Despite a strong tradition of work with television audiences (Hermes, 2009;
Morley, 2009; Kim, 2006; Gillespie, 1995; Liebes and Katz, 1990; Ang, 1985), comparatively little work has been conducted with those of film (Thornham, 1999;
Barker and Brooks, 1998; Stacey, 1994): Much that does exist is historical in focus, including a significant number of oral histories of cinema-going (Bowles, 2007; Puwar, 2007; Labanyi, 2005; Martin-Marquez, 2005; Kuhn, 2002). Most of those concerned with contemporary audiencing focus on individual film texts or fan cultures, such as Barker and Brooks’ (1998) formative study of audiences of Judge Dredd. As a consequence the scattering of scholars undertaking research into contemporary cinema-going provide long overdue insight into audience members’
engagement with the practice (Barker, 2009; Rao, 2007; Fernandes, 2006). Of particular relevance to this project is Boyle’s (2010, 2009) study of screenings for new parents, predominantly mothers, and their babies held at the Grosvenor cinema in Glasgow.
Unlike the majority of film-audience studies which tend to engage audiences of particular texts, Boyle’s ‘begins with a cinema and an audience gathered within it’
(2010: 277). A new mother herself, Boyle conducted five months of participant observation as well as interviewing 25 fellow attendees in order to explore the intersections between these cinema events and the negotiation of recent parenthood. In this way, Boyle is interested in ‘what cinema is, or can be, for"
(2010: 277; 2009: 262). While she found that films were not irrelevant, many of the women would go to the screenings regardless of what film was showing (2010:
280). Going to the cinema, participants explained, helped them to feel ‘normal’
despite the big changes that they were experiencing as new parents (2009: 271;
2009: 266; 2010: 283).
In finding that the women related to the films on the screen as much through discussions of the visual spectacle as those of narrative, Boyle argues that they occupy a space similar to that described by Gunning (1989) in his classic study of
the ‘cinema of attractions’ constituted by early film (2009: 261). Boyle suggests that, like audiences of early film, here both mother and baby were ‘learning how to be a cinema audience’ anew (2010: 280). As such, for the mothers it ‘became a site for the re-negotiation of identity and, specifically, their new relationship to public space’ (2009: 276; 2010: 280), offering ‘an opportunity to reconcile a former sense of self with their new identities as mothers’, although this did not always work (2010: 284). Situating her discussion within rhetoric around ‘good’ and ‘bad’
parenting, Boyle suggests this was partly possible due to a certain solidarity among the audience, a sense that everyone was ‘in the same boat’, and therefore less judgemental (2010: 280). As such, Boyle argues, the pleasure gained from Watch With Baby Screenings stemmed from ‘the sense of belonging to a particular kind of audience’, emphasising a collective nature of cinema that also emerged in my research and which I have come to recognise as vital to the conception being developed here (2009: 267).
Boyle’s (2010, 2009) attention to the collective atmosphere at the cinema enables her to move beyond the models of social difference engaged by classic audience studies that have been subject to charges of determinism (Hermes, 2009; Morley, 2009). By instead emphasising a social identity forged in the collective space of the cinema, Boyle (2010, 2009) implies a more emergent and dynamic
understanding, an in-the-moment relational understanding of social difference that resonates with my own findings.
In conducting research at the cinema with a particular audience, Boyle accesses all three of the key elements I want to bring into an understanding of cinema. She considers the films seen (2010: 281), emphasises the viewing body’s sensory and affective responses (2010: 281; 2009: 271), and indicates the significance of the
‘colonisation’ of the cinema space for the audience, as well as the cultural status of the exhibition site (2010: 279). In doing so, Boyle indicates the different
understandings generated when the film on the screen, the viewing body, and the space of viewing are considered together and her work supports the value of generating an understanding of cinema that considers all three together, as I am trying to do here. I had already undertaken my own research by the time I read Boyle. When I did, the number of crossovers between our findings struck me, dealing as they do with very different life stages and differently formulated
audiences. Where I hope to contribute to her insights is by paying closer attention to the co-constitutive relationship between film, body and space at the cinema, as well as by considering the significance of methodology in generating such an understanding.
The insights offered by Boyle’s work persuasively suggest the value of studying lived audiences — including the importance of paying attention to the identities and social difference being constituted in the shared space of the cinema as well as the impact this may have on representation in practice (Barker, 2009). And like Voss (2011), Marks (2000) and Sobchack (2000), Boyle (2010, 2009) also
suggests that where we watch is important. But what impact do such spaces have on cinema in practice? How are the spaces of cinema constituted? It seems clear that to explore this question, the material spaces of viewing must be considered.
While Boyle (2010, 2009) offers a rare example of such a consideration in studying contemporary cinema, there is a significant body of work exploring the historical practices of exhibition that has long considered the spatialities of cinema (Vijver and Biltereyst, 2012; Maltby, 2011; Allen, 2007; Maltby and Stokes, 2007; Hansen, 1991). These studies offer an approach to cinema that has influenced mine
significantly, and this project in many ways began as an attempt to engage some of their insights in a contemporary context.
2.5. Engaging the ‘public’: studies of exhibition from film studies and