f I From Spectatorship to- Film Consumption In Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Exhibition in America, Douglas Gomery demonstrates that film studies needs to be seen as more than the analysis of film texts, or even the study of their industrial production and of their interpretation by audiences. Cin-emagoing (and more recently the activities of consuming films via television, video, cable and satellite) is about far more than the watching of a film. For example, as Gomery argues, while Balaban and Katz became the most successful and imitated exhibitors of the 1910s and 1920s, 'one of the variables that did not count in [their] rise to power and control was the movies themselves. Indeed the company grew and prospered despite having little access to Hollywood's top films.' Their success was due to a concentration on other aspects of the dnemagoing experience through which they 'differentiated [their] corporate product through five important factors - location, the theatre building, service, stage shows and air conditioning'.1 However, Gomery's account is an 'internal' or business history of exhibition practices ' and, in the process, the meaning, of film consumption to actual cineraagoers is either absent from the account or seen as an unproblematic effect of industries' strategies.2 Indeed, it has been a recurring complaint both within and against film studies that it has largely ignored audiences.3 In response, many film scholars have challenged text-centred interpretation in favour of the study of film reception, but most of this work still concentrates on the interpretation of texts by audiences. The following study is an attempt to move beyond the analysis of how audiences interpret texts and to open up ways of j studying film consumption as an activity. From Interpretation to Consumption As David Morley puts it, 'it is necessary to consider the context of viewing as much as the object of viewing': There is more to cinema going than seeing Sims. There is going out at night and the sense of relaxation combined ■with a sense of fun and excitement. The very name 'picture palace', by ■which cinemas were known for a long time, captures an important part of that experience ... Rather than selling individual films, cinema is best understood as having sold a habit, a certain type of socialized experience ... Any analysis of the film subject which does not take on board these issues of the context within which film is consumed is, to my mind, insufficient. Unfortunately a great deal of film theory has operated without reference 4 PLACE OF THE AUDIENCE to these issues, given the effect o£ the literary tradition in prioritizing the status of the text abstracted from the viewing context.4 As the above quote makes clear, this absence has often been blamed on the fact that film studies developed within the arts and particularly out of literary studies. Film studies has therefore often been contrasted with television and media studies which largely emerged out of the social sciences and in which the study of the viewing context is far more common.3 , However, there is an additional reason for this absence within film studies. The study ' of television, unlike that of film, seems to have a more easily identifiable social context L the domestic living room - the cultural politics of which was therefore more immediately open to analysis.6 Television studies has therefore been able to concentrate not only on the different ways in which audiences decode television programmes, but also on the meanings of television viewing as an activity.? As David Morley has noted, the television can be on whether people are watching it or not, and can have a range of uses and meanings 8 For example, it can be used as a babysitter; as a focus for familial interaction; as Going to the cinema has always been about more than going Wšerfilms-."The-eapitot,-Aifreton Road, illustration from the Nottingham Journal, 17 October 1936 FROM SPECTÄTORSHiP TO FILM CONSUMPTfON * 5 a way of switching off after work; of scheduling or pacing one's day; and as an excuse for parents to pack the kids off to bed and have some time together or a 'cuddle on the sofa'. The focus on the domestic living room has therefore enabled television studies to analyse the cultural politics of television consumption and the domestic power relations that are involved with it. However, television studies did not just develop differently from film studies, but as a criticism of its key trends. For example, Morley's early work was an overt rejection of the models of spectatorship associated withl Screen theory'. For Morley, viewers of a text are always already social subjects whose ideological construction will determine whether they accept or reject a text's ideological position, or negotiate a position in relation to that text. At this stage, then, Morley was concerned with the reasons that different social groups interpreted texts differently.9 However, in the course of this research, Morley began to see that other issues also affected interpretation, which he termed 'relevance' and 'comprehension'. These terms are similar to Bourdieu's 'disposition' and 'competence', and they suggest that an audience's response to a text is dependent on their engagement with it and their ability to make sense of it. In other words, a particular viewer might simply not care enough about a programme to even get to the level of acceptance or rejection, while another may have sufficient investment in its genre, for example, that he/she enjoys it regardless of whether he/she accepts or rejects its ideological position. Similarly, if one lacks a knowledge of contemporary art, a particular painting or sculpture may be simply incomprehensible, while if one has never seen a martial arts film before, one may not know what to make of such a film. As a result, while Morley demonstrated that different audiences consumed \ texts in different ways, he also stressed that these differences were not due to individ- ; ual idiosyncrasies but that they were differentially distributed in relation to class, gender j and other forms of cultural identity. They were both produced by social inequalities but also acted to legitimate and reproduce them. Morley's research on audiences also began to throw up another issue. It became clear that interpretation was also affected by the context of viewing. Initially, Morley had held focus groups but he became interested in how the more 'ordinary' context of the home affected the ways in which audiences interpreted programmes, a shift that led him to appreciate that there was more to the activity of television viewing than the interpretation of programmes. In the process, he became aware that, as a piece of domestic ', technology, the television had meanings regardless of whether it was ever even watched. / In a similar way, Charlotte Brunsdon has shown that, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, ( the ownership of satellite dishes became associated with subordinate social classes and j certain neighbourhoods sought to distinguish themselves by banning these devices.10 In ■ this way, ownership of a satellite dish (or the lack of such ownership) came to say some- i thing about a person or household and, as Shaun Moores has shown, the decision to buy / the technology was often less about the programmes to which it gave access, than theľ meanings of the technology itself.11 / Television therefore needs to be seen in relation to other forms of domestic technology. Not only was it the case that, in the early days, there was often intense gender 6 PLACE OF THE AUDIENCE conflict over the decision to buy a television (often seen as a predominantly male preference) or a washing machine (often seen as a predominantly female preference),12 but the meanings of domestic technologies are also related in other ways. For example, as Ellen Seiter found: 'If the television is commonly considered the bad screen for children because it causes passivity, the computer is the good screen because it is construed as active and intellectual.'1' The analysis of television has therefore moved beyond a concern with the interpretation of programmes to a concern with consumption more generally.14 In other words, the consumption of television is not just about the watching of programmes but also about the consumption of the technologies through which those programmes are accessed. From Spectatorship to Ethnography in Film Studies This concern with consumption is largely absent from film studies, but audiences have been of key importance to the discipline, and it could be argued that most studies of film make claims about the effects that films have upon their audiences. For example, concerns about the audience are central both to psychoanalytic work on spectatorship15 and to work in cognitive psychology that examines viewing as a problem-solving C,process.16 However, these kinds of work elide any concern with actual audiences and are ! therefore representative of the positions that Morley and others have challenged. In I other words, they are not concerned with socially situated viewers but with an abstract : and hypothetical construct - the audience - which is presumed to have a single and uni- ' tary response to a text. f More recently, however, there has been a growing interest in reception, and it can be divided into three main areas. The first concerns the audience as a market, while the second concerns the inter-textual contexts within which the reception of films takes place, and is therefore concerned with the ways in which films are framed for audiences. The \ third and final area is the ethnography of film audiences, or work that examines audiences' own accounts of their relationship to film. The first area is represented by Bruce Austin's survey of the material produced by the film industry and other agencies in their attempts to understand, organise and control audiences.17 The analysis of these kinds of material has largely concentrated on two main issues: audience preferences18 and audience demographics.19 However, the most interesting work in this field is that of Richard Maltby, who uses these materials to analyse how the industry's 'generic typology of its audience' provided 'a means through which Hollywood could negotiate the generic organisation of its products'.20 According to Maltby, during the 1930s, the industry believed that there was a significant difference between the tastes of the urban audiences and those of small-town audiences and this belief caused it to question seriously its production, distribution and exhibition strategies.21 However, while Maltby accepts that the industry's account 'may not have been an accurate description of actual movie audiences', Peter Krämer has not only demonstrated that film industries have often been very wrong in their assumptions about audiences, but has also tried to account for their taken-for-granted assumptions about FROM SPECTATORSHIP TO FILM CONSUMPTION" " * 7 the relative importance of male and female audiences.22 len Ang has also examined the reasons industries are routinely unsuccessful in their attempts to make sense of, and hence regulate, their audiences.23 The second major area has come to be known as receptioiLstudies^ and Janet Staiger ,v is the figure most directly associated with it. For Staiger, the meaning of a film does not reside within the text, where it waits-to be discovered by the reader, but rather meanings need to be understood as the product of specific historical conditions. In other words, readers make meanings from texts on the basis of the specific assumptions and knowledges that they bring to their encounter with them. In order to study these events historically, Staiger turns to 'reviews, news articles, letters to papers, advertisements, illustrations, and publicity which circulated in the major mass media'.24 These subsidiary X texts are then analysed as the indicators of reception, and are used to identify the inter- ) textual systems that constitute these events. This work can end up in two related problems. First, it can suggest that there was £ only one way in which a text was understood within that period. Second, as Barbara o Klinger has pointed out, it tends to ignore the ways in which the meanings of texts ; change over time. As a result, reception studies can sometimes amount to little more than a historically concrete version of reader-response criticism in which the task of the critic is to unearth the 'appropriate' competences necessary for the interpretation of film.25 In this situation, the job of the critic is simply to discover how audiences were 'expected' to fill in gaps within the text and to identify the knowledge that audiences were 'required' to bring to their encounter with texts - a position which, as Jeffrey Sconce points out, divides the filmgoing public into '"skilled" and "unskilled" audiences'.26 Barbara Klinger's study of Douglas Sirk avoids many of these problems, and she i examines the different ways in which his films were understood within different cultural S contexts. In the process, she not only analyses how their meanings have changed over time, but also how they have been consumed differently within different contexts during the same period. For example, when these films are screened as part of a season of. television matinees, they are usually presented very differendy from when they are screened at film festivals or at art-house cinemas. In the first context, they are often explicitly presented as romantic melodramas while in the second they are usually presented as a critique of romantic melodrama. Klinger is quite clear that her work is not a study of actual audiences, but only an account of the conditions within which audiences encountered films - an account that can only suggest how these films might have been understood. However, as Martin * Barker has argued, while most forms of analysis can only deduce the reception of films, the strength of ethnographic research is that it can test these deductions.27 For . example, in her study of female viewers of the 1940s and 1950s, Jackie Stacey found that women used images of female stars as a cultural resource in 'the typical work of femininity: the production of oneself as both subject and object in accordance with cultural ideals of femininity'.28 However, unlike many textual approaches to these dynamics, she also found that female stars were also used as a resource to resist and 8 PLACE OF THE AUDIENCE negotiate dominant definitions of fernininity. In the United Kingdom, she notes, 'American feminine ideals are clearly remembered as transgressing restrictive British femininity and thus employed as strategies of resistance.'29 Not only were women invited to choose between different notions of feminine beauty, but 'the production of a feminine self in relation to Americanness signified "autonomy", "individuality", and "resistance"'.30 ' Similarly, in Barker and Brooks' study of the audiences for Judge Dredd, they found that while most textual analyses tend to focus on the narrative pleasures of films, their respondents were usually routinely uninterested in talking about the film in narrative terms. Rather than focus on narrative, Barker and Brooks therefore identified six key languages though which Judge Dredd was discussed, each of which involved a distinct 'way of expressing a relation to the film or to the act of going to the cinema which seems I to have wide and organising implications'.31 r However, both these studies still remain focused on the relationship between audiences and texts, rather than the activities of film consumption itself, and much the same is also true of the initial findings in Annette Kuhn's study of memories of cinemagoing in the 1930s.32 The study's concern was to investigate 'the ways in which films and cinema-going figured in the daily lives of people throughout the nation in the 1930s, and of situating cinema-going and fan behaviour in this period within their broader social and cultural contexts'.33 Unfortunately, the material that has been published out of this research largely concerns people's tastes, preferences and investments in the films that \they watched.34 Ethnographies of Film Consumption However, there is more to cinemagoing than simply the watching of films. As Nicholas Hiley has pointed out, audiences in the 1920s and 1930s did not 'treat the cinema simply as a place to see films, but as somewhere to spend time and even to sleep'.35 For other audiences, it simply 'offered a refuge from the cold outside'36 while many young couples visited their local cinemas to escape the prying eyes of their parents'.37 Furthermore, as Barker's own research suggests, film consumption is a social activity.38 According to Sue Harper and Vincent Porter, 'in 1947, barely a quarter of those waiting to see The Two MrsCarrolls (1947) were on their own', and most of those who were alone were housewives for whom 'the cinema was probably their only chance to get out of the house and enjoy solitude'.39 However, despite this observation, Harper and Porter do not devote much time to cinema as a social activity. They divide the cinemagoing public into three main groups: the indiscriminate moviegoer, the habitual moviegoer and the occasional moviegoer. Furthermore, they also point out, only '63% of the audience for Fox's Sentimental Journey (1946) had specifically chosen that film. An eighth had gone out of habit, and almost a quarter had gone for other reasons - because other cinemas were full, they had been taken by a friend, or the cinema was near a bus stop.'40 They even stress that the 'proportion of m&scriminate cinema goers would have been higher for a less popular film',41 It is not even clear what people meant when they said they had chosen the film. For FROM SPECTATORSHIP TO FÍLM CONSUMPTION '* * 9 example, they may have chosen to go to the pictures first and then decided which film to see. Their cinemagoing might primarily have been habitual. However, Harper and Porter spend little time on the mcUscrirninate moviegoer, and devote only a couple of hundred words to the case of the regular dnemagoers, and they do so because, in both these cases, 'audience tastes' are largely irrelevant and it is precisely the social activities of cinemagoing - its meanings above and beyond the watching of films - that are central. It is for this reason that Kevin J, Corbett's work is so interesting and promising. Corbett counters the claims that new technologies will mean the replacement of cinemagoing with home viewing on the grounds that these claims do not take account of the different meanings of 'going to the cinema' and 'staying in with a movie'. As a result, Corbett looks at 'how movie audiences historically have used the act of movie-watching in their everyday lives, how symbolically important the act was within their lives, or how it has contributed to forming, maintaining, and transforming their interpersonal relationships'.42 To this end, he examines the role of film consumption within the relationships of married and dating couples, and finds that their film consumption was not motivated by the desire to see a particular film but was used to create opportunities for interaction. For example, he notes that many couples 'use movie-watching as a symbolic way to celebrate special events like Christmas and birthdays'.43 As a result; while film consumption was sometimes valued because 'it was so convenient',44 couples also valued its ability to distinguish an event: Cinemagoing has always been a social event. The ABC (formerly the Carlton), Chapel Bar, City Centre 10 PLACE OF THE AUDIENCE all the couples recognised the importance of what many of them referred to as 'making a night of watching movies together and of the act to their relationship. Watching movies became a way of celebrating or - recalling Gerry Philipsen's definition of ritual - 'paying homage to' their relationship.45 Effort can make an event special, and distinguish the time together from other more mundane forms of interaction. To the extent that film preferences were a factor, things were not as straightforward ! as one might expect. In his study of family audiences, Morley pointed out that there is ; often a significant discrepancy between people's stated preferences and the shows that ; they actually watch, and he claims that this is due to the fact that people tend to watch ; television in a social setting where the programmes watched are chosen through negotiation, rather than the decision of one individual.46 In much the same way, Corbett found that people 'sometimes have to compromise so that they can spend time with their partner watching a movie',47 although he also found that the event can even be given a special meaning if one member is willing to watch something that he/she would not normally watch. Such an act can also be a way of sharing in one another's interests, or learning about the other person. It can even be used to construct a relatively independent event that is outside common experience: a specific type of film can acquire a special meaning as part of the relationship precisely because it is something that one would not watch in other circumstances. However, Corbett's account remains rather free of conflict, and these processes can often be much more tense than he acknowledges. It is therefore worth comparing his ethnographic study with that of Janna Jones, whose work on audiences at the Tampa Theatre in Florida never loses sight of the cultural politics involved in film consumption. Her account demonstrates that struggles for cultural distinction did not just affect the ways in which these audiences read specific films, but also the meaning o£ cinemagoing. For example, through their consumption of this cinema, the Tampa Theatre's audiences rejected other sites of film consumption, particularly the multiplex, which was associated with the obvious and easy pleasures of popular culture.48 However, it is worth noting that when Corbett reconstructs histories of cinemagoing, he does not turn to audience research but rather to work on exhibition. The study of exhibition is a small but developing area and although, as we saw in relation to Gomery, it is not primarily or even necessarily interested in audiences, it is one of the few areas of film studies that acknowledges that there has always been more to film consumption than the watching of films. Exhibition and Audiences The two leading advocates of this area are Robert Allen and Douglas Gomery, who have been demonstrating its importance for about twenty years,49 although it is only in recent years that this type of research has acquired momentum.50 For Allen, exhibition is important for a number of different reasons. First, it is a neglected aspect o£ the film industry, which is too often equated with film production rather than distribution or. exhibition. Second, the 'location and the physical sites of exhibition' are essential to an FROM SPECTAT'ORSHIP TO FILM CONSUMPTION " understanding of the meanings of cinema. This raises questions about the meanings of cinemagoing, but Allen also argues that film studies has been too concerned with spectacular but unrepresentative phenomena. Writing of the coming of sound, for example, Allen and Gomery stress that the experience of New York cannot be seen as representative of the whole country, but that the sound film came to New York first precisely because it was unrepresentative. As-.a result, they also provide a fascinating alternative account of the coming of sound by concentrating on the case of Milwaukee.51 Similarly, Allen argues: [the] concentration on early moviegoing as an urban phenomenon has obscured the fact that during the first decade of the movies' commercial growth, 71% of the population of the United States lived in rural areas or small towns. The first audiences for the movies in these areas were not to be found in vaudeville theatres (the towns were too small to support them) or storefront movie theatres (which, if they came at all, came later), but in tents, amusement parks, the local opera house, YMCA hall, public library basement - wherever itinerant showmen could set up their projectors.52 The issue of exhibition is therefore related to another of Allen's concerns: 'performance'. According to Allen, 'we tend to talk of films being "screened" as though the only thing going on in a movie theatre were light being bounced off a reflective surface': in the 1920s in America, for example, many viewers were not particularly interested in what feature film was playing. They were attracted to the theatre by the theatre itself, with its sometimes bizarre architectural and design allusions to exotic cultures, its capacious public spaces, its air conditioning in the summer, and its auditorium, which may have been decorated to resemble the exterior of a Moorish palace at night - complete with heavenly dome and twinkling stars. Regardless of what feature the theatre chain had secured from the distributor that week, there was sure to be a newsreel, a comedy short, a programme of music by pit orchestra or on the mighty wurlitzer, and in many theatres elaborate stage shows.53 Indeed, as Douglas Gomery has observed, the slogan for Paramount's theatre chain was: Tibu don't need to know what's playing at the Publix House. It's bound to be the best show in town.'54 As we have seen, the definitive history of exhibition is Douglas Gomery's Shared Pleasures and it covers mainstream cinemas from their origins to the present, alternative operations such as ethnic and art cinemas, technological transformations such as sound, colour and widescreen and, finally, non-cinematic forms of exhibition such as the showing of films on television, the emergence of cable television's movie channels and the emergence of home video. In the process, it provides a wealth of material on the potential meanings of film consumption to audiences. However, while Gomery covers the history of cinema from its origins to the present and does so from a national perspective, Gregory Waller has developed the more localised research that Allen and Gomery !2 PLACE OF THE AUDIENCE have called for elsewhere.55 His study examines cinema in relation to other forms of commercial entertainment in Lexington between the years 1896 and 1930. In the process, he challenges the thesis that there was a 'standardization of recreation' during the period in which provincialism was eroded by a homogenised American culture, and argues that we can 'acknowledge the importance of local and regional variation and negotiation of mass culture without falling prey to problems that often beset local history: naive boos-terism or the yearning for a supposedly more autonomous provinciality'.56 As he demonstrates, while there was a pressure to standardise experiences across cinemas, there was an equally strong pressure for cinemas to distinguish their product in order to compete with one another. Thus, while the industry became centralised after World War I, Waller argues that 'moviegoing in this period looks far less homogeneous' if one looks beyond the feature film and takes into account 'the whole "show," the multipart bill, the "balanced program"'.57 In other words, films were shown at a number of different sites within Lexington, each of which contextualised them differently. The choke between cinemas was therefore the choice between different types of experience, which meant that audiences' responses were never quite as 'unpredictable' as critics such as Miriam Hansen have implied.58 As Waller puts, it, 'to a great extent context reined in unpredictability',59 as different modes of exhibition, performance and reception came to be associated with different locations. In this way, audiences built up identifications and disidentifications with places of exhibition, and different cinemas not only had meanings that exceeded their function as places to show films, but even transformed the meaning of the films shown within them. This work on exhibition is also part of a more general turn to social and cultural history within film studies, and Allen's study of nickelodeon audiences has created a more general interest in the audiences for early cinema and attempts to regulate them.60 This research is best represented by Uricchio and Pearson's Reframing Culture and Grieve-son's Policing Cinema.61 In the first, the authors take the case of the Vitagraph Quality Films, and ask how we are to begin to understand their meanings for audiences in the late 1900s and early 1910s, when they were made. In this way, they represent a form of historical reception studies, but one that not only examines the inter-texts for these films but also places them within broader social struggles over the cinema audience - struggles that were part of larger conflicts over class and ethnicity in the period. From a slightly different perspective, Grieveson looks at roughly the same period to examine the ways in which audiences were understood in the period, and the ways in which these understandings were the product of progressivist attempts to regulate and control not only cinema audiences but social life more generally. However, while these studies are exemplary, there are problems with certain tendencies within other social and cultural histories. For example, there is preoccupation with early cinema audiences to the virtual exclusion of any later period, and this is linked to a second problem. This period is often seen as a distinct and unique moment within cinema history, which represents a moment when 'options [were] still open':62 a period of diversity and experimentation which came to an end some time between 1905 and 1915, when classical Hollywood cinema is established. The period is seen as FROM SPECTATÖRSHIP TO FILM CONSUMPTION ' ' 13 one of contestation and possibility, before audiences were finally regulated and contained.63 This position, however, relies on a profoundly ahistorical view of history, in which nothing much seems to change in the nature of either the film industry or its audiences from the period around 1910 until the emergence of the- 'new' Hollywood in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Furthermore, even a cursory examination of film history since the 1910s would find repeated claims that films and their audiences were still in need of both discipline and regulation. Notes 1. Gomery, 1992, p. 43. 2. 'v!fe have chosen the term 'film consumption' for a number of reasons. First, we are not simply concerned with cinemagoing, but also with the activities associated with other forms of distribution and exhibition: terrestrial television broadcasts, video rental and retail, satellite and cable, the internet, etc. Second, we want to distinguish these activities from the ' act of viewing itself: film consumption is about far more than simply the viewing of films. 3. Similar criticisms can be directed at other disciplines. Architectural histories of the cinema, for example, have tended to focus on the construction of these places of exhibition rather than their consumption by audiences. (See Gray, 1996; Atwell, 1980; Sharp, 1969; and Valentine, 1994.) This tendency is also evident in many of the local studies of the cinema: Williams, 1993; Clarke, 1991; Roddis, 1993; Charles Anderson, 1983. Alternatively, the experience of going to the cinema remains marginal in studies of everyday life and leisure: Davies, 1992; Langhamer, 2000; Roberts, 1984; and Roberts, 1995. 4. Morley, 1992, pp. 157-8. 5. See Jancovich, 1992, pp. 134-47; Morley, 1986; and Moores, 1993. 6. Though as we demonstrate in Chapter 12, television is not just watched in the living room, or even one's own living room. 7. The diversity of audience research and theory can be seen in the following brief selection: Abercrombie and Longhurst, 1998; Dickinson, Harindranath and Linné, 1998; Hay, Grossberg and Wartella, 1996; McQuail, 1997; Nightingale, 1996; Tulloch, 2000. 8. Morley, 1986. 9. Morley and Brunsdon, 1978; and Morley, 1980b. 10. Brunsdon, 1997. 11. Moores, 2000. For other material on the consumption of media technologies see, for example, Gauntlett and Hill, 1999; Gray, 1992; Petrie and Willis, 1995; Silverstone, 1994; and Silverstone and Hirsch, 1992. 12. Bowden and Offer, 1994, pp. 725-48. See Chapter 10: 'From Cinemagoing to Television Viewing: The Developing Meanings of a New Medium'. 13. Seiter, 1999, p. 42. 14. For work on consumption see: Lee, 2000; Lury, 1996; Miller, 1987; Miller, Jackson, Thrift, Holbrook and Rowlands, 1998; Miller, 1995; Slater, 1997; and, for a concrete study that applies and develops many of the key debates in the field of consumption studies, see Warde, 1997. 14 PLACE OF THE AUDIENCE 15. See, for example, Heath, 1981; Mulvey, 1985; and Mayne, 1993. 16. See, for example, Bordwell, 1985; Branigan, 1992; Carrol, 1988; and Smith, 1995. 17. Austin, 1989. 18. See, for example, Harper and Porter, 1999, pp. 66-82. 19. See, for example, Docherty, Morrison and Tracey, 1987; Corrigan, 1983; Hiley, 1998, pp. 96-103; and Hiley, 1999, pp. 39-53. 20. Maltby, 1999a, p. 4. 21. Maltby, 1999b. 22. Krämer, 1999. 23. Ang, 1991. 24. Staiger, 2000, p. 163. See also Staiger, 1992. 25. It can also end up as little more than a revision of 'Screen theory'. In other words, much of this work identifies the period of early cinema with a specific mode of spectatorship that is then opposed'to that of classical Hollywood cinema. For example, both Hansen and Gunning, despite the value of their work, see early cinema as a free space before narrative began to organise and regulate spectatorship, a position that tends to homogenise periods. Rather than acknowledging that different audiences had different competences and dispositions which meant that they consumed films in different ways, these writers try to identify the modes of address associated with the different epochs and hence suggest that audiences within each epoch were subject to the modes of spectatorship which these periods designate. See Gunning, 1990, pp. 56-62; and Hansen, 1991. 26. Sconce, 1995, p. 392. 27. Barker, 1998, pp. 131-47. 28. Stacey, 1994, p. 168. 29. Ibid., p. 204. 30. Ibid., p. 238. 31. Barker and Brooks, 1998, p. 145. 32. Annette Kuhn, Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain: Ethnobistory of a Popular Cultural Practice, ESRC project ROOO 25 5385. 33. Kuhn, 1999a, p. 531- 34. Kuhn, 1994; Kuhn, 1996; Kuhn, 1999a, pp. 531-43; Kuhn, 1999b, pp. 100-20; Kuhn, 1999c, pp. 135-46;and Kuhn, 2000. 35. Hiley, 1999, p. 39. 36. Hiley, 1998, p. 100. 37. Ibid., p. 101. 38. Barker and Brooks, 1998. 39. Harper and Porter, 1999, p. 68. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid. 42. Corbett, 1998-1999, p. 34. See also Corbett, 2001, pp. 17-34. 43. Corbett, 1998-1999, p. 41 44. Ibid., p. 39. 45. Ibid., p. 41. FROM SPECTATORSHIP TO FILM CONSUMPTION " 15 46. Morley, 1986. 47. Corbett, 1998-1999, p. 43. 48. Jones, 2001, pp. 122-133. 49. Allen and Gomery, 1985. 50. Tlie field has even just acquired its first substantial textbooks: Hark, 2001; and Waller, 2001. 51. Allen and Gomery, 1985. 52. Allen, 1990, p. 351. 53. Ibid-, p. 353. 54. Gomery, 1992, p. 58. 55. Allen and Gomery, 1985. 56. Waller, 1995, p. xvii. 57. Ibid., p. 218. 58. Hansen, 1991. 59. TOler, 1995, p. 37. 60. Allen, 1979, pp. 2-15; Allen, 1996, pp. 75-103; Singer, 1995, pp. 5-35; Singer, 1996, pp. 104-28; and Higashi, 1996, pp. 72-4. 61. Uricchio and Pearson, 1993; and Grieveson, forthcoming. 62. Kitses, 1969, p. 12. 63. Gunning, 1990; and Hansen, 1991.