Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema.

TLDR

Films lack immanent meaning, and their interpretations vary historically due to social, political, economic, and self‑constructed factors, a view informed by post‑structuralism, cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies. Staiger argues that studying spectators’ historical responses can enrich the history, criticism, and philosophy of cultural products. She proposes a reception‑study theory and applies it by analyzing audience reactions to films across specific historical moments, focusing on class, gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity. The application shows that audience interpretations of films differ over time, illustrating the theory’s explanatory power.

Abstract

Employing a wide range of examples from Uncle Tom's Cabin and Birth of a Nation to Zelig and Personal Best, Janet Staiger argues that the historical examination of spectators' responses to films can make a valuable contribution to the history, criticism and philosophy of cultural products. She maintains that as artifacts, films do not contain immanent meanings, that differences among interpretations have historical bases, and that these variations are due to social, political and economic conditions as well as the viewers' constructed images of themselves. After proposing a theory of reception study, the author demonstrates its application mainly through analyzing the varying responses of audiences to certain films at specific moments in history. The author pays attention to how questions of class, gender, sexual preference, race and ethnicity enter into film viewers' interpretations. Her analysis reflects recent developments in post-structuralism, cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis and cultural studies, and includes a discussion of current reader-response models in literary and film studies as well as an alternative approach for thinking about historical readers and spec