12 - The Missing Piece: Imaginary Audiences in the Ecran Fan Magazine of the 1940s

Summary

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this kind of film is not on the screen, but in the reaction of the public who, moved by what they see on the screen, intervene, as a kind of protagonist, clapping, shouting for or against, without standing still for a moment.

(Ecran, 10 December 1940, 10–11)

This chapter analyses some of the imaginary constructions of local audiences which can be identified in Chilean fan magazines of the 1940s, focusing on the case of Ecran, the main specialised film fan magazine of the period. It derives from a broader ongoing research project which investigates historical cinemagoing practices in the city of Santiago, looking to map movie theatres and film experiences from the past. Following the film consumption and reception focus present in much of ‘new cinema history’, which examines cinema as a site of social and cultural exchange (Maltby, Biltereyst and Meers 2011), this research aims to reconstruct audiences’ experiences and to situate them as part of local cinema history, understanding this as a social history of film cultures that goes beyond films themselves. This point of view aims to reposition audiences within film studies, as empirical research can assist us in contesting the idea of a single universal ‘spectator’, and can allow us to discuss the specificities of local audiences in greater detail.

We will therefore refer here to different audiences formed in relation to the circulation of texts, images and objects produced by the mediatisation of culture (Warner 2002) in Chile. We will consider being part of the audience as a condition, ‘a mode of existence of subjects’ (Mata 2001, 187) within their social context. During the 1940s, both the cinema and print media industries were part of the same media ecology, in which film fan magazines mediated audiences’ film experiences. We are interested therefore in analysing how such fan magazines can reveal some characteristics of historical audiences, either directly, by giving space to their voices and/or describing audience behaviour, or indirectly, by targeting particular articles at an implicit audience that went to the movies and read the magazines.