Due to the fact that my research is concerned with cinemas as sites of film consumption, the area of cultural geography is useful. This discipline is a sub-field of human geography and examines the ways that spaces and places within cultural landscapes are conceptualised and analysed to make sense of society and human behaviour. Doreen Massey argues for the importance of
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conceptualizing space and place in order to understand the social world and how to effect change:
Thinking of places in this way implies that they are not so much bounded areas as open and porous networks of social relations…..and this in turn implies that what is to be the dominant image of any place will be a matter of contestation and will change over time.
(Massey, 1994: 121)
Massey argues that social change and spatial change are integral to each other and while space is socially constructed, the social is spatially constructed (1994: 22). She disputes static notions of place as frozen in time, seeing them instead as processes, and arguing that places do not have single identities but multiple ones and are not enclosures with clear borders (cited in Dovey, 2009).
Within Skelton and Valentine’s collection, Massey contributes a chapter on the spatial construction of youth cultures. Here she talks about ‘individuals and social groups [being] constantly engaged in efforts to territorialise, to claim spaces, to include some and exclude others from particular areas’ (1998: 126).
She goes on to discuss how young teenagers are not permitted into certain cinemas, due to the screening of films of a higher certification than their age, thus excluding them along the lines of territorialising space (Massey, 1998:
127).
This spatial construction of cinema culture can also relate issues of social class and some social groups’ discomfort with certain venues. Devine et al (2005) analysed the connection between habitus and cultural capital (more in the following chapter) and space and place in relation to working class culture.
Their observance is that ‘where people feel comfortable in places, they tend to populate such places, either through permanent residence or through revisiting, but where they do not, they tend to avoid them’ (Devine et al., 2005: 101). For Amin and Thrift (2002: 85), this discomfort with space and place mostly occurs in the ‘cognitive unconscious’ and so behaviour in leisure spaces is intuitive and improvised and either needs to be observed in practice, or elicited in focus group discussions.
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Phil Hubbard is an academic concerned with the ‘spatiality of social life’ in order to draw conclusions about how ‘the city reproduces social difference.’5 Of particular relevance to my thesis are his articles and reports on the changing geographies of cinemas (2002; 2003b; 2004), a study on cinemas as sites of
‘embodied leisure’ (2003a), and a recent publication on the retail gentrification of British cities (2016). Hubbard has developed a particularly interesting idea relating to the question of why out-of-town multiplex cinemas attract audiences from particular socio-economic backgrounds. In Fear and Loathing at the Multiplex (2003b), he refers to a climate of fear and anxiety that ‘pervades many cities at night’ which has resulted in a re-structuring of urban life in the post-industrial era (see also Thomas and Bromley, 2000; Pain, 2001). Hubbard discusses the exclusion of certain ‘Other’ social groups from particular public and private spaces, including ‘rowdy teenagers’. This concept is supported by David Sibley who puts forward that people who appear ‘out of place’ and alternative to the dominant ‘white middle-class family ambience associated with [an] international consumption style’, are ejected from a wide range of urban settings (Sibley, 1995: 11). These concepts are useful in framing the query I have with the social, cultural and environmental factors that limit young people’s attendance at certain cinemas and indeed attract them to other types of cinemas instead. Furthermore, Hubbard argues that ‘multiplex
cinemas are not widening participation in cinema-going, but merely increasing the frequency of cinema-going among more affluent, white (and younger) consumer groups’ (2003b: 73), implying that – according to his research in the city of Leicester at least - audiences from lower-income socio-economic or ethnic minority backgrounds are not attending out-of-town multiplexes in great numbers. My queries generated by this scholarship are then; are young people afraid and anxious about attending art cinemas or are the regular (older) audiences for these venues displaying fear and anxiety about young people infiltrating their territory?
Whilst not cultural geographers, both Laurence Levine (1988) and Paul DiMaggio (1982; 1992) make a case for the significance of the physical space
5 Quoted from https://kcl.academia.edu/PhilHubbard accessed 24/05/17
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in which a cultural form is performed. Although they focus on theatre, art, and opera – their claim is that the development of theatres exclusively for
legitimate drama (as opposed to musical theatre), museums for painting and sculpture, and opera houses for opera – legitimised these cultural pursuits as high art. In the 1920s and 1930s, picture palaces were constructed in order to give audiences an experience of luxury in palatial and classical styles (Gray, 1996), and although this did not yet elevate film to the status of art, it did make cinema-going more respectable (Baumann, 2001: 89). In the 1950s, there was a general decline in cinema attendance plus a reduction in the number of
Hollywood produced films, so US cinemas started importing films from
Europe (from directors such as Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini and Jean-Luc Godard) and art cinemas started being established. According to Gomery, by the late 1960s the total number of art cinemas in the USA exceeded 1000 (including film societies exhibiting the best of European art cinema) (1992:
181). John Twomey commented on the legitimisation of film as art in 1956;
‘the art theater is a commercially as well as artistically established institution.
No longer is the art film a delicacy for the palates of a few connoisseurs’
(Twomey, 1956: 247).
The field of cultural geography has produced work on the conceptualisation of spaces and places within cultural landscapes in order to analyse society and human behaviour. Academics have written on cinemas as sites of changing cultural significance and inter-generational tension (Massey), as well as the spatial construction of cinema culture relating to issues of social class (Devine et al). Phil Hubbard has contributed significant work on cinemas as site of embodied leisure and argues for the concept of fear limiting attendance at certain cinemas (within the cityscape). Cinemas were designed as ‘picture palaces’ in the early to mid-twentieth century, making cinema-going
‘respectable’ (Baumann), but the demise of these venues and the relatively recent trend of out-of-town multiplexes has changed this perception of mainstream cinemas to them being the territory of white affluent younger audiences (Hubbard). Moving from the cultural geography of cinemas back to audiences, the next transition is to a discussion of the body of work on young cinema audiences.
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