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Professor Bridgette Wessels from the University of Glasgow will give a talk for entitled, Shifting the perspectives from audiences to how audiences form: the case of film audiences in English regions.

Summary: The question of how and in what ways audiences form when watching specialised and mainstream films within regional English film provision goes to the heart of current debates in audience studies. Audience studies theorists have made the audience increasingly visible; audience surveys have tracked film-watching trends over time; and funders, cinemas and distributors have gathered information about audience members’ preferences and their demographic composition. However, little attention has been paid to the specific relationships and interactions that exist between films and the individuals that generate and sustain audiences when watching them.

At the same time, an increase in online film distribution and film-watching as well as an array of festivals and community cinema events mean that the nature and formation of film audiences is constantly in flux, with film watching becoming an increasingly diverse and extensive experience.This has sharpened the debate about how to conceptualise film audiences and the ways in which they form. Here, audience formation is understood as a process of individual and shared engagement with films that generates film audience experiences.  

This talk develops the idea of audiences as interactive and relational by introducing the concept of ‘personal film journeys' and the identification of five types of audience formations and five geographies of film provision. These shape the ways in ‘lived film culture’ is realised within everyday lives, cultural practices, special events and public discourse. These concepts underpin the idea that audiences are a process – forming and reforming – in relation to different types of audience formations within different types of film geographies.  From this analysis it is possible to identify the social and cultural value of film, this assessing film beyond economic value.

Bio: Bridgette Wessels is Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow. She was the PI on the AHRC funded project Beyond the Multiplex that addressed the ways audiences formed in English Regions .  She has undertaken research that focuses on cultural participation and social change across a range of contexts involving digital transformations. Recent books include the edited Digital Editing and Publishing in the Twenty-First Century (2025), Film Audiences: personal journeys with film (2023) and Communicative Civis-ness: Social Media and Political Culture (2018).