Inside the gaze: the fiction film and its spectator

Abstract

Inside the Gaze combines continental and Anglo-American theory to answer questions such as: In what way does film address its spectator? How does the film prefigure the spectator? Is the film aware of its orientation towards its spectator? And to what extent does it posit itself as the spectator's lead? Francesco Casetti assumes that the film addresses an ideal interlocutor whose essential features contribute to its form.Inside the Gaze, articulates the relationship between spectator and film text around three metaphors: film signals the presence of its spectator, film assigns the spectator a specific place, and film guides its spectator along a path. These metaphors help to explore a range of issues that are crucial for cinema studies, such as enunciation, point of view, subjectivity, focalization, perspective, etc. Casetti illustrates his position with a careful analysis of a wide range of films such as Gone with the Wind, De Sanctis' Bitter Rice, Antonioni's Cronaca di un Amore, Bunuel's El, Welles' Citizen Kane and F for Fake, and Hitchcock's Stage Fright and Vertigo.It stands at a key juncture in film studies, consolidating the gains of semiotic and textual analysis while pointing toward the social analysis of viewers and the uses they make of films. Inside the Gaze represents a major contribution to the second phase of cinema semiotics, coming after a decade of important continental work on psychoanalysis and the theory of ideology, and after muck Anglo-American work in film history and reception studies, Francesco Casetti claims to look at the fashionable idea that a film inscribes or posits, its spectator and guides that spectator along a path, but by the book's end, he has developed the concept of cinematic enunciation so that it is to initiate, coordinate, and validate the enterprise of cinema itself. All readers of this short volume will come away newly sensitive to the incredible complexity of that enterprise, and will acquire tools to analyze the inner workings of narrative films and the outer workings of films with spectators.