Thelastpictureshow.docVIP

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 storytelli