After yesterday’s discussion, I found myself still considering Professor Himpele’s comment about the producer being a member of their audience. The title of the presentation that Ailee and I completed this week was “(H)industrialization: how do filmmakers imagine their audiences?” But we never stopped to think of the filmmaker as a part of their own audience. Similarly, when I brought up a previous paper I had written about the influence of film on the collective memory of WWII, I had never stopped to think explicitly about the influence of the filmmaker as an audience member.

The article, “And Yet Mt Heart Is Still Indian,” by Ganti starts with the description of the Bollywood filmmakers being an audience to the film Fatal Attraction. They are audiences to the film in which they are trying to replicate, attempting to inject their own culture and media into an established media. In order for a filmmaker to make a film that resonates with the audience, there must be a shared understanding of what the audience expects/wants from a film. Similar to Ailee’s comment in class about Hollywood directors now making movies about what they want to see, I believe we are able to distinguish the filmmaker’s role as an audience member if we further unpack their roles in representational media. In order for movies to be greenlit and created, they must be approved by many people, not just one individual. The media must be approved by culture before the media can become an influential piece of data used to inform culture. In that vein of thinking, would modern culture, which is heavily influenced by media, be merely the byproduct of a collection of filmmakers’ culture? I am thinking of the ways in which scenes are repeated, recycled, or at least inspired by past media and the ways in which filmmakers translate their experience as an audience of the original media, into the art and media which they late recreate for another audience.