Screen Traffic: Movies, Multiplexes, and Global Culture

SCREEN TRAFFIC: MOVIES, MULTIPLEXES, AND GLOBAL CULTURE Charles R. Acland Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003, 337pp. Scholars of exhibition are concerned with fraught intersection of political economy and cultural studies. In this timely new study, communications scholar Charles Acland raises bar for post-nationalist discussions of cinema culture by insisting that filmgoing must be approached a complex of industrial and cultural phenomena. Using a cultural materialist approach inspired by Raymond Williams, Acland argues that film must be considered a highly mutable site of international economics and individual emotional responses, encompassing technologies of reproduction alongside patterns of reception. Although has arguably been a enterprise since Hollywood began to aggressively develop international market in 1920s, Acland makes a compelling argument that culture became in a new way in 1980s when cinema was reconfigured a vertically integrated industry in wake of deregulation policies. Thus, his study concentrates on cinema exhibition practice a phenomenon of culture from mid-1980s to mid-1990s. The primary phenomenon under consideration here is shift in exhibition practices that emerged between 1986 and 1998, a period when grimy, utilitarian suburban multiplexes were replaced across North America by monstrous exurban space age megaplexes. Acland describes motion picture theatre an location at which discourses of audiences are being worked out and applied, and sites for mobility and flow of bodies, texts, and money. He associates these new theatrical settings with shrunken amusement parks, a logical next step in convergence of corporate entertainment industry during this period. In retrospect, Acland points out, this moment might also be seen last gasp of cinema such. Since 1998, emergent technology in cinema exhibition has been digitalisation, which potentially obviates many of metropolis/hinterland relations that have traditionally shaped cinemagoing landscape. Internet distribution of pirated mainstream films and independent productions threatens to displace-or at least radically alter-the importance of cinema a site of cultural dissemination. Informed by cultural theorists such Michel Foucault, Antonio Gramsci, Marcia Landy, and Arjun Appadurai, Acland explores the industrial and popular discourses about contemporary commercial cinema and its patrons that have become common sense. He effectively argues that filmgoing experience involves an integration of such diverse elements architecture, sound, computer graphics, and consumption of food, well watching films themselves. Acland demonstrates that despite constant shifts in exhibition practices, filmgoing continues to be an essential experience of everyday life in modern world. Cinemagoing is banal, it is erotic, it is civil, it is unruly, it is an everyday site of regulated and unregulated possibility. Acland is concerned not only with shifts in industry, but with how these shifts have contributed to a felt internationalism that might open up possibilities for a more resistant global popular, although on this point Acland is more evocative than descriptive. [P]opular cosmopolitanism needs to be taken seriously, he writes, as a pervasive mode for negotiating and managing reigning ideas and experiences of economies and cultures. Although mainly focussed on American industry, or what others have called Global Hollywood, Screen Traffic includes an extensive examination of Canada a special example of American globalization, both a site of production and a not-quite-foreign market. For Canadian viewers, Acland observes that cinemagoing most often essentially takes you away from your national home. Paradoxically, perceived foreignness of much indigenous, government-sponsored Canadian cinema distinguishes it from popular cinemagoing tastes. …

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