Charles R. Acland

Acland has spoken and written about the nonexistence of Subliminal Perception. He was interviewed on this topic on the Colin McEnroe radio show in 2012, and his publication Swift Viewing: The Popular Life of Subliminal Influence asserts that there is no such thing as Subliminal perception, at least not in the sense of spectators in a movie theatre being hypnotized to buy popcorn and drinks by having messages flashed at them at speeds beneath the threshold of human perception.

Acland and co-editor Haidee Wasson have pursued extensive research into "useful cinema", that is, the use of film in institutions such as libraries, museums, and classrooms, as well as the workplace. Acland's Screen essay "Curtains, Carts and the Mobile Screen," which won the Kovacs Prize for Best Essay, from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies in 2010 pursues this concept, as does his reflections on the tachistoscope in Swift Viewing.

Acland's book Youth, Murder, Spectacle presents the results of a study of the cultural roots violence among contemporary youth. At the centre of Acland's analysis is the sensationalization and exploitation of the murder of eighteen-year-old Jennifer Levin at the hands of nineteen-year-old Robert Chambers on August 6, 1986 in New York's Central Park.

Charles Reid Acland (born October 4, 1963) is a Professor and Research Chair in Communications Studies at Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. His fields of research include Popular Culture, Media Studies and Cultural History and Theory. He is the Editor of the Canadian Journal of Film Studies and co-editor of Useful Cinema (Duke University Press, 2011), Residual Media (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), and Harold Innis in the New Century (McGill-Queen's University Press, 1999). He is the author of three books: Swift Viewing: The Popular Life of Subliminal Influence (Duke University Press, 2012), Screen Traffic: Movies, Multiplexes, and Global Culture (Duke University Press, 2003) and Youth, Murder, Spectacle: The Cultural Politics of "Youth in Crisis," (Westview Press, 1995).