Katherine Bowles

‘Three miles of rough dirt road’: towards an audience-centred approach to cinema studies in Australia

Abstract Cinema studies in Australia has conventionally focused on the national production industry, the government policies that sustain and protect it, and the films that it has produced. The role of the Australian audience in shaping the market for Australian films is less well understood, and yet assumptions about audiences and the benefit offered to them in terms of cultural learning and national identity are embedded in policy rhetoric, and are necessarily invoked in the critique of content which accompanies a textually focused approach to the national cinema. This article proposes that Australian cinema audiences, whatever they are watching, play a more significant role in the Australian public sphere than Australian films. Drawing on oral history research conducted among rural cinema-goers in New South Wales, the article considers some of the methodological challenges and theoretical objections to an audience-centred research agenda for Australian cinema studies, and argues that the Australian case brings to international research an expanded appreciation of the diversity and locality of the global audience experience.

'Society with Spectacles': Cultural memory, business risk and the revival of 3D

The revival of 3D film and television has engaged media retailers and analysts in discussion of the risks associated with novelty viewing, and the likely barriers to wide acceptance. Research by the University of Southern California shows that purchasing decisions are shaped by perceptions of the history of 3D, and its association with ‘kitschy photos of ‘50s movie-house audiences’. In this article, I reflect on one of the most well known of these photographs, in relation to other depictions of the novelty viewing experience of the early 1950s. I suggest that both industry and scholarly analysis might benefit from a more nuanced account of ‘the spectacle’, based on the contribution of qualitative micro-research into the social nature of the audience experience, and argue that the 3D revival offers a valuable opportunity to develop this research.

Limit of maps? Locality and cinema-going in Australia

Cinema-going is a cultural experience shaped by logistics and mobility, as film distributors and exhibitors operate to enable films to be screened in places and at times when audiences can physically assemble to view them together. A historical understanding of the geography of cinema distribution, exhibition and attendance can therefore help us to understand what factors other than the choice of film title may have shaped the experience of the cinema audience. This article uses samples of trade commentary on small country cinemas in the late 1920s from the Australian trade journal Everyones, and suggests that historical GIS maps could help us to understand regional differences in the cinema-going experience, or track phenomena such as the diffusion of racial and social segregation in cinemas. Nevertheless, we need to remain mindful of the limits of maps to adequately explain the cultural experience of encountering these phenomena.