"Semio-pragmatics, an approach to the study of film and audiovisual media first proposed by Roger Odin in the early 1980s, shifted the focus from textual analysis to the interaction of text and context and to the institutional modes of framing and reading which shape the viewer's engagement with the film. A response to an impasse in post-1968 film semiotics and semio-psychoanalytical approaches to film spectatorship, semio-pragmatics contributed significantly to the further development of film studies alongside such approaches as Cultural Studies, neo-formalism, historical reception studies and the phenomenology of film. At the same time, by expanding the scope of inquiry beyond the dispositive of cinema from the outset to include home movies and mobile phone films, semio-pragmatics defined film studies as a field rather than a discipline exclusively focused on the cinephile canon, thus anticipating the current shape of that field by more than two decades."--"Abstract" of the introduction by Hediger, page 11. "Spaces of Communication" offers a concise introduction to semio-pragmatics and condenses the intellectual trajectory of one of the foundational figures of film studies into a relatively short and accessible volume. It is a book which testifies to the author's deep and rich intellectual engagement with a vast array of objects ranging from the classics of the cinephile canon to television news programs, home movies and mobile phone films.
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