ABSTRACT
It is customary for our society to see the media, generally, as a group of technologies which are unusually blatant in their devotion to the delivery of profits to the few through the exploitation of the many. 'No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the public', as the cynical phrase goes, and this perception is most comprehensively applied to the major means of mass entertainment: film and television. In neither medium is it simply true that audiences are at the mercy of a knowing and cynical group of entrepreneurs who churn out the latest money-spinner in the easy assurance of inevitable success. Fortunes are still spent and lost in making movies. The top-grossing twenty movies in any one year will be the survivors of a field numbering in the hundreds - from American producers alone. Even those movies which we have come to recognize as classics are not guaranteed to make money (Citizen Kane, usually held to be an American classic, lost money at the box-office). Movies might be made by actors, directors, and producers, but they are ultimately made successful by audiences. Promotions of various kinds intervene in the process, but the way in which one film will catch an audience's imagination while another will not is a mystery to the industry, to audiences, and to theorists alike. Nevertheless, film is, as Christian Metz (1982: 92) put it, 'our product, the product of the society which consumes it'. It is impossible to talk about film as a social practice without talking about its audiences.
