Audience Theory

Reception Theory: based on the idea that there is no single meaning for any media text.

- Given that the Effects model and the Uses and gratifications have their problems and limitations a different approach to audiences was developed by the academic Stuart Hall at Birmingham University in the 1970's.

- This concidered how texts were encoded with meaning by producers and then decoded (understood) by audiences.

- It focuses on what people see in the media and the meanings they produce.

- It says that messages from the media text can have a preferred meaning but anyone can have an individual interpretation.

- Audience readings are affected by variables of age, gender, social status and social context and thus they might not accept the preferred meaning.

Suture:

- Classical Hollywood narrative, editing, sound and miss-en-scene 'sutures' or positions the audience in certain ways making only one preferred reading (reception theory) possible, however unconscious the audience is of that position (e.g. Steven Spielburg's 'Jaws').

- The theory stems from the literary and film theories of Rowland Barthes, Stephan Heath, Laura Mulvey, Kaja Silverman, but was formulated by Daniel Day in his "The Tutor Code of Classical Cinema" (1974).

- According to these theorists, the audience 'stitches' itself into a film by relating to characters or world views expressed in a film, and then filling in the temporal and spacial gaps between scenes with our imaginations.

- This is made all easier when means, techniques, codes, and conventions of film are made 'invisible' by the filmmakers.

E.g. "Crash"