We are excited to announce a special talk by Aslı Ildır on Friday, May 16, at 12:30 in FFB-011
Title: Marketing the New Cinephilia and “Disciplining the Audience”: Audience Experiences with MUBI
Through the case of MUBI (“a streaming service specialized in curated cinema”), this research inquires into the changing audience habits with the proliferation of video-on-demand services and the discourse of control and choice, increased mobility, and democratic access. Drawing on in-depth interviews with subscribers of MUBI Turkey, the research explores the ways the audience relates to the imagined audience that MUBI assumes, promotes, and celebrates as a cultural gatekeeper and artistic patron/expert; and how, in turn, being a MUBI user becomes a sign of cultural taste. This study argues that even though users appreciate MUBI’s limited choice model compared to Netflix, they still experience feelings such as frustration, stress, and inadequacy. These feelings mainly result from MUBI’s artistic authority over them, established through the discourse of expertise/artistic patronage and limited-time model. On the other hand, users do not automatically accept the service’s expertise. Some are more critical of it than other VOD services (such as Netflix) because they consider watching MUBI a form of ‘intellectual labor’. Even though MUBI discursively maintains the long-standing dichotomies of niche-mainstream, arthouse-popular cinema, or high-lowbrow culture, the users experience these dichotomies more complexly according to their multiple subject positions.
Biography
Aslı Ildır currently holds a postdoctoral research position at Kadir Has University, where she works on the TÜBİTAK project titled Film Studies in Turkey and the ‘New Spirit of Capitalism’, supervised by Prof. Dr. Bülent Diken. She completed her joint Ph.D. in Film and Visual Culture at the University of Antwerp and in Design, Technology, and Society at Koç University. She earned her Master’s degree in Film and Television from Bahçeşehir University and a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and International Relations from Boğaziçi University. Her doctoral research focuses on the discourse of choice and control associated with video-on-demand services, as well as the changing patterns of film and television viewership. She also works as an editor and film critic for Turkey’s leading film magazine, Altyazı, and has participated as a film critic and journalist in the Talent Campus programs at the Berlin and Sarajevo Film Festivals.