Snakes on a Plane is a 2006 thriller film
starring Samuel L. Jackson in which hundreds of poisonous snakes are
released on a passenger jet flying between Hawaii and Los Angeles. Prior
to its release in theaters, its B-movie style title combined with
Jackson’s casting resulted in much hype for the film online, resulting
in a number of parody videos and fan art.
Analyse - give reasons for the significance of fandom in discussing contemporary spectatorship.
Write your analysis using your case study, write 1 paragraph for each of the following points 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 from this list:
Justify the significance of gender, ethnicity, sexuality and technology to contemporary film spectatorship, refering to past and future
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
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:
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.
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.
Iffans 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?
