Abstract
This paper explores how crowdsourced cinema platforms like OurScreen, Tugg, and Gathr enable the audience to participate in the film distribution process by programming film screenings and then promoting them through social media. This exploration evokes what scholars like Iordanova call ‘a new film circulation environment’ in which the traditional mechanisms of film distribution are being radically undermined by new technologies. However, this paper argues the power practices and power structures of the contemporary Hollywood film industry are not threatened by this more participatory audience. They are instead ceding a small measure of control over the film distribution process in order to standardise participation through pre-existing mechanisms of distribution. The paper analyses the distribution processes of several films that were programmed through these platforms. It finds that crowdsourced cinema platforms enable the audience to participate in the film distribution process by employing social capital to promote film screenings. This social capital is thus interchangeable or ‘fungible’ with the economic capital a distributor uses to identify audience demand and promote their films. This fungibility demonstrates how the contemporary Hollywood film industry is ameliorating the threat of greater audience participation by incorporating their participatory practices into a new standard by which the industry operates. It also contributes towards bridging the gap between the gift economy, which places greater emphasis on social motives, and commodity culture, which places greater emphasis on economic motives, as both the audience and the industry are following the same capitalist logic, i.e. to accumulate capital.
Presenters
Simon HewittHourly Paid Lecturer, School of Media and Performing Arts, Coventry University, United Kingdom
