Wednesday 11 March 2015

4.4 Final Critical Approach to Spectatorship: Fandom



D Grade: KeyTerms (Define)

Fandom
Cine Literate
Cinephile
Auteur
Communities
Fan fiction
Collpase of the boundary between audience and text (the film)
Film meaning is not inherant, but lies with the audience

C Grade: Apply to Examples
http://leighmediaa2filmsectionb.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/film-fans-spectatorship.html

B Grade: Analyse the contemporary film Industry for the commercial success of this approach. Pick a Case Study & give reasons for purpose of targeting fandoms using spectatorship concepts:

Alignment
Pleasures (http://leighmediaa2filmsectionb.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/pleasures-of-film-watching-relationship.html)
Factors & experiences
Readings (negotiated/preffered/oppositional)

A Grade: Explain how significant gender is to Fandom as a critical approach to spectatorship

"FILM ART" AND FANDOM (quotes)

In comparison with the early twentieth-century creation of movie fandom, the figure of the movie fan is perhaps less clearly gendered as feminine/feminized today, but this is because of a much changed cultural context, wherein both men and women are frequently targeted and imaged as consumers. 

This aspect of fandom moves closer to the scholarly appreciation of film, since treating film as art and dignifying certain directors with "authorial" or auteurist status is a strategy that has historically characterized film studies, and that still retains more than a foothold today. So-called "auteur theory" was initially employed solely by intellectuals and cinephiles seeking to value film as a medium, and although it carried cultural cachet, it was also accessible enough for nonacademic audiences to appreciate (Taylor, p. 87). Moving from being an exclusive/elitist view of film held by French cinéastes, auteurism entered the US scene and became popularized to the extent that Hollywood incorporated its discourse into its own publicity. Auteurism is no longer just a critical approach, but also a commercial strategy for organizing how audiences may respond to film texts.

One of the most significant cultural activities undertaken by film fans, then, is the way in which they seek to invest the work of their preferred performers and directors with cultural capital, setting their tastes against what they perceive and construct as mainstream cinema. However, such an apparent detachment from "the commercial" is itself commercial, since these fans are still placed within a specific market. Though this is related to the debate over fandom's resistant capability, it can also be viewed as a matter of film fans' cultural practices. Cult-film fans seek to defend and value their favored texts, but by doing so they also hope to reflect their own aesthetic taste, for they can see "true" artistic worth where general audiences cannot.  

Mark Kermode argues that horror fans actively perceive the genre's aesthetic value, whereas nonfans passively consume horror as if its representations are actual rather than aestheticized images of gore; he offers a convincing opposition between "active" fans who read horror films in relation to surreal genre precedents and "passive" nonfans who are characterized as reading horror films more naively.
In Kermode's account, horror fans are, crucially, "genre literate." Like fans of other genres or specific movie stars, they are expert consumers, able to trace generic histories and interpret new films in relation to countless preceding examples. This type of movie fan has a keen sense of intertextuality; thus, boundaries around "the text itself" tend to be partly dissolved by fans who, even while they carry out close readings of certain films, relate texts to others, either by generic category, in auteurist terms, or by focusing on a favored star. Organized fandoms, like those for cult movies or the horror genre, therefore challenge the idea that any film's meaning and significance are inherent. Rather, it is by reading films in relation to, and through, other texts that fans can convert "the film" into those meanings and values that characterize their fandom as a kind of interpretive community.
 
Fans read films not only through official publicity texts such as DVD extras, but also in relation to fan-produced texts (fan fiction). Henry Jenkins proffers the example of one fan who wrote an alternative ending to the film Thelma and Louise (1991) in which these female characters transform themselves into bats (Jenkins, 2000, p. 177). Recontextualizing the film as a lesbian vampire tale, this creative fan interpretation (and production) of meaning indicates how generic identities and textual boundaries can be reinscribed by film fans.

Thus, whether it is the interpretive activities of individual fans, or the socially organized, communal practices of fandom, fans and fandom have been as important to film studies as to the film industry.
 
Questions:
 
How does being a fan add a level of depth to passive consumers (non-fans)
 
How does being a fan or fandom help producers target this commercial market for 'cult films'. What examples of cult films can you find?
 
Find an example of fan-produced texts (fan fiction) for film on Youtube, how does this change your understanding of the Gazes, identity and alignment from your spectatorship studies?
 
What is a fandom and example of active spectatorship - explain with reference to a specific fandom around a film.
If fans can convert "the film" into those meanings and values that characterize their fandom as a kind of interpretive community. Find evidence to back this up
 
What does the article mean by the 'boundaries around "the text itself" tend to be partly dissolved by fans' - how does fan culture accomplish this, find an example.
 
What does it mean by the 2 impacts of fandom, 'interpretive activities of individual fans, or the socially organized, communal practices of fandom'? Find an example of this.

Does Fandom have academic/scholarly value as an approach to film spectatorship - what previous critical appraoich/theory does it return to and how does it develop it?

Conclusion - how does the concept of fandoms and the response of the film industry to this type of specatatorship develop our response to the question?
 
Assessment:
Which would you categorise the pleasures of Fandom?
Is Fandom Active or Passive Spectatorship? 

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