Envisaging ‘Visualisation’: Some challenges from the international Lord of the Rings audience project

Abstract

This essay explores a series of issues which have emerged around the term ‘visualisation’ as a result of materials generated out of the international Lord of the Rings audience project. ‘Visualisation’ is quite widely used as a term in film studies, but (apart from some quite precise meanings in production) not much considered. In this essay I begin from some elements of empirical evidence, and through some unlikely encounters that these spurred with bodies of work from outside film studies, I develop an argument for a new approach to thinking about ‘visualisation’. This approach would reach a long way and have wide implications, not least for the ways we think about and research film audiences, and for the ways we approach adaptation studies. Therefore the essay is as much a report on a journey of ideas, and a set of proposals, as it is a claim to a demonstration.