> I agree completely. There seems to be a large gap in film scholarship > between the filmmaker's intentions and the audience's reading. The viewer > as active participant is too often ignored. > The anecdoct about "Beauty and the Beast" brings to mind my experience with Hitchcock's "Psycho". A friend told me that she went to see it at a matinee with her new husband just after it came out. She really didn't pay attention to film and television at the time and didn't really know what the film was about. In a darkened theatre with only a half dozen other people, she said that the film disturbed her a great deal for some time with nightmares. I went to see it about five years ago with a college audience that laughed all the way through it. In this case, perhaps the audience reading of the film changed and the viewing circumstances were different. I know I find the film a little disturbing when I see it alone and humorous in a crowd. I'm still waiting for a small dilapitated theatre in a small rural town to run "The Last Picture Show" on the last night they're open -- now that would produce an interesting audience reading of a film. RAND ------------------------------------------------- Randy A. Riddle, Winston-Salem, NC [log in to unmask] -- http://www.infi.net/~rriddle ------------------------------------------------- ---- To signoff SCREEN-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF SCREEN-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]