CIE Travel Report: Jeffrey Klenotic

Jeffrey Klenotic, associate professor of communication arts, received one of the 2004-05 CIE Faculty International Travel Grants funded by the VPAA to support travel to England to meet with members of the International Cinema Audiences Research Group (ICARG). Below is his report.

Jeffrey Klenotic

I am pictured in Bloomsbury on the steps of 43 Gordon Square, former home to economist John Maynard Keynes and writer Virginia Woolf, and current home of the University of London’s Birkbeck College and the Centre for British Film and Television Studies. The site’s historical roots in both economics and culture fit the occasion well given that the Centre was hosting a daylong meeting of international researchers collectively devoted to advancing the study of cinema audiences across disciplinary boundaries.

As contemporary thought about cinema has expanded from a purely text-centered paradigm to a more context-sensitive one, an often-heard lament among cinema studies scholars is that we know vastly more about movie directors and movie aesthetics than about movie audiences and movie reception. We have written the history of movies, yes, but will it be equally possible to write the history of moviegoing itself? While the ephemerality of cinema consumption presents methodological problems even for the study of today’s film audiences, the problems multiply exponentially when we begin to think about studying audiences over the span of cinema’s 110-year history as it developed within a multitude of nations around the globe.

Despite the daunting difficulties, these problems are finally starting to receive serious and sustained attention, in part through the efforts of a recently founded collaboration of scholars dubbed the International Cinema Audiences Research Group (ICARG). The group first convened in summer 2004 during a series of meetings at the College of William and Mary’s Washington, D.C. office, and my trip to London this spring began with our meeting at Birkbeck where we moved forward with our work. Among other initiatives, ICARG is committed to developing high quality web databases to promote international and comparative scholarship on the economic, social, cultural and technological history of moviegoing, exhibition and reception.

At present, ICARG includes scholars from 10 different universities across Australia, Belgium, Britain, the Netherlands and the U.S.A. Over time, we seek to draw more scholars from a wider range of nations into the group, and toward that end, we sponsored two workshops on researching historical audiences at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies annual conference, which was also taking place at the University of London at this time.

For more information about CIE grants, visit http://www.unh.edu/cie/.