The dynamics of audience practices: mobilities of film consumption

This article addresses a dynamic of audience practice in engaging with film and identifies that this is characterised through mobilities in film consumption. It draws on rich mixed methods data to argue that not only is film an accessible and highly popular cultural activity, but that it is engaged with in various ways, and shaped by particular configurations of social, cultural, economic, and political factors as well as personal choice. The article develops a novel theoretical approach, combining audience studies and New Cinema History literature. For this, it draws on Hartmann’s (2006) notion of a triple articulation of media, treating screens as technological objects, films as media texts, and the social, spatial, and temporal contexts in which films are watched as particular environments. Each of these are considered equally important to understanding film consumption. The article also incorporates Urry’s (2008) concept of ‘mobilities’ to account for how people move between triple articulations. Here, mobilities can be: corporeal with audiences physically travelling to watch at particular venues, or in adjusting their environment around bodies; social in as far as people share films, both as material objects and in the shared experience of watching together; virtual where audiences discuss films online, share on-demand platform logins, or watch simultaneously in different places; and/or integrative, where digital technologies provide new affordances for watching films while carrying out other practices, e.g. watching via a smartphone while commuting on a train. By combining triple articulation with mobilities to examine interview and survey data, the article identifies and examines five triple articulations of film: (1) going to watch films at the cinema; (2) watching films on television at home; (3) watching films on laptop or tablet whilst in bed; (4) watching films on a smartphone when away from home; and (5) watching films on an in-flight entertainment system (e.g. on long-haul flights). It contends that people move and migrate between triple articulations of film in various ways through a diverse set of mobilities. Overall, the article argues that film consumption is best explored not just through a focus on the film as text, or on the social, temporal and/or spatial environments in which film-watching takes place, but through an understanding that the two are related and framed by wider cultural and economic factors - as well as various interactions between films, people, places, platforms, screens, and venues.