The Wicker Man (1973) Email Digest: A Case Study in Web Ethnography

Abstract

Studies of film reception have, thus far, fallen into two distinctive methodological categories. A broadly text-centred approach emerged in so-called Screen studies, which developed a range of psychoanalytically informed, universalist theories of spectatorship. More recently, sociologically and historically derived investigations have considered audiences empirically and, latterly, ethnographically. However, what this second branch of enquiry gains in its culturally grounded specificity, it tends to lose in generalist accounts of cinema-going as a social phenomenon from which the nature of audience response and textual affect is, crucially, often missing. Since the well-documented decline of cinema-going as a mass recreation and the technological diffusion of the film text across a number of different platforms and spaces, niche taste-communities have emerged with their own distinctive, committed and frequently eloquent attitudes to film consumption. Some of these offer the scholar a potentially productive new approach to bridging the divide between audiences and spectatorship.