Abstract
The catchy title of this slim volume, Live to Your Local Cinema, amplified by its subtitle, The Remarkable Rise of Livecasting, seems to invite the reader into the product of a historian. And the introductory chapter indeed sketches the development of this new, evolving broadcast medium.
How new? Author Martin Barker, professor of Film & Television at the University of East Anglia, UK, points to early demonstration of presenting television images on London cinema screens as far back as 1930 and 1939, followed on American ones as early as 1948. It only emerged, he writes, as a phenomenon in 2006, and has “grown exponentially” since then, when New York’s Metropolitan Opera, now in its eighth season of bringing performances to cinema audiences worldwide, exported its signal to screens in Britain, Japan, and Norway. Among the latest of livecasting’s advances, in May of 2014, was the first livestream offering of Inside Opera, a joint venture of all seven of the United Kingdom’s publicly funded opera houses.
Barker, however, is not a historian, but a more broadly oriented observer and student of popular culture and its audiences. A look at the variety of other topics he has researched and written on show that diverse interest. It is a diversity reflected in the remaining six chapters of this book, dissecting the medium, frequently citing writings by other researchers. (There are forty-one end-of-chapter notes and nine pages listing 104 references. Also an index.)
A chapter on “The Aesthetics of Livecasting” gets into a miscellany of problems in producing this fare. How does it, for example, impact persons physically present at the plays, concerts, dance, sports, or other events being captured? Can it add content? Should it? Detract from it? In what ways?
Similarly, “The Many Meanings of ‘Liveness’” is a chapter, the book’s most heavily footnoted, that gets into “this cacophony of contradictory claims and theories” on what might make, or keep from making, the product “Live.” Is there one kind of live for a symphony concert, another for a football game, another for a play? The discussion does not seem to offer much help.
Two chapters on audience differences and audience preferences focus in large part on Barker’s own audience-survey research, an interest also reflected in his other writings. Suffice to say, different audiences differ, in many different ways. They differ in ways demographic (age, sex, education, etc.) to physical (in front of cinema screens to TV sets in pubs to huge outdoor screens in plazas or other public places). Again, not much help.
A chapter, the briefest, looks at “The Cultural Status of Livecasts,” and discusses the social value of art and culture, their funding, and “democratization.” And a final chapter ponders “The Next Research Tasks,” closing with possibly the most interesting question: What term will this activity, often called by various names, finally settle on? Only time will tell.