Barriers to Diversity in Film – A Research Review – Aug 07

they were charming and displayed a kind of grittiness in the
characters.
(UK Film Council )
Another way to group films was demonstrated in Bennett et al (2005),
who grouped films into six categories of film genre: mainstream;
‘women’s’ cinema; older popular cinema; ‘respectable’ cinema;
younger popular cinema; and finally art house films. 4
According to their survey of over 1500 respondents, summarised in
Table 4.8, mainstream cinema accounted for 43% of audience
preferences. The genre recruited its support from action, thriller,
adventure and comedy. This audience was fairly evenly split between
women and men, and included people at all levels of education.
However age makes a difference; this genre was popular with younger
and middle-aged people, but less popular among the over-55s.
Table 4.8 Categories of film genres and audience preferences
Category of films
identified
99
% of audience Numbers of
respondents citing the
genre as their
preference
4 These categories have been derived through examining survey results of respondents’ first preferences of genre and film
directors with their specific social position, based on age, education/class, gender and ethnicity. These relations were then plotted
along axes using multivariate correspondence analysis. The vertical axis is of age and the horizontal axis related to levels of
education and class positions. They thus identify six sets of genres
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