The Last Picture Show

The Last Picture Show

Russell Belk and Robert Kozinets, York University

Unlike the movie theater in Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show, the 2010 ACR Film Festival will not be the last. But after 10 years of co-chairing the Festival, we have turned over the reigns to the very capable hands of Marylouise Caldwell and Paul Henry. Over the past 10 years we have seen videographic consumer research grow, mature, and ripen into something quite amazing. Both the quality and quantity of consumer research videos have grown over this period. The North American ACR Film Festivals have shown more than 125 films and the ACR Conferences in Europe, Latin America, and the Asia Pacific have developed their own exciting and locally-flavored Film Festivals as well.

From its inception, the North American festival itself has always had strong international representation among filmmakers and topics. If one of the challenges of consumer ethnography is to make the strange familiar and the familiar strange, consumer videography has excelled in meeting this challenge. Many of these films have found their way into classrooms and a number of them have been included in special DVD issues of several journals as well as into print journal article and chapter form. With its origins in an ACR Special Session in 2000, the Film Festival is now an ACR institution. We hope that no one could imagine a future ACR that did not offer researchers the option of representing our knowledge of consumer in an audio-visual format. As industry increasingly embraces videographic techniques for representing consumer realities and portraying their marketing research findings, it is useful for our field to follow suit and, in many ways, lead the charge towards finding new, rich forms for understanding the consumer.

The format of video and video editing over this period has been non-linear and digital throughout the past decade. Technologies have evolved and have driven the costs of video storytelling down to quite affordable levels. Thanks to the conference chairs, at the 2010 ACR Film Festival we not only had trailers available on the conference hotel CCTV, but also on the conference web site. For the upcoming Beijing ACR Conference in 2011 we will be receiving and reviewing (jurying) Film Festival entries on the Internet. ACR Films over the past decade have gone from standard definition analog VHS tapes to high definition DVDs. Camcorders have become smaller, cheaper, and more sophisticated. Digital still photography cameras are no longer so still. These technologies have also become ubiquitous as even the convergent technologies of mobile phones are capable of capturing high definition video. And editing equipment and software that would have been prohibitively expensive for the individual videographer two decades ago is now inexpensive or included free with computer operating systems and cameras. But it is not just technologies that have changed, so have the skills of filmmakers. We don’t mean by this that the ACR videos have been produced by film school graduates (although a few have), but rather that ACR members have learned from practice, by watching other ACR films, through videos on YouTube, Vimeo, and similar sites, and from occasional consumer videography workshops and classes. Over the past decade, we have witnessed dramatic improvements in the quality of Consumer Research Videography as a field. We have been fortunate to watch as several stars of the field emerged and excelled in this medium.

The medium of video has allowed experimentation with different ways of representing consumer behavior. Resulting films have varied from two and one-half minutes to ninety minutes. They have represented consumption on every continent. No doubt the medium is best used when there is behavior to be shown rather than the talking heads of interviews. Many of these stories are allowed to unfold without much narration or voice-over, but “voice-of-god” storytelling has not disappeared. Much more use is now made of video montages, quick-cuts, music, and other cinematic devices for sustaining audience interest and managing the pace and flow of the video. These techniques too have evolved and kept pace with what’s on TV and what’s on the Internet. Some films have had amusing topics and approaches while others have been deadly serious. Interestingly, both of these extremes have resulted in award-winning films.

We have had a People’s Choice Award from the first ACR Film Festival, but over the past six years we have also had a Juror’s Award. The latter award also has a monetary prize, thanks to the generosity of Gary Bamossy, Alladi Venkatesh, the Center for Consumer Culture, and the University of California, Irvine. The criteria for evaluating submitted films and the Juror’s Award have also evolved over the first decade of ACR Films. We have described these criteria in several papers (Belk 2006; Belk and Kozinets 2006a, 2006b; Kozinets and Belk 2005). They include the “Four Ts” of topical, theoretical, theatrical, and technical considerations.

This year’s ACR Film Festival showed ten films out of 19 submitted for a 53 percent acceptance rate. The films are a good example of the geographic and cultural diversity noted above. The films focus on consumption phenomena in Botswana, Brazil, China (Tibet), Japan, Qatar, and the United States, with filmmakers from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Japan, Norway, Qatar, Spain, and the U.S. As noted in the abstracts below, the topics were equally diverse, ranging from Twitter, videogamers, and World of Warcraft to Green Consumption, AIDS in Africa, Beer in Montana, Japanese tea ceremonies, Arab Gulf homes, and Shangri-La.

This year for the first time, both the People’s Choice Award and the Juror’s Award went to the same film: “Walk the Talk, Talk the Walk,” by Marylouise Caldwell, Ingeborg Kleppe, and Stephen Watson. Congratulations go to these filmmakers for their powerful and moving film about a competition for positive role models for HIV positive men in Botswana. It is fitting that we should turn over the film festival at this time in its history to one of its top award-winning film-makers. We are looking forward to the next decade of successful ACR Film Festivals.

Brief Abstracts

Beer Country

Caroline Graham Austin, Montana State University, USA

Since the first settlers arrived at the St. Mary’s mission in the mid-19th century, Montanans have loved beer --- they love making it, sharing it, talking about it, and drinking it. In this film, we investigate the historic, economic, cultural and aesthetic values that make Montana America’s own Beer Country.

Retweet: A Digital Meditation on the Power of Twitter

Donna Hoffman, University of California, Riverside, USA
Thomas P. Novak, University of California, USA

The phenomenal growth of Twitter, a popular microblogging application, is testament to consumers’ desires to instantaneously connect with other consumers. Though many deride the seeming meaningless of the ‘‘twitter stream,’’ consumers are putting the application to use in surprisingly potent ways. This video offers a brief reflection on the recursive power of Twitter.

Talk The Walk, Walk the Talk

Marylouise Caldwell, University of Sydney, Australia
Ingeborg Kleppe, Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration
Stephen Watson, e+b media, University of Sydney, Australia

This documentary shows how HIV+ people in Botswana radically transform themselves from AIDS victims to become public role-models of Positive Living, a health life-style that prolongs infected people’s lives and prevents them from infecting others and reinfecting themselves. They learn to deal with stigma, ignorance and limited social or financial support.

Tea for Two: Luxury in Japanese Tea Ceremony

Hiroshi Tanaka, Chuo University, Japan
Junko Kimura, Hosei University, Japan

This study aims to anatomize the mechanism of luxury generation in the Japanese tea ceremony. Based on detailed interviews, we found that (1) Teamwork, (2) Theme-orientation, and (3) Game, are the three key concepts which depict the interactions between host and the guests and thus lead to generate sense of luxury.

Is Green?

Gary Bamossy, Georgetown University, USA
Basil Englis, Berry College, USA

This film examines consumers’ reactions to the marketing practices of ‘‘Green Washing’’ –representing products as being environmentally friendly in ways that result in consumers feeling confused, skeptical, and cynical about those claims, and more generally, about the green movement towards sustainable consumption practices. The public discourse around ‘‘environmentally friendly’’ offerings is becoming increasingly contentious, socially divisive, and politicized, and this film explores these dynamics.

Domains of Privacy in Arab Gulf Homes

Sobh Rana, Qatar University, Qatar

Russell Belk, York University, Canada

Globalization has both ameliorating and exacerbating effects on traditional cultural patterns. Based on ethnographic fieldwork over a three-year period, we analyze how local Islamic cultures affect consumption and marketing amid this swirl of new influences.

Paradise Lost: The Making of Shangri-La

Russell Belk, York University, Canada
Rosa Llamas, University of León, Spain

Once upon a time, there was a peaceful Himalayan Fairyland that was a Garden of Eden, an earthly Paradise, and a Heaven on Earth. Its name was Shangri-La. And now the harried city dweller can vacation there. In 2002 the county of Zhongdian in China’s Yunan Province changed its name to Shangri-La. Based on fieldwork in 2009, we consider the positive and negative effects of this bid to attract tourists and transform the local economy.

Sustainability: A New Consumer Movement

Adam Schmidt, Saint Joseph's University, USA
Thomas Ferraro, Saint Joseph's University, USA
Diane M. Phillips, Saint Joseph's University, USA

Consumers define sustainability in different ways and enact a variety of different behaviors to construct, maintain, and enhance their sustainable lifestyles. Further, those resulting multi-dimensional lifestyles are clearly personal. They tap into deeply held values, connect to communities, and evoke strong emotions. Sustainability is a new consumer movement.

Gamerz

João Fleck, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil
Stefânia Almeida, Pontifícia Universidade Católica, Brazil
Utpal Dholakia, Rice University, USA

José Mazzon, Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil

We aimed at analyzing and understanding the peculiarities of video game consumption interviewing hardcore players that interact in Microsoft Xbox 360 virtual communities. The results allowed us to infer that the virtual experience and the online interaction are key elements presently in the consumption of games.

World of Warcrafters

João Fleck, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil
Carlos Rossi, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil
Rodrigo Segabinazzi, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil
Getúlio Reale, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil
Diego Costa, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil
Marco Martins, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

We aimed at understanding, through a videographic study, what caused the reputed online game, World of Warcraft, to become such a phenomenon of consumption. Our results indicate that the involvement of players results from the achievement of goals, through the manipulation of an avatar that cooperates with others to compete.

References

Belk, Russell (2006), “You Ought to be in Pictures: Envisioning Marketing Research,” Review of Marketing Research, Vol. 3, Naresh Malholtra, ed., Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 193-205.

Belk, Russell and Robert Kozinets (2006a), “Camcorder Society: Quality Videography in Consumer and Marketing Research,” in Russell Belk, ed., Handbook of Qualitative Research Methods in Marketing, Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 335-339.

Belk, Russell and Robert Kozinets (2006b), “Videography,” in Sage Dictionary of Social Research Methods, Victor Jupp, ed., Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 318-322.

Kozinets, Robert and Russell Belk (2005), “Videography in Marketing and Consumer Research,” Qualitative Market Research, 8 (2), 141-183.