10.0h The Audience:
[1]
The audience for Exploding
Cinema ranges from commercial film professionals to eco-warrior type radicals.
The connections with Reclaim the Streets, Undercurrents and the Anarchist
Bookfair will define some of the audience but others will be less political,
with an interest in film from any number of angles.
No audience surveys have
been completed.[2] It is
difficult to be an active member of the collective and spend the show talking
to as many of the audience as possible. The tendency is to talk to people you
know, the filmmakers and other underground film contacts, so one does not get
to know sections of the audience who are on the edges of these scenes. I once
set out to do an audience survey at the post Volcano event in 1998. The
clipboard formality of the questionnaire clashed so much with the dark, loud,
informal atmosphere I abandoned it.
The questionnaire is
associated with marketing and this style of investigation is antithetical to
the underground and to the informal atmosphere of an evening event. It is a
methodology associated with the commercial world with associations of an
invasion of privacy and a manufacture of 'need'. Perhaps the indeterminate
nature of the audience is the whole point. It means that Exploding Cinema
functions as a forum in which subcultures crossover or clash. It is a place
where the commercial and professional mix and merge with the amateur. In short
there were thought to be unacceptable costs involved with using a questionnaire
methodology.
The Exploding Cinema events
seem to cross-pollinate other areas of culture, or involve people lives that
are not part of the 'no/lo budget' film scene. These oblique effects could
easily be missed by even the most sophisticated survey. Firstly because effects
are often subconscious and would not be easily articulated. Secondly because
important effects might not be statistically widespread and so not register.
The diffusion of democratic discourses is about the quality and innovativity of
singular messages a well as the quantitative density that can be sensed in the
general buzz of an audience.
Obtaining an audience
profile for those who attend Exploding Cinema shows may be difficult to achieve
on the basis of empirical evidence without destroying what you are studying.
The problem of reducing the diversity of the audience profile in the attempt to
label it is also a serious problem. The profile may also change over time,
which implies a prolonged and costly study that again would tend to intrude
into the 'atmosphere' and radically change it.
At the same time a central
slogan of Exploding Cinema is 'The Audience Decides' and the aporia of research
data on the audience is a place where further research may be needed.
At the centre of my thesis
are ideas about how the public realm and culture effect each other. I am
interested finally in what comes up from the underground into the public realm
and its effects on society as a whole. This is inevitably a set of
communicative effects that is carried by the audience.
So the audience and how they
take in what they experience, how they make use of it is something of an
unknown at least in terms of empirical evidence. This is partly because of the prior need to establish the
nature of the phenomena under study on the basis of recognised, disciplined
methodologies, but it is also because of methodological difficulties and the
resource limitations of a self funded solo research programme.
I have approached the
problem of the abstraction of the audience theoretically. Assuming that they
adhere to the general models of communicative eloquence or coherence proposed
by Habermas does bring up the problems of such universal modelling (see
previous theory discussions).
One thing we do know about
the Exploding Cinema audiences is that they are more or less active. They often
will be drinking eating and talking through films. Sometimes they will even
lose any balance of attention and the films can be sidelined. In minutes of the
5th May 1993 the club atmosphere in which people talk through all
the films was noted.[3] Sometimes the
audience would become drunk and too 'active'.[4]
It may also be fair to say
that the Exploding Cinema and the Volcano network are to some extent their own
audience. The Exploding Cinema Collective, the filmmakers who show their films
and the audience are not separate. I would certainly expect the Exploding
Cinema audience to include a higher percentage of practitioners and counter
cultural types than you might find in a typical cinema audience. I could also
expect a large part of any Exploding Cinema audience to be organically
interrelated by complex network connections. Although it would also be a valid
criticism that Exploding Cinema does too little to encourage further networking
beyond what happens organically.[5]
In contrast to the commercial culture at 'Peeping Toms', a Soho based film
society for those working in the film industry, only a few of the Exploding
audience declare needs for contacts. Although people do announce shows and
events, and it may not be easy to meet the people you want to at an Exploding
event, although they might be there.[6]
I did however take an
artistic approach to 'capturing' the audience. On two or three occasions I
videod portraits of members of the audience as they entered the venue. I then
copied this onto VHS and showed it back to the audience in one of the
intervals.[7]
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[1] The audience has not been a
focus of this research programme. It is to some extent an subject which was
difficult to approach from my research position as a member of the collective.
[2] A few completed forms from
an audience survey by Ghisli during the shows at the Loughborough Arms, were
found in the archive at Colette's flat but turned out to contain little of use.
[4] A meeting after the 5th
show at the Jugglers Arms (late May 1993) noted the 'stroppy' audience. Colette
is reported saying: 'We lost control of the audience'.
[5] Organic networks are likely
to reflect and reproduce prevailing social forces even if, as here, they have a
certain underground style.
[6] Peeping Tom's was running regular
monthly discussion meetings and screenings during the period that I was
studying Exploding Cinema. I attended several meetings that had speakers and
there would be opportunities for people to get up and declare their own talent
for hire. The general ethos was one of supporting entry into the commercial
sector.
[7] This reflected the genre of
'local topicals' that were common in cinemas up to the 1930's. The audience for
local community activities, like carnivals or processions, were filmed and
shown, uncut, to the cinema audience when they had been processed. The cinema
would often announce 'come and see yourselves on the screen'. In the North West
Film Archive these now constitute some of the most important early film records
of working class life. From a paper by Maryann Gomes, director of the North
West Film Archive, 'The Past as Present: the home movie as a cinema of record'
(1999) m/s.