A rough ride: strenuous spectatorship and the early cinema of assaults

Abstract

This essay revisits the question of masculinity and early cinema to explore the construction of strenuous spectatorship – a gendered mode of mediated engagement emerging in the late nineteenth century at the intersection of cinema and war. Combining voyeuristic distance with a somatic sense of risk, strenuous spectatorship offers the paradoxical provision of ‘authentic’ embodied experience through the mediated thrills of screen violence. Looking to the figures of the war correspondent and the thrill-seeking soldier alongside the charge films and battle reenactments of the Spanish-American and Philippine-American wars, the essay analyzes how such representations functioned to transform the very act of observation into a specifically manly activity. In contrast to accounts emphasizing the disembodied identification of the male spectator with the apparatus, here the visceral appeals of cinematic assault are seen to circulate within the context of the strenuous life, in which intense, immediate sensation was understood as primitive balm to the enervations of modern life. Rather than a masculine subject undone by technological modernity, in the charge films and battle reenactments the technology of the cinema is imbued with strenuous promise, suggesting that spectatorship – like war itself – might harbour possibilities of masculine reinvigoration. Looking beyond the early cinema, the essay suggests the ongoing relevance of strenuous spectatorship to war representation today, from the visceral attractions of film and television, to the embodied appeals of first-person shooter games and military simulation technologies, in which the watching and the waging of war are aligned in newly elaborate and more emphatic ways.