A REVIEW AND

In the last two decades, film studies has effectively expanded the sites of its discipline to include political economy, reception studies and discourse analysis. In part, this is a response to what has been perceived as attempts by other disciplines, like communication studies and cultural studies, to colonize the study of film. Within the field, there is an increased sensitivity to the need to establish standards and methods of measurement which avoid the errors and excesses associated with critical approaches such as auteurism, ideological analysis, aesthetics and metapsychoanalytic theory. These humanities-based approaches are often considered problematic because of their assumption that artifacts can be usefully evaluated apart from their institutional and discursive contexts. Since the 1980s, the tradition of reading artistic “signatures ” in films by certain “auteurs, ” or the interpretation of individual films as ideology or “deep structure, ” for example, has slowly been replaced by more formal approaches, including institutional analysis and reception studies. Communications professor Charles Acland’s work has been connected to these disciplinary shifts: evidence of this is his Screen Traffic which is an attempt to describe the predominantly institutional discourses around “cinemagoing ” during the period 1984-1998. The goal of the research is to describe the way that mass spectatorship is imagined in the North, after the shift from New Hollywood to Global Hollywood. In the end, one of the achievements of the book is that it serves both as an account of the state of things in the Canadian film industry, as well as the state of film studies in the midst of the society of the spectacle. Acland’s approach incorporates much of what is now considered fundamental cultura