Teaching Film Reception Studies: Modelling “Not Knowing” as a Fruitful Position

DJOYMI BAKER: Central to teaching my film genre course is an acknowledgement that film genres do not merely exist within films themselves, but rather the idea of a film genre also circulates through marketing (such as trailers and posters) and reception (such as reviews and audience responses).

While audience research is beyond the scope of an undergraduate film studies course, analysing marketing materials and reviews is certainly achievable. Examining the way a film was reviewed upon its initial release can reveal a host of historically-specific ideas around film genre, and the cultural context in which they operate.

Reviews for older films can also throw up some interesting obsolete expressions, abbreviations or cultural references. I use this example to advocate modelling “not knowing” to our students as being a positive part of curiosity that sparks inquiry around reception, rather than “not knowing” as being something negative that disempowers students.

In a week on film-noir we watch Charles Vidor’s 1946 film Gilda, starring the glorious Rita Hayworth, who is the focus of many of the reviews of the time. Students are provided with seven different newspaper reviews of the film, which they read in pairs or small groups. The instructions are to circle any words that seem to provide the film with a genre label, as the film was released in March 1946, while the term “film noir” was not coined by Nino Frank until August 1946. Students were also to circle anything else that struck them as interesting or confusing to discuss with the class.

The Variety review of Gilda began like this:

“Practically all the s.a. habiliments of the femme fatale have been mustered for Gilda, and when things get trite and frequently far-fetched, somehow, at the drop of a shoulder strap, there is always Rita Hayworth to excite the filmgoer” (1945).

When I first read this review, I had no idea what “s.a. habiliments” might mean. A quick Google revealed habiliments to be an old-fashioned word for clothes (with apologies to Shakespeare scholars, given he used this term in several of his plays). Working out “s.a.” was trickier, but given the context I realised it referred to sex appeal (or more specifically in this sentence, ‘sexually appealing clothes’).

None of my student initially shared their difficulties with outdated expressions such as these in the film reviews – or at least they might have discussed this within their reading group, but did not disclose it to the whole class. As Peters, Le Cornu and Collins note, “It takes confidence for learners to admit that there are gaps in their knowledge, or understanding… Learners may feel vulnerable about admitting their ignorance to others” (2003, p. 3).

So instead, I told them that I originally had no idea what it meant. I was curious about what the reviewer was getting at, particularly as it was the opening line. I had to look it up, and then figure the rest out. After this revelation, students then shared other terms or references they’d been puzzled or surprised by. In other words, they relaxed about their lack of understanding. My position as teacher is usually one of knowing, of expertise, but in this case revealing “not knowing” was more productive of an open and engaging discussion about film reception.

In the context of the course, this strategy helped to draw students’ attention to the way that film reception and criticism is historically contingent, and how genre labels change over time. But more broadly, this method helped students see that they should not feel intimidated if they do not initially comprehend the course materials.

“Not knowing” is not something we would usually share with our colleagues, or at least not in those terms. Yet so much of what we do is actually about not knowing something and attempting to shift this position through our research. The difference is we have our prior knowledge of our discipline to scaffold that process. Students often do not, which makes admitting not knowing a more vulnerable position for them. As such, modelling “not knowing” as teachers can be about empowering students to take a positive approach to curiosity and discovery. As one student remarked in the feedback survey, “I don’t feel stupid when I don’t understand.”

References

Frank, N 1946, “Un Nouveau Genre ‘Policièr’, L’Aventure Criminelle’, L’Écran Francis, Vol. 61: 8-9, 14.

Peters, J, Le Cornu R and Collin, J 2003, “Towards a Constructivist Teaching and Learning,” A Report on Research Conducted in Conjunction with the Learning to Learn Project, November, https://www.education.sa.gov.au/docs/curriculum/tfel/towards_constructivist_teaching_and_learning.pdf

Variety Staff, 1945, “Gilda”, Variety, 31 December, https://variety.com/1945/film/reviews/gilda-1200414757/

‘& Juliet’: Violent delights

STEPHANIE RUSSO: & Juliet is a jukebox musical that utilises the many, many hits of the Swedish pop mega-producer Max Martin to reimagine the story of Romeo & Juliet. In this queer, feminist, modern and diverse retelling, Juliet does not die, but instead lives to go party in Paris and sing “…Baby, One More Time”. What more could you want?

Currently playing at the Lyric Theatre in Sydney, & Juliet is delightful, and offers the best representation of Anne Hathaway I’ve seen in any piece of work about Shakespeare.

However, in the weeks since I’ve seen the show I’ve been thinking about what kind of reading of Romeo & Juliet is reflected in & Juliet.

& Juliet’s emphasis on a twenty-first-century feminist reimagining of Shakespeare’s play obliquely suggests, I would argue, that Shakespeare’s ending reflects an inability to imagine a happy ending or, perhaps more significantly, a happy ending for a female character. That Romeo & Juliet is a tragedy is understood as a failure of the imagination, or simply disappointing, particularly in the eyes of Anne Hathaway.

Anne, out on the town after securing a babysitter for her children back home in Stratford-upon-Avon, is dissatisfied by the ending of this tragedy. Anne wants to revive Juliet because she wants a happy ending for a woman. This position is completely understandable, and perhaps even one shared by the audience, but it also suggests that Shakespeare was too sexist to allow Juliet anything to do but die.

Maybe I’m just taking things a bit too seriously, but the inference here that Shakespeare was just another white man who didn’t know how to write women has increasingly been grating on me. Juliet has long been the character from the play that has captured the imagination of audiences. It is Juliet who appears to grow and change most significantly in the play; while Romeo acts impulsively and other men consistently fail her, Juliet is always self-aware and intelligent. Juliet is beloved, and that’s because Shakespeare was so good at writing women: there’s a reason why actresses clamour to play her!

In her excellent book Searching for Juliet, Sophie Duncan explores how Juliet has become something of an Agony Aunt for generations of young lovers. Knowing full well that she is fictional, men and women of all ages write to Juliet for romantic advice. That drive to speak to Juliet specifically—and not to Romeo—reflects the pull that Juliet has over readers and audiences. Juliet seems to speak to us so strongly that she is understood to have something to say about modern relationship dilemmas.

One of the most interesting moments in the play is at the end of the first Act, when Shakespeare decides to revive Romeo from the dead with no explanation. He wants chaos! In that brief moment, we see a Shakespeare who was able to radically reimagine existing stories and create something wholly new and unexpected. Even Anne, who has hitherto taken charge of the direction of the story, is shocked. However, throughout the second Act, all that Shakespeare seems to want to do with Romeo is to move him back into the role of the romantic lead and back towards Juliet, seemingly unable to imagine a Juliet without a Romeo, despite his self-professed proclivity for chaos.

& Juliet reflects that conviction in Juliet’s centrality to the play, but the apparently triumphant ending of the musical is a bit disappointing. The musical leans into Romeo’s identity as a self-confessed “douche,” but then has Juliet increasingly drawn to him anyway, even though it is not quite clear what this intelligent, self-possessed woman sees in him. At the end of the musical, Juliet and Romeo have decided to date and see where things go, but it is unclear why she makes this choice, aside from the sheer inevitability of Romeo and Juliet as a romantic pairing. If you’re going to go for a girlboss ending, why not lean in?

There is an argument to be made that Shakespeare is a much more radical writer than this modern-day take. Romeo & Juliet is far more willing to test out conceptions of love, and its boundaries and consequences, than what ends up being a fairly conventional romcom where everyone ends up in their ‘rightful’ place. For all the (completely misguided) insistence that Anne Hathaway’s character is not seen by Shakespeare, as she is only worth the second-best bed in his will, and that she wants Juliet to make choices of her own, unlike her husband who only wants her to die, & Juliet completely elides why we side with Juliet. The play’s Juliet can see their peril where Romeo cannot. Juliet makes choices when her options are few, and yet despite being given complete agency in the musical, her ending is far more conventional than the desperate gamble she takes in the play. 

In a way, & Juliet almost accidentally replicates the processes of early modern authorship. Shakespeare and Anne collaborate on knitting together this new story, testing out ideas and experimenting with alternative endings and the introduction of unexpected new elements. From what we know of the early modern stage, Shakespeare would have worked in a similar manner, collaborating with his fellow actors, and perhaps even asking other playwrights to fill in details. It’s refreshing to see a Shakespeare who doesn’t write away in his room by himself, inspired by some kind of divine muse, but a Shakespeare who lives, works and writes on the stage.

However, taken as a whole, & Juliet provides what I would argue is quite a shallow reading of the play. The musical is certainly joyful and fun, and I had a great night out. But what does it say about Romeo and Juliet as a piece of art that has endured centuries? Not very much, in the end, except for the fact that we like the “& Juliet” part more. But we already knew that.

What Makes Reading Social: One Direction and Inline Comments

LUCY ROUSE: It’s the year 2013. Beyonce played the Superbowl, Apple released the iPhone 5s– with a revolutionary fingerprint scanner, Cronuts (the fusion of croissants and donuts, obviously) became a thing, and most importantly, the British boyband One Direction was dominating the charts. With a rabid fanbase, me included, One Direction firmly cemented their place in the cultural consciousness of the era. A key example of this cultural command was seen in their strong fanfiction communities. As a teenager, I would eagerly await the daily updates of Anna Todd’s After – a Harry Styles fanfiction uploaded to social reading platform Wattpad, where the singer is reimagined as a troubled and mysterious college student with a dark past. I would devour the latest instalment and at school lunch the following day, I would gather a group of fellow After readers to discuss the day’s chapter. We would talk about how dialogue made us feel, whether we liked new characters, and how we felt about Harry as a love interest. It was a social and receptive process, where we were affectively and interactively responding to the fiction in ‘real time’.

Digital media and the rise of social reading practices through BookTok, Bookstagram, and platforms like Goodreads, means that we don’t need a group of friends to discuss our reactions to fiction. Fan readers on Wattpad are given the opportunity to express pent-up emotions through its “inline commenting” feature. Inline commenting allows a reader to select a specific line of a text and comment on it, rather than on the full chapter. The number of comments that have been made on a line appear on the side of the text block. On Wattpad, inline comments spike at key plot points; when a “ship” makes first contact, when they’re having sex, or when a character turns out to be a villain all along. Inline comments work to sustain the liveness of online texts, for fanfictions which have long been posted and completed, new readers are still able to contribute to the overarching network of the text, adding their reactions and feelings about the plot. Furthermore, readers returning to the text for a re-read comment on foreshadowing, noting things that they may not have on their first readthrough.

The inline commenting feature opens an accessible network of readers. When a commenter is screaming, crying, or keyboard-smashing over their ship holding hands, they interact with an affective community of past and present readers, actively shaping how the novel is perceived to those in the future. This rich network of readers, diarising their thoughts on top of the text itself, is a form of public annotation. When readers annotate these digital texts, they leave their affective traces on the work – their thoughts and reactions. Furthermore, readers can both improve and damage the text’s future reception. As previously mentioned, re-readers will go back and note elements of the text that they missed on their first read. While some readers will use linguistic cues like *RR* at the front of their comment, warning new readers of a potential spoiler, others do not. New readers can get spoiled even from something as little as identifying that comment numbers have spiked on a seemingly normal line of dialogue.

Inline comments also raise questions about the publicity of reading. Whilst under reception theory, reading is seen as an active and public process where readers approach a text with a rich network of pre-existing associations, Inline commenting brings this public interactivity to a new level. Inline comments often express affect over taboo plot points, like sex or death, and commenters feel comfortable reacting publicly to these plot points. It can be speculated that this is due to a notion of community that the inline commenting function fosters. Readers experience solidarity by seeing that the text has had an impact on past readers, creating a version of Berlant’s intimate public, where readers bond through shared affective response.

Ultimately, inline comments are an affective hub where the thoughts, feelings, and emotions of readers past and present lie in wait to be perceived by those of the future. They act as a reminder that digital media and social reading practices are making literary reception much more visible – a concept we may have to grapple with as reception scholars.

Further reading

Berlant, Lauren Gail. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship, Duke University Press, 1997.

Driscoll, Beth, et al. Genre Worlds: Popular Fiction and Twenty-First-Century Book Culture. University of Massachusetts Press, 2022.

Felski, Rita. Hooked: Art and Attachment. University of Chicago Press, 2020.

Stein, Louisa Ellen. Millennial Fandom: Television Audiences in the Transmedia Age. University of Iowa Press, 2015.

Spontaneous applause: A reflection on film reception after COVID

DJOYMI BAKER: The lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic necessitated the closure of cinema theatres, and for academics such as me, who would normally teach cinema studies on campus at universities, the temporary end to weekly film screenings for students on the big screen. Instead, our “film of the week” had to shift to streaming at home on a variety of devices. As the lockdowns lifted (in late October 2021 here in Melbourne, Australia, which had the longest in the world)[i] —and our university gradually moved from fully online, to hybrid, to fully on campus—the split among student viewing practices have been felt in the cinema and the classroom.

Last year, we screened F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), the story of an un-named Man (George O’Brien) who is tempted by The Woman from the City (Margaret Livingston), to the distress of his Wife (Janet Gaynor). Sunrise is a transitional film that sits between the silent era and the sound era, in that it has written intertitles rather than dialogue, but features a synchronised soundtrack with a score and sound effects. It also displays innovative cinematography, particularly in the famous marsh scene during which the camera is “suspended from overhead cables so that it glides” through the set.[ii] Recalling this shot, Murnau proclaimed: “To me the camera represents the eye of a person, through whose mind one is watching the events on the screen. It must follow characters at times into difficult places… It must whirl and peep and move from place to place as swiftly as thought itself.”[iii] These features were recognised at the inaugural Academy Awards in 1929, where it won the “Most Unique and Artistic Picture,” despite having been a commercial failure.[iv] More recently, Sunrise was voted number 11 in Sight and Sound’s 2022 poll of “critics, programmers, curators, archivists and academics” for “The Greatest Films of All Time.”[v]

It nonetheless came as a surprise to me that students spontaneously applauded at the end of the screening, something that did not occur for any other film in the course. Many of our students have little or indeed no exposure to silent or early sound films, so it does require an adjustment to their regular viewing expectations. The setting was particularly apt in this instance, being the ornate Capitol Theatre, built in 1924, a silent era “picture palace” once hailed as “the best cinema that has ever been built or is ever likely to be built.”[vi] Picture palaces were attractions in their own right. Nearly a century later, COVID brought renewed focus on the physical and social experience of the cinema theatre. Wheeler Winston Dixon, writing in 2020, lamented that streaming cannot “make up for the absence of an audience, real-life human contact, and seeing a film on a large theatre screen, as it’s supposed to be shown.”[vii]

Many of our students share this notion of the theatrical film ideal. In a study conducted during COVID in 2020 and 2021, my colleagues Alexia Kannas, James Douglas, and James Thompson found that “students tended to associate the lack of timetabled screenings with a decline in their engagement levels.”[viii] Yet streaming at home also provided students with some valued affordances, such as pausing or rewinding, which in some cases students felt aided their understanding.[ix]

The theatre may persist as an ideal, but statistically it no longer prevails. Writing back in 2015, Brett Mills points out, “the dominant way in which audiences consume film is not in the cinema, but in the domestic environment.”[x] Post-COVID, our students are now more significantly split across those wanting to return to the shared, theatrical big-screen experience, and those who appreciate the convenience and affordances of streaming at home.

Murnau’s Sunrise was a case in point, eliciting applause in the theatre, yet prompting disagreement in the classroom discussion. Many of my students who streamed at home expressed their difficulties connecting to the film, and their surprise that it had prompted applause at the screening. Aesthetic, narrative and ideological considerations emerged in conversation, but also the difference in viewing conditions. As Kannas, Douglas and Thompson’s research suggests, this kind of noticeable split in engagement levels between theatre and streaming will not necessarily always be the case.

More broadly, once audiences have options available to them, they will seek different experiences with different expectations when they choose how to watch a film.[xi] Where, how, and with whom we watch a film has always impacted the film experience, but I would suggest that our pre-, during- and post-COVID experiences, in the classroom and beyond, has made us particularly aware of these film reception dynamics.

[i] Renju Jose, 2021, “Melbourne readies to exit world’s longest COVID-19 lockdown,” Reuters, 21 October, https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/melbourne-readies-exit-worlds-longest-covid-19-lockdowns-2021-10-20/

[ii] Roger Ebert, 2004, “Sunrise,” 11 April, https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-sunrise-1928

[iii] F. W. Murnau, quoted in Jonathan Rosenbaum, 2004, “The stuff of dreams,” The Guardian, 1 February, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2004/jan/31/1

[iv] Jacob Agius, 2022, “Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (F.W. Murnau, 1927),” Senses of Cinema, Issue 103, https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2022/cteq/sunrise-a-song-of-two-humans-f-w-murnau-1927/

[v] BFI, 2022, “The Greatest Films of All Time,” https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/greatest-films-all-time

[vi] Robin Boyd, quoted in Lisa French, 2017, “Melbourne’s Capitol Theatre: ‘The Best Cinema That Has Ever Been Built or Is Ever Likely to Be Built,” Senses of Cinema, Issue 85, https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2017/screening-melbourne/melbournes-capitol-theatre/#fn-32032-2

[vii]  Wheeler Winston Dixon, 2020, “Film in Lockdown,” Senses of Cinema, Issue 95, https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2020/cinema-in-the-age-of-covid/film-in-lockdown/

[viii] Alexia Kannas, James Douglas, and James Thompson, 2023, “Gazing or glancing? Mapping student engagement when film studies move online,” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 53-54, DOI: 10.1177/13548565221148102

[ix] Kannas, Douglas and Thompson, 2023, pp. 53-54.

[x] Brett Mills, 2015, “Should film studies be a sub-discipline of television studies?” CSTOnline, 13 February, https://cstonline.net/should-film-studies-be-a-sub-discipline-of-television-studies-by-brett-mills/

[xi] Matthew Hanchard, Peter Merrington, and Bridgette Wessels, 2020, “Being part of an audience: Patterns of contemporary film audience experience,” Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies, vol. 17, issue 2, p. 129, https://www.participations.org/volume-17-issue-2/

Thoughts on the ‘Firebrand’ trailer

STEPHANIE RUSSO: I have thought a lot about queens. I wrote a book about the most infamous English queen, Anne Boleyn, and as somebody who specialises in historical fiction, there is never any shortage of fiction about queens, so queens seem to creep in at the edges of everything I write. Queens are a handy tool, after all, for thinking about the intersection of power, sex and gender.

Thinking about shifts in how queens are represented can tell us a lot about the reception of these periods in the modern world. For instance, Yorgos Lanthimos’s film The Favourite (2018) gave us what I would call ‘Eighteenth-Century Weird’; the perception that the eighteenth century was fundamentally strange, even grotesque. This aesthetic was later taken up in the (fantastic) series The Great (2020-23). Fun fact: both The Favourite and The Great were written by the Australian writer Tony McNamara.

The latest queen film to have caught my attention is Firebrand. Or, at least, the trailer has, since the film has not premiered in Australia yet. The film stars Alicia Vikander as Katherine Parr, the final queen of Henry VIII. In other words, the “survived” part of “divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived”. The film is based on Elizabeth Fremantle’s popular 2013 novel Queen’s Gambit.

The trailer stresses Katherine Parr’s religious radicalism and determination to “change” the country. That change is the embrace of Protestantism. While Henry had infamously split from the Roman Catholic Church years earlier so that he could divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn, theologically he was still quite Catholic. Katherine Parr, however, was a devotee of religious reform. The trailer is full of shots of Vikander looking steely and determined. The final line sees her ponder “what is the point of being queen if I don’t have the courage of my convictions”.

This vision of Katherine as fiery and determined reflects our contemporary obsession with finding feminist foremothers wherever we can. In the musical Six, Katherine is the queen who inspires the other queens to set aside their differences and find an identity outside their status as “one of six” wives.

Katherine Parr has not always been read in this way. Traditionally, Katherine has been represented as something of a nursemaid: the older, docile woman who cared for Henry as he became ever more incapacitated. Other novels, such as Jean Plaidy’s The Sixth Wife (1953) stress the danger she consistently faced as the wife of a notoriously temperamental and violent man who had already shown a willingness to discard wives violently. Philippa Gregory’s The Taming of the Queen (2015), likewise, stresses the danger and violence of the Katherine/Henry marriage, and particularly the way that Henry seeks to “tame” her through sex. The theme that Plaidy often returned to in her novels was that even the most powerful women—queens—could be abused and captive wives. And Philippa Gregory is notorious for her sexed-up representation of the Tudor court.

There so nothing inherently “wrong” with imagining Katherine Parr’s narrative as a feminist survivor narrative, and it is true that Katherine was a committed Protestant who, somewhat dangerously, committed her religious sentiments into print. However, when we fictionalise the past we imagine the past as we want to imagine it. We want to see stories of fierce, fiery and intelligent women, so that’s what we find there.