Making Sense of Cinema Anthology

Edited by Christopher Olson (Seems Obvious to Me) and myself, Bloomsbury Academic will release Making Sense of Cinema: Empirical Studies into Film Spectators and Spectatorship on February 25, 2016.

Making Sense of Cinema is an anthology collecting empirical studies that display different methods for studying real film spectators engaging with real films. Film studies has had a tradition of theorizing the nature of film and how people respond to it, but has done less to study the actual interactions between the individual film-goer or film audience and a specific film text. The rise of different quantitative and qualitative media studies traditions brought in different ways of studying this interaction, most commonly around television and digital games. The rise of such reception and audience studies, and the improvement and steady development of different methods, has meant that traditional film studies has begun to consider how the theories of film studies can be tested through empirical research.

This anthology collects such research from both quantitative and qualitative scholars to demonstrate the various methods being utilized to understand how people receive, interpret, make sense of, decode, recode, be impacted by and use film texts. The scholars in this book — from Martin Barker to Darren Waldron, from Alexander Geimer to Jodi Sita, from Annie Dell’Aria to Jessica Hughes, and many others — employe questionnaires or interviews or ethnographies or eye-tracking experiments or several other methods to understand how people make sense of cinema, in the moment of engaging with it to after having taken in the entire text.

The hope is that this book will inspire not only film scholars but any media scholars to recognize the potential for empirical reception studies and to realize their capability for doing similar research to advance our understanding of the role of the media in people’s everyday lives.

You can pre-order your copy now directly from the publisher or from your favorite online retailer (such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and more). We are also sponsoring a giveaway on Goodreads that is your chance to win the book before it even goes on sale. You can enter the giveaway starting January 22nd following the link below.

Goodreads Book Giveaway