yearbook 2004/05 - The European Film College

to recover its image as an art form,
rather its standard and quality have
been gradually deteriorating. It is
said that contemporary cinema only
meets the taste of a section of the
people. The audiences who still go to
cinema halls tend to be less educated
and belong to the low-income group
i.e. the working class people of the
society. It fits with the notion of Jane
Adams who termed the movie theatre
a ‘Dream Palace’ where the urban
working class might get the scope to
perpetuate their dream.2 But this is
not the entire reason for this
change in demographic of
the cinema audience. We saw
a tremendous technological
boom in the media and communication
sphere in last
two decades. As the middle
class are economically well
off, they also have access to alternative forms
of entertainment, VCR, cable
TV, VCD/DVD and the
Internet, which have brought
them much wider options.
Big budget Hollywood films,
the Mumbai glamour world,
the vastness of cyberspace
with chat rooms and various
pornographic options can be
found as well as newly released
Bangla cinema, which is also easily accessible
through those new technologies. So the state
of audience at the cinema halls in Bangladesh
has been found to be one in a state of change.
Before going on to review the film audience in
Bangladesh it could be relevant to discuss the
concept of “audience” itself.
Audience: The concept
Actually the concept of ‘audience’ had not registered
among the media scholars as a culturally
significant one until 1980s. 3 For the first
FROM THE STUDENTS
time, Denis McQuail drew the attention
regarding media audience in 1983 in his
book Mass Communication Theory. 4 He
found that the media audience was an important
entity and defined the audience
as an aggregate of spectators, readers, listeners
and viewers. He also termed the audience
as ‘mass’, ‘public or social group’ and ‘market’.
In postmodern a approach, the reader (movie
viewer) is the prime concern, text (movie) and
author (director of the movie) is less important.
Therefore more attention is supposed to be paid
to the audience in the contemporary cine-world
although the producers, artists, distributors and
the audience cohere together in the process of
filmmaking and projection. They control each
other as Jarvie (1970: 42) says: