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New Film History: An Introduction
Peter Krämer
This seminar is intended to introduce you to the study of film history, and it does so by
focusing on two case studies, namely 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Avatar (2009). In
this introduction, I want to say a few things about film history in general and about the
second of our case studies in particular. In doing so, I also want to introduce myself to
you.
1 Academic Context
Today, Film Studies is a well-established academic discipline with dozens of specialist
academic journals and book series being published around the world, as well as
hundreds of undergraduate and postgraduate degree programmes being taken by
thousands of students. There are many national and international professional
organisations for Film Studies, and countless Film Studies conferences are being
organised every year.
In many of its conferences, organisations, degree programmes and publishing
ventures, the discipline of Film Studies is closely associated, even explicitly combined,
with other disciplines, notably Television Studies, Media Studies and Cultural Studies. It
is also the case that, beyond the confines of Film Studies, films are being studied in the
context of many other disciplines, including not just Television Studies, Media Studies
and Cultural Studies but also, for example, Literary Studies, Philosophy, Modern
Languages, Economics and Psychology. Indeed, one is likely to find publications and
courses on films in almost all disciplines in the Arts and Humanities or the Social
Sciences.
Where is this academic interest in films coming from? When I started studying
film in the 1980s, first in Germany and then in the UK, my main reason for doing so was
that I loved watching movies (whereby the term “movies” refers to films originally
made for theatrical release, although I actually had seen most of them on television
rather than in a movie theatre). Having failed to get into film school – with the intention
of becoming a filmmaker myself –, doing Film Studies seemed to me like the next best
thing. Initially I thought that this would primarily entail film criticism, that is the
analysis, interpretation and evaluation of films: How does a particular film work? What
does it mean? How good is it?
However, I quickly became aware of the fact that there had been an important
history of film theory, that is more or less philosophical writing about the very nature of
film as a medium (a particular form of communication, of artistic expression, of
audiovisual experience etc.), going back all the way to the 1910s. I also learned that the
history of film technology (in the sense, initially, of photochemical-mechanical devices
able to display a rapid succession of still images so as to create the illusion of
movement) went back to the 1880s, and that the commercial exploitation of this
technology had started with coin-in-the-slot peep-hole devices (so-called
“kinetoscopes”) running film loops only a few seconds long in 1894 and with the
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projection of programmes of short films onto large screens in front of paying audiences
in 1895 (the term “cinema” in its narrow sense refers only to the latter). It was possible,
therefore, to trace the development of film form, film technology, film companies, film
exhibition and film audiences from the 1890s onwards - to do film history, in other
words.
In fact, Film Studies in the 1980s was undergoing a historical turn. In the 1960s
and 1970s, Film Studies had been established (often by people with a background in
Literary Studies) as a distinct academic discipline through an emphasis on theory and
criticism, complemented by a very general, often imprecise account of the history of film
style and genres, with comparatively little attention being paid to film technology,
economics and audiences (although, interestingly, other academic disciplines, especially
Economics, Business Studies and Communication Studies, had been exploring these last
three topics for decades). From the late 1970s onwards Film Studies teaching and
research (initially under the heading “New Film History”) did not only embark on a
systematic review of the history of film form, with a particular emphasis on so-called
“early cinema” (that is the period up to 1915), but also paid much more attention to the
medium’s technological foundations, the industrial context in which films were made,
marketed and exhibited, the ways in which film production, marketing and exhibition
were organised and the people involved in this, including the cinemagoers whose ticket
purchases paid for it all.1 The focus was very much on how things changed over time.
Indeed there was a sense in the 1980s that such historical change had accelerated
in recent years, notably with the spread of video recorders and the sale and rental of
pre-recorded tapes. Ever since the rise of television as a mass medium (initially in the
United States in the late 1940s and early 1950s, later also in other countries), most films
made for theatrical release had been seen by more people on the small screen than in
theatres, people spending much more time watching theatrical movies on television
than in cinemas. However, movie companies in the US and elsewhere had generated
much more income from renting films to movie theatres than from the sale of broadcast
rights. It is only with the rise of video from the late 1970s onwards that the theatrical
income of film companies was finally eclipsed by income generated through people’s
consumption of movies in their homes. By the mid-1980s video tapes had become the
single most important source of income for the American film industry. For some
commentators at the time this was enough to declare the “end of cinema”.
Of course, cinema – the theatrical projection of moving pictures for paying
audiences – is still very much with us today, although it is no longer a photochemicalmechanical
technology, but has largely gone digital. Billions of cinema tickets are sold
every year, and every day millions of people gather in movie theatres around the world.
A film’s commercial success in movie theatres tends to be replicated in other media
(notably on Blu-ray/DVD and streaming services); in other words, movies rarely reach a
1 When I did my MA in Film Studies at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in 1985/86, I was taught by
some of the foremost practitioners and promoters of the “New Film History”, notably Thomas Elsaesser.
See, for example, the important text book he developed from his teaching at UEA: Thomas Elsaesser (ed.),
Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, London: BFI, 1990.
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very large audience through small screen media without first having been widely
shown on big screens in cinemas. (A reminder: “Movies” here refers to films originally
made for theatrical release. Of course, films made directly for television – also known as
“made-for-television movies” – can reach vast audiences through TV broadcasts without
ever having been shown in a cinema, but they usually do so only in one country and
they rarely do well in other media such as Blu-ray/DVD.)
If, in addition, we consider the fact that the theatrical release of a movie is often
accompanied not only by massive advertising campaigns, but also by widespread
reporting in the media and by the sale of a wealth of tie-in merchandise (ranging from
toys to soundtrack albums), we can note that the social experience of cinemagoing
remains culturally and economically important. However, it would be difficult to argue
that it is more important than, for example, computer gaming, television viewing, music
listening, internet surfing or the use of social media.
It is also worth noting that a substantial share of overall ticket sales, and of the
film industry’s total income, is accounted for by only a few big hit movies (rather than
ticket sales and revenues being more evenly distributed across the many hundreds of
films which are given a theatrical release every year). What is more, since most people
around the world go to the cinema very rarely (or not at all), they are likely to see only
such hit movies on the big screen (while watching a wider range of films on small
screens, that is television sets, computers and handheld devices). Cinema, then, is today
very much a social experience revolving around hits, and the film industry is a hitdriven
endeavour.
This was not the case (at least not to anywhere near the same degree) in the more
distant past. In the United States, cinemagoing was very much a general habit from the
1910s to the 1940s. During this time, one to two thirds of the population went to the
cinema every week, which meant that most people watched a wide range of films,
rather than focusing on a few hit movies. However, from the late 1940s onwards,
attendance levels declined. Only teenagers and young adults continued to go to the
movies regularly, while the rest of the population attended cinemas only on special
occasions, usually for one of the big hit movies, which, already in the 1950s, were known
as “blockbusters”. From the 1950s onwards, such hits made up a substantial portion of
the American film industry’s overall income while also accounting for a substantial
portion of its investment in film production – these films tended to be very expensive.
In other countries, the shift from habitual cinemagoing of large segments of the
population to an orientation towards a few big hit movies took place later than in the
United States. In much of Western Europe, for example, it happened across the 1950s
and 1960s, and in China – for decades by far the largest cinema market in the world in
terms of the number of tickets being sold – as late as the 1990s (importantly, in recent
years, the Chinese market has recovered and is now one of the world’s largest again).
Given the fact that in the decades after World War II cinemagoing in the United
States, Western Europe and elsewhere came to focus on hit movies, one would expect
that Film Studies scholars, especially where they claim to deal with “popular” cinema,
pay attention to how well individual films performed at the box office and which films
performed best overall. Surprisingly, only relatively few scholars have pursued this line
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of inquiry.
Among the pioneers was Joseph Garncarz, who I got to know while we both
studied at the University of Cologne in the 1980s, and whose systematic research on box
office charts exerted an enormous influence over my own work as a scholar and also
over the work of a number of other researchers around the world. From the 1990s
onwards, Garncarz published academic essays and books on what types of film were
successful at the (West) German box office (in other words, on the patterns that hit
movies formed), how these types (or hit patterns) changed over time, and why such
change took place.2 His work has covered most of the 20th century, compared (West)
German box office charts with those in other countries, and offered complex
explanations for historical change focusing on the dynamic interaction between film
industrial developments, shifts in public opinion and generational turnover. In my first
monograph from 2005, I applied the same approach to American cinema between the
1940s and the 1980s.3
The systematic study of box office charts produced several unexpected results.
Garncarz found that (West) German box office charts were dominated by domestic
productions – covering a range of genres and usually featuring German stars – until the
1960s. After a transitional period, in which imports from European countries often
ranked very highly, it was only in the 1980s that American films came to rule the annual
top ten. Garncarz and other scholars found that in many countries – not just in (West)
Germany – the takeover of box office charts by American imports did not happen as
early as had previously been assumed. In some countries, like India – in terms of the
number of tickets being sold now the largest market in the world – it has not happened
even today.
Film Studies scholars had long claimed that the American film industry
dominated world markets since the 1910s, because it managed to export its products in
large numbers to most countries. What Garncarz pointed out was that, while the
American film industry might dominate the supply of films in a given country (that is
the number of films on release), this did not necessarily mean that there was more
demand for American imports in that country than for domestic productions. Instead
people in that country might actually prefer, and therefore buy more tickets for,
domestic productions (if the country was large enough to sustain a substantial domestic
film industry).
2 See, for example, Joseph Garncarz, Filmfassungen: Eine Theorie signifikanter Filmvariation, Frankfurt am
Main: Peter Lang, 1992; Joseph Garncarz, “Hollywood in Germany. The Role of American Films in
Germany 1925-1990”, Hollywood in Europe: Experiences of a Cultural Hegemony, ed. David W. Ellwood und
Rob Kroes. Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1994, pp. 94-135; Joseph Garncarz, Hollywood in Deutschland:
Zur Internationalisierung der Kinokultur, 1925-1990, Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld, 2013; and Joseph
Garncarz, Wechselnde Vorlieben: Über die Filmpräferenzen der Europäer, Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld, 2014.
3 Peter Krämer, The New Hollywood: From Bonnie and Clyde to Star Wars, London: Wallflower, 2005; also see,
for example, Peter Krämer, “Would You Take Your Child To See This Film? The Cultural and Social Work
of the Family-Adventure Movie”, Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, ed. Steve Neale and Murray Smith,
London: Routledge, 1998, pp. 294-311, and Peter Krämer, “Big Pictures: Studying Contemporary
Hollywood Cinema Through Its Greatest Hits”, Screen Methods: Comparative Readings in Film Studies, ed.
Jacqueline Furby and Karen Randell, London: Wallflower, 2005, pp. 124-32.
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Unfortunately, much film scholarship still fails to take the basic distinction
between supply and demand into account, and continues to make false – or at least
unexamined – claims about how successful American films are around the world and
how long this has allegedly been so. However, it is the case that American imports have
come to dominate box office charts in many, possibly the majority of, countries since the
1980s.4 This is not to say that American box office dominance applies to the majority of
the world’s population because, as we have seen, the exceptions include India – where
about a fifth of the people on this planet live – and also, possibly, other large countries.5
The second big surprise revealed by the systematic study of box office charts was
that from the 1920s to the 1960s, the most successful exports of the American film
industry to Western Europe, which was its most important export market during this
time, tended to be films that were set in Europe, dealt with European characters (often
played by European-born stars) and were based on European literature and/or
important European historical figures and events. What is more, from the late 1940s to
the mid-1960s, such “Europeanised” films also dominated box office charts in the
United States. In fact, quite a few of the American film industry’s biggest hits of the
1950s and 1960s were also, at least partially, shot in Europe, and might involve key
personnel (such as the actress Audrey Hepburn and the film director David Lean) who
had not only been born and raised in Europe, but also continued to live and work there.
This raises the question how “American” the American film industry actually was in the
decades after World War II.
When trying to answer this question, it is useful to focus on the operations of the
major Hollywood studios. “Hollywood” here refers to a suburb of Los Angeles where
many American film studios opened in the 1910s. Across the 1910s and 1920s, these
production facilities were merged with distribution companies, operating across the
United States and much of the rest of the world, and then also with theatre chains so as
eventually to form the so-called “Big Five” fully vertically integrated majors
(Paramount, Loew’s/MGM, Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox and RKO). By comparison,
the “Little Three” majors (Columbia, Universal and United Artists) did not own theatre
chains.
This distinction largely became irrelevant when after a 1948 US Supreme Court
ruling in an anti-trust case against the majors, they were ordered to separate their
American theatre chains from the rest of their companies (which could, however,
4 I have surveyed the literature on this topic and examined global box office charts since the 1970s in Peter
Krämer, “Welterfolg und Apokalypse: Überlegungen zur Transnationalität des zeitgenössischen
Hollywood”, Film transnational und transkulturell. Europäische und amerikanische Perspektiven, ed. Ricarda
Strobel and Andreas Jahn-Sudmann, Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2009, pp. 171-84; and Peter Krämer,
“Hollywood and Its Global Audiences: A Comparative Study of the Biggest Box Office Hits in the United
States and Outside the United States Since the 1970s”, Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and
Case Studies, ed. Richard Maltby, Daniel Biltereyst and Philippe Meers, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011, pp.
171-84.
5 China, for example, did not import up-to-date Hollywood films until the 1990s, and then initially only in
small numbers. In the new millennium the number of Hollywood imports has increased and they can be
enormously successful, yet the Chinese film industry also produces blockbuster hits, so that there is no
straightforward dominance of Hollywood movies in the Chinese market.
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continue to own theatres in other countries). Around the same time, cinema attendance
levels in the United States and thus overall film industry income dropped dramatically.
The major studios reduced their output of theatrical releases (making fewer films which
were, however, on average much more expensive) and fired most of their employees on
long-term contracts, instead putting together teams of free-lancers for individual
productions.6
This meant that from the 1950s onwards, the major Hollywood studios
concentrated on financing and co-ordinating film production, and on distributing the
resulting films around the world, whereby the actual making of these films could take
place anywhere in the world. What is more, from the 1970s onwards, the money the
studios used to make these films increasingly came from outside the United States
(especially from Japan and Germany), and from the 1980s onwards several studios were
(in some cases only temporarily) owned by non-American companies (from Australia,
Japan, Canada and France).
Rather than simply declaring Hollywood to be American, it might therefore be
more adequate, with regards to the decades since the 1950s, to describe it as an
international network of film companies – principally the major studios Paramount,
Warner Bros., Sony Pictures Entertainment/Columbia, Universal, 20th Century Fox and
Disney (these last two currently attempting a merger) – which are headquartered in Los
Angeles and use global resources (in terms of finance, source material, personnel,
production facilities and locations) to make big-budget films for distribution all around
the world. From the 1960s onwards, these film companies have tended to be part of
conglomerates operating across a range of industries (since the 1980s the main focus of
these conglomerates has been on media and entertainment).7
Hollywood’s international dimension is nicely illustrated by Avatar, a film
financed and distributed by 20th Century Fox, which had been owned since the 1980s by
the Australian media conglomerate News Corp., and was written, directed and
produced by the Canadian James Cameron, who cast the English-born Australian actor
Sam Worthington in the lead role and made the film partly in studio facilities in New
Zealand.
Yet despite the international make-up and reach of the major studios, it is to be
expected that, to some extent, their operations are shaped by their specifically American
context. After all, most people working for the majors – especially script writers and top
executives – have been born and raised in the United States, and, first and foremost,
their films are designed to appeal to American audiences (although eventually their
foreign revenues might be larger than those from the United States).
This raises the question of what is “specifically American” about the United
6 When the major studios entered the production of situation comedies and drama series for television
across the 1950s, they reinstated a version of the “factory” system they had previously employed for the
production of films made for theatrical release.
7 It is also worth noting that in the 1980s and 1990s, the major studios took over, or set up, smaller
companies concerned with the production and/or distribution of smaller budget films which have
traditionally been labelled “independent” – a term which obviously becomes rather problematic in this
context.
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States. In other words, how does the United States differ from the rest of the world? One
way to answer this question is to compare the results of public opinion polls in the
United States with those in other countries. Such a comparison (which has been carried
out by the people running the World Values Survey) reveals that what distinguishes the
United States is the fact that, despite the country’s long-term modernisation, a large
percentage of the population holds on to what one might call archaic values and
attitudes (religiosity, support for gun ownership and the death penalty etc.); in other
modernising countries these values and attitudes play a much smaller, and ever
decreasing, role.
The Hollywood elite does not share these archaic values and attitudes, partly
because it is made up of a wholly non-representative selection of Americans (as well as
foreigners), consisting mostly of highly educated, secular, middle-class, white urban
men, who are likely to have an international outlook (rather than being more narrowly
focused American patriots). And yet both these Americans and the foreigners who have
moved to Los Angeles to join the Hollywood elite have to contend with the cultural
specificity of the society in which they live and the specific orientation of their primary
audience in the United States.
Among other things, this means that they are inclined to draw on religion as a
particularly important cultural resource in a wide range of films, most of which are not,
in any narrow sense of the word, religious. This can be seen, for example, in the
(biblically inflected) titles of blockbusters such as Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) or
Armageddon (1998). As these examples illustrate, religious visions of the “end of the
world” are one of the most influential cultural traditions that Hollywood movies draw
on. Indeed, since the 1970s, many of Hollywood’s biggest hits – both in the United States
and in the rest of the world – focus on (the threat of) large-scale, often global
destruction.8
While recent years (especially since the release of The Passion of the Christ in 2004)
have seen an increase in academic work on the role of religion in, and for, Hollywood
cinema, it is perhaps fair to say that, as far as film criticism is concerned, the
predominant approaches in Film Studies focus on issues of gender, race, sexuality, class
and nation, and that they set out to determine, and evaluate, the ideology of individual
films and indeed of Hollywood’s output as a whole (whereby “ideology”, broadly
speaking, is a certain way of viewing the world, of understanding what it is like and
how it should be).
Such critical work is based on the assumption that a film can be said to have a
definite ideological orientation (with regards, for example, to matters of gender, race
etc.), and also that this orientation tends to be in line with, and thus in support of, the
dominant ideology in American society, which, in turn, is assumed to represent the
interests of white, heterosexual, middle and upper class, American men. Furthermore,
without necessarily stating it explicitly, scholars tend to assume that films have the
8 See Krämer, “Welterfolg und Apokalypse”.
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power to influence how their audiences see the world.9
All of the assumptions underpinning ideological criticism can, and have been,
challenged, for example along the following lines: A film can have more than one
ideological orientation, or none at all; rather than the audience’s worldview being
influenced by a film, it is more likely that their understanding of that film is shaped by
their pre-existing worldview. For our purposes, however, it is most important simply to
reiterate here that there is more to Film Studies than ideological criticism.
When confronted with an individual film such as Avatar, instead – or in addition
to – analysing its ideology, scholars may want to find out how this film came into
existence, how it took the shape it did, and why. This might involve research on the
companies and people involved in its production, and also on the cultural traditions the
filmmakers draw on and the contemporary public debates they engage with. Here the
analysis could focus, among other things, on the underlying ideological concerns or
explicit political interests of the people involved in the production of the film.
Furthermore, scholars may want to analyse the form and style of a film, paying
particular attention to its story, characters and themes, without aiming to reveal the
film’s (presumed) underlying ideology (which is often imagined to be hidden from
view, requiring counterintuitive interpretive moves). Here the aim can be to determine
what kinds of sensual and emotional, but also perhaps intellectual and ethical responses
the films is likely to generate in viewers, whereby the analysis draws not only on the
film itself but also on the results of research in the social and natural sciences about how
people perceive and process information.
Related to this, scholars may want to investigate how actual audiences engaged
with a given film. For this, it is worth considering the fact that people often come to
watch a film only after (sometimes prolonged) exposure to the advertising and publicity
surrounding it, and also to critical writing about it (e.g. reviews and viewers’ comments
on the internet) and word-of-mouth reports from friends, colleagues and acquaintances.
In other words, a viewer responds to a film in the light of expectations formed by the
way it was marketed by its distributor and received by other people. In addition these
expectations may be formed through familiarity with the previous work of a film’s star
or director, and with the genre(s) a particular film appears to belong to. In analysing all
this, scholars can focus on the political issues being raised, and the topical debates being
referenced, in advertising, publicity and critical writing.
More generally, scholars may investigate the composition of the audience a
particular film manages to assemble (in terms of gender, age, class etc.), how much the
different segments of the audience enjoyed the film, what they liked and disliked about
9 The concern that films can influence the attitudes, values, outlook and behaviour of their audiences has a
long history. Indeed, when the rapid spread of cheap movie theatres (called “nickelodeons” in the United
States) after 1905 made films accessible to almost everybody in the Western world, including the poorest
(and often immigrant) segments of the population, concerns about how films would influence their
audiences gave rise to informal research efforts which in turn led to political campaigns and the
institutionalisation of film (self-)censorship. Arguably, these initial research efforts were the foundation of
what would later be constituted as the academic discipline of Communication Studies and also,
eventually, of Film Studies.
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it, and which meanings they ascribed to it, also – and this is particularly important for
what are usually referred to as “fans” – whether the film played an on-going role in
their lives (through repeat viewings, the purchase of associated products, references to
the film in conversations etc.). With regards to this last point, there may be cases in
which people feel that their enjoyment and understanding of a particular film has
(ethical, political) implications for how they live their lives.
In this seminar we will draw on the kind of scholarly work I have just outlined
more than on ideological film criticism. As already mentioned, we will do so with
reference to 2001: A Space Odyssey and Avatar.
2 The Avatar Case Study
My own initial interest in Avatar, which I first saw when it had just been released in
December 2009, stemmed from the fact that I did not only enjoy it but also experienced
it, especially its ending, as a kind of call to action.10 The film’s story about an Americanidentified
military-industrial complex embarking on a campaign of potentially
genocidal, environmental destruction so as to gain access to a precious mineral seemed
to relate very directly to contemporary politics as well as, more generally, to the whole
history of Western colonialism and of fossil fuel driven industrialisation. At the same
time the film’s backstory about the Earth’s natural resources having been depleted, and
its biosphere largely destroyed, by the year 2154 offered a glimpse of a likely future for
our civilization. I felt that the final close-up of Jake opening his eyes and staring directly
into the camera posed a question to me: What are you going to do about it?
I had been reading about environmentalism and especially about anthropogenic
(that is man-made) climate change for several years. I agreed with those who argued
that, next to the proliferation of nuclear weapons, climate change was the greatest
challenge humanity had ever faced in its history, and that carrying on with “business as
usual” would lead to a dramatic reduction in the quality of life on this planet and many
millions, probably billions of human deaths (as well as the extinction of many other
species).
It so happened that the most eagerly anticipated attempt of the world’s
governments to agree on a global change of direction (away from “business as usual”) at
the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen ended in catastrophic
failure on the very weekend in December 2009 that Avatar was released around the
world. This made the challenge that I thought the film posed to its viewers particularly
poignant and relevant: If top-down politics was unable to address the issue, a
grassroots, bottom-up process involving each and every one of us was our only hope.
10 It is perhaps worth noting that by 2009 I had published two articles about the films of James Cameron,
focusing on Titanic (1997), and therefore was primed to take note of Cameron’s follow-up to that recordbreaking
release; see Peter Krämer, “Women First: Titanic (1997), Action-Adventure Films and
Hollywood’s Female Audience”, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 18, no. 4 (October 1998),
pp. 599-618; and Peter Krämer, “‘Far across the distance...’: Historical Films, Film History and Titanic
(1997)”, The Titanic in Myth and Memory: Representations in Visual and Literary Culture, ed. Tim Bergfelder
and Sarah Street, London: I.B. Tauris, 2004, pp. 163-72.
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Perhaps, I thought, Avatar could help mobilise people for this purpose.11
At first, this sounded all too fanciful even to myself. After all, I am aware that, as
a film scholar, I am inclined to take movies all too seriously, to perceive meanings in
them others often can not see (unless they are film scholars), and to assign an
importance to them that they do not actually have. But then both anecdotal and
systematic evidence emerged which appeared to confirm my initial impression.
To begin with, the film turned out to be a huge success at the box office. Indeed,
eventually its worldwide gross far surpassed that of the previous record holder – James
Cameron’s Titanic (1997). Due to ticket price inflation and fluctuating exchange rates
between the world’s currencies, it is difficult to compare box office revenues across
longer periods of time. Nevertheless, it is likely that within its first year of release Avatar
reached a larger number of people – first in cinemas, then also on the small screen via
pirate copies as well as legal DVDs and Blu-rays, streaming services and pay-TV
screenings – than any other film has ever reached in the same amount of time.
Due to varying ticket prices around the world, it is difficult to calculate how
many people saw the film in cinemas between December 2009 and December 2010, but I
would estimate that it was about half a billion, with at least as many people probably
seeing it only on the small screen. This would mean that about one out of seven people
on the planet saw Avatar in its first year of release (this proportion must have increased
significantly since then, not least due to regular television broadcasts of the movie).
Of course, the extremely wide reach of this film did not, in itself, suggest that the
people who saw it engaged with it very deeply. But in conversations with friends in the
weeks and months after the film’s initial release, I began to hear more and more stories
about people being so strongly affected by Avatar that they would declare a change in
their attitude towards the natural environment and towards other aspects of their lives,
and also perhaps express the desire to make changes to the way they lived their lives.
While I did not closely follow discussions on fan websites and on social media, nor even
the media reporting about the film’s varied impact around the world, I was aware of socalled
“Avatar depresssion” (also known as “Post Avatar Depression” or “Avatar
blues”) – a much discussed condition apparently affecting many viewers of the film who
were so enchanted by its fictional Pandoran world that they were unable to cope with
11 I was encouraged in my thinking about the potential of Avatar by the research I had recently carried out
on Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), a film which Cameron has acknowledged as a major
influence on his life and work, that influence being particularly noticeable in Avatar, especially its final
close-up which echoes the shot of the “Star Child” staring at the camera at the end of Kubrick’s film. My
examination of letters sent by regular cinemagoers to Kubrick in the late 1960s and early 1970s revealed
that many people had been deeply affected by 2001, to the point where some of them said that it had
changed their view of what cinema is and indeed their view of the world; a few even reported that the
film had given their lives a new direction. Central to all this was the idea of re-birth as represented in
2001. Viewers applied this idea to the cinema (which, in their view, was reborn with 2001), as well as to
their own lives and to the society they lived in; 2001 at the very least reminded them that both had the
potential to be fundamentally transformed. See Peter Krämer, “’Dear Mr. Kubrick’: Audience Responses
to 2001: A Space Odyssey in the Late 1960s”, Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies, vol. 6,
no. 2 (November 2009), http://www.participations.org/Volume%206/Issue%202/special/kramer.htm;
also see Peter Krämer, 2001: A Space Odyssey (BFI Film Classics), London: British Film Institute, 2010.
11
the return to their everyday existence. This certainly suggested that Avatar could have a
strong impact on people (even if the media reports turned out to be somewhat
exaggerated).
Last but not least, throughout 2010 I came across occasional reports about
political protests in which activists (the first ones appeared to be Palestinians on the
West Bank in February) linked their concerns to Avatar by painting themselves blue and
wearing costumes inspired by the movie’s Na’vi. In addition James Cameron made
public statements about his intention to make the world a better place with his films.
What I did not fully realise at the time was that he was also already directly intervening
in public debates about environmental issues in 2010 – by joining indigenous tribes in
the Amazon who were trying to defend their land against the building of a huge dam,
and by attacking what has been called “extreme extractivism”, that is the highly
destructive extraction of fossil fuels, in this case oil from tar sands in his home country
Canada. In this way, there obviously existed many concrete links between Avatar and
political activism, and my initial response to the film, seeing it as an important cultural
event with considerable political potential, did not seem so fanciful after all.
However, the most important influences on my thinking about Avatar were two
academic friends. At my own university I had been talking for several years with the
philosopher Rupert Read about the power of movies. As Rupert had long combined his
academic teaching and research with environmental activism and mainstream political
work through the Green Party, it was not altogether surprising that he suggested we
should go beyond merely discussing the political potential of Avatar and the instances
demonstrating its actual impact; we should also act on our understanding of the film’s
importance and try to work towards actually mobilising people who were deeply
impressed by Avatar for political purposes.12
I could not at all imagine how one would go about doing this. But then I
discussed my interest in Avatar with Henry Jenkins, an old friend who I had first met at
a Film Studies conference in 1987, a time when we had both been historians of American
film comedy of the 1920s and 1930s. I then moved on to the study of contemporary
Hollywood whereas Henry became, among many other things, one of the founding
fathers of Fan Studies. He did not only direct me to two articles he had published in
September 2010 on “Avatar Activism”,13 but also told me about one of his current
research projects that dealt with the ways in which organised fandom was increasingly
becoming involved in political activism (to do, for example, with human rights), while,
at the same time, political activists were increasingly making use of people’s interest in
12 Cp. Rupert Read,“Avatar: A Call to Save the Future”, Radical Anthropology, no. 4 (November 2010), pp.
35-41 ; and Rupert Read, “Avatar: A transformed cinema, a transformation of self, (and then) a
transformation of world”, ThinkingFilmCollective blogspot, 11 October 2013,
http://thinkingfilmcollective.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/avatar-transformed-cinema.html.
13 Henry Jenkins, “Avatar Activism”, Le Monde diplomatique, September 2010,
http://mondediplo.com/2010/09/15avatar; and Henry Jenkins, “Confessions of an Aca-Fan: Avatar
Activism and Beyond”, Confessions of an Aca-Fan, 22 September 2010,
http://henryjenkins.org/2010/09/avatar_activism_and_beyond.html.
12
popular culture to mobilise them for action.14 This was certainly very encouraging to
hear, and prompted me to start doing more extensive research not only on Avatar and its
audiences but also, more generally, on the connections between media, political activism
and social change.15
Perhaps the single most important thing that reading about the latter taught me
was that in most cases the contributions that particular media representations or
political actions make to general changes in society are very small indeed (although
cumulatively these representations and actions may have a substantial impact). This
means that, when examining Avatar, its audiences and the political activism that draws
on, or is inspired by, the film, we can not expect much in terms of immediate political
effectivity; indeed, even at the personal level, we are initially at best looking for subtle
shifts and the potential for re-orientation, and not at actual life changes.
Having said this, the by now quite substantial literature on how people have
engaged with Avatar demonstrates that a significant portion of its total audience (this
portion comprising many million people) has taken the film quite seriously – because
people were emotionally affected by it and/or felt that it conveyed an important
message –, rather than seeing it as mere entertainment and an only superficial and
fleeting experience.16 Debates about the film (in private as well as in public forums)
were no doubt most extensive and intense in the weeks after its initial release, yet
researchers found that even months and years later the film popped up unprompted in
conversations about environmental issues, and that a vibrant fan culture continued to
operate through websites and occasional face-to-face gatherings (although fan activity
14 This project resulted in various important publications, including a special issue (vol. 10 in 2012) of the
journal Transformative Works and Culture on “Transformative Works and Fan Activism”, ed. Henry Jenkins
and Singita Shrestova; and Henry Jenkins, Sangita Shresthova, Liana Gamber-Thompson, Neta KliglerVilenchik
and Arely Zimmermann, By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism, New York: NYU
Press, 2016.
15 I have to admit that my research on Avatar has progressed rather slowly, mostly because it has not been
the main focus of my work. However, I have written numerous conference papers on Avatar, starting with
“Between Hollywood and Copenhagen: James Cameron, Environmentalism and Avatar (2009)”
(presented at the MeCCSA conference in Salford in January 2011), a revised version of which was
published as “Avatar: Environmental Politics and Worldwide Success”, Pure Movies, 6 November 2013,
http://www.puremovies.co.uk/columns/avatar-environmental-politics-and-worldwide-success/. Also
see Peter Krämer, “The 3-D Experience and Hero’s Journey of Avatar”, ThinkingFilmCollective blogspot, 31
January 2016, http://thinkingfilmcollective.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/the-3-d-experience-and-herosjourney-in.html;
Peter Krämer, “From 2001: Space Odyssey to Avatar: Reflections on Cultural Impact and
Academic Research”, Screening the Past, no. 42 (October 2017),
http://www.screeningthepast.com/2017/09/from-2001-space-odyssey-to-avatar-reflections-on-culturalimpact-and-academic-research/;
and Peter Krämer, “‘Enter the World’: James Cameron’s Avatar (2009)
and the Family-Adventure Movie”, Fantasy/Animation: History, Theory, Culture, ed. Christopher Holliday
and Alexander Sergeant, New York: Routledge, forthcoming in 2018, pp. 261-75.
16 See Bron Taylor (ed.), Avatar and Nature Spirituality, Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University
Press, 2013, esp. Part III; and Carolyn Michelle, Charles H. Davis and Florin Vladica. “Understanding
Variation in Audience Engagement and Response: An Application of the Composite Model to Receptions
of Avatar (2009)”, The Communication Review, vol. 15, no. 2 (2012), pp. 106-42; and Yosefa Loshitzky,
“Popular Cinema as Popular Resistance: Avatar in the Palestinian (Imagi)nation”, Third Text, vol. 26, no. 2
(March 2012), pp. 151-63.
13
has been much reduced in recent years, it may be revitalised by the release of the first of
four planned sequels in December 2020).
Furthermore, while the use of Avatar iconography in political protests appears to
have been confined to the first year or so after the film’s initial release, James Cameron’s
political engagement (to do with indigenous rights and environmentalism) has
expanded and intensified since 2010, not least with his involvement in the production of
the award winning documentary series Years of Living Dangerously which was first
broadcast in 2014.17 Cameron may not always directly refer to Avatar in his public
statements on political issues, but it seems that it was the work on this film that made
him more sensitive to these issues and emboldened him to do something about them. In
addition, it was the very success of Avatar which focused a lot of media attention on
Cameron so that his statements are paid attention to by many.
There are, then, many indications that Avatar has not only reached more people
than any other film in recent years, but has also engaged many of them profoundly, so
profoundly in fact that it may have had an impact on their everyday lives. There is also
plenty of evidence that the film was widely understood – by its writer-directorproducer,
by media commentators, by political activists and by other viewers – as a
political intervention into public debate. Hence it should be a particularly interesting as
a case study.
17 I have explored the political dimensions of the film’s reception and of Cameron’s post-Avatar activities in
a series of as yet unpublished conference papers. See, for example, Peter Krämer, “The Avatar Project:
Politics and Popular Culture”, “The Political Screen” conference, London, June 2015; Peter Krämer, “The
Avatar Project: Blockbuster Cinema, Academic Research and Grass-Roots Activism”, “Media, Politics and
Activism” conference, Norwich, April 2016; Peter Krämer and Rupert Read, “Avatar, Years of Living
Dangerously and Beyond: Film and Environmental Activism”, “Film and the Environment” conference,
Norwich, May 2016; Peter Krämer, “The World of Avatar Audiences: From Fan Studies to Political
Mobilisation”, the annual Fan Studies Network Conference, Norwich, June 2016; and Peter Krämer,
“Connectivity in and around Avatar: From Film Analysis to Political Activism”, the annual Network of
European Cinema and Media Scholars conference “In/between: Cultures of Connectivity”, Potsdam, July
2016.