ABSTRACT
The cultural prominence of the feature film within Western cultures may have peaked in the 1930s, but it remains pervasive today. Indeed, in a reversal of the trend over the preceding thirty years, the 1990s witnessed a steady growth in the size of film audiences as the number of screens in use multiplied dramatically. Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, audiences seem to have stabilized largely around the late 1990s’ levels, although they do fluctuate significantly from year to year in ways that more or less reflect the popular appeal of the films on release at the time. As I write this, in 2005, audience figures are down. Popular cinema in 2005, however, is very different from what it was in the 1930s. Now, popular film is rarely presented to its public as a single product, event or commodity. Rather, it is a kind of composite commodity, linked to ‘The Making of . . .’ DVD, the computer or video game, the range of action figures, or the theme park ride – all aimed at extending the purchase of film beyond the cinema walls. More fundamentally, the change in the nature of film as a cultural commodity reflects the hard industrial fact that film is no longer the product of a self-contained industry; today, it is most often merely one of a range of cultural commodities produced by large multinational conglomerates whose main interest is more likely to be electronics or petroleum or theme parks than the construction of magical narratives for audiences to enjoy on the screen.
