Reinhard CarrieLynn D. (Hrsg.): Making Sense of Cinema

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.Reading Making Sense of Cinema I was totally baffled to see the film spectator arise brightly, high-res and three-dimensional, from the dark, cross-lit by manifold complementary color spots cast by specialists in disciplines as diverse as linguistics, acoustics, art history, cultural studies, cultural analysis, audience research, communication research, cinematography, critical (genre) studies, visual perception, neuroinformatics, cognitive film studies, and screen writing. And all it seemed to take is a shared conviction that direct observation makes for the brighter picture.