As a bit of a history geek, I found this week’s cinema reading particularly interesting. Aptly named The Hollywood Studio System (1930-49) (by Douglas Gomery), it described how in the early years, American cinema production was dominated by eight companies. The big five (Warner Brothers, RKO, 20th Century Fox, Loew’s and Paramount) and, to a lesser extent, the little three (Columbia, Universal and United Artists) held an oligopoly over the film market due to many factors, including their control over channels of distribution and exhibition. Today, we think of the three aspects of the film industry (production, distribution and exhibition) as being relatively separate, but during the reign of the studio system it was the big companies’ ownership of theatres that enabled them to not only gain the biggest audiences for their films but drive out competitors who had nowhere to exhibit their own films.

In the seminar, we furthered this discussion of the history of the studio system and looked at the way it defined our ideas of ‘mass culture’. The studio system, along with the invention of mass-communication systems such as the telegraph, created the idea of a ‘mass audience’; large groups of people could now not only experience the same product, as they had previously with books and newspapers, but in the case of cinema, they could experience it in the same way. As a result, there was a perception that audiences would therefore get the same meaning out of film, and this was an idea we challenged in the seminar. Could it not be true that audience members, with their different contexts and backgrounds, would each experience a film very differently? This, we concluded, is the more popular opinion today, but it’s clear that the debate surrounding mass audience is still very relevant, particularly in relation to popular culture studies. The discussion took me back to year twelve media, when we studied media effects theories such as the Bullet Theory (popular in the time of the studio system) and the more recent Uses and Gratifications Theory. The theories present different hypotheses regarding the effects media has on its audiences and the different ways in which audiences can engage with a text, making them very relevant to our discussion last week.