Graeme Turner. Handbook of Film Studies. Editor: James Donald & Michael Renov. Sage Publications. 2008.

Writing about ‘Film Studies’ as if it were a singular object requires a level of invention at the best of times; the disciplinary transna­tionalism it implies bears very little inspection before it falls apart. In relation to my topic here, this is especially the case. The rela­tionships between Film Studies and cultural studies have varied significantly from one national location to another over the last several decades. Even if we only address the Anglo-American tradition, which is after all where the influences are most direct and significant, important differences come to light.

It is in the US where Film Studies has had the strongest institutional presence, although in many cases it has been located in schools or departments of literary studies. From the 1960s onwards, Film Studies in the US devel­oped its own identity as a discipline, proving a little resistant to influences from outside; from mass communications studies and the social sciences early on, and from cultural and media studies later. Literary studies, with its increasingly sophisticated mode of textual analysis and canon formation, proved a congenial disciplinary ally for American Film Studies; certainly, it was the most prominent of very few disciplines given their due within the field over the years. Cultural studies, of course, developed much later in the US than in the UK, and its early proponents in America were not particularly interested in film: instead, you would have to say, television and popular music were the preferred sites of examination. All of this has changed over time—particularly over the last decade—and, while American Film Studies has largely maintained its focus upon film texts and the processes through which we understand and interpret them, it has certainly begun to conceptualize these texts and processes within a wider context—social and cultural as well as canonical. The relatively recent renaming of the Society for Cinema Studies in the US (becoming the Society for Cinema and Media Studies) is a significant step, marking the formal resolution of a very long debate. However, the length of that debate, and the determination it reflects among some sections of the association to resist the inclusion of popular media such as television within their disciplinary field, indicates how doggedly American Film Studies has protected an exclusivist disciplinary identity. Nonetheless, as we will see, there are significant areas of
research and theory within American Film Studies, that have prospered in recent years, which reveal the influence of work from within cultural, media, and communications studies and which move us away from a text-centred aesthetic model of contemporary Film Studies.

In the UK it was quite different. Film Studies took longer to establish itself in the university system and, when it did gain a foothold there, film theory and cultural theory developed more or less in tandem. During the 1970s and 1980s, proponents of both traditions participated enthusiastically in many of the same debates—albeit often from competing points of view. In the late 1970s, for instance, the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies devoted a whole research project to debating and refining the textual approaches identified with the editorial position articulated in the pages of the journal, Screen (for example see Hall, 1980; Morley, 1980). The popular success and broadly cross-disciplinary application of an early outcome of such debates, John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972), indicates something of the contemporary consensus around the problems to be addressed—and the methodologies available—within cultural, representational, and film theory at that time. Unlike its American counterpart, British Film Studies did not exclude the consideration of television, although it had its own way of dealing with it. As was the case with their interest in the feature film, British Film Studies maintained an aesthetic and political agenda which privileged those television texts seen to be challenging, avant- garde or politically ‘progressive’. While not discounting them, British Film Studies was never as focused on generic or canonical questions as its counterpart in the US. Much of the debate during the 1970s and early 1980s was about the politics of specific film texts, but from this distance it is clear that the overarching interest at the time was inherently theoretical—participating in the elaboration of a grand theory which might explain the workings of the medium as a signifying practice and as ideology.

The cross-disciplinary take-up of recently translated French theorists such as Roland Barthes (1975) and Louis Althusser (1971) helped to construct the debates which con­nected Film Studies to related theoretical developments in literary, cultural and media studies.

It would be some years, however, before British Film Studies took a serious interest in actual film audiences, in the cinema as a form of mass entertainment (rather than as a reproducer of ideologies), or in researching the historical contexts within which popular cinema was actually produced and consumed. The mainstream developments in British cultural studies during the 1980s—the shift from the text to the audience, and the increasingly contextualized accounts of cultural production—did not immediately filter through into work being done in film. During the 1990s, however, a number of important books which worked comfortably across both theoretical traditions began to appear—Yvonne Tasker’s Spectacular Bodies (1993) for instance. These could not be confidently pigeonholed as definitively either film or cultural studies and indeed were warmly welcomed by readers from both traditions.

Of course, there were many other for­mations of the Film Studies-cultural stud­ies relationship in other national locations. In Australia, Film Studies began in a partic­ularly close partnership with interdisciplinary developments in communications, media and cultural studies. The grounds for exchange were there from the beginning and many would argue that the broadly contextualized version of Film Studies which grew up around the revival of the Australian film industry led the way into cultural theory—rather than the other way around (Turner, 1993). Given such different histories, then, it would be unrealistic to expect the following account of the rela­tionship between Film Studies and cultural studies to compel assent from everyone, no matter where they were located. In some cases, as well, there is a danger of considerable overlap in the account of the influence from cultural studies and that from, say, television studies, which is dealt with elsewhere in this book.

This account will speak primarily to the Anglo-American traditions which have dominated theoretical debate and peda­gogic practice in the Western take-up of Film Studies. Inevitably, it will present a generalized account of these traditions that will to some extent elide national and theoretical differences in order to make the argument in the space available. The reader of what follows might also require a little tolerance for the precise arrangement of the definitional boundaries chosen to configure the structure of the trade between these two intellectual fields. Whereas it might be true that Film Studies has been historically quite intent on maintaining its disciplinary boundaries, cultural studies and some of its cognate fields—media studies, television studies, communications studies—have not necessarily been that way inclined. These more intrinsically interdisciplinary fields have often regarded a disciplinary boundary merely as a challenge to be overcome—certainly, if it is a boundary demarcating territory as belonging to someone else. Cultural studies is renowned for performing methodological smash-and-grab raids on its more traditional colleagues.

Nonetheless, this account of the rela­tionship between film and cultural studies highlights what I suggest are genuinely significant developments in Film Studies over the last two decades—and developments which cultural studies has helped to generate. I would also suggest that it is precisely these changes which are most fundamentally impor­tant now as Film Studies must position itself to deal with the dramatic expansion of screen cultures across many media and entertainment formats and systems of delivery.

Does Film Studies Need Cultural Studies?

Let us ask this question: why might Film Studies need cultural studies? My short answer to this is that cultural studies has proved valuable in helping Film Studies deal with the understanding of film as a social practice. I want to flesh out some of the arguments behind that answer in this section.

The dominant focus for the broad field of Film Studies for most of its history, and in most of its locations, has been upon the privileged film text. A canon of texts was developed through which film history was discussed, and through which arguments were elaborated about the nature of the film experience for the ideal spectator. Until relatively recently, that is probably until the late 1980s, there was little interest within Film Studies in interrogating the film experience of the actual audience sitting in an actual cinema. The film texts selected were analyzed as artistic expression rather than as popular entertainments. Popular cinema did figure at times, but largely through the lens of an enquiry into the workings of genre or of the director as auteur. Both of these categories enabled the retrieval of certain popular film forms and many mainstream cinema texts; however, that retrieval did not easily extend to a consideration of what it was that made these films specifically popular entertainments.

It is not hard to see why that might look like a disciplinary formation in need of cultural studies. In its early days in the UK, cultural studies cut its teeth on defining the popular, on rescuing mass cultural forms from elitist disregard in order to understand the meaningfulness of the practices of everyday life. Over the 1980s, in particular, cultural studies had been especially interested in television, and had found ways of deal­ing with the television text that explicitly set aside the consideration of its aesthetic dimensions. Cultural studies had also engaged in vigorous debates with scholars in Film Studies about the processes through which all kinds of texts were both produced and understood. Cultural studies’ characteristic move at that time was to contextualize both sets of processes, implying a high degree of determination behind both the composition and the reading of the text. Film Studies had a similarly deterministic view of the operation of texts, seeing them as able to position the reader in ways that appeared, at certain points in the debate, virtually irresistible. However, as cultural studies, over time, shifted its interests from the text to the audience, and as it modified its assumptions about the agency of that audience over the determinations of the text, cultural studies and screen theory started to move apart.

I would locate this moment in the early 1990s, and I would suggest that as the two fields begin to define their differences, interestingly, cultural studies’ usefulness to Film Studies increased. The fact that the two fields had fallen out of step with each other seemed to enable a clearer focus on the value of the differences that were revealed. This, in turn, seems to have highlighted the value of the more contextual or ‘cultural’ approaches to film. As I said earlier, one needs to be cautious about generalizing comments here, but I think Film Studies experienced something of its own ‘cultural turn’ over the 1990s as it became more receptive to the approaches and bodies of knowledge from related disciplinary fields—not only cultural studies, but also media studies, communica­tions studies, cultural history, and the group of approaches to design, architecture and art history usually gathered under the label of visual culture.

As a result, it is now possible to suggest, Film Studies has experienced a series of pluralizing shifts that better reflects the social and cultural resonance of the loca­tions of its objects of study. Importantly, these locations have not remained static; the range of options for cinema audiences has multiplied dramatically in recent years. There is now a proliferation of screen cultures and it would be hard to argue that film is any longer the dominant one. The shape of the film industry has been restructured as it has become entangled in the global shift towards convergence that suddenly makes Internet service provi­sion as important as home theatre formats. Film Studies has had to respond to these developments. As Toby Miller puts it in a provocative contribution to the collection, Keyframes:

The brief moment when cinema could be viewed as a fairly unitary phenomenon in terms of exhibition (say, 1920 to 1950) set up the conceptual prospect of its textual fetishisation in academia… Now that viewing environments, audiences, technologies and genres are so multiple, the cinema is restored to a mixed-medium mode. At this crucial juncture, the division between the text and context must be broken up. The who, what, when, where, and how of screen culture—its occasionality—must become central to our work. (2001: 306)

In such an industrial context, cultural studies’ focus upon the culture that surrounds film’s production and consumption now makes more sense than ever. As a result, it was only a matter of time before scholars and departments using a literature-based model of Film Studies—concerned only, really, with the film text and its presentation in cinemas—had to decide in what way and on whose terms it must accommodate these shifts.

Speaking from the position of someone working in cultural studies but with a longstanding interest in negotiating ways of dealing with film—as text, as industry, and as popular culture—my view is that the need for such an accommodation has been apparent for a long time. My own film textbook, Film as Social Practice, first published back in 1988, was explicitly designed as a cultural studies intervention into Film Studies. It focused upon popular cinema rather than canonical texts, upon the cinema as a site of consumption, and upon the full range of social practices connected with going to the movies. The strategy of dealing with film as a social practice was employed as a means of disconnecting film from discourses of the aesthetic and reconnecting it with the practices of its popular audiences. Others had developed the notion in more sophisticated ways before me, however, and still more were able to think about what that might mean for the study of film in the future. James Hay, for instance, writing from a background in film, cultural studies and communications studies, saw its potential in this way:

What is necessary, I would argue, is a way of discussing film as a social practice that begins by considering how social relations are spatially organized—through sites of production and consumption—and how film is practiced from and across particular sites and always in relation to other sites. In this respect, cinema is not seen in a dichotomous relation with the social, but as dispersed within an environment of sites that defines (in spatial terms) the meanings, uses and places of ‘the cinematic’. (1997: 216)

This is the kind of suggestion that now tends to be routinely embedded in contemporary writing about cinema. Those who have directly advocated this kind of approach to Film Studies—just in the last few years—include many of the contributors to Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams’ reader Reinventing Film Studies (2000), Gill Branston in Cinema and Cultural Modernity (2000), Matthew Tinkcom and Amy Villarejo in their reader Keyframes: Popular Cinema and Cultural Studies (2001), Janet Harbord’s Film Cultures (2002), Janet Staiger’s Perverse Spectators (2000), and my own Film Cultures Reader (2002), to name a few. If we were to add to these the range of books which deal with popular cinema genres from a cultural studies point of view—from the early mix of cultural history and cultural studies in Thomas Doherty’s (1988) study of teenpics to the amalgam of industry, cultural and textual analysis in Will Brooker’s (2000) study of the Batman franchise—we would build up quite a significant body of work.

In the classroom, the study of film has already been redefined over the last decade. Most film programs today not only deal with the film text and the processes through which we make sense of film as a discrete medium, but they also—in some cases, even primarily—focus upon the cultural contexts in which the consumption of film takes place, as well as the industrial contexts within which it is produced. Although there are still complaints about the residual disciplinary insularity of contemporary American Film Studies, specifically its failure to interest itself in the more empirical material that has come from research into political economy, technology and policy studies (Miller, 2001), this situation has improved significantly in recent years.

In what follows, then, I want to review four areas where the multilateral trade between film and cultural studies has been most active, and productive—for both sides. It is not always easy to pick up the precise pattern of such trade. Rarely is it a simple transaction, where one body of work directly and explicitly influ­ences another. In many instances, what we are dealing with is a categoric conceptual shift—such as the turn to audiences—which affects work on television, on film, on computer games, on the developing theorization of cultural consumption in general. To argue that such a shift is an effect solely of cultural studies is to grossly oversimplify. So, I want to pick out those areas where it seems to me the influence of cultural studies upon Film Studies has been, if not unilateral nor unalloyed by influences from other disciplines, certainly highly significant over the last decade or so.

From Aesthetic Object to Social Practice

I have argued elsewhere (Turner, 2002) that the contemporary academic study of film has moved away, decisively, from a predominantly aesthetic interest in the text as well as from the enterprise of ‘grand theory’—the elaboration of an overarching theoretical model for Film Studies. Significantly, an increasing number of the studies of con­temporary cinema focus upon the meanings and pleasures popular films provide for their audiences. While the interest remains in the film text—they tend to look at specific genres or groups of texts, the nature of the meanings and pleasures examined as the products of these texts is social, political or cultural rather than aesthetic. Increasingly, it would seem to me, the default motivation for research into popular cinema is to understand the cultural function of the feature film as a form of popular entertainment in contemporary Western societies.

Among the outcomes of such work is a large critical literature on film genres that have little aesthetic cachet at all: the ‘trashier’ end of popular cinema—horror films, action movies, slasher/teen flicks. What this kind of work does is to reintegrate previously denigrated genres with the field of study in order to more adequately acknowledge their centrality to the production industry, as well as to the cinema’s commercial audience. Interestingly, while many of those working on such topics may have chosen not to identify their projects exclusively with the discipline of Film Studies, they have tended to present an insider’s critique of the positions which had excluded such texts from analysis in the past. Tania Modleski’s important early study of horror films is aimed at puncturing what she describes as the ‘postmodern’ dismissal of all popular culture as inherently complacent, bourgeois and beneath consideration (1986). Carol Clover’s highly influential study of slasher/horror films directly confronts screen theory’s ‘male gaze’ orthodoxy to argue for a more flexible positioning of the spectator through the analysis of such trash-culture texts as I Spit on Your Grave (Meir Zarchi, US, 1978) (1992). Tasker’s account of the ‘action heroine’ in Spectacular Bodies (1993) sets out to recover the positive political potential of the films she examines (The Terminator [James Cameron, US, 1984], The Long Kiss Goodnight [Renny Harlin, US, 1996] and G.I. Jane [Ridley Scott, US, 1997], for example): their contribution to expanding the range of female identities represented in popular film. Tasker’s objective is not to reconcile these films with a traditional aesthetic, but rather to draw attention to the elite prejudices that would exclude their consideration from the field of Film Studies. Drawing on cultural studies as well as screen theory, Tasker provides an analysis of these films’ cultural functions and their spectacular pleasures in a way that also helps to explain their popular success.

It is important to recognize the usefulness of the examples set by those who have worked on television with similar aims in mind. A remarkable number of scholars and researchers who have participated in the shift I am describing work across the two media and carry over into their film analysis the benefits of being able to deal with television texts as popular cultural forms that generate meaning and pleasure. Among the writers I have in mind here are Mark Jancovich, Jane Feuer, Steve Neale, Ed Buscombe, Miller, Modleski, and Staiger; there are many others. Television studies, in particular that part of it connected with cultural studies, has become (if anything, too) comfortable with its deferral of issues of aesthetics and quality, but its application to the renovation of a Film Studies hitherto ill-equipped to deal with mainstream cinema as popular entertainment has been extremely useful.

Tinkcom and Villarejo represent this shift as a reflection of cultural studies’ emphasis on ‘the specificity of the cultural commodity to the formation of social identities and practices’ (2001: 2). It is certainly true that much of what you might call this ‘revisionist’ account of popular cinema is concerned with examining popular cinema’s participation in the construction of social and cultural identity. In some cases, such as Richard Dyer’s White (1997), the dis­cussion is about how the naturalization of particular production practices assists in the reproduction of whole ideological categories within the field of representation developed in the Western cinema. More often, though, the focus is upon how particular cultural communities make use of film texts through the manner of their consumption. There is a growing literature on the appropriation of popular cinema by queer sexualities, by racial minorities, and by other marginalized communities (see Straayer, 1996, on queer readings, for example). Larger still, however, is that literature which examines how cin­ema works to construct, deconstruct and problematize mainstream cultural identities as well. Examples of the work I have in mind include Susan Jeffords’ work on masculinity (1994), Barbara Creed (1993) on the ‘monstrous-feminine’, and John Hill (1997) on national cinema.

These approaches still centre on the film text, however, and so it is important to point to another way of dealing with film as a social practice: by examining the cinema as a social space, as a specific site of consumption, offering pleasures in its own right and confirming the social identities implicated in the choice to go there in the first place. Some of this work has an historical dimension. Miriam Hansen (1991) argues that the early cinema presented women with an ‘alternate public sphere’, a public social space where they were entitled to inhabit on their own, and which was separate from the world of family to which they were otherwise tied. Jackie Stacey’s account of British women’s experience of the picture palaces of the 1940s and 1950s uncovers the cinema’s capacity to provide an alternative space that was magically and consolingly different to the everyday world of post-war Britain (1993). The material conditions of the cinema—what Stacey describes as the sensuous experience of the luxury of the cinema space—contrasted dramatically with the material conditions of these women’s daily lives and Stacey demonstrates how important this was to their experience. Coming to the idea of the cinema as a social space from quite a different direction, Harbord (2002) examines the way particular sites of exhibition—the multiplex, the art house, the film festival—differently construct the experience of cinema-going, and how this difference influences the production of ‘the value of the film’. Rather than focusing upon the film text exhibited, however, her analysis of these sites deals with them as domains of circulation: the multiplex is folded into the experience of shopping, for instance, whereas the film festival becomes incorporated into, among other things, the spatial practices of tourism. Such approaches move us away from focusing upon the film text as aesthetic object towards a much broader approach to the movies that attempts to better understand the industrial conditions which enable its production and the cultural conditions which support its consumption.

From the Spectator to the Audience

This is the area where cultural studies’ influences have been most significant to the development of the contemporary practice of Film Studies. Drawing upon its work with television audiences, in particular, cultural studies has assisted Film Studies’ shift from an almost exclusive focus upon a specta­tor who was almost entirely a theoretical proposition to a more empirical engagement with histories and quasi-ethnographies of actual film audiences.

Theoretical development in the early years of Film Studies was confined largely to theorizing the processes thought to structure audiences’ understanding of the screened text. Psychoanalytic accounts were favoured, examining film’s participation in the production of subjectivities. Dominant, though, was the practice of interrogating film’s political function—which was largely, it has to be said, ‘read off’ the specific text. Mostly, the film critic in these early years outlined the reading they argued was generated by the text and relied on the explanatory power of the interpretation they could present as a means of defending their reading. During the heyday of what came to be called ‘screen theory’, the 1970s and 1980s, there was little consideration of attempting to capture and analyze the processes of consumption employed by actual viewers inside the cinema. Similarly, as a result of the dismissal of what was regarded as the regressive and complacent politics of popular cinema, there was very little serious investigation of the appeal of popular film to its viewers. To some extent, it was taken for granted that the film text’s capacity to position its reader provided us with all the explanation we needed; that these films reproduced dominant ideological positions and that this was confirmatory and pleasurable for its audiences.

The history of Film Studies from the early 1990s onward changes much of this, however. A crucial factor seems to have been the gradual building of the critique of the Laura Mulvey argument about the dominance of the male gaze, which resulted in a series of modifications and qualifications—in which Mulvey herself, of course, was a significant participant. As I have put it elsewhere:

The modification of theories of what [Mulvey] called ‘the male gaze’, are part of a progressive renovation of the claims made by screen theory as it responded to the competing claims from other traditions of research. In particular, the recovery of a sense of agency for the individual viewer and the acceptance that the process of viewing must be historically contingent, as well as a renewed interest in the social and economic history of the commercial production industry, has displaced the universalizing implications of screen theory.The need to account for the pleasures of popular cinema audiences, in ways that acknowledge at least the theoretical possibility that they may not be ideological dupes, has become irresistible. (2002: 4)

Cultural studies was not the only competing research tradition, of course, that helped provoke this shift. Social history, for one, has been particularly significant; as noted earlier, Hansen’s important history of the audiences for silent cinema demonstrates the usefulness of archival research for establish­ing the meanings and pleasures contemporary audiences found in this body of film. In such accounts, popular cinema remains in the centre of the frame, the notion of the historical audience replaces the theoretical category of the spectator, and cultural studies, social history, and television audience studies become increasingly relevant. In Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby’s Hollywood Spectatorship (2001), the comparison of the two models of the spectator/audience is explicit: the theoretical, text-based con­struction of the spectator is placed against the historical evidence of actual audience consumption and viewing patterns.

Among the provocations from within cultural studies, Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott’s study of the James Bond phe­nomenon has been particularly influential in its proposition that the film text must be understood as the product of a specific set of conditions of reception—industrial, discursive, ideological, cultural—which they call ‘reading formations’ (1987). While there are textual determinants that limit the extent to which this happens, they argue, in general the particular ‘reading’ of the text at any one point in time is overdetermined by details of the reading formation at that time. The text is provisionalized by such a move, and the focus of study shifts onto the conditions of reception. It is a shift endorsed by Staiger in her review of reception studies, Interpreting Films (1992), where she recommends what she calls British cultural studies as a means of recovering the importance of the historical context in which film is consumed in order to affirm the role of the audience in generating meaning. Similarly, Barbara Klinger’s book on Douglas Sirk makes the point that, as films ‘pass through culture and history, they are subject to systems of signification that lie outside textual boundaries, systems largely responsible for negotiating their public identity’ (1994: xvi). Klinger acknowledges Staiger’s work on reception and singles out Bennett and Woollacott’s influence in ‘demonstrating the importance of analyzing contextual factors in discussions of the social meaning of texts’ (1994: xvii). By the time the next instalment of Staiger’s project appears, Perverse Spectators (2000), she is in no doubt that ‘contextual factors, more than textual ones, account for the experiences [audiences] have watching films and television and for the uses to which those experiences are put in navigating our everyday lives. These contextual factors are social formations and constructed identities of the self in relation to historical conditions’ (2000: 1).

Other attempts to find a way to make the move from the spectator to the audience have turned explicitly to work within cultural studies analyses of television as a model for future practice. Annette Kuhn (1984) does this very early on, for instance, pointing to the work of Charlotte Brunsdon and Dorothy Hobson on the British soap opera, Crossroads (1964-88). The most obvious connection to cultural studies work on television has occurred in the borrowing of television studies’ ethnographic or quasi-ethnographic accounts of the experience of audiences. In her research for Star-Gazing (1993), which included archival and historical study, Stacey sought the contribution of women who wished to share their memories from the 1940s and 1950s of the function of the cinema and of cinema stars in their lives. The letters sent by these women became the sources for a rich study of the audience’s experience of cinema during this time. Jaqueline Bobo’s interviews with black women about their response to the film The Color Purple (Steven Spielberg, US, 1985), are aimed at using the evidence drawn from these audience members in order to challenge the interpretation of the film presented by white, liberal, readers: as a negative representation of black culture. The study reveals how actively and contingently these audience members read their texts—a study of agency in practice. Jancovich’s response to what he calls ‘the turn to audiences’ examines fan discussion sites on the web, developing insights provided by work on subcultures and their construction of distinction, in order to better understand how audiences participate in the construction and defence of film genres (2000: 24).

Finally, in this section, it is worth returning to the aspect of Stacey’s work the previous brief description has elided—the function of the star, an object of identification and desire, as among the pleasures available to audiences in the cinema and as one of the key variables in audiences’ choice of what films to see in the first place. Stacey’s book is primarily about the classic Hollywood star’s function for her correspondents, and it is contextualized within a strong tradition in Film Studies—initiated primarily by Dyer’s Stars (1979), but carried on as an area of research ever since (see, for instance, Gledhill, 1991). While the film star remains a discrete category which it makes sense to retain, it has been displaced somewhat by cultural studies and other disciplines’ growing interest in celebrity. Celebrity is the larger category, spanning a range of industries from television through to high-profile sports, and there is a danger of the specificity of the film star being submerged within it. On the other hand, the growth of celebrity culture, within the media and within the sports and entertainment industries generally, has accelerated the cycle of fame, developed new formats through which it can be produced, and blurred some of the distinctions used to differentiate the film star from the celebrity. As a result, cultural studies’ work on celebrity has become increasingly relevant to understanding the cultural function of the film star in the age of the celebrity (Marshall, 1997; Turner, 2004).

New Technologies and the Return of Spectacle

There are at least three dimensions to this topic: the challenge presented by the convergence of screen cultures enabled by new digital technologies, the influence of computer generated imagery on commercial cinema production, and the high profile now afforded to special effects as a means of marketing new cinema releases.

The rapid development of new formats of delivery for the film text, and of the media cultures which are building up around related screen cultures—computer games, computer graphics and design, for instance—give, urgency to the need to find ways of understanding film which accept that it can no longer be regarded as a free-standing, autonomous technology. The development of new visual media has outstripped existing models of analysis and so we must pay close attention to the practices of consumption or performance that have grown up around them. The digitized text has the capacity to be far more plastic than its predecessors—celluloid, videotape, and so on—and the exploitation of this potential enables an active conversation between producers and consumers, or between the user and the text. We need to investigate the practices involved in these conversations. Such work has begun, although much of it is speculative and highly theoretical—that is, without a large evidentiary base. Nonetheless, it is clearly possible that the relations developed through new media may differ greatly from those which structure the use of ‘old’ media such as television. Angela Ndalianis (2000) is representative of such a view when she argues that ‘computergraphics’—used as a term to pick up the whole range of pc-based screen technologies—creates an illusory magical environment in which the audiences act and spectate at the same time. Such a proposition significantly revises the orthodox understand­ings of the agency available to audiences within screen cultures. It has become almost an alternative orthodoxy within the discussion of new media cultures that new forms of interaction—even, in some cases, new forms of subjectivity—are generated by new media technologies, and that these new forms dramatically shift the balance of power from the text towards ‘the user’.

This takes us a considerable distance from the positioning text of post-Althusserian screen theory and from 1980s theories of the cinematic apparatus and so on. It is not at all clear, yet, what might be agreed about what we understand from such a distance, however. I don’t think the contemporary formations of Film Studies are particularly well equipped to deal with these issues at the moment. Film Studies has had to look to other locations for developed accounts of new media technologies, their modality, and the relationships constructed around them by their users. There is some useful work in cultural and new media studies which focuses upon investigating pleasure, upon what it is that audiences derive from their use of these technologies or from their attendance at these spectacular events (for instance, Gauntlett and Horsley, 2004; Marshall, 2004). It is still a slim and undeveloped literature, however. Ironically, this is an instance where cultural and media studies need to do what they had earlier suggested Film Studies should do to renovate its understandings of the cinema audience: that is, to defer some of the more speculative theorizing until they can draw on a larger body of basic research which examines what actually happens between the user and the screen. While there has been a great deal of speculation about the potential of new media technologies which offer greater interactivity than conventional film or television, there is still very little examination of what actual users do with that interactivity. Consequently, it is premature to suggest that we are looking at a paradigm shift in which digital media radically democratizes the processes of media consumption.

The second issue I want to deal with here relates to what many would argue is a particular consequence of developments in computer-generated special effects in the cinema. It has become commonplace to suggest that Hollywood cinema now depends on the production of spectacle, rather than narrative, as a means of generating an audi­ence for mass-marketed movies. Some, such as Geoff King (2000), take a counter view and argue that narrative remains dominant: in his account of Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, US, 1993), for instance, King argues that even the most spectacular of special effects are still contained with ‘the arc’ of the narrative. Whatever the resolution of this debate, it is commonly acknowledged that the development of CGI technologies has dramatically expanded the potential for, and reduced the cost of, the integration of CGI into the representation of setting, action, special effects—even of character—in the movies. Therefore, it is argued that the marketing of Hollywood cinema has been dominated by the presentation of the spectacular rather than the meaningful: by the promotion of the visual effects available in the film concerned rather than the narrative concept which structures it or, even, the stars who appear in it. It is not necessary to see all these as mutually exclusive categories, of course, and neither are such distinctions particularly novel. There have been previous instances in the history of film when new technologies exercised a similar, apparently magical, attraction. Tom Gunning’s account of early cinema as ‘a cinema of attractions’ has been reprised recently by a number of writers as a means of reminding the field that the importance of spectacle to the contemporary popular cinema does have its historical antecedents. Gunning’s account of cinema’s early history, when it was part of a vaudeville bill and when its performance was surrounded by other kinds of entertainment, is useful in nudging Film Studies slightly aside from its privileging of narrative as the necessary hook to consumption and from overstating the novelty of current trends.

Michele Pierson’s study of special effects usefully places contemporary cinema’s exploitation of the spectacle within a larger and much longer historical context (2002). Drawing upon a wide range of research traditions and theoretical insights (film theory, film history, cultural history, cultural studies, and new media technologies), Pierson writes a cultural history of the public visual spectacle—not merely spectacle in the cinema—from the nineteenth century to the present. This provides the perspective that enables Pierson to warn her readers about the historical shortsightedness of the contemporary enthusiasm for CGI in particular and notions of convergence in general. Spectacle, she argues, has always been there, and it has been integrated into screen cultures from the beginning. A benefit of Pierson’s approach is its focus upon the specificity of the pleasures generated by the spectacle and thus implicated in the contemporary development of the spectacular potentials of CGI. So far, she argues, there has been very little scholarly treatment of special effects and thus very little information about ‘the patterns of production and consumption governing the use of new technologies in relation to older cultural forms’ (2002: 59). As a result, the narratives of convergence which have overwhelmed much media and academic discussion in recent years have received greater, and less critical, acceptance than they deserve. Her book sets out to address this by relating very different stories about how CGI has been used and what functions it has served.

What is most interesting about Pierson’s project in this context is its refusal to simply jump on the new technologies bandwagon and argue that, once CGI and digitization arrives, everything has changed. While in many ways driven by the imperatives of cultural studies and essentially a work of media or cultural history, Pierson’s book is also clearly situated within a longstanding, continuing project for both Film Studies and cultural studies: that of understanding the specific pleasures of cinema as they shift and mutate in response to new systems of delivery and new formats of exhibition. This means we must acknowledge contemporary cinema’s reliance on ‘the novelty of its attractions to capture and sustain the attention of viewers’, and thus its inevitable investment in new technologies which can produce new spectacular experiences to sell to its audiences (2002: 122). On the other hand, we must also recognize the audience’s continuing ‘emotional and intellectual attachment to the cinema—to the particular kind of experience it offers—that has continued to lure them away from the television set, the video or DVD player, the game console, and the computer screen’ (2002: 122). There is still enough which is specific to this medium and its classic locations of consumption to require attention and explanation. Even if these locations have multiplied in ways that blur the boundaries between the cinema and ‘the other spaces of consumption that surround it’, the experience of cinema shows no signs of disappearing altogether (2002: 122). Rather, we need to understand these new locations, and these new experiences as well as those we have hitherto regarded as those of cinema. As a task for Film Studies that looks quite a tall order, but one that needs to be acknowledged, nonetheless.

Cultural History, Film History, and Political Economy

Among the dominant themes in screen theory over the 1970s and 1980s was the importance of psychoanalytic approaches to understanding spectatorship. While it was never uncontroversial, it did operate as an orthodoxy for some time and became the reference point for discussions of screen theory (or ‘grand theory’). Since that time, there has been something of a backlash against the ambitions of grand theory (and not only in its application of psychoanalysis) in favour of a more modest but more empirically-based approach to understanding film (see Bordwell and Carroll, 1996). As we saw earlier, collections such as Reinventing Film Studies, Keyframes, and my own Film Cultures Reader constructed the subject of Film Studies differently, not only in terms of its integration into the analysis of popular culture, but also in terms of what kind of research and debate was seen as useful. Much of the writing referred to throughout this chapter (such as that of Staiger, Branston, or Miller), as well as that coming from quite different perspec­tives—such as David Bordwell’s cognitivist approach—expresses an impatience with the dominance of ‘grand theory’ over the last few decades ofAnglo-American Film Studies. In its place, there is frequently a defence of the usefulness of more instantiated, or what has been called ‘middle level’, research that seeks to contextualize film historically within the structures of consumption and production before focusing on more specific and conjunctural, rather than overarching and universalizing, issues.

Cultural studies has played a crucial role here, not only in the shift of focus, but also in the way that work responding to that shift has been pitched and framed. Klinger observes that one consequence of the ‘growing impor­tance of cultural studies to Film Studies in the 1980s’ was that film criticism ‘often shed the abstract language of the previous decade to embrace popular culture and make media analysis more responsive to concrete historical and social contexts, as well as the audience’ (1994: 28). An increasing interest in cultural history within cultural studies has been reflected by a similar turn to cultural histories of film. The development of cultural policy studies has reinforced, in addition, what Miller has called a ‘radical historicisation of context’, such that the analysis of textual properties and spectatorial processes must now be supplemented by an account of occasionality that details the conditions under which a text is made, circulated, received, interpreted, and criticized, taking seriously the conditions of existence of cultural production.’ (2001: 306)

This expansion of context more directly acknowledges the parts played by cultural institutions and government policy environ­ments as well as the globalizing political economies of the cultural and entertainment industries.

While, strictly speaking, there is little that we might call political economy in this tradition yet, Miller et al.’s Global Hollywood (2001) does indicate what that might look like, down the track. At the moment, however, it is certainly possible to point to related developments, such as the renewed interest in the histories of film economics or industrial analysis by such as that published by Tino Balio over the 1990s. If there has been a turn to audiences, as well as a cultural turn, and if it is increasingly common now to think of film as a social practice that involves more than just the interpretation of a text, it is probably also true to say that there is a growing academic interest in the workings of the film industry—an ‘industrial turn’, if you like. Hence, we have work such as Justin Wyatt’s diagnosis of the high-concept film (1994), which blends industry economics, textual and genre analysis, and marketing to produce a detailed account of the generic preferences structuring the economic behaviour of the industry (and vice versa). More recently, we have Janet Wasko’s thoroughly contextual- ized and empirically detailed analysis of the Hollywood film industry, How Hollywood Works (2003). There are more disciplinary influences involved in such work than cultural studies, of course, which has itself only rel­atively recently acknowledged the need for a properly economic or industrial analysis of the cultural sector. Indeed, what I am describing here is probably a multidisciplinary response to a growing realignment between some of the ‘new humanities’ with some of the social sci­ences that may have affected cultural studies before Film Studies. The effect of this general realignment on film history has been signifi­cant in that contextual, economic and industry matters now figure larger than ever before.

The study of film as a cultural industry, and as a component of the political economy of the media and entertainment industries, moves us in different directions from those outlined in my account of the beginning of Film Studies early in this chapter. When it becomes the object of this sort of examination, film no longer stands as a body of textual material or as a particular signifying practice. It stands instead as a locus of sociocultural history or as a site for the examination of sociocultural change.

Conclusion

Cultural studies has influenced what the study of film now looks like, and it has hastened the modification of the dominant paradigms under which the field was established. The cultural turn across the new humanities over the 1980s and the 1990s may suggest that this was something that was in the air at the time which effected an homologous series of shifts of focus within, rather than a direct intellectual transaction between, these two disciplinary formations. However, my argument is for a more dynamic relationship than this: that cultural studies has had a direct and important influence in several specific areas of development in contemporary Film Studies. These include the embracing and developing of research into the cultural function of popular film genres, into the audience’s reception and consumption of the movies, and into a version of film history that is more interested in industry economics than the formation of a canon. These are significant shifts in focus for the field. Nevertheless, this does not constitute a sea change, but rather an expansion or diversification, a plurality of approaches to Film Studies that may help it deal with the changing media environment in which it must now situate itself.