Introduction

Any member of a contemporary industrial society can easily lose sight of the fact that no commodity (including that of cinema) can ever be said to be entirely finished until it reaches the hands (or eyes and ears) of a consumer. Marx took great pains to remind us of the fact that the consumer is as responsible for “making” the commodity as the more customary set of actors whom we identify as its “producers”—in this case, the vast array of writers, cinematographers, software designers, directors, musicians, publicity personnel, actors, projectionists, video distributors, and myriad other workers who labor on a film. Despite our sense that viewing is too often conceived of as a form of passivity, the recipient must produce a film through his or her intellectual endeavors of making sense of a film and deciding that its meanings coincide with or differ from a world-view that the spectator thinks of as his or her own.