Matinees, Summers and Opening Weekends

Newspapers and the 7:15 ShowingCinemagoing involves planning. Even in the most impromptu instances, onehas to consider meeting places, line-ups and competing responsibilities. One arranges child care, postpones household chores, or rushes to finishmeals. One must organise transportation and think about routes, traffic,parking or public transit. And during the course of making plans for atrip to the cinema, whether alone or in the company of others, typicallyone turns to locate a recent newspaper. Consulting its printed page letsus ascertain locations, a selection of film titles and their correspondingshow times. In preparing to feed a cinema craving, we burrow through anewspaper to an entertainment section, finding a tableau of informationand promotional appeals. Such sections compile the mini-posters of movieadvertisements, with their truncated credits, as well as various reviewsand entertainment news. We see names of shopping malls doubling as namesof theatres. We read celebrity gossip that may or may not pertain to thefilm selected for that occasion. We informally rank viewing prioritiesranging from essential theatrical experiences to those that can wait forthe videotape release. We attempt to assess our own mood and the taste ofour filmgoing companions, matching up what we suppose are appropriateselections. Certainly, other media vie to supplant the newspaper's rolein cinemagoing; many now access on-line sources and telephone servicesthat offer the crucial details about start times. Nonetheless, as acampaign by the Newspaper Association of America in Variety aimed toremind film marketers, 80% of cinemagoers refer to newspaper listings fortimes and locations before heading out. The accuracy of thatassociation's statistics notwithstanding, for the moment, the local dailyor weekly newspaper has a secure place in the routines of cinematic life. A basic impetus for the newspaper's role is its presentation of aschedule of show times. Whatever the venue -- published, phone or on-line-- it strikes me as especially telling that schedules are part of theordinariness of cinemagoing. To be sure, there are those who decide whatfilm to see on site. Anecdotally, I have had several people commentrecently that they no longer decide what movie to see, but where to see a(any) movie. Regardless, the schedule, coupled with the theatre'slocation, figures as a point of coordination for travel through communityspace to a site of film consumption. The choice of show time is governedby countless demands of everyday life. How often has the timing of a film-- not the film itself, the theatre at which it's playing, nor one'sfinancial situation --determined one's attendance? How familiar is theassessment that show times are such that one cannot make it, that the filmbegins a bit too earlier, that it will run too late for whatever reason,and that other tasks intervene to take precedence? I want to make several observations related to the scheduling of filmexhibition. Most generally, it makes manifest that cinemagoing involvesan exercise in the application of cinema knowledge -- that is, minute,everyday facilities and familiarities that help orchestrate theordinariness of cultural life. Such knowledge informs what Michel deCerteau characterises as "the procedures of everyday creativity" (xiv). Far from random, the unexceptional decisions and actions involved withcinemagoing bear an ordering and a predictability. Novelty in audienceactivity appears, but it is alongside fairly exact expectations about theevent. The schedule of start times is essential to the routinisation offilmgoing. Displaying a Fordist logic of streamlining commoditydistribution and the time management of consumption, audiences circulatethrough a machine that shapes their constituency, providing a set time forseating, departure, snack purchases and socialising. Even with thestaggered times offered by multiplex cinemas, schedules still lay down afixed template around which other activities have to be arrayed by thepatron. As audiences move to and through the theatre, the scheduleendeavours to regulate practice, making us the subjects of a temporalgrid, a city context, a cinema space, as well as of the film itself. To besure, one can arrive late and leave early, confounding the schedule'sdisciplining force. Most importantly, with or without such forms ofevasion, it channels the actions of audiences in ways that considerationof the gaze cannot address. Taking account of the scheduling of cinemaculture, and its implication of adjunct procedures of everyday life,points to dimensions of subjectivity neglected by dominant theories ofspectatorship. To be the subject of a cinema schedule is to understand one assemblage ofthe parameters of everyday creativity. It would be foolish to see cinemaaudiences as cattle, herded and processed alone, in some crude GustaveLeBon fashion. It would be equally foolish not to recognise the manner inwhich film distribution and exhibition operates precisely by constructingimages of the activity of people as demographic clusters and generalisedcultural consumers. The ordinary tactics of filmgoing are supplementalto, and run alongside, a set of industrial structures and practices. While there is a correlation between a culture industry's imaginedaudience and the life that ensues around its offerings, we cannot neglectthat, as attention to film scheduling alerts us, audiences are subjects ofan institutional apparatus, brought into being for the reproduction of anindustrial edifice. Streamline AudiencesIn this, film is no different from any culture industry. Filmexhibition and distribution relies on an understanding of both the marketand the product or service being sold at any given point in time. Operations respond to economic conditions, competing companies, andalternative activities. Economic rationality in this strategic process,however, only explains so much. This is especially true for an industrythat must continually predict, and arguably give shape to, the "mood" andpredilections of disparate and distant audiences. Producers, distributorsand exhibitors assess which films will "work", to whom they will bemarketed, as well as establish the very terms of success. Without a doubt,much of the film industry's attentions act to reduce this uncertainty;here, one need only think of the various forms of textual continuity(genre films, star performances, etc.) and the economies of massadvertising as ways to ensure box office receipts. Yet, at the core of theoperations of film exhibition remains a number of flexible assumptionsabout audience activity, taste and desire. These assumptions emerge froma variety of sources to form a brand of temporary industry "commonsense",and as such are harbingers of an industrial logic. Ien Ang has usefully pursued this view in her comparative analysis ofthree national television structures and their operating assumptions aboutaudiences. Broadcasters streamline and discipline audiences as part oftheir organisational procedures, with the consequence of shaping ideasabout consumers as well as assuring the reproduction of the industrialstructure itself. She writes, "institutional knowledge is driven towardmaking the audience visible in such a way that it helps the institutionsto increase their power to get their relationship with the audience undercontrol, and this can only be done by symbolically constructing'television audience' as an objectified category of others that can becontrolled, that is, contained in the interest of a predeterminedinstitutional goal" (7). Ang demonstrates, in particular, how variousindustrially sanctioned programming strategies (programme strips,"hammocking" new shows between successful ones, and counter-programming toa competitor's strengths) and modes of audience measurement grow out of,and invariably support, those institutional goals. And, most crucially,her approach is not an effort to ascertain the empirical certainty of"actual" audiences; instead, it charts the discursive terrain in which theabstract concept of audience becomes material for the continuation ofindustry practices. Ang's work tenders special insight to film culture. In fact, televisionscholarship has taken full advantage of exploring the routine nature ofthat medium, the best of which deploys its findings to lay bareconfigurations of power in domestic contexts. One aspect has beentelevision time and schedules. For example, David Morley points to therole of television in structuring everyday life, discussing a range ofresearch that emphasises the temporal dimension. Alerting us to the non-necessary determination of television's temporal structure, he commentsthat we "need to maintain a sensitivity to these micro-levels of divisionand differentiation while we attend to the macro-questions of the media'sown role in the social structuring of time" (265). As such, thenegotiation of temporal structures implies that schedules are notmonolithic impositions of order. Indeed, as Morley puts it, they "must beseen as both entering into already constructed, historically specificdivisions of space and time, and also as transforming those pre-existingdivision" (266). Television's temporal grid has been address by others aswell. Paddy Scannell characterises scheduling and continuity techniques,which link programmes, as a standardisation of use, making radio andtelevision predictable, 'user friendly' media (9). John Caughie refers tothe organization of flow as a way to talk about the nationalparticularities of British and American television (49-50). All, whilemaking their own contributions, appeal to a detailing of viewing contextas part of any study of audience, consumption or experience; uncoveringthe practices of television programmers as they attempt to apprehend andcreate viewing conditions for their audiences is a first step in thisdetailing. Why has a similar conceptual framework not been applied with the samerigour to film? Certainly the history of film and television'sassociation with different, at times divergent, disciplinary formationshelps us appreciate such theoretical disparities. I would like to mentionone less conspicuous explanation. It occurs to me that one frequently seesa collapse in the distinction between the everyday and the domestic; inmuch scholarship, the latter term appears as a powerful trope of theformer. The consequence has been the absenting of a myriad of other -- ifyou will, non-domestic -- manifestations of everyday-ness, unfortunatelyencouraging a rather literal understanding of the everyday. Theimpression is that the abstractions of the everyday are reduced to dailyoccurrences. Simply put, my minor appeal is for the extension of this vein oftelevision scholarship to out-of-home technologies and cultural forms,that is, other sites and locations of the everyday. In so doing, we payattention to extra-textual structures of cinematic life; other regimes ofknowledge, power, subjectivity and practice appear. Film audiencesrequire a discussion about the ordinary, the calculated and the casualpractices of cinematic engagement. Such a discussion would chartinstitutional knowledge, identifying operating strategies and recognisingthe creativity and multidimensionality of cinemagoing. What are thediscursive parameters in which the film industry imagines cinemaaudiences? What are the related implications for the structures in whichthe practice of cinemagoing occurs? Vectors of Exhibition TimeOne set of those structures of audience and industry practice involvesthe temporal dimension of film exhibition. In what follows, I want tospeculate on three vectors of the temporality of cinema spaces (meaningthat I will not address issues of diegetic time). Note further that myobservations emerge from a close study of industrial discourse in the U.S.and Canada. I would be interested to hear how they are manifest in othercontinental contexts. First, the running times of films encourage turnovers of the audienceduring the course of a single day at each screen. The special event oflengthy anomalies has helped mark the epic, and the historic, fromstandard fare. As discussed above, show times coordinate cinemagoing andregulate leisure time. Knowing the codes of screenings meansparticipating in an extension of the industrial model of labour andservice management. Running times incorporate more texts than the feature presentation alone.Besides the history of double features, there are now advertisements,trailers for coming attractions, trailers for films now playing inneighbouring auditoriums, promotional shorts demonstrating new soundsystems, public service announcements, reminders to turn off cell phonesand pagers, and the exhibitor's own signature clips. A growing focalpoint for filmgoing, these introductory texts received a boost in 1990,when the Motion Picture Association of America changed its standards forthe length of trailers, boosting it from 90 seconds to a full two minutes(Brookman). This intertextuality needs to be supplemented by a consideration of inter-media appeals. For example, advertisements for television began appearingin theatres in the 1990s. And many lobbies of multiplex cinemas now offera range of media forms, including video previews, magazines, arcades andvirtual reality games. Implied here is that motion pictures are not theonly media audiences experience in cinemas and that there is an explicitattempt to integrate a cinema's texts with those at other sites andlocations. Thus, an exhibitor's schedule accommodates an intertextual strip,offering a limited parallel to Raymond Williams's concept of "flow",which he characterised by stating -- quite erroneously -- "in allcommunication systems before broadcasting the essential items werediscrete" (86-7). Certainly, the flow between trailers, advertisementsand feature presentations is not identical to that of the endless, ongoingtext of television. There are not the same possibilities for"interruption" that Williams emphasises with respect to broadcasting flow.Further, in theatrical exhibition, there is an end-time, a time at whichthere is a public acknowledgement of the completion of the projectedperformance, one that necessitates vacating the cinema. This end-time isa moment at which the "rental" of the space has come due; and it harkens areturn to the street, to the negotiation of city space, to modes of publictransit and the mobile privatisation of cars. Nonetheless, a scheduleconstructs a temporal boundary in which audiences encounter a range oftexts and media in what might be seen as limited flow. Second, the ephemerality of audiences -- moving to the cinema, consumingits texts, then passing the seat on to someone else -- is matched by theephemerality of the features themselves. Distributors' demand forincreasing numbers of screens necessary for massive, saturation openingshas meant that films now replace one another more rapidly than in thepast. Films that may have run for months now expect weeks, with fewerexceptions. Wider openings and shorter runs have created a cinemagoingculture characterised by flux. The acceleration of the turnover of filmshas been made possible by the expansion of various secondary markets fordistribution, most importantly videotape, splintering where we might findaudiences and multiplying viewing contexts. Speeding up the popular inthis fashion means that the influence of individual texts can only betruly gauged via cross-media scrutiny. Short theatrical runs are not axiomatically designed for cinemagoersanymore; they can also be intended to attract the attention of videorenters, purchasers and retailers. Independent video distributors,especially, "view theatrical release as a marketing expense, not a profitcenter" (Hindes & Roman 16). In this respect, we might think of suchtheatrical runs as "trailers" or "loss leaders" for the video release,with selected locations for a film's release potentially providingvisibility, even prestige, in certain city markets or neighbourhoods. Distributors are able to count on some promotion through popular consumer-guide reviews, usually accompanying theatrical release as opposed to thepassing critical attention given to video release. Consequently, thisshapes the kinds of uses an assessment of the current cinema is put to;acknowledging that new releases function as a resource for cinemaknowledge highlights the way audiences choose between and determine bigscreen and small screen films. Taken in this manner, popular audiencessee the current cinema as largely a rough catalogue to future culturalconsumption. Third, motion picture release is part of the structure of memories andactivities over the course of a year. New films appear in an informal andever-fluctuating structure of seasons. The concepts of summer movies andChristmas films, or the opening weekends that are marked by a holiday,sets up a fit between cinemagoing and other activities -- familygatherings, celebrations, etc. Further, this fit is presumably resonantfor both the industry and popular audiences alike, though certainly fordifferent reasons. The concentration of new films around visible holidayperiods results in a temporally defined dearth of cinemas; an inordinatefocus upon three periods in the year in the U.S. and Canada -- the lastweekend in May, June/July/August and December -- creates seasonalshortages of screens (Rice-Barker 20). In fact, the boom in theatreconstruction through the latter half of the 1990s was, in part, to dealwith those short-term shortages and not some year-round inadequateseating. Configurations of releasing colour a calendar with the tacticalmanoeuvres of distributors and exhibitors. Releasing provides aparticular shape to the "current cinema", a term I employ to refer to atemporally designated slate of cinematic texts characterised mostprominently by their newness. Television arranges programmes tocapitalise on flow, to carry forward audiences and to counter-programmecompetitors' simultaneous offerings. Similarly, distributors jostle witheach other, with their films and with certain key dates, for the limitedweekends available, hoping to match a competitor's film intended for oneaudience with one intended for another. Industry reporter Leonard Kladysketched some of the contemporary truisms of releasing based upon theexperience of 1997. He remarks upon the success of moving Liar, Liar (TomShadyac, 1997) to a March opening and the early May openings of AustinPowers: International Man of Mystery (Jay Roach, 1997) and Breakdown(Jonathan Mostow, 1997), generally seen as not desirable times of the yearfor premieres. He cautions against opening two films the same weekend,and thus competing with yourself, using the example of Fox's Soul Food(George Tillman, Jr., 1997) and The Edge (Lee Tamahori, 1997). Whiledistributors seek out weekends clear of films that would threaten toovershadow their own, Klady points to the exception of two hits opening onthe same date of December 19, 1997 -- Tomorrow Never Dies (RogerSpottiswoode, 1997) and Titanic (James Cameron, 1997). Though but asingle opinion, Klady's observations are a peek into a conventional strainof strategising among distributors and exhibitors. Such planning for thetiming and appearance of films is akin to the programming decisions ofnetwork executives. And I would hazard to say that digital cinema,reportedly -- though unlikely -- just on the horizon and in which textswill be beamed to cinemas via satellite rather than circulated in prints,will only augment this comparison; releasing will become that much morelike programming, or at least will be conceptualised as such. To summarize, the first vector of exhibition temporality is thescheduling and running time; the second is the theatrical run; the thirdis the idea of seasons and the "programming" of openings. These are justsome of the forces streamlining filmgoers; the temporal structuring ofscreenings, runs and film seasons provides a material contour to theabstraction of audience. Here, what I have delineated are components ofan industrial logic about popular and public entertainment, one thatoffers a certain controlled knowledge about and for cinemagoing audiences. Shifting Conceptual FrameworksA note of caution is in order. I emphatically resist an interpretationthat we are witnessing the becoming-film of television and the becoming-tvof film. Underneath the "inversion" argument is a weak brand oftechnological determinism, as though each asserts its own essentialqualities. Such a pat declaration seems more in line with the mythos ofconvergence, and its quasi-Darwinian "natural" collapse of technologies. Instead, my point here is quite the opposite, that there is nothingessential or unique about the scheduling or flow of television; indeed,one does not have to look far to find examples of less schedule-dependenttelevision. What I want to highlight is that application of any term ofdistinction -- event/flow, gaze/glance, public/private, and so on -- hasmore to do with our thinking, with the core discursive arrangements thathave made film and television, and their audiences, available to us asknowable and different. So, using empirical evidence to slide one termover to the other is a strategy intended to supplement and destabilise themanner in which we draw conclusions, and even pose questions, of each. What this proposes is, again following the contributions of Ien Ang, thatwe need to see cinemagoing in its institutional formation, rather thansome stable technological, textual or experiential apparatus. Theactivity is not only a function of a constraining industrial practice orof wildly creative patrons, but of a complex inter-determination betweenthe two. Cinemagoing is an organisational entity harbouring, reviving andconstituting knowledge and commonsense about film commodities, audiencesand everyday life. An event of cinema begins well before the dimming ofan auditorium's lights. The moment a newspaper is consulted, with itslocal representation of an internationally circulating current cinema, itslistings belie a scheduling, an orderliness, to the possible projectionsin a given location. As audiences are formed as subjects of the currentcinema, we are also agents in the continuation of a set of institutions aswell. ReferencesAng, Ien. Desperately Seeking the Audience. New York: Routledge, 1991.Brookman, Faye. "Trailers: The Big Business of Drawing Crowds." Variety13 June 1990: 48.Caughie, John. "Playing at Being American: Games and Tactics." Logicsof Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Ed. Patricia Mellencamp.Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990.De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. SteveRendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984.Hindes, Andrew, and Monica Roman. "Video Titles Do Pitstops on Screens." Variety 16-22 Sep. 1996: 11+.Klady, Leonard. "Hitting and Missing the Market: Studios Show Savvy --or Just Luck -- with Pic Release Strategies." Variety 19-25 Jan. 1998: 18.Morley, David. Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies. New York:Routledge, 1992.Newspaper Association of America. "Before They See It Here..." Advertisement. Variety 22-28 Nov. 1999: 38.Rice-Barker, Leo. "Industry Banks on New Technology, Expanded Slates." Playback 6 May 1996: 19-20.Scannell, Paddy. Radio, Television and Modern Life. Oxford: Blackwell,1996.Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. New York: Schocken, 1975. Citation reference for this articleMLA style:Charles Acland. "Matinees, Summers and Opening Weekends: CinemagoingAudiences as Institutional Subjects." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture3.1 (2000). [your date of access].Chicago style:Charles Acland, "Matinees, Summers and Opening Weekends: CinemagoingAudiences as Institutional Subjects," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture3, no. 1 (2000), ([your date of access]). APA style:Charles Acland. (2000) Matinees, Summers and Opening Weekends:Cinemagoing Audiences as Institutional Subjects. M/C: A Journal of Mediaand Culture 3(1). ([your date of access]).