Cinema Canada (Jun 1983)

Oe ne a Film and the Future: Changes in Film Viewing Situations, and their Implications by David Poole This paper willbe a speculative look at the way the contexts in which films are viewed may change what films are about, who they are seen by and, to some extent, their forms. I'll be concentrating on two main areas -— the effect of television home viewing on film and the way that specialty film audiences are changing film content and form. I'll begin by explaining why | think TV will soon act as more than a delivery system for old material (as it has for most of its history to date). My moment of illumination came when watching an_ Intellevision commercial in which George Plimpton lauded the virtues of “Space Invaders”, a video game that has a simulated 3-D bombing run on an alien planet in a sequence lifted straight from the climactic scenes of Star Wars. The commercial reinforced ideas | was developing about the birth of new attitudes to the television screen which are, in turn, giving rise to new film forms as audiences demand -— and are capable of getting—an increasingly interactive role with the material they are shown. This new role goes beyond the interaction possible on present video games to a point at which the “realism” of cinema is combined with the control that video/computer inputs allow. Before trying to predict how current viewing practices will affect films, it may be useful to briefly outline the traditional practice of film viewing and to bring out some of the more obvious features of that practice; features that are undergoing fairly radical change. The standardization of film lengths at 60-90 minutes and the creation of theatres that were intended exclusively for film screenings led to the “classic” viewing situation that appears to have been in force until the late ’40s. In this configuration, audience attention was completely directed toward a screen and, as much as possible, conditions were arranged to try to keep the audience from becoming self-conscious. The audiences for these screenings were traditionally drawn from a cross-section of the population, film attendance was frequent, and if you missed a film on its first run, there was a chance you could see itina second-or third-run house. The introduction of broadcast TV in the late '40s — TV’s First Wave resulted in a number of changes that modified but did not substantially change the relationship between the viewer and the filmic material. Primarily, the mass audience began to fragment into a spectrum of specialized audiences POOLE based initially on age. The drive-in market developed and reinforced a ‘teen audience, while the viewers for spectacular films were drawn from an older group of filmgoers for whom film attendance was becoming more and more a “special event” rather than a weekly occurrence. Another group was delineated by devotees of foreign and ‘art’ films, which were gaining increasingly significant audiences in North America. It was suggested by such viewers that certain films deserved repeated viewings and so rep houses were established where a film could be viewed and re-viewed over a relatively long time period. The dominant viewing strategy for ‘art’ films moved away from the theatrical model to the model of the novel or the museum piece, both of which could be returned to and discussed in the terms reserved for ‘serious’ art. The Second Wave of TV was distinguished by a number of trends — each precipitating an increasingly diversified use of the home TV screen. In the late ’60s and early '70s widespread conversion to colour broadcasting and the increased number of channels available on the UHF band expanded the technical range of materials that could be transmitted by TV signal. This, coupled with the continuing installation of cable TV services fed from satellites (as in the U.S.) or refeeding signals from outside normal reception range (as in Canada), led to a greater potential for the diversification of programming on TV. In effect, TV began to repeat some of the recent history of cinema, as more and more channels became available, each with the potential to reach a distinct and narrowly defined audience. Of late, the term “narrowcasting” has become popular to describe the phenomenon of programming fora very limited audience group (either by transmitting at extremely low power or by limiting the material broadcast to appeal to a very distinct group). When combined with the pay-TV establishments, the number and diversity of channels open to TV viewers creates possibilities for the targeting of programs that were previously not possible even on film. Another major trend of the ‘70s has been the increasing acceptance of video-recording and playback machines. With the proliferation of 25 ee = acces ter ee ee a BT ne