Unit 26: Film Studies - Task 4 - My Relationship With Film

One of the most important parts of a film is its audience. As part of an audience, you interact with the film. A film’s audience can determine its popularity and status in culture. It is almost impossible to create a film for everyone due to the difference between the individuals who make up the audience and the way each single person reads the film and is affected by it.

Spectatorship of a film can be seen in two different ways. Active Spectatorship suggests that audiences are made up of individual active spectators who each are different and will have different reactions to a film. These active spectators are independent in choosing what films to watch and do not just watch what they are told to. Passive Spectatorship suggests that a film audience’s knowledge or life experience has no effect on their reaction or reception to the film they view. Often, film directors actually prefer their audience to be passive. They will put very obvious preferred readings in their films so the audience will react in the way they want. These preferred readings can be conveyed to the audience through choice of music, lighting and cinematography in hope that this would cause a specific emotional response. Some film makers do like the audience to have a more personal response and be active spectators. They sometimes encourage their audience to interpret the film in their own way. However, in bigger Hollywood blockbusters, a preferred reading is usually put forward to the audience and a Director has a specific idea of the plot and characters that they want the audience to understand. A common use of active spectatorship is leaving an open ending to a film. Open endings leave a sense of ambiguity for the audience and allow them to use their imagination rather than being told exactly what happened. An example of an ambiguous ending is Memento. The film finishes by totally changing what the audience thought they knew and leaving them unsure what to think.

Audiences can gain four main types of pleasure from watching a film; personal relationships, personal identity, diversion and surveillance. The most common of these four is probably Diversion, this is because it is the most common reason a person wants to watch a film. Films allow a person to divert from their own lives and escape into another reality. Many films offer huge amounts of escapism to an audience such as, Lord Of The Rings or Star Wars, which take place in other worlds we aren't familiar with. Personal Relationships or Personal Identities are when an audience feel a personal attachment to characters in a film or can relate to the characters. For example, The Inbetweeners movie is very relatable to groups of young 'lads', especially in the UK, as they will have experienced very similar situations. Older men can also relate to it as they can remember being in similar situations when they were younger. Other examples could be 'stoner' movies as 'stoners' will likely relate to the characters and topics in the films due to their lifestyle. Some films fall into the Surveillance type. In these kind of films the audience are often educated because they are watching a film which explores a subject, idea or even culture, for example, that the viewer isn't aware of or familiar with. A lot of foreign films are surveillance because of the look at a different culture. For example, 'Sin Nombre' is a Spanish film which explores gang culture. Anybody from a different country and totally unfamiliar with any kind of gang culture would be educated by this film.


A viewer's response to a film can differ depending on their Media Literacy. Depending on an audience's knowledge of the media and how film works, they can have a different interpretation. For example, some one like me who is a film student will view films very differently to a casual viewer due to the fact that a film student knows more about how a film is put together and how stories work whereas a normal film goer would have more a simple idea and not look into those kind things. An example of the responses differing could be seen with 'Memento'. The film has a non-linear timeline and the audience have to think about how the story pieces together rather than it all just happening chronologically. While someone with better media literacy than others might find that very interesting and enjoy the challenge of piecing it together, someone with less media literacy/a casual film goer might just find the story confusing and boring and they might prefer to see a film which happens chronologically.

Intertextuality is where a film references another piece of media. This includes parodies, spoofs and homages. In parodies/spoofs a film is deliberately referencing another piece of media, usually in a comedic way, sometimes even mocking it. In 'Hot Fuzz' the entire Hollywood action genre is parodied throughout the movie with characters acting in similar ways to popular 'action heroes'. Specific moments from films such as 'Point Break' are also parodied however could also be classed as a homage to the film. In homages, a director purposely references a piece if media in some way in their own film but, unlike parodies, homages tend not to be comedic and are usually meant to show an appreciation for the thing they are referencing.

Pre & Post-viewing experiences and a persons opinion on a film can be affected by different aspects. For example, a person who watched all the trailers a promotion for the film they are seeing might have high expectations and be let down however someone who saw nothing beforehand would have no expectations. Trailers can have a large effect on people experiences with films. Often, in comedy trailers the best jokes are shown to get the best laughs and gain audience however this leads to all the best jokes being heard before the film and the audience being let down. Similarly a trailer can give away too much plot, a problem many people believe to be in today's cinema. A recent example would be the trailer for 'Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice'. With people an audience already gathered from simply the announcement of Superman and Batman being in a film together, you would think there would be no need to give away too much plot. However, the trailers released before the film came out revealed what many considered to be far too many plot points and even giving away twists which, had they not been mentioned in the trailer, would have been very entertaining to an audience when watching the film in the cinema. This, among many other reasons, contributed to overwhelmingly bad reviews from critics and fans alike.