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. In addition to the star system, with its "picture
personalities," directors and those involved in the technical
craft of filmmaking are now also increasingly publicized celebrities in
their own right. This shift means that film fans can align themselves
more clearly with notions of film as art—and partly avoid
negative stereotypes of celebrity obsession—by indicating their
fandom of film directors.
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. Uniting
filmmakers, scholars, publicists, and fans, the notion that certain
privileged directors are artists has tended to create and sustain
aesthetic personality cults around them. This type of
"personality cult" also has been significant to certain
organized fandoms, such as those surrounding offbeat, sleeper, quirky,
and classical Hollywood films labeled "cult movies." These
organized fandoms have tended to use auteur theory as a means of
claiming to find artistic value within the terrain of independent film.
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. Such fan
audiences' bids for distinction are especially clear in relation
to genres that are frequently devalued in "dominant" film
criticism, such as "trash" and exploitation cinema. 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,
Conrad Veidt and Annabella in
Under the Red Robe
(Victor Seastrom, 1937).
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, sometimes working against what producers, and
other audiences, may view as the obvious categories, boundaries, and
identities of a film. 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. They demonstrate how loyal audiences can be a part of
film commerce and also set themselves apart from commercial processes.
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Audiences: A Sociological Theory of Performance and Imagination
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Barker, Martin, and Kate Brooks.
Knowing Audiences: Judge Dredd—Its Friends, Fans, and Foes
. Luton, UK: University of Luton Press, 1998.
Dyer, Richard.
Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society
. London: British Film Institute, 1986.
Fiske, John. "The Cultural Economy of Fandom." In
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Fuller, Kathryn H.
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Fan Culture
. Washington, DC and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996.
Hills, Matt.
Fan Cultures
. London and New York: Routledge, 2002.
Jenkins, Henry. "Reception Theory and Audience Research: The
Mystery of the Vampire's Kiss." In
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, edited by Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams, 165–182.
London: Arnold, 2000.
——.
Textual Poachers
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Kermode, Mark. "I Was a Teenage Horror Fan, or, How I Learned
to Stop Worrying and Love Linda Blair." In
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Klinger, Barbara. "Digressions at the Cinema: Commodification
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Meehan, Eileen R. "Leisure or Labor?: Fan Ethnography and
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Sanjek, David. "Fans' Notes: The Horror Film
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Matt
Hills
