Interpreting films

Staiger contends that looking at how past audiences reacted to films can enrich the study of movies as cultural products. In her view, films carry no fixed meaning inside them. Interpretations vary across history, shaped by social, political and economic conditions and by the ways viewers picture themselves.

After setting out a method for studying reception, she applies it mainly by examining how audiences responded to particular films at particular moments. Her case studies run from Uncle Tom's Cabin and Birth of a Nation to Zelig and Personal Best.

Throughout, she pays close attention to how class, gender, sexual preference, race and ethnicity shape what viewers take from a film. Her approach draws on post-structuralism, cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis and cultural studies, and it engages current reader-response models in literary and film scholarship while proposing another way to think about historical readers and spectators.