There are movies that enthral viewers’ hearts from the very first episode and can keep them interested and intrigued right to the end. The Lord of the Rings is surely one of the perfect examples of such films that are really hard to pause watching. If you are looking for three hours of fabulous adventures and the journey full of mysteries, this movie is definitely the best choice ever.
Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings film trilogy became a worldwide phenomenon in the beginning of the 21st century and had a deep effect on the universal screen culture. Shot in New Zealand, it tells the story of a powerful ring and tries to demonstrate the fascinating trip of spirit and darkness. The director managed to reproduce the fantastic world filled with history, feelings and details that had exceeded all expectations. All the magnificence, greatness and beauty of Tolkien’s book was now fully realized and found the admiration of its millions’ fans.
Being at the centre of The Lord of the Rings academic community, two well-known film professors and editors interested in audience studies research, Martin Barker and Ernest Mathijs conducted the international The Lord of the Rings project. Their aim was to investigate how audiences across the world responded to the films of The Lord of the Rings and what role film fantasy played in the lives of different kinds of audiences. Taking into consideration the combination of qualitative responses and quantitative results as well as submitting one woman’s responses in details, the project suggested a considerable amount of significant implications for the fields of film and cultural studies in particular. We will attempt to analyze two separate articles based on The Lord of the Rings project and explain methodology, process and results of the research as well as demonstrate the overall importance of such project.
The first article, Changing lives, challenging concepts: Some findings and lessons from the Lord of the Rings project, contains a description of the key points from the international project conducted and gives answers to all imposed questions. The project consisted of three equally serious research stages. The first stage included a three-month period of assiduous gathering of prefigurative information of different kinds. The next six months the audience from all over the world was proposed to fill a web questionnaire existent in 14 languages that in some countries was complemented with paper-based completions. The individual who had the most conventional answers and tended to typify patterns and tendencies according to the analysis of the questionnaire database was then invited to the interview. Some questions asked people to graduate their responses along several measurements, others to expound chosen variants in their own words. The crucial issue called “The Modality Question” was among the most significant one in the whole project (Barker & Mathijs 2008). It required respondents to choose out of twelve terms up to three which on their opinion were the best examples of the genre.
The main reason for people’s preference in Epic could be its versatile usage that in fact has a lot of fluid meanings. The united qualitative and quantitative investigations of the world’s database had acknowledged that Epic could be easily combined with all the other choices. Fifty-six respondents, for example, not only preferred Epic as one of their Modality categories, but also utilized the term while sharing their impressions of the film. Analyzing such responses examiners were able to find the extensive range of meanings of the word Epic as well as drawing an analogy between it and degrees of praise or criticism of the film. The most striking revelation was the fact that the biggest amount of people who favoured Epic genre appeared to be those whose experience was connected with a moral or even spiritual dimension to a considerable extent. Thus, one can come to a conclusion that for some respondents, Epic was the synonym of the Spiritual Journey.
The last part of the project was the personal interview with one representative of The Lord of the Rings audience. Vivienne Sobchack was chosen as a person who preferred Spiritual Journey to Epic as her Modality choice. In the interview the woman confessed that the movie had reawaken her interest in the books which she was so fond of in her youth. Though Vivienne could not completely explain her preference of Spiritual Journey during the long interview, the organizers of the project managed to reveal some other exquisite phenomenon. The woman as well as many other viewers of the movie got used to experiencing the story very emotionally and with same interest, despite the fact that she already knew everything and it was not the first time she was watching it. This looked like a strategic “forgetting” that Vivienne believed happened against her will, in subconscious level (Barker & Mathijs 2008).
The research was trying to illustrate Sobchack’s theoretical interest in The Lord of the Rings movie, not only to show an original and curious phenomenon, but also to discuss it as a vital condition of the emotional result of the film on its audience. The project also denoted that there was going to emerge a new big cultural purpose for film. The Lord of the Rings definitely presented an amazing and skilful work that was capable of arousing different majestic feelings almost similar to spiritual pleasure and evoking common interest and a sense of the communality of these two concepts.
The second article that should be mentioned here is Rings around the World: Notes on the Challenges, Problems & Possibilities of International Audience Projects. It described the particular problems and issues the organizers were faced with during the international audience project and also suggested some new questions worthy of notice and consideration. The article emphasized that the project could be very helpful in preventing such problems as well as offering ways of managing them.
Though the project was not the first to utilize a web questionnaire as a productive way of analyzing thousands of responses all over the world, little in fact was known about strengths and weaknesses of its usage (Livingstone 2003). In addition to the Modality Question fully reviewed in the previous article, this one also distinguished Question six. It asked people to describe in their own words the location and the period of existence of Middle-earth and simply present their own variant of the fantastic world from Tolkien’s book.
Thus, in general the project could be seen as a successful one. The virtue and value of it consisted not only in increasing a number of some important issues that had to be examined and discussed in details among cross-cultural researchers, but at the same time in revealing the truth that international studies prove to be rather helpful in challenging and enlarging humans’ knowledge, outlook and resources.
The idea of organizing such project in my own country seems incredibly exciting to me. As I am from India, the topic of the research will definitely be connected with Indian films. To my mind, the world is not fully aware of the beauty and overall history of these films and has to give them a chance to win people’s hearts and interests. The goal of this project will also be concerned with referring Indian films to a concrete genre and gathering general information about its popularity in the world.
The research questions would be carefully selected during the first stage of the project. Any Indians who are interested in such idea would be able to offer their questions on a specially created website and then they would be reviewed by the film professors and experts. There should definitely be a question of determining three closest genres Indian movies can be attributed to, from the list proposed and followed by a small explanation of the choice. Another question that can be really interesting to know is the general opinion concerning the chances of Indian films to win Oscar and other award in the world film industry as well as emotions and feelings evoked by these movies. Finally, some critics and suggestions of the film’s quality and techniques could also be found there. Then all the questions will be included in the web questionnaire and will be available in several languages all over the world.
The project will make it possible to compare the nature of responses according to the country they will get from. After a complex cross-cultural examination countries with the highest mutual levels of responses will be taken into detailed consideration. As a result, there would appear an impressive scheme of portraying the Indian place in the world’s film industry and all the feelings and impressions they produce. The project will also take into account the length of time different countries were watching Indians’ films, the rate and depth of the watching and various distinct terms devoted viewers used in their responses compared to the most general choices in every country.
So, The Lord of Rings international project made an excellent job in giving audience the chance to express their own opinions concerning the success of the movie as well as sharing their personal impressions evoked by it and even speaking out the judgement. That’s why, similar projects in India would be a good way of analyzing world’s views concerning Indians films and making some alterations to broaden and improve its film‘s technique.
Bibliography
Barker, Martin & Mathijs, 2008, Ernest, Watching the Lord of the Rings: Tolkien's World Audience, Practice, New York: Peter Lang, pp. 115-119.
Barker, Martin, 2005, The Lord of the Rings and Identification: A Critical Encounter, European Journal of Communication, pp. 353–378.
Barker, Martin, Jane Arthurs and Ramaswami Harindranath, 2001, The Crash Controversy: Censorship Campaigns and Film Reception, London: Wallflower, pp. 20-22.
Livingstone, Sonia, 2003, On the Challenges of Cross-National Comparative Media Research, European Journal of Communication, pp. 477-500.
