Shifting Cades, Dissolving Identities understanding the differentiated cultural history of nationalist perception in the initial years of independence. ASPECTS OF POPULAR CULTURE THEORY In the literature on popular culture there has been a tendency to conceptualize it as a field of resistance to the dominant culture. A number of strategies have emerged from this premise, perhaps the most important of which has been the value attributed to interpretation.1 Such currents have sought to undercut the sweeping dismissal of mass culture as a homogenous artefact, based on mechanical production and for 'mass7 consumption. Approaches in reception studies have attempted to recover the complexity and multiplicity of viewpoints that exist within the consumption of an industrially produced culture, whether of print or audio-visual products. There has also been a historiographical current which has looked much further back in time, to the late medieval and early modern culture of Europe, which I will draw upon to outline my own approach. The work of Peter Burke on popular forms and practices2 and that of Roger Chartier on popular literature3 show that popular culture is characterized by a socially complex participation and multi-class audiences. While Burke has pointed to a mutuality of influence in elite and plebeian forms, Chartier has noted the wide range of groups — merchant, artisan, journeyman, even peasant — in the consumption of late medieval publishing.4 Such cultural practices and products are not hermetically sealed off from the dominant culture, though assimilation of that 'other' culture — learned, formal — may be highly idiosyncratic and transformative.5 It is exactly this process of transformation that is the object of studies of popular culture. Such transformations are introduced not only through the inversion of hierarchies, or the introduction of prohibited discourses in events such as the carnival,6 but also through shifts in the form and style of the cultural product. Burke has shown how the cultural expression of shepherds, woodlanders and miners was related to the existential rhythms of work, environment and social life.7 But in dealing with the forms of popular culture in industrializing and industrialized societies we have an altogether different, more complex, hybrid and transactional object. As Chartier has noted, 'we must replace the study of cultural sets that were considered as socially pure with another point of view that recognizes each cultural form as a mixture, whose constituent parts meld together indissolubly/8 The Experience of the Spectator In placing emphasis on formal and narrative aspects of the cinema I realize I am running the risk of imposing meaning on the historical spectator, and that I also diverge from that current in the study of popular culture which insists that meaning must be constructed primarily by reference to how different audiences relate to the cultural product. Journal of Arts 6' Ideas