In Screen Traffic, Charles R. Acland examines how, since the mid-1980s, the U.S. commercial movie business has altered conceptions of moviegoing both within the industry and among audiences. He shows how studios, in their increasing reliance on revenues from international audiences and from the ancillary markets of television, videotape, DVD, and pay-per-view, have cultivated an understanding of their commodities as mutating global products. Consequently, the cultural practice of moviegoing has changed significantly, as has the place of the cinema in relation to other sites of leisure.

Integrating film and cultural theory with close analysis of promotional materials, entertainment news, trade publications, and economic reports, Acland presents an array of evidence for the new understanding of movies and moviegoing that has developed within popular culture and the entertainment industry. In particular, he dissects a key development: the rise of the megaplex, characterized by large auditoriums, plentiful screens, and consumer activities other than film viewing. He traces its genesis from the re-entry of studios into the movie exhibition business in 1986 through 1998, when reports of the economic destabilization of exhibition began to surface, just as the rise of so-called e-cinema signaled another wave of change. Documenting the current tendency toward an accelerated cinema culture, one that appears to arrive simultaneously for everyone, everywhere, Screen Traffic unearths and critiques the corporate and cultural forces contributing to the "felt internationalism" of our global era.

A study of film exhibition in the age of globalization and the cineplex.

About the Author

Charles R. Acland is Associate Professor of Communications Studies at Concordia University, Montreal. He is the author of Youth, Murder, Spectacle: The Cultural Politics of "Youth in Crisis" and coeditor of Harold Innis in the New Century: Reflections and Refractions.

Reviews
"Drawing upon economic data, promotional material, fandom, and the trade press, Charles R. Acland takes his study of contemporary cinema culture into the busy intersection of debates about post-national and post-cinematic audiences. Acland assesses the cross-marketed media landscape-megaplexes, television, videotapes, DVDs, fast-food, music, and the web-and deftly maps the global consequences of traffic across these new forms of mobilized visuality."-Anne Friedberg, University of Southern California
"We need a book about global audiences that is smart about theory and chock-full of facts. Charles R. Acland has delivered one, an incisive blend of cultural and cinema studies. Buy it, get it, plunder it!"-Toby Miller, coauthor of Global Hollywood



Book Information
ISBN 9780822331636
Author Charles R. Acland
Format Paperback
Page Count 352
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 503g