The Missing Piece: Imaginary Audiences in the Ecran Fan Magazine of the 1940S

This chapter investigates the image of local audiences constructed by Chilean fan magazines, particularly Ecran, one of the few specialised written and visual sources of the 1940s. It argues that Ecran’s strategies to engage with readers allow scholars to observe audiences through the eyes of the press, by analysing direct references, such as editors’ descriptions and impressions expressed in screening reports, and forms of reader participation, including letters and local contests. These audiences’ actual appearances contrast to the ideal social images that Ecran communicated through advertising, photographs, and Hollywood reports, which created expectations and desires for modernity not always corresponding to the audiences encoded in the pages of the magazine. Exploring such rifts provides valuable information not only on the actual behaviour of local cinemagoers but particularly on media strategies and negotiations to respond to imaginary spectators. Although magazines have hardly been explored in local film history, these results suggest that they might shed some light on a missing piece – that of local readers and cinemagoers – especially considering the absence of data about historical audiences in Chile.