What does audience research have to teach us about the relations between cinema and other cultural traditions (theater, literature, etc)? How do its findings query the claims made by other less empirical approaches to the issues raised by adaptations and cross-overs? In this essay I draw on three projects that, among those I have been involved with across more than twenty years, have produced especially relevant evidence. But I begin and end with some critical reflections on the dominant ways in which this issue has been framed within film studies.

The question of the relations between watching films, and watching them as films – that is, with their distinctively filmic characteristics as a main ground for audience engagement with them – has a long and complicated history. There is nothing special about that fact in itself. Very many fields of cultural and artistic endeavor have undergone equivalent debates – with both persistent tensions and episodic crises. Theater, literature, poetry, music, painting, and many more at various points in their history have been riven by challenges centered around the question of their specificity as “media.” Theater, for instance, experienced a rolling crisis in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with critical battles and audience riots, over the “proper” nature of plays and dramatic experience. Classical music underwent its crisis just a few years later, but in a rather different form, with the simultaneous rise of atonal music and of popular forms such as jazz. Poetry underwent a sharp confrontation in the early 1960s between those associated with the rise of the Mersey Poets – who stressed the accessibility of poetry, and were willing to that end to associate it with jazz, painting, dance, and comedy – and an older group who saw this as cheapening distinctively “poetic language.” In a number of media (patchwork and pottery are two examples), attempts to promote an art version (art quilts, and studio pottery) of what had predominantly been understood as crafts have engendered debates over what should count as the proper criteria for quality. Each of these histories is distinctive, but collectively they appear often to cover much of the same ground – to which Pierre Bourdieu's account of the clashes between “high” and “low” orientations to art continue to seem very pertinent.