpreting films (see Chapters 1 and 6) Social life Aspects of an individual’s life that are not personal, but are shared, often via communal activities, e.g. by watching a film together Social self A term that locates the individual in society as a ‘social self’ (drawing on classical American pragmatism) by asserting that people’s identities are generated (and changed) through a processual relationship – both between the ‘I’ and the ‘me’ and in relation to the Other – through specific interactions and relations as well as personal introspection Specialised film A term that originated in the United Kingdom Film Council’s founding of a ‘specialised fund’ to support films that fell outside of mainstream circuits of funding, distribution and exhibition. It has since been used in variable ways, with alternatives such as ‘arthouse’, ‘independent’ and ‘cultural cinema’ each being proposed as replacement terms by various people (see Introduction) Subscription Video-on-Demand (SVoD) An online service delivered via a particular platform using a paid subscription model that provides access to films and/or television programmes which can be streamed to a particular media device and watched at that point in time, or downloaded by a viewer to watch at a different time of their own choice. Also see Video-on-Demand (VoD) The Other The Other includes particular individuals who are significant to a person, e.g. a friend, family member or work colleague with linked lives. It also includes a ‘generalised Other’ who represents the perceived set of attitudes among a wider social group, e.g. a sense of decorum among the regular members of a particular cinema venue (Evans, 2011). The dynamic and interactive process between the ‘I’ and ‘me’ enables people to reflect on themselves and on other people, and to relate both to particular contexts, as well as making sense of their personal experience in relation to their wider experience of cultural and social life

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xxiv Glossary Triples In the development of a computational ontology, all Beyond the Multiplex data were assigned to one of three elements – Entities, Entity characteristics and Relationships. When one of each are combined, they form a tri-part structure called a ‘triple’ Venue-specific audience This audience type and experience revolves around people watching at a particular cinema venue, festival or event and feeling a sense of community in doing so. At times this can be tied to the materiality of the place, such as the layout and/or design of a building. It can also revolve around a particular style of programming and a shared sensibility among the other people who watch films at the same venue Video-on-Demand (VoD) An online service delivered via a particular platform that provides access to film and television programme (TVoD) content, which can either be streamed or downloaded to a particular media device and watched by a viewer at a time of their own choice, either cost-free or via a paid subscription. Also see Subscription Video-on-Demand (SVoD)

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Abbreviations

ACE Arts Council England BFI British Film Institute BtM Beyond the Multiplex DCMS Department of Culture, Media and Sport EU European Union FAN Film Audience Network FH film hub FPRP Film Policy Review Panel ICO Independent Cinema Office SVoD Subscription Video-on-Demand UK United Kingdom UKFC UK Film Council US United States VoD Video-on-Demand

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Introduction: understanding contemporary film audiences

Introduction The question of how and in what ways audiences form when watching specialised and mainstream films within regional English film provision goes to the heart of current debates in audience studies. Audience studies theorists have made the audience increasingly visible; audience surveys have tracked film-watching trends over time; and funders, cinemas and distributors have gathered information about audience members’ preferences and their demographic composition. However, little attention has been paid to the specific relationships and interactions that exist between films and the individuals that generate and sustain audiences when watching them. At the same time, an increase in online film distribution and film-watching as well as an array of festivals and community cinema events (DCMS, 2018) mean that the nature and formation of film audiences is constantly in flux, with film watching becoming an increasingly diverse and extensive experience. This has sharpened the debate about how to conceptualise film audiences and the ways in which they form. Here, audience formation is understood as a process of individual and shared engagement with films that generates particular experiences. Although film-watching is often considered in terms of the audience, there is a need to understand different types of audiences; how individuals come together as film audiences; and what broader patterns relate to the choices of how, where, when and why people watch films. This monograph extends and develops a conceptualisation of the audience as an interactive and relational construct (Livingstone, 2013) by introducing how audience as a process underpins specific audience configurations. These dynamic configurations materialise in particular instantiations of audiences. These instantiations of audiences are a relational process that is shaped by the

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geographies and mixed economy of film provision and the ways that film features in people’s life journeys and their lived cultural experiences. This monograph argues that audience formation is a process which is multidimensional. The dimensions are: audience types; geographies of film provision; personal journeys with film; and the mixed economy of film. In the Beyond the Multiplex (BtM) project these dimensions served as a framework to develop empirically informed concepts, which have generated a new theory of film audiences. This theory posits that audiences are a process and the ways in which audiences form are underpinned by individuals’ personal film journeys and participation in different types of audiences that materialise within particular geographies of film provision. This is understood in relation to film as a cultural form, in terms of both mainstream and specialised film. These forms are composed of the relations of production and exhibition that produce particular opportunities for people to watch film; the narratives of the form in terms of film preferences and genres; and types of participation in the different ways people choose to watch film, e.g. alone or with others, at a specific venue or while on the move. Approaching the cultural forms of both mainstream and specialised film provides a way of understanding the processes of interactions and relationships that people have with film throughout their lives and that shape their audience experiences.

Researching film-watching beyond the multiplex in English regions A core challenge for film audience research has been how to capture the richness of people’s cultural and social engagement with film in ways that also account for how it materialises in broader audience trends, including within the context of film provision and cultural policy. Doing so requires obtaining and analysing qualitative and quantitative data as well as analysing existing documents and creating a way of working with that mixed data in a relational way. The central argument presented in this monograph is based on research carried out for the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project ‘Beyond the Multiplex: Audiences for specialised film in English regions’ (Ref: AH/P005780/2). The research examined: (1) how to enable a wider range of audiences to participate in a more diverse film culture that embraces the wealth of films beyond the mainstream; and (2) how to optimise the cultural value of engaging with those less familiar films, identified as ‘specialised’. To do so, it extended an earlier pilot project called ‘How Audiences Form’ (HAF), which found diversity in the different levels of film provision and in people’s perceptions of film provision – both between English regions and within them (Corbett et al., 2014). HAF highlighted the need to know

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Introduction 3 more about the provision of specialised films in English regions outside London, and about how audiences form in relation to specialised film provision in them. To address this, BtM focused on four English regions – North East, North West, South West, and Yorkshire and the Humber – each of which corresponded to a geographical area covered by a particular British Film Institute (BFI) regional film hub. The specific choice of regions was based on their having comparable characteristics, each hosting a combination of university towns and rural areas as well as a broad range of film provision, including independent and commercial chain venues. This comparison across regions helped to address the project’s central research question: ‘How do audiences engage with, and form in different ways, around specialised and mainstream films?’ In particular, it provided a way to ascertain how audiences form around film in particular instances, as well as identifying some general patterns that occur in different places. The audience was central to this inquiry and is therefore a key aspect of this monograph, with a particular focus on the meaning of film-watching to different audiences in the four studied English regions. This is contextualised through research findings on how effective film policy and strategies are at increasing specialised film audiences in the United Kingdom (UK). To address its aims, the research required a holistic approach, one that could encompass provision, consumption and meaning-making at both national and regional levels. This involved developing a multilevel research design to examine the various interactions people have with film venues, events, digital platforms and specific types of films (including specialised ones) in each of the four studied regions. For this, data were gathered through various research methods. Before conducting fieldwork, existing datasets on cultural consumption in general and film in particular were gathered, to develop a set of socio-cultural profiles for different film audiences. Another method of desktop research (also carried out before the fieldwork) involved collating and gathering 114 key policy and industry documents, providing a baseline understanding of the policy landscape surrounding film in the UK and how it has changed over a ten-year period. In terms of fieldwork, the project undertook fifty semi-structured interviews with audience members in each of the four studied regions (200 in total), gathering insights into people’s film-watching practices and preferences, and the way in which films feature in their cultural, personal and social lives. Furthermore, a three-wave sample survey was conducted with 5,071 participants in the first wave, 547 in the second wave and 250 in the third wave, which provided details about which films people watch and prefer, with whom, when, where and why, over a six-month period. A further twenty-eight interviews with film policy and industry experts added an understanding of the challenges, concerns and working practices within film distribution and exhibition.

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Meanwhile, a set of sixteen film-elicitation focus groups extended the research by obtaining insights into how people make sense of the narratives and stories of specialised films. To develop valuable recommendations for policy development, a set of Delphi workshops and questionnaires with film industry and policy experts were carried out alongside the research, to ensure that it would be meaningful for a range of stakeholders such as the BFI, Film Audience Network, regional film hubs and film distributors, exhibitors, programmers and marketing managers. The mixed data from the different research methods were brought together and stored in a graph database, using a computational ontology (ontology from here on) to define and query it. This enabled the data to be analysed holistically through the interactions and relations found within different datasets. The key objective was to enable both quantitative and qualitative data to be stored together so that they could be interrogated through distant and close readings simultaneously. The ontology enabled a coherent analysis of rich insights and broader patterns by identifying relationships across the mixed datasets. The intention of using an ontology in this way was to provide the sector with both a dataset and a set of search and visualisation tools that could assist them in making decisions over audience development at both regional and national levels.

Contextualising film audiences In terms of background context, BtM examined film viewers’ practices and personal experiences of watching and consuming film to determine how audiences form. One aspect of this involved examining how they do so in different places, around different levels of film exhibition provision. The fieldwork was conducted in the four English regions to better understand how film features within people’s lives, how film-watching is experienced and how people engage with different types of film in different parts of the country. Here, the research sought to understand the extent to which the places where people live and the different levels of film exhibition provision available in those locations serve to shape film engagement and the types of audiences that form. In doing so, it addressed different urban and rural geographies within and across the four regions, with film exhibition provision varying both between regions (nationally) and within each region (differing from city to city, town to town, and rural areas in between). It also included examining the range of opportunities provided by the specific types of film exhibition available in each place, from a dominance of mainstream film through to multiplex cinemas in some places and/or a more diverse range of choice through independent and boutique chain cinemas

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Introduction 5 in others, as well as community film provision, film societies and clubs, and festivals. Understanding the implications of these different geographies of film exhibition provision is important because the uneven provision of nonmainstream film across the country means that people have different opportunities to watch film in different places. Therefore, they can have different relationships with film. For example, although the number of cinema venues across the country that predominantly programme mainstream film increased from 554 to 609 between 2008 and 2017, the number of cinemas that predominantly programme non-mainstream and specialised films decreased from 168 to 162 over the same period (BFI, 2019a: 21). Looking at how these cinema venues are spread out across the UK shows that there are large disparities in the concentration of non-mainstream programmed cinemas. In some regions the opportunity to watch specialised films at the cinema is decreasing far faster than in others. For example, the BFI noted that in 2019 around 34.6% of all the UK’s non-mainstream cinema venues were based in London (BFI, 2019b). Of these, 15.7% were in the South East, 9% in Yorkshire and the Humber, 8% in the South West, 4.5% in the North West and only 1.9% in the North East (BFI, 2019b). Similar regional disparities can also be seen in admission figures, with the DCMS (2018) reporting that 66.3% of adults in the South East watched a film at a UK cinema in 2016/17, compared to only 47.8% in the North East (DCMS, 2018). Over the same period, London had an average of 3 cinema admissions per head, compared to 2.4 in the North East and 2.3 in the North West. In short, fewer people who live in the northern regions of England go to the cinema, and those who do tend to go less frequently than people living in London or the South West. They also have less opportunity to do so, with their regions seeing the fastest decrease in specialised film exhibition provision. What this shows is that, at a comparative regional scale, there are regions with limited opportunities for people to experience a diverse film culture, and regions with a far more diverse offer. In turn, this raises questions about the existing provision of specialised films both across and within each region. However, although the experience of filmwatching is statistically less frequent and associated with fewer opportunities in some regions, it is no less meaningful to the people who engage with films there than in regions with greater admission figures and levels of film exhibition provision. To account for the full range of experiences, BtM considered the role of place and regional and sub-regional film exhibition provision as a central aspect when seeking to understand how audiences form. This meant understanding the relationships and affinities people had to particular types of venue in each place, such as their local independent cinema or a general type of venue such as a nearby multiplex.

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As well as seeking to understand the opportunities to watch film that were available to people in different places, the project examined how people’s engagement with film changed over their lives. This meant understanding the context of how people’s personal experiences shaped their film consumption at different moments, and how film featured in their cultural, personal and social lives. These moments can be characterised by understanding the lifecourse as being pluralistic, which recognises that personal circumstances and interests interact with age and life development stages in the creation of an individual’s biography and lifecourse. This also involves moments of change in a person’s relationship with film and film-watching – for example, developing and changing film preferences; watching films in a different way when introduced to new cinemas, platforms, or filmmakers; or through adjustments in the amount of time available to watch films, e.g. periods of serious illness, unemployment, raising children, increased work commitments or retirement. Throughout these changes, people make decisions over what to watch, when, where, with whom and for particular reasons, e.g. for escapism, entertainment, relaxation, to learn something, to immerse themselves alone in a film narrative or to watch with other people as part of a shared social activity. Examining how people’s engagement with film changed over their lives, and how that related to the opportunities available to them at particular moments in their lives, in different places, and the different experiences and opportunities that both offer, are central to understanding how people form audiences around film. To address what it means to be part of a film audience, and how it relates to the opportunities and experiences that people have when participating in audiences, there is a need to examine how individuals feel and think when watching films; how that relates to their sense of being part of a film audience; and the meanings that they ascribe to doing so. This requires considering how people watch films at different moments of their lives, in different geographies, and the influence of both on their sense of being part of an audience. It also entails taking into account how different types of venue (e.g. watching at a specific cinema type versus watching at home through a Video-on-Demand (VoD) platform), film genre or type (e.g. within the broad remit of specialised or mainstream) affect their sense of being part of an audience. Who people watch films with is another key factor in understanding how and why people choose to watch films alone or with other people, and what that means for their relationship with film and audiences. Therefore, it is important to understand which relations between a broad range of other people and groups are important to people when watching films – from family, friends and peers, through to strangers. To meet BtM’s aim of determining how a wider range of audiences might be enticed to participate in a more diverse film culture and embrace the

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Introduction 7 wealth of films beyond the mainstream, the project examined how and why people participate in different audiences in relation to the opportunities they have to watch film in different places, at different moments in their lives and around different types of film. It did so by examining how people engage with film throughout their lives, identifying patterns in the interactions and relations involved with watching in different geographies, within different types of audience. Extending this to address the project’s second aim – to optimise the cultural value of engaging with specialised film – required gaining an understanding of the differing values placed on films when people form and watch within different audiences.

Balancing economic and cultural value: from mainstream to specialised film An audience’s film viewing takes place against a background of shifting cultural policy and funding contexts, just as film-watching in different parts of the country is shaped by the local connections with the wider film industry nationally and internationally. In the UK, film production, distribution and exhibition are all associated with a dynamic set of economic and cultural values. Mainstream films are often associated with their commercial value and considered primarily in terms of their box office ‘performance’, i.e. return on financial investment. In 2018, 787 films were released in UK cinemas – an average of around 15 new films a week. Most of these films were classified by the BFI as ‘specialised films’ (58%), including documentaries and foreignlanguage films. However, these films took only 3% of the total box office income (£39.5 million), showing that the audience for these films was small as compared to a handful of mainstream films that generated significant revenues by attracting much larger audiences. Films that might be classified as ‘arthouse’, ‘independent’ or ‘specialised’, although still operating in a commercial field to a certain extent, are often designated as being different from mainstream films because they are perceived to have a stronger sense of cultural and artistic value. Sometimes these films are explicitly defined in opposition to the mainstream by their form, subject, style, mode of distribution and exhibition or the scale of the audiences they reach. Terms like ‘non-mainstream’, ‘independent’ and ‘arthouse’ are sometimes used interchangeably by those working in the film exhibition sector and by audiences, having blurred definitions. However, the term ‘specialised film’ has a more formal definition in the UK, being used by the UK Film Council (UKFC, which existed from 2000 to 2011) as a broad classification to designate or group together a particular subset of film genres in an attempt to distinguish them from mainstream films such as those produced by major

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Hollywood studios (KPMG, 2002). This subset of films was made eligible for public subsidies because of their cultural value, and the economic contribution they could make to British film production. The BFI took over the UKFC’s remit as the country’s lead agency for film in 2012 (Vaizey, 2012), taking on the role of overseeing the preservation and promotion of moving-image culture and industry in the UK. Controlling grant funding for film exhibition nationally, managing the national archive and running key institutions such as the London Film Festival has reinforced the BFI’s role and authority as a key national arbiter of film taste. The BFI continues to use the term ‘specialised film’, both to define funding criteria and to analyse box office data, by categorising films as either ‘specialised’ or ‘mainstream’. The BFI (2012) define the term ‘specialised’ as being ‘quite broad’, adding that it ‘relates to those films that do not sit easily within a mainstream and highly commercial genre … [and which] might be expected to appeal at present to a more narrow audience segment than a more mainstream film’ (BFI, 2012: 10). Elsewhere, the BFI explain that the genres and film traits referred to when categorising a film as ‘specialised’ include ‘most feature documentaries, subtitled foreign language films and re-releases of archive/classic films’ (BFI, 2017b: 3). In short, the term is used as an oppositional catch-all term to encompass films that are not mainstream, with the latter used to refer to films that are ‘the product of a dominant production industry in a society; the production of Hollywood for example’ (Fourie, 2006: 225). Some of the categories for specialised film used by the BFI are clearly defined, such as foreign-language films with subtitles, documentaries, archive/ classic films, artists’ film/ experimental and British films. However, other aspects are less specific, referring instead to a film’s unconventional style, form, subject matter or representation. Here, the BFI’s (2012: 11) guidance on how to categorise a ‘specialised film’ is instructive, where they make the following qualification: the distinction between specialised and mainstream films is not always clear cut. Indeed, even with specialised films, distinctions might be drawn between those that might have an opportunity to attract and please a wide audience and those that will intrinsically remain open only to a limited audience.

This approach acknowledges that, for certain films, there may be a very small audience as compared to mainstream film. However, the BFI (2012: 11) add that this is not necessarily their primary concern if films have significant artistic or cultural value, or if they ally with notions of national identity: Films, thus, might be regarded as existing along a spectrum with core arthouse at one end, and high cost, high production value effect and star driven films

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Introduction 9 (mainstream Hollywood) at the other … the judgement as to whether a certain film can be categorised as ‘specialised’ is necessarily subjective.

This spectrum is also to a certain extent mirrored in how cinemas are programmed in the UK. Although many multiplex and boutique cinemas show a predominantly mainstream programme of films, there is some blurring. For example, certain multiplex venues play Bollywood or Polish films to reach a local audience from the South Asian or Polish diaspora, while some independent cinemas play mainstream, Hollywood blockbusters to boost their income through widely popular films. The ‘boutique’ chains such as Everyman mostly distinguish themselves through customer experience rather than programme, but some such as Curzon with its distribution arm and VoD platform promote a broader range of films based on cultural rather than purely economic value. From the perspective of the UK Cinema Association, which represents both multiplex and independent cinemas (Clapp, 2018: np, emphasis added): There is more crossover between, inverted commas, ‘specialised’ venues in the UK and the mainstream than there is in other territories. The more specialised venues in the UK are hugely entrepreneurial. There’s more of a continuum of business models in the UK. There’s not a clear divide: you’re commercial and mainstream, and you’re specialised and independent.

This blurring of cinema programming to a certain extent extends to online film programming across a range of different VoD services as well. There has been a rapid increase in the audience size for films on Subscription Video-on-Demand (SVoD) services, with 47% of all UK homes subscribing to at least one of the main SVoD services, such as Amazon Prime Video and Netflix, in 2019 and spending around a quarter (24%) of their total viewing time watching films (Ofcom, 2019). The services with the largest number of subscribers, such as Netflix, provide mostly mainstream films targeted at the broadest possible demographic, with a handful of nonmainstream titles to stretch the reach of their subscriber base further. Meanwhile, a number of SVoD platforms have focused on curated programmes of non-mainstream titles and films that are unavailable to stream elsewhere, with a focus on cultural value. These include the BFI Player, which is dedicated to British archive film, classic films and selected new releases, and the curated streaming service and distributor Mubi, which Smits and Nikdel (2019) depict as specialising in a broad array of world cinema while emphasising curatorial discernment and cultural value in their film programming choices. Despite the blurring and overlap between specialised and mainstream film definitions, and cinema and VoD platforms that show both to differing degrees, the term ‘specialised film’ remains in use by the BFI, although less strategically than when it was first introduced by the UKFC. Designating

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a group of film types and genres as ‘specialised’ was an attempt to define a cultural form of film in Britain that was distinct from Hollywood and United States (US) imports, and rooted in its cultural value to audiences, the British film industry and British identity more widely. For the BFI this has included promoting films that were determined to have cultural value, but were potentially limited in their audience reach by a dominant system of commercially focused film production, distribution and exhibition in the UK.

Audience development in UK film policy and industry practice Growing film audiences (and, in turn, box office receipts) was the central tenet of the UK government’s film policy review in 2012, and this has since defined how the BFI operates. The review panel asserted that ‘[w]ith the help of carefully crafted policy interventions, growth in audiences – at the cinema and in all other media – will increase access and choice and benefit films of every kind’ (BFI, 2012: 11). They also noted problematic disparities in what UK audiences were able to see, remarking that ‘the audience across the UK still gets to see too few British films, especially independent [ones] and too few films from the rest of the world apart from ever popular Hollywood blockbusters’ (BFI, 2012: 11). The review panel’s recommendations set out how the BFI and others should ‘enhance audience access to a broader range of British and specialised film’ (BFI, 2012). In response to the 2012 panel review, the BFI moved away from the UKFC’s focus on funding technological development (as digital projection expanded), and towards investment in audience development. This included programmes with a greater commitment to increasing the audience for specialised film, diversity in professional representation and the diversity of the audiences at events they funded. As one of their key national investments, the BFI created the Film Audience Network (FAN), composed of a set of regional and national film hubs tasked with ensuring that ‘the greatest choice of film is available for everyone across the whole of the UK’ (BFI, 2020a: np). The film hubs’ focus lay with increasing the size and diversity of audiences by bringing together film exhibitors to share and develop their best working practices, as well as providing grants for audience development programmes. While the film hubs work on a local level, the BFI retains centralised control of funding for large and prestigious programmes for cinemas and film festivals through a concurrent set of funds. The first phase of the FAN ran from 2013 to 2017, consisting of nine film hubs covering six English regions (London, North East, North West, Midlands, South East, South West), with separate national film hubs for Northern

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Introduction 11 Ireland, Scotland and Wales. In 2017 the regional film hub geographies in England were revised to align with Arts Council England (ACE) regional boundaries, leaving five English regional film hubs (London, Midlands, North, South East and South West), plus the three national ones. Funded using the BFI’s National Lottery grant provision, the hubs were each led by existing film organisations and venues located in each territory, such as Film Hub North, which was led collaboratively by Showroom Cinema in Sheffield, HOME in Manchester and Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle. The film hubs worked on a membership model, where film exhibitors including cinemas, film festivals, multi-arts centres, community cinemas and film archives within each territory could join the hub. By joining, the exhibitors gained access to additional training, financial support, special film programmes and networking, and over a thousand exhibitors joined the FAN across the UK. The goal of the hubs’ second (ongoing) phase, 2017–22 is to develop ‘more diverse audiences for UK and international film’ (BFI, 2020a). The tone of this approach was slightly different from the first phase, which aimed to ‘extend film choice, increase and broaden film audiences, and enhance opportunities for audiences to engage with and learn about film’ (BFI, 2020b) Between the two phases there was a shift in focus from increasing the size of audiences for screenings funded by the BFI, to changing the demography of this audience. This is evident in particular by introducing the BFI’s Diversity Standards (2020b) and promoting programming for those aged between 16 and 30, a key priority set out in the BFI’s five-year strategic plan, BFI2022 (BFI, 2017a, 2020c). The Diversity Standards are a set of contractual requirements attached to BFI funding that require those funded to engage ‘under-served audiences’ and audiences outside central London. The FAN is also tasked with supporting new releases to ‘engage with more diverse audiences’, by supporting the marketing of films that distributors and exhibitors might deem to be commercially ‘risky’ or ‘too challenging’ for audiences (FAN, 2020) and therefore not promote very widely, or at all. Films that have been supported in this way include Italian director Alice Rohrwacher’s Happy as Lazzaro (2018) and Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters (2018). The FAN is used to promote films such as these, with each film hub providing resources to market the films in their area, with the aim of reaching a larger audience than might otherwise have been achieved. All of these BFI initiatives are attempts to influence and shape the ways that film audiences form, whether in scale, composition, location, experience, or the formation of audience in relation to a specific film. Understanding this is central to the question of how audiences form when watching specialised and mainstream films within regional English film provision.

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Outline of the chapters This monograph is structured as follows. Chapter 1 reviews the current literature about audiences more generally, and film audiences in particular, and assesses the strength and limitations of existing conceptualisations of audiences. It discusses how the research undertaken in BtM deepens and extends the concept of audiences as a process that is both relational and interactive, by exploring audience members’ personal film journeys, examining what types of audiences people participate in and how these feature in specific film geographies. In doing so the chapter sets out the overall framework of analysis that was used to consider how audiences form and what types of audiences form in relation to patterns of film provision. Chapter 2 describes and discusses the novel methodology for studying how audiences form that was used in the BtM research. The innovation combined mixed-methods research with a computational ontology. The chapter describes how the methodology was developed, by outlining the aims of BtM and its research themes before introducing the particular English regions under study – the North East, North West, South West, and Yorkshire and the Humber – in terms of demographics, geographic profile and film provision. The BtM project research themes are then outlined, including the practices of specialised and mainstream film consumption, the social aspects of audiences and how audiences value film in cultural terms; the meaning of film and audiences’ interpretive resources; the significance of place, venue and film events for audiences; and the role of film policy and distribution in shaping regional film provision. Chapter 3 presents BtM’s analysis of the policy and industry documents listed in Appendix 1. It shows that film provision, distribution and exhibition interact to create various opportunities for audiences to engage with film, set against how commercial and cultural values materialise in different types of film exhibition. The chapter explains that UK film policy discourse and funding distribution has shifted over time and that, throughout its history, there has been a spectrum of organisations which are focused on increasing the commercial and economic value of film for profitability, on the one hand, and those that generate cultural value, on the other. As a result, the policy landscape and industry practices have maintained these differences, while funding and support for specialised film has continued but not dramatically changed the scale of the non-mainstream film exhibition sector over recent years. Building on this analysis, Chapter 4 compares UK film policy with the research data to set out five modes of place in relation to film provision across the four English regions studied in BtM. It argues that a small number of cities and towns have a diverse film offer, but most are dominated by

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Introduction 13 mainstream types of film, and there are areas with very limited or no level of specialised film provision. The chapter adds that this unevenness is not necessarily linked to the socio-cultural profiles of people living there but, rather, it reflects cultural inequalities between different places which are especially prominent within the regions. Using the BtM audience interviews enables insights to be drawn out about how the diversity of film provision in different places shapes people’s sense of place. Together, the chapter demonstrates that the uneven distribution of specialised film exhibition provision across England shapes how people view where they live, but that people are reflexive and often creative in finding ways to overcome limitations, by seeking out film online or in other ways. Chapter 5 turns to audience member experiences and develops a new concept of personal film journeys. It characterises these as the relationships a person has with film over their lifecourse. Although people pass through the same lifecourse stages, from childhood through early adulthood and midlife into old age, there are dimensions of their personal biographies which can affect their relationship with film at each stage. For example, one dimension involves being actively introduced to particular types of film. Although this is often associated with childhood and adolescence, the chapter shows that it can occur at any point in a person’s life. Other dimensions include: education and learning, and their impact on a person’s ongoing relationship with film; creative exploration, personal discovery and taking risks on new types of film; socio-cultural profile and social environment in terms of who people are connected to through their linked lives, where they live, and how that shapes their relationship with film. The chapter also discusses changes within people’s lives that can disrupt their relationship with film, e.g. periods of illness, relocation or changes to the configuration of their relationships with others, such as leaving home, starting a new personal relationship or going through a break-up or divorce. Cumulatively, these dimensions lead people towards developing a relationship with film over their lifecourse that is personal, in that it both feels unique to a particular individual and is also something that is a shared intersubjective and cultural experience. All of these factors combine in the concept of personal film journeys. Chapter 6 examines the ways in which audiences interpret and make sense of film content, by focusing on a range of contemporary British and foreign-language films released in 2016, 2017 and 2018. It explores how films capture, captivate, engross, absorb, shock, challenge and occupy people and audiences. It does so through exploring how individuals respond to formal aspects of film such as narrative, visuals and sound, in comprehending and interpreting film. It argues that people draw on various resources, acquired through their formal and informal education and personal life experiences, to make sense of film narratives and stories.

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Chapter 7 identifies five distinct types of film audience experience in which people engage with, and participate in, film audiences. These comprise: individualised, group, venue-specific, global and digital audiences. It notes that each type of film audience and the experience it offers revolves around a particular set of relationships and interactions around film-watching. Also, it explains that participation in each type of audience may relate to particular life stages, to the ways in which individuals develop a relationship with film and to how film viewing is embedded into their personal, social and cultural lives. Another feature of film audience experiences is that individuals may – and do – engage in all five audience types and experiences, and in more than one type at once. They choose what type of audience and audience experience they want to participate in at any given time and place that will meet a desired set of film choices, social and cultural criteria. These are embedded in patterns of relationships which people have with film and in how they creatively craft their personal journeys with film within wider film provision. As a result of this, individuals move between audience types and experience a range of film audiences. Chapter 8 develops a new theory of audiences – and film audiences in particular – which is that the contemporary audience is a process that results in five types of audiences and audience experiences. The audience as a process involves the ways people develop relationships with film and the level and types of provision open to them. This process is realised through the distinctive relations that audiences have with film and their film audience experiences, and through a specific set of interactions they have with film and within audience experiences. The key relations are with: screens; venues and places; audience types; and other people, socially and culturally, in lived film culture. The interactions are with: friends, family and wider communities; screens and venues; film throughout the lifecourse; film stories through interpretive work; and the practices of audiences. These relations and interactions form audiences as a process in general terms. Film audiences’ relations and interactions are interwoven and come together in varying ways, depending on: audience members’ personal life experiences; life stage and circumstance; access to and engagement with culture, with the media (broadly defined) and screens and with place-based film culture at the local level. These relations and interactions are composed of a set of meta-concepts, comprising: personal film journeys; geographies of film provision; a mixed economy of film provision and policy; types of audience experience; lived film culture; and the social and cultural value of film. The meta-concepts identify the various aspects of the audience as a process that support interest in – and engagement with – film. Together, these aspects coalesce to form a process that underpins and characterises audience formation. A key feature of this process is that it is dynamic and flexible, because relationships with

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Introduction 15 film and with film audiences are configured in various ways, with people drawing on their resources, life stage, experience and interests to create their personal journey with film and their film audience experiences. The Conclusion summarises the argument made in the monograph. It draws together the theoretical discussion in Chapter 8 with the key concepts and findings of the BtM project to show how audiences form, discussing the value of film from audience perspectives. It also provides a set of recommendations for film exhibitors, funders and policy makers seeking to develop specialised film audiences in the UK, as well as a guide to the open access BtM dataset, search and visualisation tools, and suggested areas for further research. In addition to this monograph, all research data obtained in BtM is publicly open for secondary reuse. This is available on the BtM open access website, which not only houses all the data but also contains open access tools that can be used to search the data, open access visualisations of the data, frequently asked questions and details of the meta-data and background information about the project, its methodology and data. See: www.beyondthemultiplex.org/. The datasets are also available via the University of Glasgow’s Enlighten data repository under a creative commons 4.0 (CC-BY-4.0) licence. • For a list of the policy and industry documents analysed, and the qualitative coding scheme generated by coding them, see Higson et al. (2020) – available at: http://researchdata.gla.ac.uk/id/eprint/942. • For a copy of the anonymised transcripts, socio-economic and demographic details of participants and the qualitative coding scheme used to analyse semi-structured interviews with audience members, see Wessels et al. (2019) – available at: http://researchdata.gla.ac.uk/id/eprint/883. • For a copy of the questions and anonymised responses to the three-wave survey, see Yates et al. (2019) – available at: http://researchdata.gla.ac.uk/ id/eprint/884. • For anonymised transcripts, socio-economic and demographic details of participants, and the qualitative coding scheme used to analyse all film-elicitation focus groups, see Forrest et al. (2019) – available at: http://researchdata.gla.ac.uk/id/eprint/885.

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1 Understanding audiences: conceptualising and analysing film audiences

Introduction This chapter reviews the knowledge and literature about audiences generally, and film audiences in particular, and assesses the strengths and limitations of current conceptualisations of the audience. The chapter discusses the development of a new framework and underpinning theoretical approach that can address the limits of previous research and scholarship on audiences. In doing so, it provides the overall framework of analysis used throughout this monograph to consider how audiences form and the different types of audiences that form in relation to patterns of film exhibition provision. It argues that the characteristics of audiences and their dynamics have changed over the years and that existing concepts about audiences do not fully capture how audiences form, the composition of modern-day types of film audiences, their dynamics or the experiences of people who participate in them. The argument made is that a new framework is required to examine contemporary film audiences. This framework must balance the richness and creativity of audiences with the institutional arrangements of the cultural forms of film, including its values, production, distribution and exhibition. The chapter is structured into seven sections, followed by a conclusion. Beginning with an assessment of historical theoretical approaches to audiences, the chapter then reviews current theoretical lenses in relation to ideas of the structuring and agency of audiences. Building on this, the conceptualisation that audiences are relational and interactive is presented, then expanded upon through the notion of cultural forms, which focuses on the interrelations of production, narrative and participation. Taking this idea further, the chapter then considers meaning within audiences and the ways relationships with film are developed through creativity, interpretation and personal and cultural lived experience. Finally, it explains how an innovative

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framework was developed to enable a much more profound understanding of audiences.

The quandary of finding and defining audiences Defining ‘the audience’ has been a central point of debate – a ‘quandary’ – for media theorists from the 1930s to the early twenty-first century (Christie, 2011). In general terms, definitions, and the approaches to audiences based on those definitions, highlight shifts in audience formations over time, reflecting social, cultural and media technology changes. The main shift is seen as one from a mass of passive audiences to many fragmented, diffuse and active audiences. Some of the discourses around this transformation argue that it does not make any sense to talk about audiences as a single entity at all in the twenty-first century’s digital media-saturated world (Livingstone and Das, 2013; Jermyn and Holmes, 2006). Others take the view that, although audiences and the formation of audiences are more complex to characterise in the early twenty-first century than during the industrial period of mass media and mass audiences, the idea, actuality and experiences of an audience are still present (Livingstone and Das, 2013). Either way, working out how to identify these changes and how to define and theorise new and emerging characteristics of audiences is a challenge facing film audience scholarship, film policy and the film industry in the twenty-first century. In terms of developing new theoretical approaches to audiences, the question of how audiences form for both specialised and mainstream film in and across regional life goes to the heart of the above-noted quandary in audience studies (Livingstone, 2013). This is because there is regional variation in the characteristics and levels of film provision, variation in people’s socio-cultural backgrounds and interests and variation in film culture in particular places. These variations are indicative of changing trends, which include: the proliferation of personal, media, venue and pop-up screens; the widening of viewers’ choice about which screen is used; inequality in the diversity of film programming and venue types; and new practices in film viewing and audience engagement by diverse groups within regional populations. These aspects of audiences have not yet been properly identified or clearly understood in the scholarship. There is a recognition that changes are occurring, however, partly because developments in audience studies – especially in the shift to seeing audiences as active – mean that audiences are becoming increasingly visible under the lens of research and policy. This focus on audiences has revealed that they are changing in the ways they engage, partly due to the rapid development of online consumption and the

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increasing array of cultural activities (Christie, 2012). Some of these changes stem from what audiences want and how they are organising and configuring the ways they engage in audience experiences. Both the actions of audiences and the changing media and cultural landscape mean that the quandary of how to find, define and understand audiences is raising new challenges. One of the key challenges is, first, to identify what these new practices, experiences and trends are, and then to ascertain how to understand and analyse them. This challenge requires audience research to develop a holistic approach that balances the creativity of audiences with the ways their experiences are structured. In order to grasp these points, research needs to widen its focus beyond just the viewing and audience experience and response (Barker and Mathijs, 2007), by scrutinising the ways audiences form socially and culturally. This also means going beyond the social practice approach to audiences (Turner, 1999), by addressing the ways that venues, screens and programming are structured and feature in the formation of audiences. Furthermore, there is a need to understand the ways audiences interact with the films themselves – how audiences engage with film narratives, representations and techniques to interpret them, and how film becomes a meaningful part of their lives as a cultural form. These points suggest that a multidimensional approach is needed, one that focuses on the process of formation as well as actual instantiations of film audiences. Such a focus on the process of audience creation and the different aspects of that process and of audiences as entities will enable researchers to identify the characteristics of audiences and ascertain what underpins those characteristics. The need to look at process in order to understand change (and continuity within change) is well established within historical sociology (Abrams, 1984). Focusing the lens on process enables researchers to identify change, its underlying dynamics and its lived experience. It also, importantly, lays a foundation for developing new theoretical approaches to audiences. This is because, as Abrams argues, social and cultural life is a process of interaction between a subjective experience of life and what appear to be external objective realities. He drew on the scholarship of Berger and Luckmann (1967) in their seminal work The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge to address the puzzle of human agency within social structure. This is often referred to as the ‘two-sidedness’ of the social world, where people are both creators and created, and where human action constructs worlds but also constrains humans. This points to the way that society is often experienced as a fact-like system, something external, given and coercive, yet individuals are actually creating and recreating that fact-like system through their imagination, communication and social action. This is what Berger and Luckmann (1967) call the awesome paradox of how human action creates a world of things, and yet that world of things appears

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objective and given. In terms of film audiences, the production, distribution and programming of film is institutional and appears objective and robust, yet film experiences are something audiences feel active in and engage with creatively. Further, audience experiences are changing, as outlined above, so audiences are also shaping and adapting to emerging new forms of audiences. To address this ‘awesome paradox’, Abrams (1984) emphasises that research should focus strongly on lived experience of personal lives in relation to social and cultural institutions. Abrams insists on the need to focus on the relation of the individual as an agent with purposes, expectations and motives, and on society as a structuring environment of institutions, values and norms. This relationship between human agents (agency) and institutions (culture and society) is lived. Abrams stresses that this relationship is not composed of abstract concepts and theories but is lived in the immediate world of action and reaction. He argues that there is a need to understand the relationship between personal activity and experience, on the one hand, and social organisation, on the other hand, as something constructed through time. This makes the continuous process of construction the central concern of analysis. That process can be studied in many different contexts, such as personal biographies and careers, in the setting of particular events such as a revolution or election, particular developments such as the making of the welfare state (Abrams, 1984) and, more recently, the media (Couldry and Hepp, 2017). Scholarship on the process of audiences is underdeveloped. It is timely to develop such an approach because of the increasingly diverse ways audiences form. To address audiences in this way requires drawing on theoretical approaches that recognise the agency and creativity involved in being part of film audiences, as well as the culture and institutionalisation of film and the organisation of film audiences from industry, policy and organisational perspectives.

Current theoretical lenses on the structuring and agency of audiences Placing a focus on the creative and structuring aspects of audiences and how they form is not new. The challenge of understanding both aspects of audiences has been present since the early audience studies of the 1930s and continues in the early twenty-first century. However, approaches within audience studies have tended to privilege either structure or agency as the defining feature of shaping audiences. This was seen in the early research into mass audiences in the 1930s and 1940s, which took a ‘media effects’ approach. In general terms, within this perspective audiences at that time were defined as a mass made up of an ‘aggregate of individuals actually or

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potentially exposed to what the main channels of communication had to offer …’ (McQuail, 2013: 10). There were several approaches within the overall perspective, however, which – whether taking a functionalist (e.g. Lazarsfeld and Merton, 1969), Marxist (e.g. Frankfurt School) or psychoanalytic (e.g. Metz, 1981) approach – viewed the structuring of narrative as being part of a wider social, political economy, social psychology and cultural industry structuring of audiences (Steinert, 2003). All of these approaches regarded the structure of the media as powerful and audiences as passive, being both strongly positioned by the texts as to how they viewed those texts and heavily influenced by the media’s agendas (Fejes, 1984: 224). Criticism of these approaches is well rehearsed, observing their main shortcomings as being that they do not acknowledge any agency that audiences have and that they are media deterministic. The main critique of not identifying agency within audience experiences led to approaches that seek to understand how and why people engage with the media. One of the first to emerge, which coincided in the 1940s with some early media affects approaches, was an approach that focused on individuals’ uses of media to obtain forms of gratification from the media. Studies within this ‘uses and gratification’ approach are still applied today by proponents such as Kamboj (2020), are behavioural in their theoretical orientation and scrutinise what people do with media, in contrast to the media effects approach, which looked at what the media does to people (see Livingstone, 2003). From its inception to its twenty-first-century application, this approach recognises that individuals are active in how they use media, within the media choices available to them. Choice is dependent on what an individual will gain from a particular option, what they will find gratifying from a specific media experience. The gratifications gained from particular media forms and media content then shape future choices. Although this approach recognises that audiences are active, it regards that activity as purely behavioural, in that patterns of choice are based on the gratification obtained. Thus, agency is reduced to a binary relationship between use and gratification, with little attention being paid to wider contextual, cultural and social factors (Katz et al., 1973). It tends towards being ‘self-referential’, in that ‘the gratifications obtained by [people] using particular media content are satisfying. It is assumed that [their] likeliness to choose this kind of medium again will increase …’ (Hasebrink and Popp, 2006: 371). Although acknowledging that audiences can exercise choice, this approach therefore falls short, in that it does not fully recognise the creativity and agency of audiences in how they engage with media socially and culturally. The ‘cultural turn’ (Chaney, 2002), which arose in the 1970s and continued strongly until the early 2000s, addresses the weaknesses in determinist and behaviourist approaches in sociology, cultural studies and media studies,

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including audience studies. Stuart Hall, a leading figure in cultural studies, considered how audiences interpret texts in relation to the ways those texts are structured through dominant ideologies. Taking a semiotic approach within a hegemonic ideology, Hall developed an encoding/decoding analysis of audiences that led to many studies focusing on a cyclical process of audiences decoding encoded media texts (Bratich, 2005; Livingstone, 2003). Hall (1973) opened up theoretical space to explore whether there was any correspondence between encoding and decoding and, if there was, to what degree. He did this through the concept of preferred readings, which refers to those aspects of dominant meanings that are encoded into texts and seek to shape preferred readings of them in alignment with the dominant ideology – although there is no guarantee that readers will actually decode the texts that way. These studies showed that there is some agency in interpreting texts, but deemed this to be only within the confines of hegemonic culture, where the dominance of certain aspects of ideology are encoded into representations and texts (Hall, 1982). The main thrust of Hall’s (1973) thesis is the relationship between systems of meaning and class position in the interpretation and negotiation of texts. He asserted that the decoding of media texts is not fully structured by class position or their encoding: there is room for reappropriations of meanings as forms of resistance. The unresolved internal contradictions of this approach, whereby audiences were seen as having a shared set of semiotic codes that might nonetheless allow different interpretations, led to the focus on audiences and the active audience (Chaney, 1983). Working in relation to Hall’s (1973) thesis, the defining study that viewed audiences in this way was Morley’s (1992) Nationwide Audience research. This study explored the relationship between texts and readers’ social positions, widely defined to include age, gender, ethnicity and occupation, as well as class. In very general terms the study found that readings varied not just with socio-demographic factors but also with people’s cultural networks, formal and informal education and the topics of the texts. This study fostered many audience studies focusing on a range of audiences including women, young people and ethnic minorities (e.g. Ang, 1996), making audiences visible. Concerns were raised, however, including the point that it separates interpretation from texts and other structuring factors, resulting in giving audiences too powerful a role in decoding texts. Another body of work produced during the 1980s and 1990s focused on the wider context of audiences, specifically film audiences, beyond simply the interaction between audience and text. This perspective had its basis in Turner’s book, Film as Social Practice (first published in 1988). This book and subsequent research highlighted the social and cultural aspects of film audiences, such as how film features in people’s weekly lives, the practices of going to the cinema

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and what meanings film has for people. This approach and Morley’s both opened up research to examine how, and to what degree, audiences are active within certain cultural and social frameworks. Although these two approaches did not necessarily speak to each other at the time, they nonetheless influenced the opening up of new areas of research. The focus was on capturing wider changes in audiences, their practices and their experiences during the 1980s and into the digital media age. The greater individualisation of social life, the rise of consumer society, the proliferation of screens (e.g. portable TVs, Sony Watchmans) and subsequent digital media combined to usher in new audience practices (Hanchard et al., 2020b). These dynamics and research foci generated a new approach that focuses on the ‘active audience’, starting in the 1990s. The active audience approach starts from the basic premise that audiences are active both in interpretation and in their practices (Barker, 2012). This continues the ongoing binary debate about whether audiences are passive or active (Livingstone, 2013), but extends it by acknowledging that audiences are plural, messy, individual and collective, consumerist and political. The approach seeks to move beyond considering audiences as a singular body that was open to realist scrutiny, to recognising that audiences are plural, even fugitive, fictional or discursive constructions (Livingstone, 2015). It sees audiences as diffuse, fragmented, dead or more alive than ever (see Livingstone and Das, 2013). Sonia Livingstone and her colleagues interjected into these debates, arguing that audiences are relational and interactive constructs which are socially, culturally and politically significant in their various configurations, and feature within consumerist frameworks. In defining audiences as relational and interactional, Livingstone (2013) asserts that the diverse sets of relationships between people and media forms need to be acknowledged. This requires a balance between paying attention to film texts and attention to audiences, which she proposes can be achieved by looking at the practices of consumption and practices of engaging with film. This means asking how texts – specialised and mainstream films – are located and understood as part of people’s social and cultural practices. This emphasises the modes of connection, relationship and communication that make up the development of ‘audiencehood’ (Livingstone, 2013), which can identify the kinds of audiences that form in specific contexts. This multidimensional approach extends the reception and interpretive approaches of Hall and the wider film-as-social-and-cultural-practice of Turner. The social and cultural practice study of film has been developed through the relatively recent approach of ‘new cinema histories’ (Maltby et al., 2012). This marks a move away from concentrating on film content – texts – and towards addressing the consumption and circulation of film. It has a strong focus on cinemas as sites of social and cultural exchange (Maltby, 2011) and, although not fully aligned to reception and active audience

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studies, it includes an overall recognition of audience experience. The distinctive point about new cinema histories is that it examines cinema as a commercial institution in relation to the socio-cultural history of its audiences. There is a risk that this approach might underplay the film-specificity of the medium. However, given that these texts are experienced by audiences in a particular context, it asserts that attention needs to go beyond film production and exhibition to the contextual, social and cultural practices of engaging with film through audiences and their experiences. New cinema histories approaches acknowledge that these experiences are not abstracted out of wider production and distribution activities, and so they base their research on audience practices and meanings of cinema, and contextualise these in their respective historical film environment. They highlight the social practices around cinema-going – which venues people chose, the accessibility of those venues, who they went with and when and the practices and lived experience of film. This approach therefore includes the temporal and spatial dynamics of audience practice and experience. Although the focus of the new cinema histories approach is on understanding and rewriting film history by largely focusing on the cinema-going experience, its sensibility chimes with Sonia Livingstone’s perception of audiences as relational and interactive constructs. New cinema histories looks at the relationships and interactions of film audiences, focusing strongly on the cinema experience historically. It often draws on memory studies and focuses less on contemporary experiences, and hence less on home-based viewing or digitally enabled viewing and audience experiences.

Audiences as relational and interactive In debates about conceptualising audiences generally, and film audiences in particular, there are tensions about whether to focus on audiences, film production and exhibition, or the film as text. There are also tensions in terms of seeing audiences as active or passive within reception studies, which focus on the relationship between audiences and texts. Although all of the approaches outlined above are insightful, each has a rather narrow focus and tends to reduce the audience to one particular aspect of it, thus missing the complexity of audiences within the wider media, social and cultural environment and compromising any understanding of the richness of audiences, in whatever historical period. This lack of attention to the multidimensionality of audiences is especially pertinent in addressing contemporary, twenty-first-century audiences. The complexity and multidimensionality of twenty-first-century audiences is increasing in the current media-rich environment and through less formalised social and cultural practices and lifestyles (Wessels, 2014). In the contemporary

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media environment there are multiple channels, including digital platforms and streaming channels, which allow people to choose when, where and how they watch films. There is also a proliferation of screens that extend the traditional cinema screen, which include digital televisions, digital laptops and notepads, mobile phones and pop-up screens in galleries and community events. Thus, individuals and groups have changed how they view content including films, when they watch and whether they watch alone, with a small or large group, or join a global or digital audience. Because of all this, commentators working within the established foci of audience and film studies discussed above have argued that audiences nowadays are fragmented and diffuse – or may no longer even exist (see Livingstone and Das, 2013). However, taking a more open approach to audiences considers their richness in how they engage with media. This may enable the debate to move on from its current position and identify the different aspects and dimensions of audiences, their practices and experiences. This has the potential to extend knowledge about the current perceived boundaries of audiences, types of audiences and how they form within the wider film and media environment. To do this requires creating a new analytical framework that will serve to underpin a new, empirically informed theoretical understanding of film audiences and audiences more widely. The starting point in considering the richness and complexity of audiences, including film audiences, is to develop an approach which emphasises that audiences are composed through the sets of relationships and interactions that combine to bring them into being and which, in so doing, generate specific audience experiences. Livingstone’s definition of audiences being relational and interactive is helpful in this context, as she argues that there is a need to theorise and conceptualise audiences in new ways that recognise the work of audiences, their social, cultural and political roles and how they position themselves in the contemporary media landscape. She focuses strongly on the agency of audiences, but also seeks to address how this agency is shaped in relational and interactive terms. As mentioned above, Livingstone (1998) advocates that audiences should be conceptualised as relational or interactive constructs that acknowledge the diverse sets of relationships between people and media forms. Consumption is part of these relations and interactions, especially in the meaningfulness that consumption has in shaping identities and lifestyles (Wessels, 2014). However, considering consumption on its own does not necessarily draw out the depth of engagement and participation in the media form itself and in wider culture. This requires a deeper and broader cultural analysis of how and where specific aspects of culture are located within people’s social and cultural practice, emphasising the modes of connection, relationship and communication that make up the development of ‘audiencehood’ (Livingstone, 2013).

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Considering audiences as relational and interactional constructs, as Livingstone (2003) posits, therefore includes examining the diverse relationships among people in the ways they engage with particular mediums and media. This can be developed by following her call that audience studies research should look at how media and media texts are located and made meaningful through people’s social and cultural practices (Livingstone, 2013). She argues that this means taking into account the temporal and spatial contexts that surround and embed a range of screens into audience practices and experiences (Livingstone, 2007), as well as the experiential aspects of different screens, and the ways that audiences relate and interact with each other around different screens – temporally, spatially and contextually. This consideration of the contextual aspects of audiences’ relations and interactions also requires ascertaining whether context frames audience relations and interactions – and, if so, to what degree – or if the relations and interactions of audiences themselves generate the context. Livingstone (1998) recognises this point, writing that: the relationship between media and people (rather than audience as a kind of social grouping), and that this relationship could usefully be analysed at both macro and micro levels … [through] an explicitly multi-level approach … (Livingstone, 1998: 206)

The focus on both the macro and micro aspects of audiences’ relationships highlights that although audiences are active, they are also embedded in wider relationships. The macro relationships are not necessarily determining factors, but they feature in the shaping of audiences and in their particular instantiations. Audiences’ social relations point to the wider media environment and the specificity of particular cultural forms in relation to the interactions of audience members and their personal relationships with other audience members, media and texts. This means that attention needs to be placed both on the agency of audiences and on the broader social and institutional factors that act as a frame for that agency. This frame may of course be questioned, resisted, and changed through action, but nonetheless wider factors feed into audiences’ relationships. In the case of film, these include the economic and cultural factors of production, exhibition and programming, and the values of commercial and cultural institutions in the creative economy. Livingstone proposes considering not only the agency of audiences – something that active audiences approaches do – but also how that agency is part of wider institutional relations. In doing that she advocates a multilevel approach that can address the agency of audiences, the particular cultural and media forms and texts, and wider institutional aspects of the production and distribution of those texts. One way to develop this call is to consider audiences’ agency within the concept of a cultural form.

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Cultural forms The concept of cultural forms refers to the ways in which culture materialises in particular ways, and what specific aspects of culture symbolise – and mean – for individuals, groups and wider societies. Several authors have proffered definitions of cultural forms, including Raymond Williams (1974), who argues that television, for example, is not determined by its technology but, rather, is embedded within domestic culture. Willis (1978), in another example, sees the cultural form as the ways in which groups in society appropriate cultural artefacts to create subcultures of various types. David Chaney’s (1990) concept of the cultural form is appropriate and useful for analysing macro and micro aspects of audiences. This is because his conceptualisation addresses the relations and interactions among institutional aspects of the production and distribution of culture, the texts and narratives of a particular cultural form and the types of participation and engagement by a range of audiences. This balances attention on macro, micro and meso relations in shaping audiences without making any one aspect the determinant, while recognising production, texts and members of audiences as they come together to create audiences and audience experiences. Chaney asserts that any cultural form has three interdependent dimensions that relate and interact with each other (Chaney, 1983, 1990). The first dimension is the relations of production, which refers to the social organisation of the production and distribution of cultural objects and performances, including specific features of technologies and types of cultural phenomenon. The second dimension is the characteristics of the mode of narration of a form, including its themes, style and narrative organisation. The third dimension is the types of participative interactions between producer, performer and audience of particular cultural forms. This concept of the cultural form also includes in a more general sense the personal and collective characteristics of social bonds that are implied in cultural performance and generated through performances. Two further points that Chaney makes about this concept of the cultural form are: first, that the medium does not equal the form. Within the medium of film there are different cultural forms, for example mainstream, commercially driven film and specialised, culturally driven film. This means there are distinctions between the relations of production, narratives and participation of each cultural form within a medium. So, for example, a Hollywood film, financed, produced and distributed to a mass global audience via corporate multiplex cinemas, is operating within a different cultural form to a low-budget political documentary, distributed directly by the producer/director and shown at a human rights film festival. Chaney’s second point is that cultural forms are not restricted to aesthetic forms of representation, but can include other ways in which personal and

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shared ways of being in the world can be symbolised and expressed, such as through documentary film. In addressing the dynamics of the ways in which film audiences form, this concept enables researchers to scrutinise the process of film audience formation in a holistic way. Furthermore, it acknowledges that variations within the medium of film itself mean there is a need to ascertain whether there are different dynamics and factors in the ways in which audiences form for different types of film, such as mainstream or specialised. It also recognises the ways in which culture – whether performances, artefacts or texts – interacts with and is embedded in personal lives and shared cultures. This opens up possibilities for investigating the relationship between individuals, groups and culture and exploring how that relationship develops and is sustained through specific interactions with culture, including film culture. Employing this concept of the cultural form – with its framework of the relations of production, narratives and participation in the form – means that researchers can address the wider context of the institutions of film, including film provision, can assess variations in film types and narratives and can understand the personal and intersubjective meaning of film for people. It enables researchers to understand how audiences form, while taking into account the relationship between the ways in which opportunities in engaging with film are organised as well as individual and group interest in film, and their creative engagement with film, including how they relate to the film narrative and share thoughts about a film. This balance is important because it acknowledges the structuring of film provision and the meanings that various types of film have for people, which combine in the dynamics of audience formation. The significance of taking Chaney’s cultural forms approach is that it emphasises relationships and interactions of cultural forms that assist in developing the concept of audiences as being relational and interactive. The cultural form as defined by Chaney can be operationalised as an analytical framework to develop multilevel research, as it covers the ways in which audiences form in contextual terms and in detailed interactions and relations, as well as at wider industry, policy and provision levels.

Culture and meaning within audiences Understanding audiences’ experiences requires paying attention to the meaning of the audience experience itself and the texts or performances within specific cultural forms. The meaningfulness of the engagement with a text or performance and audience experiences moves cultural engagement to mean more than just cultural consumption. To focus on meaning, the anthropologist

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Clifford Geertz (1973) draws on the post-analytical philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Alfred Schutz and the interpretive social science of Max Weber to conceptualise ‘meaning’. Geertz (1973: 5) takes a semiotic approach to culture and, in a much-cited quotation, argues that: Believing … that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun … I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretative one in search of meaning.

This approach advocates that, to understand and interpret a culture’s web of symbols, scholars need to identify its main elements and then determine the relationships among those elements, as these relationships generate the characteristics of a whole system more generally. They do so through the way that core symbols are organised and express a system’s underlying structure or ideological principles. These are a part of systems of meaning, which are public, because they are the collective property of particular groups of people and societies. Therefore, understanding culture from this perspective requires paying attention to the richness of cultural life, the ways in which aspects of culture are important and why. As Geertz (1973) observes, without this understanding it is not possible to engage meaningfully in social life. What Geertz provides for the development of a theory of audiences, including film audiences, is an integration of social action that, on the one hand, is larger than individuals, and on the other hand, recognises the interpretive variation within people who are differently positioned within social groups and society more widely. According to his notion, meaning is structured through symbolic order, but it is an order that is interpreted in differing ways and acted upon in varying ways. Culture is relational and interactive, created through the interpretation of meaning, which Geertz deems to be public. This means that the texts and performances of different cultural forms are shared and intersubjective, but they are also personal. This focus on culture being both public and personal and something that involves interpretation and negotiation of symbolic and social order provides an insight into the ways in which audiences engage in the meaning-making aspects of cultural forms – including film – as well as the ways in which institutions and organisations that produce those texts and narratives generate symbolic frameworks for the practices of engagement and negotiation of meaning undertaken by audiences. As noted above, Turner (1999) raises the point that, through social practices around film, audiences form, and the meaning of films and the audiences’ experience is realised. Thus, films and audience experiences become part of both personal and shared culture, which extends beyond the immediate

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audience experience and wider film culture, into the culture of everyday life (Williams, 1958, 1974). These practices have temporal and spatial dynamics in how people engage in culture and in audiences. In the case of film, for example, temporal dynamics include the differing amounts of time people have to watch films, the ways films are watched, recorded, screened and/ or broadcast at set times and whether it is possible to pause and restart a film from a streaming service. Spatial dynamics relate to the ways that film venues, events and screens are located in relation to people, and that films are watched either while static, for instance, in a cinema or on a sofa at home, or while moving, like on a plane screen or on a smartphone on a bus. Variations in the dynamics of the temporality and spatiality of social practice also relate to how the processes of film exhibition, distribution, programming and production are organised. In terms of audiences this relates specifically to the audiences’ participative interactions with the cultural forms. This focuses on the members of an audience participating through shared and personal film-watching and through their relations and interactions with film venues, platforms and events. Building on this, considering social practices also brings into view the characteristics of social bonds as well as the personal, intersubjective and shared cultural sensibilities of cultural engagement, including with film. When looking at practices, the relationships between personal activity and experiences, on the one hand, and social organisation, on the other, become clear in the ways that, for example, film is personal for each individual audience member but simultaneously shared as part of an audience experience. These relationships are also shaped through the differing personal and creative relationships people may have with film within the wider institutional organisation of the production, distribution and exhibition of film. Understanding the ways in which people develop a relationship with film and with the audience experience involves examining the personal aspects of that relationship, the ways audiences interpret texts and the wider cultural and social meaning of film and the audience experience.

Relationships with film: creativity, interpretation and personal and cultural lived experience Part of understanding audiences is ascertaining what film and the audience experience means for people, and in what ways both of these become – and remain – meaningful. In terms of considering audiences’ relationship with film, there are three areas to explore: how people engage with film creatively, given its institutional framing; how they comprehend and interpret film; and the ways in which engaging with film and with audiences is at once

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personal, social and cultural. As discussed above, research in the 2010s and early 2020s looks at various aspects of this. For instance, diverse approaches within audience studies focus on the relative activity or passivity of audiences, their interpretation of film texts and the wider social practices of cinema-going and film-watching. Each of these approaches tends to take a binary view on these and/or reduces the audience experience to one aspect of it, failing to capture the richness of film audiences and their wider contextual framing and processes. Understanding the ways individuals develop a relationship with film and engage with it as audiences requires giving attention to how these social practices contribute to creating meaningful relations with film. To underpin any assessment of the ways in which people develop relationships with film there is a need to develop a theoretical approach that identifies both the creativity of engaging with film and film audiences and an understanding of how any such creativity is framed by a wider institutional and contextual framework. The work of George Herbert Mead complements the overall approach of Clifford Geertz (1973) and Philip Abrams (1984) discussed above. Using Mead’s (1934) theorisation of the self and society adds to Geertz’s work by bringing into focus how meaning and interpretation is achieved by individuals within the dynamics of their personal, social and cultural relations. In particular, Mead recognises the creative aspect of actions and interpretation within wider social and cultural mores, sensibilities and knowledge. Although Mead (1934) argues that society is made through people’s social interactions and relations, he recognises the ways in which this process results in social institutions such as family life, education and wider culture. He goes on to argue that, since these are the result of human and social action, they can also be changed through action. This complements Abrams’ (1984) analyses of change in social life, because both Mead and Abrams focus on process. Mead does this through examining the relationship between the self and society, while Abrams centres on the relationship between personal experience, on the one hand, and wider society experienced as being fact like, on the other hand. Their approaches are relevant in understanding audiences, because audiences are situated vis-à-vis the institution of film, including its production, distribution and exhibition. Nonetheless, through the ways audiences engage with film, they create the meaning of the film, through their comprehension and interpretation of the narrative and by bringing the film into wider culture in how they share film – both through the audience experience and more broadly through their social and cultural networks. These three approaches underpin the dynamics of a cultural form such as film. Mead’s (1934) contribution in understanding the audience is based on his thesis that the individual in society is a ‘social self’, which is generated through a processual relationship between the ‘I’ and the ‘me’. He defines

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the ‘I’ as the aspect of the self that enables a person to act beyond habit and social expectations and to be creative (see also Gronow, 2008). Mead reasons that the ‘I’ is that creative part of the self that responds to situations based on past personal experiences in ways that are novel and not necessarily predictable (Roseneil and Ketokivi, 2016), by generating actions that are largely unknowable, either in advance or in the present moment. The ‘I’ is therefore generative and constitutes the distinctiveness of a person. Mead (1934) adds that the ‘I’ exists only in relation to the ‘me’. The ‘me’ is the social object of the ‘I’ and can be understood as a person’s self-image when they look at themselves through the eyes of ‘the other’, interpreted through webs of meaning involving a symbolic order. The other is understood as a ‘generalised other’ that represents the perceived set of attitudes among a wider social group, such as an audience for example, as well as an individual’s significant others. Through this process, people reflect on themselves and on others, on contexts and personal experience in relation to cultural and social life. Mead’s theoretical approach is useful for understanding audiences, as it enables an examination of the personal relationships people have with films in a way that also acknowledges the creative aspects of that engagement, as well as the point that personal experiences are social and cultural. Mead’s (1934) thesis extends into the development of symbolic interactionism, which highlights personal experience through social interaction (Blumer, 1969). The key aspect of symbolic interactionism is that it focuses on meaning, which is significant in understanding how film engages people by becoming a meaningful part of their personal and cultural life. There are three central tenets to this which are useful in assessing audiences, how they form and what the meaning of audiences and films are for people. The three tenets are that: (1) humans act towards things in relation to the meaning that something has for them; (2) the meaning of things arises out of the social interactions someone has with others and wider society; (3) meanings are formed, handled and modified through interpretive processes that people have in encountering and dealing with particular events (Blumer, 1969). This theoretical approach highlights the process of social and cultural life becoming meaningful, which includes both the ways people engage with culture and cultural texts such as film. Film as part of a society’s socionarratology (Frank, 2010) tells stories that engage people in processes of interpretation with others as audiences, or that are shared in public and personal discourse, through encountering the story on screen and relating that story to personal as well as wider social and cultural experience. The personal is therefore a connection between the self which is understood subjectively but is also connected to and embedded within wider social and cultural intersubjective meaning. In fact, one can argue that the way the personal connects the self with wider social and cultural worlds is at the

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crux of the relationship people develop with film. Film tells stories that can be personally felt at the same time as portraying social and cultural stories, events, characters and situations. Extending the discussion in this section in looking at people’s relations and interactions with film therefore involves examining personal relations with films. Carole Smart’s writing on personal relations shows that the ‘personal’ is ‘an area of life which impacts closely on people and means much to them …’ (Smart, 2007: 28), observing that social and cultural life is personal to an individual. Smart (2007) recognises that this does not mean that the personal is completely individual, autonomous and abstracted out of wider social and cultural relations, but states that the personal, whether personal experience, meanings that feel deeply personal and indeed ‘personal life’, is ‘always already part of the social’ (Smart, 2007: 28). Thus, the ‘personal’ is both subjective and intersubjective, acting as a catalyst that blends individuals and society, enabling individuals to locate themselves within their wider social and cultural lives (May, 2011). This reveals the ways in which ‘people, selves and values … [are] … relational, connected and embedded, in webs of relationships’ (Mason, 2004: 166). These relations are embedded in social lives that are imbued with meaning through the culture of everyday lives as well as through the cultural and symbolic lives of people, communities, networks and society. Personal lives and senses of personal development evolve over time and through the lifecourse. Traditionally, the idea of the lifecourse refers to age-linked transitions such as birth, childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, midlife and old age (WHO, 2000). These are experienced as a sequence of socially defined events and roles that are shaped and given meaning through the social institutions of a particular historical period (Giele and Elder, 1998). The idea has been extended to recognise that there are various patterns within different people’s lives, especially in pluralistic contemporary social life in which lifecourse trajectories and transitions vary considerably (Bengtson et al., 2009). Lifecourses are therefore not solely based on chronological age, but are also shaped by individual and collective trajectories of experience in space, in place and through time. ‘Lifecourses, through their lived process are shaped by events, roles, memory and retrospection’ (Worth and Hardhill, 2015: 2). The shaping and experience of lifecourses are embedded within people’s personal and social relations, in what is termed ‘linked lives’ (Bengtson, et al., 2009). The concept of ‘linked lives’ focuses on the relational aspects that shape a person’s lifecourse, whether including relations with family members, friends, work and education colleagues, as well as community and/or special interest groups. These intersect with relations based on factors such as age (generational and intergenerational), gender (same gender and other genders), ethnicity, levels of education and income, geographical location and cultural interests. This signals that

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the ways in which a lifecourse becomes meaningful for a person are through his or her personal and cultural relations as well as through their education level, family background and socio-economic status. Further, events in a person’s life and changes in their situation also shape the lifecourse and its experience. So, the lifecourse is something that feels personal but also feels part of wider social and cultural life. Situated within these creative and meaning-making processes is the activity of comprehending and interpreting social and cultural life, including its texts and performances. Film features in this process for many people in that it is a popular cultural activity and because the stories it tells, although dreamlike to some extent, also encourage ways to think imaginatively about situations, characters and life narratives. Established approaches to the relationship between audience and narrative have split across the binary of active and passive audiences. Those taking a passive approach argue that the film text positions the viewer and his or her gaze through the structure of the film narrative. Those who take an active approach argue that audiences have considerable freedom to interpret the text, asserting that the meaning of the text is created through audience interpretation, rather than the text itself. Hence, understanding the creative and symbolic aspects of the ways in which film narratives become meaningful requires balancing audience interpretations and film texts with personal, social and cultural knowledge and experience. Although insightful, these approaches tend to emphasise either text or audience rather than the interaction between the two, the process of constructing and understanding narratives, or interpreting them. Rather than seeing the ways films are understood as a single process, which involves either encoding and decoding or being passively received or actively interpreted, interactions with narrative can be seen as two related processes – comprehension and interpretation (Livingstone, 2007). The first, comprehension, is the ways in which the audience grasps and understands the narrative. In this process audiences grasp the denotative level of textual meaning of the text – so, what the text is saying, what the plot is, who the characters are and what the story is about. This focus on comprehension keeps the text and its narrative in play, rather than assuming that the text has little influence on viewers’ interpretation or determines any interpretation. The second, concurrent or subsequent process, is interpretation, how the audience interacts with a text by engaging with its textual meaning through processes of implication and association that are shaped by a person’s contextual, cultural and personal knowledge and experience (Livingstone, 2007). Both of these processes place a demand on the viewers’ textual and extratextual knowledge. Extratextual knowledge is comprised of the personal and cultural resources of audience members’ lives, experiences and knowledge, which they use in interpreting a narrative. This means that, although there

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is some level of shared understanding about what a film is about – its comprehension – the film is also open to a range of interpretations by audience members. This acknowledges that audiences are plural and that texts are polysemic (Livingstone, 2013) and open to a diversity of interpretations. Concentrating on these two processes – comprehension and interpretation – means recognising that the text and the cultural context of the audience members are equally important in the ways audiences interpret a film. This is because, although audiences are plural, located and reflexive, they are also engaging around a particular film narrative.

Developing a framework to understand audiences In order to advance the thinking around audiences, especially contemporary film audiences, the authors realised that there was a need to develop a new analytical framework in order to address the relationship between the agency and creativity of audiences and the comprehension and interpretation of film narratives, and film provision. This was because there was a need to understand both the meaningfulness of audience experience for a range of people across various types of lifecourses, and how this is created and shaped by them by developing relationships as they interact with the institution of film. Moreover, such a framework would also address the broader trends in audiences and the organisation of film provision. To do this, the above discussion was used as the basis for developing a framework that can support a deep and rich understanding of film audiences and particular types of provision – one that was based on film as a cultural form and would advance Sonia Livingstone’s definition of audiences as relational and interactive. The framework produced is comprised of: • an overarching understanding of film as a cultural form, in order to address audiences holistically by paying attention to the relationship and interactions between the relations of production and provision of film, its institutional arrangements, its narratives and texts, and the ways in which audiences engage with film; • the use of theoretical approaches that address the meaningfulness of human action, interaction and relationships in social and cultural terms; • an exploration of the processes of audiences, including their formation as well as their instantiation and configuration; • a consideration of the ways in which people develop a personal relationship with film, which also connects them to wider social and cultural communities and narratives. Attention is also focused on how that changes through time and across the lifecourse. This includes the types

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of films people view, the venues and screens they use, how and who they share film with, and what makes film and the film audience experience meaningful to them; • an understanding and analysis of how film provision and film culture interacts in particular ways with different people, what access they have to film and film culture; • use of all the above to identify, understand and analyse the relations and interactions that characterise audiences and their formation. The framework was applied to support the understanding of film audiences by focusing on how people engage with film and the audience experience in their personal and cultural lives, and how they comprehend and interpret film narratives in the context of film provision (production, distribution and exhibition) and policy. This has opened up the possibility of examining the process of how audiences form, which can start to identify and assess the current changes in audience configurations and formations.

Conclusion: situating audiences within the process of the institutional arrangement of film The debates about how to define audiences and how to understand the ways they are changing in the digital period raise a central issue for audience studies – how to balance the richness and creativity of audiences with the institutional arrangements of film, its values, production, distribution and exhibition. This point – the balance between agency and structure – is an ongoing concern in audience studies. As discussed in this chapter, previous theoretical and conceptual approaches have tended to focus on just one of these, and they tend to give prominence to either structure (whether text or the relations of production) or agency (the active audience). This is limiting in two main ways. First, these approaches do not cover the variations and complexity of the ways in which audiences and film as an institution combine to create audience experience and engagement. Second, the limitation of the first point means that current research is finding it difficult to address the dynamics of current audiences, their formation and their characteristics. The difficulty is at two levels. One, in terms of the precise character of audiences, which often leads to assessments that audiences are fragmented, diffuse, have ceased to exist or are everywhere, which tend to abstract audiences out of the institutional arrangements of film and their own context and culture. Two, the rise of many different types of screens and changes in production, distribution and consumption through digital means is creating a more complex institutional framework of film. Furthermore, this trend is combining with broader social change, in particular, the ways people

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organise their leisure time, namely informalised and flexible, and how they engage with culture across high-, middle- and low-brow levels, and through various kinds of events such as film festivals, film pop-ups and different types of cinema, as well as the mainstream media and social media. These trends are resulting in audiences having more opportunity to access film in terms of screens, platforms and ways of sharing film than in the pre-digital era. Although the screen, platform and venue environment is proliferating, this does not mean that the range of film on offer is more diverse, and so choice remains limited, as does access to events and film culture that is diverse. Nonetheless, the audience–film environment is more complex – or complex in another way – than previous audiences in the industrial period. This is not to say that everything has changed, as there are still audiences who attend their local cinema and structure their film choices through new releases at a commercial cinema and/or particular programmes at an independent cinema. Family audiences centred on a television at home continue. These continuities are in the mix of changes of screen types and flexible, digitally enabled viewing, along with choices about when to watch what types of film, with whom or alone. To assess these changes and understand them, the authors identified the need for a framework that addresses and keeps in balance the creativity and richness of film audiences and their experience with the organising ways film is institutionalised. To do this, the authors of this monograph argue that a holistic approach is needed that focuses on the formation of audiences as well as on their particular instantiations. Such a holistic approach can keep the dimensions of film audiences in view. These dimensions are the audiences, the film texts and media and the production and exhibition of film, which combine to create specific audiences and their experiences. These aspects are also contextual in that they are embedded in the culture of the institution of film and in the socio-cultural lives of individuals and audiences. Furthermore, attention needs to be given to the creative aspects of audiences and their experiences in relation to the institutional arrangement and organising of film and film culture. This requires drawing on cultural and interpretive theoretical approaches that emphasise human and social agency and identify how meaning is created through social and cultural interactions. These approaches can be deepened to focus on the practices and lived experience of audiences – not only as they view films, but in terms of how film and audience experience becomes meaningful for a person and also for wider communities, culture and public discourse. To address this, and to understand audiences, involves recognising that film is both personally engaged with and, therefore, also culturally and socially engaged with. This means that the personal relationship with film needs to be considered – not only in and

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of itself, but also to ascertain how that personal relationship features in the ways audiences form and in actual audience experience. This points to the underpinning dynamics of audiences and the ways they form; that is, how a person develops a relationship with film across their lifecourse features in their viewing and audience practices. This focus creates a new lens through which to examine ways in which audiences form, develop and learn, one which is situated, as it contextualises audiences with people’s lives, their resources and their accessibility to film culture as well as film. Attention is therefore also paid to process – the process of audience formation and the process of developing relationships with film with regard to the economic and cultural structuring of film provision, namely the institutionalisation of film. Process therefore also includes the structural aspects of film in its production, distribution and exhibition. Audiences interact with the institution of film in terms of what types of films are programmed, where they are available, which screens they use and the types of audiences that configure in particular venues and other sites of film viewing. This is a dynamic relationship, since audiences engage with film provision in terms of film programming and allied production, distribution and exhibition. In so doing they shape this provision, as commercial and cultural film bodies respond to audience choice and trends, but these bodies also shape the audience experience in the ways they then decide to produce and distribute film. This suggests that audiences are dynamic and they form in relation to the institutional arrangement of film. By taking this lens to look into audiences, researchers can address the creative and structuring aspects of audiences as they engage with film as a cultural form. This extends Sonia Livingstone’s concept of audiences being relational and interactive and grounds these relations and interactions by contextualising them within the production, narrative and audience participation of film as a cultural form.

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2 Film audiences in English regions: research context and methodology

Introduction This chapter discusses the methodology of Beyond the Multiplex, which examined the ways in which film audiences form in English regions. The methodology was designed to address BtM’s central research question, which was: ‘How do audiences engage with, and form in different ways, around specialised and mainstream films?’ The specific design of the methodology was based on the theoretical framework described in Chapter 1, which addresses both agency and structure in the ways audiences form. To do this, the project used mixed methods to capture the meaningful and rich experiences of film audiences and ascertain how these form into broader audience trends within the institutional and structural aspects of film distribution and exhibition. To support the analysis of the mixed data, a computational ontology was then used to identify relationships among the datasets. Another aspect of BtM’s research practice is that it involved partners from the BFI regional film hubs and its FAN, to bring together insights from this empirical study with existing policy and practice. The chapter discusses how the methodology was used during the project. It therefore provides details of BtM’s sampling approach and methods used, discussing how mixed methods and the computational ontology were used to address the relational and interactive dimensions of audiences identified within the study’s original framework of film as a cultural form. The chapter first outlines some of the methodological challenges in researching how audiences form, then introduces the context of the research, namely where the research took place and the rationale for the regions chosen as BtM’s sample. This is followed by an overview of the research design and methods used before discussing the details of each method, and what each method contributed to understanding audiences. The chapter then discusses the use

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of the computational analysis within the process of analysis. It concludes by considering how the use of mixed methods, underpinned by the computational ontology, was helpful for understanding audiences and their formation.

Operationalisation of the methodological challenges in researching how audiences form The methodology was designed to address one of the key challenges of audience studies research, which is how to capture the richness of audiences’ experiences within the wider context of film provision, access to film and film culture. As discussed in more detail in Chapter 1, there is a relatively long history of research about film and television audiences, going back to the 1920s. Alongside changes in theoretical approaches and knowledge about audiences, methodologies have also expanded over time (Livingstone, 2013). There are, however, long-standing tendencies in approaches and allied methodologies. One enduring trend is that contemporary audience studies research often involves either large-scale quantitative surveys to capture broad behaviours and trends (e.g. Arts Council England, 2011) or much smaller qualitative studies of specific audience experiences (e.g. Evans, 2011). While such studies clearly have many strengths and merits, they also harbour weaknesses. For example, findings from qualitative studies cannot be generalised, while quantitative arts impact studies often hold a positive bias and overstate the impact of particular art forms on audiences (Johanson and Glow, 2015). The significance of these weaknesses is highlighted when we recognise audience experiences as rich and diverse (Christie, 2011; Barker and Mathijs, 2012) and/or consider audiences to be relational and interactive (Livingstone, 1998; Corbett and Wessels, 2017). These insights suggest the need for research to address the relationships that audiences have with film, including how they watch them – online, at events and festivals, at home and at cinemas – which set the scene for BtM. Part of understanding how audiences engage with film is through their interpretive processes of narratives and content and how these create meaningful film experiences for them. The meaningfulness of film and audience experience also involves the ways that places, venues and events are significant for their experience of film. These aspects of audiences and their experience are influenced by the impact of film policy and industry practice on real and perceived levels of access and provision. This is especially relevant to the exhibition of specialised film because access is uneven across England, so research was needed to examine the local and regional circumstances of film audiences.

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Addressing these aspects of the multidimensional character of film audiences and the process of how they form therefore required the use of mixed methods. Understanding the richness of film audience experiences requires qualitative methods, and identifying broader trends in audiences’ film-watching activities needs quantitative methods. This had to be complemented by a document analysis of film industry trends and policy, as well as a secondary analysis of trends in cultural participation in order to contextualise how audiences form within the wider film and cultural sector. The use of one methodology would not have enabled the research project to grasp the process of audience formation. Instead, a mixed-methods methodology was designed that enables research to identify how various dimensions of film provision and audiences feed into the different ways that people create their engagement with film, the depth, variety and richness of audience experience and the broader trends of audience formation. The advantage of using mixed methods was that it allowed BtM to grasp the range of different aspects inherent in the formation of audiences. This made it an appropriate choice of methodology. There were, however, challenges in adopting this methodology. One of the main challenges was that each of these dimensions has different ontological and epistemological underpinnings, which in turn inform their respective methodological approaches. Although recognising the difficulties of combining methods with their respective underlying ontological frames, more recent arguments have suggested that these difficulties should not hinder the use of mixed methods (Crossley and Edwards, 2016; Mason, 2006). Crossley and Edwards (2016), for example, question the premise that ontological underpinnings need to determine the methods used. Instead, they reason that methods do not necessarily embody theoretical, ontological or epistemological assumptions and, further, that methods can be used in a variety of ways and adapted to meet the questions of a phenomenon under review. Mason (2006) has a similar view and expands the argument into data analysis: she argues that, rather than limiting research to one approach, mixed methods create lenses onto complex social worlds and combine data in grasping that complexity. Nonetheless, as with other methodological approaches, attention needs to be given to the details of the design of any particular research methodology. This ranges from the overall project design to the design of each method and the specific process of analysis, as well as the ways in which each dataset frames a specific research focus. This involves a consideration of how to code data systematically in terms of relations between data – both within the same dataset and across different datasets (Cresswell, 2009). The details of all these factors as applied in BtM are discussed below. In relation to data analysis, the BtM project developed an innovative approach by developing a computational ontology that was designed to support the

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data analysis and identifying and understanding the relations between that data in a highly systematic manner. To conceptualise these relations, BtM used Chaney’s (1990) concept of ‘cultural form’ to highlight the significance of relations between producers, distributors and consumers (Merrington et al., 2019). By applying this to film, BtM explored the relations between different dimensions of film as a cultural form. This meant addressing the provision of film in terms of film distribution and exhibition, including film policy, the commercial and independent film sectors and other stakeholders, such as broadcasters, festival organisers, venue managers and programmers, marketing managers and film critics. It also meant examining individual film viewers’ and audiences’ perspectives and practices. The activities of each of these worlds, and how they relate to one another, generates particular audience experiences within the wider context of policy development, film industry practices and cultural consumption. Employing the concept of the cultural form and seeing audiences as relational and interactive, BtM used a multidimensional mixed-methods methodology to gather data and a computational ontology to assist in the thematic analysis. In this way, BtM was able to examine film audiences in a complex and relational way that considers specific film audience formations and experiences alongside the broader circumstances in which audiences form. As discussed in Chapter 1, the BtM project and its focus on the underresearched area of the process of how audiences form required undertaking research that would capture data on several dimensions across the provision of film and the engagement in film by audiences. The overall dimensions are: film consumption, place, venue and events, policy and industry trends and the meaning that film holds for people. These are articulated in different ways depending on context and film engagement, in the ways in which audiences form within particular film cultures of particular places in a wider regional context (Figure 2.1). The above provides an overview of the dimensions of the ways in which film audiences may form. However, in theoretical and analytical terms, they needed to be deconstructed in order to develop knowledge by operationalising applied research into the ways that audiences form. The way the BtM project did this is shown in Figure 2.2. In designing the methodology, the project operationalised its framework, which included the cultural form and the relational and interactive characteristics of audiences. It did this by developing a range of methods that were used to contribute to a multidimensional use of mixed data (Mason, 2006). Such an approach uses different methods that can be linked to each other coherently to inform each other, cross-reference each other and simultaneously build on each other in the ways each offers particular insights. In taking this

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film consumption

Audience/regional place, venue, events film culture

meaning of film

policy and industry

Figure 2.1  Overall dimensions of the formation of film audiences

Audiences, interactions and relations in regional film context/culture ● ● ●

Venue-based viewing figures Socio-cultural profile Digital viewing

● ● ●

Meaning of film

Practices of consumption ● ● ●

Construct meaning Engagement/lived experience Narrative/cinematic language

What films? Regional provision Role of film hubs

●

Place (venues, events, home, mobile)

Policy and Industry Figure 2.2  Dimensions of audience formation

approach, the BtM project used qualitative interviews to inductively explore the interactions and relations of audiences in regional contexts and film cultures. This method was linked with a quantitative secondary analysis of film and cultural participation to generate a socio-cultural index of profiles of film audience members. This was further informed by an analysis of viewing

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figures and a document analysis of film and industry policy, to identify levels of provision. This in turn was linked to the practices of consumption that were explored through qualitative interviews, the aforementioned viewing figures and a three-wave survey, which ascertained what films people watched over a six-month period. Linking into all of this, sixteen qualitative film elicitation focus groups explored how people contract meanings of film through their interpretive practices of film narrative and cinematic language in fostering their engagement with film and lived experiences. These dimensions and processes were contextualised in the places they had occurred – whether in venues, or events in particular places, at home, or mobile viewing. In addition to film policy and industry document analysis, BtM undertook a co-creation approach with regional film policy and provision stakeholders. This involved meetings and workshops with regional film hubs and their members, leading to applying a Delphi methodology to develop policy and practice recommendations (provided in the Conclusion). This operationalising of the methodology meant that the research could capture details of the specific dimensions of audience formation and explore how they interact and relate to each other in the ways that audiences form. To ensure that the analysis of this multidimensional methodology was systematic and relational – linked – the BtM project used a computational ontology which enabled the researchers to interrogate a diverse range of datasets and to map relationships between the constituent dimensions of audiences and how they form. The methodology design and operationalisation sought to overcome some of the challenges in using mixed methods. It did this by adapting a multidimensional logic to mixed methods and by supporting the analysis through the use of a bespoke computational ontology that mirrored the relations and interactions of a knowledge domain of the ways that audiences form. This was applied in the context of four English regions, which are described in the following section.

Research context: film audiences in four English regions The BtM project was introduced in Chapter 1 and its research activities formed the basis of a new theorisation of audiences, using its empirical data gleaned from four English regions. BtM explored the provision of, and engagement with, film in four English regions: the North East, North West, South West, and Yorkshire and the Humber. It examined audiences, film provision and consumption in theatrical, place- and venue-based exhibition spaces, including multiplexes, independent cinemas, film clubs and community cinema, as well as events such as film festivals. It also addressed non-theatrical forms of film provision and consumption, such as terrestrial and cable/

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satellite television, DVD, Blu-Ray and the various online and VoD platforms. To further interrogate provision, it also examined the ways in which films are made available to audiences through the work of the funding and distribution gatekeepers who determine what sorts of films get made, which of them are put into distribution and under what conditions. Furthermore, it looked at audiences themselves, and people’s experiences of films and film audiences. The choice of regions was based on demographic profiles and levels of access to specialised and mainstream film exhibition. There is less access to specialised film in the English regions than in London. The South West of England has better provision than the North East, North West, and Yorkshire and Humber regions. All four of these regions were selected for the research because they have similar demographics and a similarly unequal distribution of film exhibition. These regions also dovetail with the BFI regional film hubs and FAN geographies. The characteristics of each provided the context for exploring the ways in which audiences form, and together they provide an extensive evidence base from which to develop knowledge about audiences. The North East is the smallest of the four studied regions by population size, with 2,669,900 people living there. The socio-economic profile of the population is marked by low levels of ethnic diversity, lower educational attainment levels and a higher level of unemployment than the national average (ONS, 2019). In terms of film consumption, adults living in the North East are less likely to go to the cinema than people in any other English region, at 47.8% as compared to the English average of 57.8% (DCMS, 2018). In part, this is tied to the levels of cinema provision. In addition, although there is a good level of multiplex mainstream provision across most of the region, the number of specialised film screenings is below the national average. The North East has 160 cinema screens (6.1 per 100,000 people) across 27 cinema venues, 137 of which are located in multiplex cinema chains, and 23 in traditional and mixed-use cinemas. However, only five of these are classified as ‘specialised screens’, dedicated to showing predominantly specialised film programmes, including arthouse films. This amounts to just 1.5% of all specialised screens in the UK – of which 34.6% are located in London (BFI, 2019b). Film exhibition development in the region is supported by Film Hub North, while Northern Film + Media promotes screen industries across the region. However, despite the largest city within the region, Newcastle, having three independent cinemas – Tyneside Cinema, Star and Shadow Cinema and Side Cinema – there are no major film festivals there. Nearby, the slightly smaller city of Sunderland has no independent cinema, but it hosts an annual short film festival. In contrast, large North Eastern towns such

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as Middlesbrough, Darlington and Hartlepool do not have any independent film cinemas or festivals, while some smaller towns in the region have mixed art-form venues which screen films, and/or small independent cinemas, for instance, Jam Jar in Whitley Bay, The Maltings in Berwick, The Forum in Hexham and the ARC in Stockton-on-Tees. Throughout the North East there are also a small number of well-established film clubs, film societies and festivals, such as Berwick Film & Media Art Festival. Alongside independent cinema, newer ‘boutique’ small commercial chain cinemas have started to open in the region since about 2010, including an Everyman cinema in Newcastle and an Odeon Luxe in Durham. Together, this shows that there is potential for people to access a diverse range of films within the region, but that it is in specific places through independent venues, festivals and film clubs or festivals, rather than being widespread. The North West region has the largest population of the four studied regions, 7,341,200, making it 2.5 times the size of the North East. The population has a mixed socio-economic profile and areas of mixed ethnic profile, educational attainment levels that are slightly lower than the national average and an unemployment level that is slightly higher than average (ONS, 2019). In terms of film exhibition provision, there are 480 cinema screens in the North West (6.7 per 100,000 people) across 73 venues, 412 of which are located in multiplex chain cinemas and 68 in traditional and mixeduse cinemas, with only 20 (6.1% of the UK total) classified as specialised screens (BFI, 2019b). As with other regions, the cities and towns there have the broadest levels of film exhibition. For example, in Manchester, HOME is the central independent venue, while smaller cities and towns such as Warrington, Blackpool, Preston, Stockport and Bolton have a few independent or non-mainstream venues but a range of mainstream multiplex provision. There are also some mixed art-form venues which show films, such as The Dukes in Lancaster, but, considering the size of the region, these are limited in numbers. Outside of the larger cities and towns there are several film festivals, societies and events across the region that each provide access to non-mainstream films, such as the Leigh Film Society, Keswick Film Festival and Plaza Community Cinema. In addition, as with other regions, a set of small commercial ‘boutique’ chains have expanded since 2010, opening venues in affluent areas, including Everyman cinemas in Altrincham, Clitheroe, Liverpool and Manchester, as well as a Curzon Cinema in Knutsford. In terms of support for film provision in the region, again the key agency is BFI Film Hub North (which supports the North East, North West, and Yorkshire and the Humber), with HOME in Manchester being one of the hub’s lead organisations. In addition, although there is no longer a regional screen development agency for the North West, there are

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film production development offices for the main cities of Liverpool and Manchester. The South West has a total population of 5,624,700, composed of a mixed socio-economic profile with some areas of mixed ethnic profile but largely not mixed, educational levels close to the national average and unemployment levels lower than the national average (ONS, 2019). There are 380 cinema screens in the South West (6.9 per 100,000 people) spread across 88 venues, 259 of which are located in multiplex chain cinemas and 121 in traditional and mixed-use cinemas, with 16 classified as specialised screens showing predominantly non-mainstream films – 4.9% of the UK total (BFI, 2019b). It is notable that the region has the lowest proportion of multiplex screens of any region in the UK. In terms of how specialised film exhibition is distributed across the South West, Bristol is by far the largest city and boasts the broadest array of film exhibition opportunities. The main independent venues there are the Watershed and the Cube, and there are several film festivals such as Encounters, Afrika Eye, Palestine Film Festival and Radical Film Festival. In contrast, smaller South Western cities and towns like Exeter, Gloucester, Plymouth and Swindon have multiplex chain cinemas but a limited level of independent provision. Across the region, there are also a range of community cinemas, film festivals, societies and events, including organisations like Moviola, The Bath Film Society, Stroud Film Festival and Cheltenham Film Festival, which all increase the diversity of film provision. The region is supported by Film Hub South West, led by the Watershed cinema in Bristol, where the national screen development agency Creative England is also based. Yorkshire and the Humber is the second-largest of the four studied regions, with a population size of 5,503,000 split across both urban and rural areas (ONS, 2019). The region has a mixed socio-economic profile, with slightly lower levels of educational attainment and higher unemployment than the national average, and boasts a high level of ethnic diversity, with the thirdhighest Asian population in England after London and the West Midlands (ONS, 2019). The region has a total of 336 cinema screens (6.6 screens per 100,000 people) across 56 venues, 313 of which are located in multiplex cinema chains, with 23 in traditional and mixed-use cinemas, and 27 specialised screens (8.3% of the UK total) (BFI, 2019b). The distribution of these screens, as in other regions, is primarily centred in cities and towns. Film provision varies, and Sheffield has the broadest range of film provision, including the Showroom cinema and the Sheffield Doc/Fest documentary film festival, whereas provision in Leeds, Bradford, York and Hull relies on mainstream film, multiplex cinemas and ‘boutique’ cinemas such as Curzon and Odeon Luxes. Independent provision includes the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford, the Pictureville cinema, Aesthetica Short Film Festival and the Yorkshire Film Archive in York, as well as Hyde Park

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Picture House in Leeds and Leeds International Film Festival. Yorkshire and the Humber comes under the BFI’s Film Hub North, alongside the North East and North West regions. The Showroom cinema in Sheffield is the hub’s lead organisation and Screen Yorkshire promotes regional production. Along with Northern Film + Media, Screen Yorkshire is one of the few remaining regional screen agencies that were created by the UK Film Council in 2002. These regions provided the context for studying how audiences form. Qualitative and quantitative methods were used to understand the richness and experiences of audiences in these regions, as well as wider trends of audience formations within specific contexts of provision and exhibition.

Details of the research design and methods As outlined above, the overall research design and methodology was a mixed-methods one that used both qualitative and quantitative methods. The methods were selected based on the insights each would generate into film audiences, and each was planned into a specific research timetable. The sequence of the methods was designed so that each method, its data and analysis would then inform the methods that followed. Part of this process involved developing the computational ontology mentioned above, which structured the data and allowed analysis to take place across datasets systematically. In terms of process, this meant that the research design was interactive across the methods and data collection and management for the duration of the project, involving continuous dialogue and integration across datasets. This allowed checking for validity from a range of insights into the data – both through each dataset and through referencing across datasets. A number of different methods were used to address the various aspects of audiences, their experiences and how they form in the context of their contextual settings. The methods were: • an analysis of film industry and policy documents, to understand the film provision and exhibition in the four regions studied; • the development of a socio-cultural index of specialised film audiences through a secondary analysis of national datasets, to understand audience segmentation based on cultural interests and activities as well as socioeconomic background; • semi-structured interviews with audience members to understand the meaning of film for people, how they view film and their audience experiences; • a three-wave survey to assess audience patterns and trends at scale over a six-month period;

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• film elicitation focus groups to understand how people comprehend, interpret and engage with film narratives, content and cinematic techniques; • semi-structured interviews with key policy and industry experts to understand the challenges of provision and exhibition; • Delphi panel workshops and an online questionnaire with film policy makers, exhibitors and programmers, to develop policy recommendations based on BtM’s findings. Taken together, all these different methods provided in-depth insights and a broad overview of trends, refined through the input of expert knowledge. These methods were organised into three main phases of research.

Phase One: analysis of policy and industry documents and secondary analysis of audience profiles Analysis of policy and industry documents To understand and assess film policy in relation to film provision and audience development, 114 key film policy and industry documents were identified through a literature search and collated in 2017–18, before being analysed both statistically and discursively (see Higson et al., 2020). The documents included publicly available reports, annual statistical sets, policy briefings, statements and strategies from key UK film-related cultural organisations that were published between 1997 and 2018 (by the BFI, MEDIA-EU Creative Europe and UKFC). All statistical data were descriptively analysed using IBM SPSS 24 to determine the number of specialised films released, their box office revenue and changes to funding distribution over time. The text within written documents required a descriptive qualitative analysis (qualitative open coding using QSR NVivo 11) of the discourses used by each organisation to promote their goals. An initial open coding scheme was developed into focused codes through an iterative analysis of policy and industry documents. Overall, the two types of analysis provided insights into film policy over a twenty-year period (see Chapter 3). Findings from the analysis also informed the choice of interview questions asked of policy and industry experts (see below). Socio-cultural profiles in film consumption To identify audience segmentation in terms of social and cultural influences, a secondary analysis was undertaken of the BFI ‘Opening Your Eyes’ survey (Northern Alliance and Ipsos MediaCT, 2011) and the Department of Culture, Media and Sport’s (DCMS) ‘Taking Part’ survey 2016/2017 (DCMS, 2017). This analysis combined the BFI and DCMS responses from questions about consumption and attendance (which films people had seen), film consumption by type (across all media) and film genre preferences (see Yates et al., 2019).

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Table 2.1  Socio-cultural profile measures Socio-cultural measure Age

Education level

Gender

Household income (per year) Type of area lived in Cultural participation

Groupings 18–25 (early adulthood) 26–54 (part of midlife) 55+ (late midlife and old age) Basic or no qualifications Vocational, secondary or further education University degree or higher Male Female Other £30,000 or more