ABSTRACT
Context matters. The experience of watching a movie or television show depends not just on the audiovisual text itself, but on the audience, the venue, and the technology used to exhibit it. While close study of film and television texts themselves remains a central component of media scholarship, over the past few decades film and media studies has increasingly recognized that pure textual analysis misses crucial components of how these media function. Studies such as Anna McCarthy’s 2001 book Ambient Television (on television viewing outside the home) and Barbara Klinger’s 2006 work Beyond the Multiplex (on the varying ways viewers use films in their post-theatrical releases) have highlighted the importance of exhibition context by focusing their attentions not on media texts themselves, but on the ramifications of the varied places and ways in which television and cinema are consumed.
