Identifying Hollywood's Audiences: Cultural Identity and the Movies (review)

Book Reviews | Regular Feature right on target. Once again, these two experienced editors—wellknown for their media research—have produced a book that will generate many lunch table arguments about a topic that, unlike those Dumont television sets, is here to stay. Robert W. Matson University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown Rmatson+@pitt.edu Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby, editors. Identifying Hollywood's Audiences: Cultural Identity and the Movies. British Film Institute, 1999. 209 pages, $81.25. Tight Focus John E. O'Connor, the founder and long-time editor of this journal, argued in his path-breaking book Image asArtifact: The Historical Analysis ofFilm and Television (Krieger, 1990) that historians must approach visual documents with the same basic kinds of questions they bring to the study of the written word: questions about the content, production, and reception of the materials under examination. "Questions about reception and spectatorship," he also asserted, "have been the most troublesome for film scholars and historians alike." (10-19) This situation no doubt owes much to the fact that by approaching film as text—that is, dealing mainly with matters of content and production —scholars may apply familiar methods ofanalysis (even while making the necessary adjustments for the unique nature offilmic communication—itselfthe subject ofa large and growing literature). The contributors to Identifying Hollywood's Audiences all appear not merely to agree with O'Connor's general approach but also to support his implication that the reception of films is that field of inquiry most neglected to date and most potentially rewarding to researchers. Their focus, as the title indicates, is Hollywood films in particular rather than film or visual materials in general, an emphasis that permits an even stronger manifesto. In the introductory chapter, Richard Maltby contends that the continuing eclipse of reception studies by an "emphasis on interpreting individual motion pictures as aesthetic objects" has resulted in several mutually reinforcing misperceptions. The captious claims of the Hollywood studios to be regarded as "dream factories," rather than the brutally calculating business corporations they really are, have been strengthened and, in consequence , the decision-making processes of the studios and the nature of the films that resulted have been misunderstood.(3) A workbased on such concepts is bound to be a fairly critical one, founded as it is on a rejection of Hollywood's assertions that filmmaking is inherently risky and the reactions offilm audiences largely unknowable in advance. Assuming to the contrary that the studio corporations have in fact assiduously studied and derived knowledge of the preferences of the consumers of their products, the authors propose to do likewise . In the process, they not only criticize Hollywood's self-portrait but also, as Maltby puts it, they inevitably "challenge the dominance of text-based construction of the 'the spectator' in scholarly discussions of film spectatorship."(17) The volume is thus constructed in support of a very clear thesis and, for an anthology, maintains a tight focus, especially throughout its first section devoted to Hollywood's efforts to tailor its activities to its perceptions of the film going public. Because the editors themselves contribute chapters they are responsible for a considerable portion ofthe book's text as well as its overall design. The very tightness of focus in an anthology results in a certain repetitiveness that would not be present in the work of a single author, however. Almost all of the authors cite the same sources for the context and background of their studies, so that a keen reader following the notes encounters multiple references to Janet Staiger and Leo Handel among others . (It is a small nuisance, of course, and might be positively beneficial to graduate students seeking a mastery of the literature for their comprehensive exams!) The viewers of films themselves are the subjects of the book's second section which is, of necessity, more diffuse both in subjects and methodologies. Nevertheless, since reception studies posit a significant role for spectators in the filmmaking process, it is importantto examine their perceptions both ofthemselves and the films they watch. This is tricky work, though, for it leads the historian onto the more uncomfortable methodological ground of surveys, focus groups, and semiotics. On the other hand...