The following is the bulk of the presentation I will be giving this Friday, October 11th, at the Midwest Popular Culture Association conference in St. Louis.  For all of you (which is the majority of the world) who cannot be there to hear the presentation, I give you what it is all about — my first full study testing my minutia reception studies method.

“Making sense of the American superhero film:

Critical engagement and cinematic entanglement”

Today I am presenting the first full fledged study to utilize a method I have been developing to measure a film spectator’s engagement with a film on a moment-by-moment basis.  I call it the “minutia reception method”, and I hope that when applied it can help us understand how people make sense of a film – what they draw on to interpret the film, what they focus on in the film, and what is their overall impression of the film.  I employed this method as part of a larger study; this part focuses on how people engaged with American superhero films.  The analysis I am presenting here seeks to understand how their making sense of these films involved becoming entangled in it whilst simultaneously or alternatively being critical of it – and how the one does not preclude the other from occurring.

Continue reading “Making Sense of Superhero Films”