ABSTRACT
Recent work in film and television studies focusing on the issue of reception has led to an increased emphasis on the specific social and historical context(s) in which a text is released and understood. As these contexts change each time a film is seen, any interpretation or reading will be shaped by a combination of the text and the context of its exhibition, by questions of gender, audience interests, foreknowledge and expectations, and by the social and cultural place of the reader. Reception studies examines how various social and cultural backgrounds affect audience evaluations, critical judgments, and interpretative strategies. In Interpreting Films, Janet Staiger's approach to reception studies emphasizes how contexts mold interpretations, how responses from controlling cultural forces attempt to shape a “normative” reading of a text, and how “marginal” responses rework texts in the service of a personal or social agenda. 1 Such interpretations of films can offer the analyst traces of how texts are positioned in larger cultural debates. A study of public interpretations and judgments of films (such as publicity and reviews) can also help establish what audience expectations might have been. While it is impossible to access each spectator's biases and prior knowledge, reviews survive as a marker of various culturally determined evaluations of films and can give a sense of the variety of publicly circulating readings.
