Personal
The individual context: a maker's own history and style; a viewer's own position and memory.
- reference
- context-force
The context that isn't worldly forces but particular people
Production: a maker's biography, obsessions, and signature — the reason two directors given the same script return different films. Reception: the individual viewer's experience, identity and movie-memory, which no two audience members share.
What to ask
What of the maker's own life is legible in the text? What does this viewer bring that changes what the text can mean?
Canonical cases
Martin Scorsese is the wiki's standing example: a filmmaker whose personal context — Little Italy, asthma, a childhood spent watching instead of playing — arrives on screen as movie-memory, most nakedly in Alice — the prologue, a childhood imagined as the films that furnished it. On the reception side: everyone who knew Hitchcock as television's droll host brought that persona into Psycho (1960), exactly as he intended.