Caetlin Benson-Allott, The Stuff of Spectatorship: Material Cultures of Film and Television

Abstract

In The Stuff of Spectatorship, Caetlin Benson-Allott turns an expert eye on the material culture that embeds, situates and shapes popular media, its production and consumption. Material culture, with its broad and interdisciplinary understanding, allows the author to cast a wide net to examine the ways in which ‘the stuff around media’ inflects what is on-screen, how it got there, the framing of it, and viewer engagement towards a nuanced and holistic understanding of film and television, their history and culture. What drives the book is an interest in the messy and tangled ecosystem of contemporary American film and television. Focusing deliberately on the web of interconnections that shape and perpetuate the media system, and that affect creators, consumers and content, the book seeks to move beyond narrow medium- and genre-specific analysis to expand understandings of context for popular media and offer critique of existing scholarship. There exists a body of scholarship that addresses the infrastructure and hardware of cinema as well as exhibition spaces and settings, starting with early cinema and travelling exhibitors. Studies of film reception have also examined the physical and social spaces of cinema, actual audiences and the material cultures of cinemagoing. Yet Benson-Allott’s book does not locate itself within this scholarship; rather it distinguishes itself from studies of technology, apparatus and infrastructure, as well as scholarship on embodied engagement with media, or ‘specific sites of media consumption’ (p. 2).