Matinees, Summers and Opening Weekends
Authors: Acland Charles 
Published: October 2020

Newspapers and the 7:15 Showing
Cinemagoing involves planning. Even in the most impromptu instances, one
has to consider meeting places, line-ups and competing responsibilities.
One arranges child care, postpones household chores, or rushes to finish
meals. One must organise transportation and think about routes, traffic,
parking or public transit. And during the course of making plans for a
trip to the cinema, whether alone or in the company of others, typically
one turns to locate a recent newspaper. Consulting its printed page lets
us ascertain locations, a selection of film titles and their corresponding
show times. In preparing to feed a cinema craving, we burrow through a
newspaper to an entertainment section, finding a tableau of information
and promotional appeals. Such sections compile the mini-posters of movie
advertisements, with their truncated credits, as well as various reviews
and entertainment news. We see names of shopping malls doubling as names
of theatres. We read celebrity gossip that may or may not pertain to the
film selected for that occasion. We informally rank viewing priorities
ranging from essential theatrical experiences to those that can wait for
the videotape release. We attempt to assess our own mood and the taste of
our filmgoing companions, matching up what we suppose are appropriate
selections. Certainly, other media vie to supplant the newspaper's role
in cinemagoing; many now access on-line sources and telephone services
that offer the crucial details about start times. Nonetheless, as a
campaign by the Newspaper Association of America in Variety aimed to
remind film marketers, 80% of cinemagoers refer to newspaper listings for
times and locations before heading out. The accuracy of that
association's statistics notwithstanding, for the moment, the local daily
or weekly newspaper has a secure place in the routines of cinematic life.
A basic impetus for the newspaper's role is its presentation of a
schedule of show times. Whatever the venue -- published, phone or on-line
-- it strikes me as especially telling that schedules are part of the
ordinariness of cinemagoing. To be sure, there are those who decide what
film to see on site. Anecdotally, I have had several people comment
recently that they no longer decide what movie to see, but where to see a
(any) movie. Regardless, the schedule, coupled with the theatre's
location, figures as a point of coordination for travel through community
space to a site of film consumption. The choice of show time is governed
by countless demands of everyday life. How often has the timing of a film
-- not the film itself, the theatre at which it's playing, nor one's
financial situation --determined one's attendance? How familiar is the
assessment that show times are such that one cannot make it, that the film
begins a bit too earlier, that it will run too late for whatever reason,
and that other tasks intervene to take precedence?
I want to make several observations related to the scheduling of film
exhibition. Most generally, it makes manifest that cinemagoing involves
an exercise in the application of cinema knowledge -- that is, minute,
everyday facilities and familiarities that help orchestrate the
ordinariness of cultural life. Such knowledge informs what Michel de
Certeau characterises as "the procedures of everyday creativity" (xiv).
Far from random, the unexceptional decisions and actions involved with
cinemagoing bear an ordering and a predictability. Novelty in audience
activity appears, but it is alongside fairly exact expectations about the
event. The schedule of start times is essential to the routinisation of
filmgoing. Displaying a Fordist logic of streamlining commodity
distribution and the time management of consumption, audiences circulate
through a machine that shapes their constituency, providing a set time for
seating, departure, snack purchases and socialising. Even with the
staggered times offered by multiplex cinemas, schedules still lay down a
fixed template around which other activities have to be arrayed by the
patron. As audiences move to and through the theatre, the schedule
endeavours to regulate practice, making us the subjects of a temporal
grid, a city context, a cinema space, as well as of the film itself. To be
sure, one can arrive late and leave early, confounding the schedule's
disciplining force. Most importantly, with or without such forms of
evasion, it channels the actions of audiences in ways that consideration
of the gaze cannot address. Taking account of the scheduling of cinema
culture, and its implication of adjunct procedures of everyday life,
points to dimensions of subjectivity neglected by dominant theories of
spectatorship.
To be the subject of a cinema schedule is to understand one assemblage of
the parameters of everyday creativity. It would be foolish to see cinema
audiences as cattle, herded and processed alone, in some crude Gustave
LeBon fashion. It would be equally foolish not to recognise the manner in
which film distribution and exhibition operates precisely by constructing
images of the activity of people as demographic clusters and generalised
cultural consumers. The ordinary tactics of filmgoing are supplemental
to, and run alongside, a set of industrial structures and practices.
While there is a correlation between a culture industry's imagined
audience and the life that ensues around its offerings, we cannot neglect
that, as attention to film scheduling alerts us, audiences are subjects of
an institutional apparatus, brought into being for the reproduction of an
industrial edifice.
Streamline Audiences
In this, film is no different from any culture industry. Film
exhibition and distribution relies on an understanding of both the market
and the product or service being sold at any given point in time.
Operations respond to economic conditions, competing companies, and
alternative activities. Economic rationality in this strategic process,
however, only explains so much. This is especially true for an industry
that must continually predict, and arguably give shape to, the "mood" and
predilections of disparate and distant audiences. Producers, distributors
and exhibitors assess which films will "work", to whom they will be
marketed, as well as establish the very terms of success. Without a doubt,
much of the film industry's attentions act to reduce this uncertainty;
here, one need only think of the various forms of textual continuity
(genre films, star performances, etc.) and the economies of mass
advertising as ways to ensure box office receipts. Yet, at the core of the
operations of film exhibition remains a number of flexible assumptions
about audience activity, taste and desire. These assumptions emerge from
a variety of sources to form a brand of temporary industry "commonsense",
and as such are harbingers of an industrial logic.
Ien Ang has usefully pursued this view in her comparative analysis of
three national television structures and their operating assumptions about
audiences. Broadcasters streamline and discipline audiences as part of
their organisational procedures, with the consequence of shaping ideas
about consumers as well as assuring the reproduction of the industrial
structure itself. She writes, "institutional knowledge is driven toward
making the audience visible in such a way that it helps the institutions
to increase their power to get their relationship with the audience under
control, and this can only be done by symbolically constructing
'television audience' as an objectified category of others that can be
controlled, that is, contained in the interest of a predetermined
institutional goal" (7). Ang demonstrates, in particular, how various
industrially sanctioned programming strategies (programme strips,
"hammocking" new shows between successful ones, and counter-programming to
a competitor's strengths) and modes of audience measurement grow out of,
and invariably support, those institutional goals. And, most crucially,
her approach is not an effort to ascertain the empirical certainty of
"actual" audiences; instead, it charts the discursive terrain in which the
abstract concept of audience becomes material for the continuation of
industry practices.
Ang's work tenders special insight to film culture. In fact, television
scholarship has taken full advantage of exploring the routine nature of
that medium, the best of which deploys its findings to lay bare
configurations of power in domestic contexts. One aspect has been
television time and schedules. For example, David Morley points to the
role of television in structuring everyday life, discussing a range of
research that emphasises the temporal dimension. Alerting us to the non-
necessary determination of television's temporal structure, he comments
that we "need to maintain a sensitivity to these micro-levels of division
and differentiation while we attend to the macro-questions of the media's
own role in the social structuring of time" (265). As such, the
negotiation of temporal structures implies that schedules are not
monolithic impositions of order. Indeed, as Morley puts it, they "must be
seen as both entering into already constructed, historically specific
divisions of space and time, and also as transforming those pre-existing
division" (266). Television's temporal grid has been address by others as
well. Paddy Scannell characterises scheduling and continuity techniques,
which link programmes, as a standardisation of use, making radio and
television predictable, 'user friendly' media (9). John Caughie refers to
the organization of flow as a way to talk about the national
particularities of British and American television (49-50). All, while
making their own contributions, appeal to a detailing of viewing context
as part of any study of audience, consumption or experience; uncovering
the practices of television programmers as they attempt to apprehend and
create viewing conditions for their audiences is a first step in this
detailing.
Why has a similar conceptual framework not been applied with the same
rigour to film? Certainly the history of film and television's
association with different, at times divergent, disciplinary formations
helps us appreciate such theoretical disparities. I would like to mention
one less conspicuous explanation. It occurs to me that one frequently sees
a collapse in the distinction between the everyday and the domestic; in
much scholarship, the latter term appears as a powerful trope of the
former. The consequence has been the absenting of a myriad of other -- if
you will, non-domestic -- manifestations of everyday-ness, unfortunately
encouraging a rather literal understanding of the everyday. The
impression is that the abstractions of the everyday are reduced to daily
occurrences.
Simply put, my minor appeal is for the extension of this vein of
television scholarship to out-of-home technologies and cultural forms,
that is, other sites and locations of the everyday. In so doing, we pay
attention to extra-textual structures of cinematic life; other regimes of
knowledge, power, subjectivity and practice appear. Film audiences
require a discussion about the ordinary, the calculated and the casual
practices of cinematic engagement. Such a discussion would chart
institutional knowledge, identifying operating strategies and recognising
the creativity and multidimensionality of cinemagoing. What are the
discursive parameters in which the film industry imagines cinema
audiences? What are the related implications for the structures in which
the practice of cinemagoing occurs?
Vectors of Exhibition Time
One set of those structures of audience and industry practice involves
the temporal dimension of film exhibition. In what follows, I want to
speculate on three vectors of the temporality of cinema spaces (meaning
that I will not address issues of diegetic time). Note further that my
observations emerge from a close study of industrial discourse in the U.S.
and Canada. I would be interested to hear how they are manifest in other
continental contexts.
First, the running times of films encourage turnovers of the audience
during the course of a single day at each screen. The special event of
lengthy anomalies has helped mark the epic, and the historic, from
standard fare. As discussed above, show times coordinate cinemagoing and
regulate leisure time. Knowing the codes of screenings means
participating in an extension of the industrial model of labour and
service management.
Running times incorporate more texts than the feature presentation alone.
Besides the history of double features, there are now advertisements,
trailers for coming attractions, trailers for films now playing in
neighbouring auditoriums, promotional shorts demonstrating new sound
systems, public service announcements, reminders to turn off cell phones
and pagers, and the exhibitor's own signature clips. A growing focal
point for filmgoing, these introductory texts received a boost in 1990,
when the Motion Picture Association of America changed its standards for
the length of trailers, boosting it from 90 seconds to a full two minutes
(Brookman).
This intertextuality needs to be supplemented by a consideration of inter-
media appeals. For example, advertisements for television began appearing
in theatres in the 1990s. And many lobbies of multiplex cinemas now offer
a range of media forms, including video previews, magazines, arcades and
virtual reality games. Implied here is that motion pictures are not the
only media audiences experience in cinemas and that there is an explicit
attempt to integrate a cinema's texts with those at other sites and
locations.
Thus, an exhibitor's schedule accommodates an intertextual strip,
offering a limited parallel to Raymond Williams's concept of "flow",
which he characterised by stating -- quite erroneously -- "in all
communication systems before broadcasting the essential items were
discrete" (86-7). Certainly, the flow between trailers, advertisements
and feature presentations is not identical to that of the endless, ongoing
text of television. There are not the same possibilities for
"interruption" that Williams emphasises with respect to broadcasting flow.
Further, in theatrical exhibition, there is an end-time, a time at which
there is a public acknowledgement of the completion of the projected
performance, one that necessitates vacating the cinema. This end-time is
a moment at which the "rental" of the space has come due; and it harkens a
return to the street, to the negotiation of city space, to modes of public
transit and the mobile privatisation of cars. Nonetheless, a schedule
constructs a temporal boundary in which audiences encounter a range of
texts and media in what might be seen as limited flow.
Second, the ephemerality of audiences -- moving to the cinema, consuming
its texts, then passing the seat on to someone else -- is matched by the
ephemerality of the features themselves. Distributors' demand for
increasing numbers of screens necessary for massive, saturation openings
has meant that films now replace one another more rapidly than in the
past. Films that may have run for months now expect weeks, with fewer
exceptions. Wider openings and shorter runs have created a cinemagoing
culture characterised by flux. The acceleration of the turnover of films
has been made possible by the expansion of various secondary markets for
distribution, most importantly videotape, splintering where we might find
audiences and multiplying viewing contexts. Speeding up the popular in
this fashion means that the influence of individual texts can only be
truly gauged via cross-media scrutiny.
Short theatrical runs are not axiomatically designed for cinemagoers
anymore; they can also be intended to attract the attention of video
renters, purchasers and retailers. Independent video distributors,
especially, "view theatrical release as a marketing expense, not a profit
center" (Hindes & Roman 16). In this respect, we might think of such
theatrical runs as "trailers" or "loss leaders" for the video release,
with selected locations for a film's release potentially providing
visibility, even prestige, in certain city markets or neighbourhoods.
Distributors are able to count on some promotion through popular consumer-
guide reviews, usually accompanying theatrical release as opposed to the
passing critical attention given to video release. Consequently, this
shapes the kinds of uses an assessment of the current cinema is put to;
acknowledging that new releases function as a resource for cinema
knowledge highlights the way audiences choose between and determine big
screen and small screen films. Taken in this manner, popular audiences
see the current cinema as largely a rough catalogue to future cultural
consumption.
Third, motion picture release is part of the structure of memories and
activities over the course of a year. New films appear in an informal and
ever-fluctuating structure of seasons. The concepts of summer movies and
Christmas films, or the opening weekends that are marked by a holiday,
sets up a fit between cinemagoing and other activities -- family
gatherings, celebrations, etc. Further, this fit is presumably resonant
for both the industry and popular audiences alike, though certainly for
different reasons. The concentration of new films around visible holiday
periods results in a temporally defined dearth of cinemas; an inordinate
focus upon three periods in the year in the U.S. and Canada -- the last
weekend in May, June/July/August and December -- creates seasonal
shortages of screens (Rice-Barker 20). In fact, the boom in theatre
construction through the latter half of the 1990s was, in part, to deal
with those short-term shortages and not some year-round inadequate
seating.
Configurations of releasing colour a calendar with the tactical
manoeuvres of distributors and exhibitors. Releasing provides a
particular shape to the "current cinema", a term I employ to refer to a
temporally designated slate of cinematic texts characterised most
prominently by their newness. Television arranges programmes to
capitalise on flow, to carry forward audiences and to counter-programme
competitors' simultaneous offerings. Similarly, distributors jostle with
each other, with their films and with certain key dates, for the limited
weekends available, hoping to match a competitor's film intended for one
audience with one intended for another. Industry reporter Leonard Klady
sketched some of the contemporary truisms of releasing based upon the
experience of 1997. He remarks upon the success of moving Liar, Liar (Tom
Shadyac, 1997) to a March opening and the early May openings of Austin
Powers: International Man of Mystery (Jay Roach, 1997) and Breakdown
(Jonathan Mostow, 1997), generally seen as not desirable times of the year
for premieres. He cautions against opening two films the same weekend,
and thus competing with yourself, using the example of Fox's Soul Food
(George Tillman, Jr., 1997) and The Edge (Lee Tamahori, 1997). While
distributors seek out weekends clear of films that would threaten to
overshadow their own, Klady points to the exception of two hits opening on
the same date of December 19, 1997 -- Tomorrow Never Dies (Roger
Spottiswoode, 1997) and Titanic (James Cameron, 1997). Though but a
single opinion, Klady's observations are a peek into a conventional strain
of strategising among distributors and exhibitors. Such planning for the
timing and appearance of films is akin to the programming decisions of
network executives. And I would hazard to say that digital cinema,
reportedly -- though unlikely -- just on the horizon and in which texts
will be beamed to cinemas via satellite rather than circulated in prints,
will only augment this comparison; releasing will become that much more
like programming, or at least will be conceptualised as such.
To summarize, the first vector of exhibition temporality is the
scheduling and running time; the second is the theatrical run; the third
is the idea of seasons and the "programming" of openings. These are just
some of the forces streamlining filmgoers; the temporal structuring of
screenings, runs and film seasons provides a material contour to the
abstraction of audience. Here, what I have delineated are components of
an industrial logic about popular and public entertainment, one that
offers a certain controlled knowledge about and for cinemagoing audiences.
Shifting Conceptual Frameworks
A note of caution is in order. I emphatically resist an interpretation
that we are witnessing the becoming-film of television and the becoming-tv
of film. Underneath the "inversion" argument is a weak brand of
technological determinism, as though each asserts its own essential
qualities. Such a pat declaration seems more in line with the mythos of
convergence, and its quasi-Darwinian "natural" collapse of technologies.
Instead, my point here is quite the opposite, that there is nothing
essential or unique about the scheduling or flow of television; indeed,
one does not have to look far to find examples of less schedule-dependent
television. What I want to highlight is that application of any term of
distinction -- event/flow, gaze/glance, public/private, and so on -- has
more to do with our thinking, with the core discursive arrangements that
have made film and television, and their audiences, available to us as
knowable and different. So, using empirical evidence to slide one term
over to the other is a strategy intended to supplement and destabilise the
manner in which we draw conclusions, and even pose questions, of each.
What this proposes is, again following the contributions of Ien Ang, that
we need to see cinemagoing in its institutional formation, rather than
some stable technological, textual or experiential apparatus. The
activity is not only a function of a constraining industrial practice or
of wildly creative patrons, but of a complex inter-determination between
the two. Cinemagoing is an organisational entity harbouring, reviving and
constituting knowledge and commonsense about film commodities, audiences
and everyday life. An event of cinema begins well before the dimming of
an auditorium's lights. The moment a newspaper is consulted, with its
local representation of an internationally circulating current cinema, its
listings belie a scheduling, an orderliness, to the possible projections
in a given location. As audiences are formed as subjects of the current
cinema, we are also agents in the continuation of a set of institutions as
well.

References

Ang, Ien. Desperately Seeking the Audience. New York: Routledge, 1991.
Brookman, Faye. "Trailers: The Big Business of Drawing Crowds." Variety
13 June 1990: 48.
Caughie, John. "Playing at Being American: Games and Tactics." Logics
of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Ed. Patricia Mellencamp.
Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990.
De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steve
Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984.
Hindes, Andrew, and Monica Roman. "Video Titles Do Pitstops on Screens." Variety 16-22 Sep. 1996: 11+.
Klady, Leonard. "Hitting and Missing the Market: Studios Show Savvy --
or Just Luck -- with Pic Release Strategies." Variety 19-25 Jan. 1998: 18.
Morley, David. Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies. New York:
Routledge, 1992.
Newspaper Association of America. "Before They See It Here..." Advertisement. Variety 22-28 Nov. 1999: 38.
Rice-Barker, Leo. "Industry Banks on New Technology, Expanded Slates." Playback 6 May 1996: 19-20.
Scannell, Paddy. Radio, Television and Modern Life. Oxford: Blackwell,
1996.
Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. New York:
Schocken, 1975.

Citation reference for this article
MLA style:

Charles Acland. "Matinees, Summers and Opening Weekends: Cinemagoing
Audiences as Institutional Subjects." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture
3.1 (2000). [your date of access]
<http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/cinema.php>.
Chicago style:

Charles Acland, "Matinees, Summers and Opening Weekends: Cinemagoing
Audiences as Institutional Subjects," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture
3, no. 1 (2000), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/cinema.php> ([your date of access]).
APA style:

Charles Acland. (2000) Matinees, Summers and Opening Weekends:
Cinemagoing Audiences as Institutional Subjects. M/C: A Journal of Media
and Culture 3(1). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/cinema.php> ([your date of access]).