Abstract
In contemporary society, many visual advertisements for film and TV are
embedded in the urban space. People can easily consume these secondary texts
before and after watching the primary texts, and visual experiences relating to
film and TV are mediated everywhere and all the time. Such experiences shape
contemporary media culture, and researchers have tried to understand the
logic of the reception of these texts. However, previous studies assumed the
ubiquity of these texts and neglected the historical process in which visual
advertisements came to be utilized. For understanding ubiquitously mediated
visual experiences, it is important to construct histories of these secondary
texts. From this viewpoint, this research investigates when and how exhibitors
started to utilize visual advertisements for newly released films, and analyzes
the reception of such materials.
Focusing the discussion on the oldest cinema trade magazines published
first around 1930—Kokusaieigashinbun and Kinemashuho—this paper shows
how from the late 1920s, film exhibitors began to embed visual advertisements
in urban space to attract emerging audiences on the move. During the 1920s,through the reformation of transportation systems, urban audiences could move
more freely among entertainment districts such as Asakusa, Ginza and Shinjuku.
Given this possibility of moving around, film exhibitors had to make an
effort to draw them to their own movie theaters. Consequently, on the one
hand, vicarious film experiences were mediated through such materials in the
context of time and space, without being related to actual watching practices;
while on the other, film experiences as expectation/memory were persistently
mediated before/during/after watching films by the relay of filmic images. In
these two ways, film experiences were redefined and became ubiquitously
mediated.
