The Taste of the Cinema-goers in Rasht

In the heart of all life's events, there has always been an interest and need toward cultural and artistic issues. In daily life, people perceive the absence of these requirements which they try to meet during their leisure time. These needs actually refer to people's tastes and preferences according to which they organize their pastime. Every social setting provokes its own inclination toward special kinds of commodities. Every individual has got their own distinct preferences which are part their cultural identities. People are interested in different leisure activities including music, movies, theater, sports, etc. Among the wide range of leisure activities, cinema is considered to be one of the leading pastimes in today’s modern world. The tastes of individuals in the society, as part of their cultural capital, are rooted in their habitus and grow under the influence of different factors such as social status, education, place of residence, etc. The theoretical approach which studies this phenomenon is Pierre Bourdieu's cultural capital theory. Analyzing different tastes of individuals, he believes that although charisma ideology considers interest in the legal culture as a kind of divine gift, the scientific observation shows that cultural needs are not formed by themselves but are the result of education. According to Bordieu, life style is the product of habitus which are obtained due to interaction and based on formats of habitus and are turned into systems of signs which are socially valued. Individuals’ life style results in taste formation and because of this Bordieu associates taste with habitus and believes that in the formation of tastes, attitudes are of prime importance. In the present study, applying Bordieu’s theory, the main hypothesis is as the following: It seems that the cinematic tastes and choices for sparing pastime are influenced by the real social life situations which are related to the action and mind of the individuals. The present paper is both quantitive and qualitative in nature. To analyze the cinematic tastes of the cinema-goers, in the quantative method questionnaire and in the qualitative method interview with experts in the field have been applied. To design a questionnaire which directly and indirectly illustrates the cinematic tastes, some of the questions are chosen to be researcher-made and some are inspired by Pier Bordieu’s ready-made questions on cinema-goers in Paris. In the present study, applying Bordieu’s theory, the main hypothesis is as the following: It seems that the cinematic tastes and choices for sparing pastime are influenced by the real social life situations which are related to the action and mind of the individuals. The population of the research includes the cinema-goers in Rasht (thoes who go to cinemas to watch movies). An attempt has been made to detect the effect of independent variables as: economical status, social status, education, age, etc on the dependent variables as the cinematic taste and the act of cinema-going. The effect of cinema-going as the independent variable on the cinematic taste as the dependent variable has been also analyzed. The thorough analysis of the population including 378 cinema-goers through relevant statistical tests revealed that economical status, social status, education, place of residence, etc are the main factors which exert a dominant impact on the formation of the cinematic tastes. Concerning the relationship between age and cinematic tastes, it further became known that, age has no effect on the cinematic taste and people in different ages have different cinematic tastes.