Like many other people, film is very much part of my life, and conversations with friends over many years raised questions about the ways people develop relationships with film, both specialised and mainstream. There seemed little research about people’s relationship with film, with screens and venues and how film exhibition and policy shaped those experiences. This experience raised questions about how people develop their relationships with film, and how they come together to form audiences, and what their audience experience meant to them. Working with colleagues at the Universities of Sheffield, York, Liverpool and Glasgow and BFI regional Film Hubs, we undertook a 4-year study of the ways in which audiences form, the Beyond the Multiplex: audiences for specialised films in English regions project, hereafter ‘BtM’ (Ref: AH/P005780/2).
Changes in audience experience and in audience trends are resulting in claims that audiences are fragmented and diffuse, and it’s no longer feasible to talk about audiences as they cease to exist in a discrete and bounded way (Livingstone and Das, 2013). However, research has under-explored the ways in which audiences form, and whether they form into distinct forms through the ways in which people develop relationships with film and the role of venues, screens, texts, and interpretation of relationships with film.
The BtM project undertook extensive empirical research to explore audiences in four English regions. It reviewed film policy, distribution and exhibition through document analysis and industry and policy interviews, developed a socio-cultural index of film audiences through secondary analysis, and gained understanding of film audience experiences from 200 in-depth interviews and a three-wave large scale survey, as well as undertaking 16 film elicitation focus groups to explore people’s engagement with film texts. The project used Sonia Livingstone (2013) conceptualisation of audiences as ‘relational and interactive’ as a framework from which to develop theory. It also developed its mixed methods research through an innovative methodology using a data ontology to capture the richness of film audience experience and broader trends in audiences.
From this research, BtM developed new insights, theory and findings about how contemporary film audiences’ form. It identifies and theorises film audiences and a process, one crafted out of the contextual relationships and interactions between people, film and exhibition. The project found and developed new concepts that constitute this process: namely people’s personal film journeys, that people form into five types of audiences, each offering a unique experience, and that despite digital media, there are geographies of provision and valued venue-based experience. Through the creative engagement with film and the mixed economy of specialised and mainstream exhibition, film becomes a companion for many people throughout their lifecourse. What BtM found was that as audiences have evolved and changed over time, film can be defined through its openness – extending the notion of it being popular culture – to being a lived culture embracing both artistic, experimental and alternative film and mainstream genre and entertainment film. Our participants spoke of the meaning of film for them, its social and cultural value and our BFI Regional Film Hub experts also brought out the social and community role of cultural cinema, something supported by the mainstream film sector experts too. Film continues to be an important cultural form, and film audiences are adapting in how they form and develop relationship with film.