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

by CarrieLynn D. Reinhard (Editor), Christopher J. Olson (Editor)

There are a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches to researching how film spectators make sense of film texts, from the film text itself, the psychological traits and sociocultural group memberships of the viewer, or even the location and surroundings of the viewer. However, we can only understand the agency of film spectators in situations of film spectatorship by studying actual spectators' interactions with specific film texts in specific contexts of engagement.

Making Sense of Cinema: Empirical Studies into Film Spectators and Spectatorship uses a number of empirical approaches (ethnography, focus groups, interviews, historical, qualitative experiment and physiological experiment) to consider how the film spectator makes sense of the text itself or the ways in which the text fits into his or her everyday life. With case studies ranging from preoccupations of queer and ageing men in Spanish and French cinema and comparative eye-tracking studies based on the two completely different soundscapes of Monsters Inc. and Saving Private Ryan to cult fanbase of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy and attachment theory to its fictional characters, Making Sense of Cinema aligns this subset of film studies with the larger fields of media reception studies, allowing for dialogue with the broader audience and reception studies field.

320 pages, Hardcover

First published February 25, 2016

About the author

CarrieLynn D. Reinhard is also known as CarrieLynn. Reinhard.

CarrieLynn D. Reinhard is an Associate Professor in Communication Arts and Sciences at Dominican University where she teaches digital communication technologies, media production, and research methods. She received her Ph.D. in Communication from Ohio State University under the tutelage of Brenda Dervin, and she was a post-doctoral research fellow at Roskilde University in Denmark. She misses the pickled herring of Denmark, as well as the lovely streets of Copenhagen.

Her research focuses on fan, audience and reception studies and new methodologies for their study. She has published numerous articles and book chapters on this topic, as well as other topics regarding digital media studies. She has upcoming work on the problems with contemporary fandom and fan communities, and hopes one day to produce a documentary exploring the similarities between pop culture fans and religious practitioners.

She hosts The Pop Culture Lens podcast with Christopher J. Olson, and together they are developing a new research approach to professional wrestling studies. A new convert to professional wrestling, she likes the Chicago federation AAW and the WWE developmental program NXT more than WWE, but she will always chant for Zayn, Bayley and Balor wherever they are.

Reviews

[Christopher]

I'm biased, but I think this collection is pretty dang good.