At an early stage of my research, I formulated a hypothesis that the film industry and its audience are affectively related. Ever since, I have centred my research on the physical experiences of both the audience and the industry workers. The research has in the past years repeatedly generated the question as to whether I would use scientific equipment to monitor changes in my informants’ physical condition. At academic conferences or at casual house parties, many of those I spoke to seemed to expect that I would detail variations in heart rates or sweat levels in order to evidence my proposed theories.

I, however, collected the majority of my fieldwork material via personal interviews and focus group discussions. This chapter reviews these methods. The first half delineates the progress of the ethnographic research, conducted between mid-2009 and early 2011. I will recount certain tentative findings and explain how they have effectively led me to reconceptualise the relationship between the film industry and the audience. In the second half, I address the adequacy of ethnography in the study of bodily phenomena.

Enticement via Formulaity

When I first set out to undertake my field research in July 2009, I was interested in the sensory aspects of cinematic communication and inspired by Janet Harbord's approach as outlined in Film Cultures. On the latter premise, I saw films as a process that strings together the practice of production, distribution, exhibition, official competition, marketing, and consumption. I based my first working hypothesis on this understanding. The hypothesis prompted me to study the film industry-audience relationship as a product of the film process. The work at this stage brought my attention to the fact that the post-2000 Taiwan film industry had endeavoured to entice its audience's senses by means of generic cinematographic language. Generic cinematographic communication, I then realised, permits a transmission of sensory perception between the filmmaker and the spectator.

To start out on the fieldwork, I spent July to September 2009 in Taipei reconstructing the film process of Formula 17 (Chen Yin-jung 2004), a queer romance movie whose box office success was said to have changed the relationship of Taiwan film audiences to local film productions. I set down a work plan that consisted of three tasks.