Cinematic Spectatorship Research Articles

From Reel to Real – an epilogue: Feminist politics and materiality at the London Filmmakers’ Co-operative

Abstract This article is an a posteriori reflection on the film programme entitled ‘From Reel To Real: Women, Feminism and the London Filmmakers’ Co-operative’ that I curated in the context of the 50th anniversary of the LFMC. This programme, which took place at Tate Modern and Tate Britain in September 2016, gathered more than 40 films – both single screen and expanded – by 25 film-makers from different generations. In addition to attempting to situate the unique contribution of the women film-makers associated with the LFMC in relation to both experimental and feminist film, I argue that the LFMC’s particular relationship with filmic materiality led the women film-makers to apprehend cinematic spectatorship but also subjectivity, the body or one’s relationship with the other in ways that can be productively explored in the light of recent developments in both film and feminist theory.

The Displaced ‘Dispositif’

“ Dispositif ” is a term used in film studies since the 1970s to describe the entire system of mechanical and human factors which together bring about the cinema experience. It therefore refers to (amongst other things) the space of the auditorium, the screen, the projection technology and the physiology of the spectator. Many of its qualifying components are masked from the view of participants in the system. The dispositif’s purpose is to set up the conditions for a specific type of cognitive experience, one which mirrors and extends (and in some readings, controls) the experience of its participants. The Displaced Dispositif is a performance designed for the space of a cinema theatre, but featuring the projection of fragments of early silent cinema on a coeval (1910s) film projector from the auditorium. The film fragments are live-scored by the sound artist, Shaun Lewin, using a combination of closely mic’d sources on the projector itself, luminance data from the projected image and EEG brainwave data recorded from participants during previous projections of the film. Displacing elements in the dispositif in this way, by shifting modalities, situating in parallel, feeding back and layering, draws attention to its hidden existence and creates the potential for a more knowing and informed participation in the cinema experience. It also serves to demonstrate the degree to which dispositifs of modern cinema spectatorship, which have morphed and proliferated since the widespread digitization of film heritage, have radically altered both the technological and experiential qualities of the medium. By integrating EEG data, the performance adds the dimension of electrophysiological experience to the long tradition within experimental cinema of artists calling attention to Cinema’s hidden structures. As well as challenging the dominance of the worldview propagated by the film industry, the performance also signals a means of re-engaging with the creative potential of the system itself, once unshackled from its bonds to the reality effect and freed from the limits imposed by its commercializing instincts.

Film Writing Adapted for Game Narrative: Myth or Error?

Film Writing Adapted for Game Narrative: Myth or Error?

The Anemic Cinemas of Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp was among the first artists in the transatlantic avant-garde to acquire his own movie camera in 1920 but would produce only a single complete film, Anemic Cinema (1926), over the course of his decades-long career. Scrutiny of written sources and other archival materials reveals significant experimentation with the moving image in other formats and media, particularly after his relocation to the United States in the 1940s. Avoiding standard filmmaking, the artist interrogated period conceptions of the cinematic medium and spectatorship through a series of filmic and nonfilmic works, including Discs (ca. 1945–47), Please Touch (1947), and Étant donnés … (1946–66).

The Unbearable Lightness of Bones: Memory, Emotion, and Pedagogy in Patricio Guzmán’s Chile, La Memoria Obstinada and Nostalgia De La Luz

Focusing on two documentary films by Patricio Guzmán, Chile, Obstinate Memory (1997) and, especially, Nostalgia of the Light (2010), this paper examines some of the relations between neoliberal violence (during and after the Pinochet dictatorship), memory, knowledge and emotionality, both historical and personal. It does so by reading and reviewing the actions, narratives and experiences of a group of astronomers, archaeologists and geologists who work in the Atacama desert of northern Chile and a group of women who search for the remains of their loved ones, victims of political violence, in the same desert within the shifting contexts of cinematic spectatorship. Attentive to the possibilities and pitfalls of empathic identifications and connections, it also considers the ethical and political implications of the interplay of cinema (Guzmán), photography (Paula Allen) and poetry, sky writing and "land art" (Raúl Zurita).

Revisiting the apparatus: the theatre chair and cinematic spectatorship

Revisiting the apparatus: the theatre chair and cinematic spectatorship

A Trip to the World Cinema: The Fantastic Spectators of Felisberto Hernández and Alberto Mario Ferreiro

ABSTRACTWhat if World Cinema was a cinema, a global movie theatre called the World Cinema? This is the imaginative leap taken in two works of fiction published in Uruguay at the end of the 1920s: the ‘Prologue’ to Felisberto Hernández’s experimental Books without Covers (1929), and ‘The Cinema Seen from the Screen’ (1930) by Alberto Mario Ferreiro. Both texts construct scenarios of fantastic, impossible cinematic spectatorship that are nevertheless situated within early twentieth-century Uruguay’s unusual political climate and the global phenomenon of the avant-garde. The fantastical points of view constructed by Ferreiro and Hernández work to interrogate both the promises and the perils of spectatorship in a medium whose circulation was becoming increasingly global.

Cultivating borderland food memories, from field to screen

ABSTRACTA documentary film producer situates key scenes for her work-in-progress film on youth, culture, and farming near the United States–Mexico border, Remembering How to Eat, in terms of theories of memory, place, and ecology; border studies; cinematic spectatorship; and sensory ethnography. The paper argues that documentaries about food and farming can help render a sense of place-based memory and identity, particularly on the border, which is typically characterized by mobility and transience. Such films can help cultivate a sense of food sovereignty in communities by rendering a multisensory engagement with the culinary and agricultural past. Such engagement includes not solely plants and farming processes but stories, recipes, and folktales. The paper lays the groundwork for a documentary cinematic aesthetic that gleans from these cultural materials a borderland sensorium that treats food and plants as active agents that compel us to act in certain ways. This approach can not only help transmit the multisensory, embodied knowledge of food and agriculture to future generations but sets up a politics that includes the plant world, often seen as mere background, in discussions about climate change that are crucial to our collective agricultural futures.

Channeling Rear Window

:Rear Window is usually interpreted as a metaphor for cinema and film spectatorship. However, the film's domestic setting, plural spectacles, and gendered spectators' conversations could also refer to television, which at the time was sweeping the nation, and which Hitchcock was on the verge of exploring creatively and financially.

Gaze in the military: authorial agency and cinematic spectatorship in ‘drone documentaries’ from Iraq

Documentary films employing soldier-generated material were a popular phenomenon during the War in Iraq, as film-makers utilized soldier-captured footage and narration in their films. One of the most successful was Deborah Scranton’s The War Tapes (2006). Notably, Scranton gave the soldiers cameras, and offered instructions through technology while the soldier-videographers were deployed, a technique she called a ‘virtual embed.’ Similar films included Bad Voodoo’s War (2008), Combat Diary (2006) and This is War (2007). A central production issue was that the directors lacked access to the events as they happened because they took place on a dangerous battlefield. This paper will explore how soldier-filmed material is implemented in these documentary films. I advance the term ‘Drone Documentary’ as a conceptual analogy to refer both to the aesthetic style of the long-range surveillance camera and to the agentless operative gathering images and intelligence on behalf of a distanced, yet powerful controller.

Experiential Realism and Motion Pictures

This article sets up a neurophenomenological approach to understanding cinema spectatorship in order to investigate how embodied engagement with technologies of sound and motion can foster a sense of experiential realism. It takes as a starting point the idea that the empirical study of emotive, perceptual, motor, and cognitive processes involved in film spectatorship is impoverished without a phenomenological account of the lived experience under investigation. Correspondingly, engaging with neuroscientific studies enriches the scope of phenomenological inquiry and offers new insights into the film experience. Analysis of diverse films including Interstellar, Leviathan, San Andreas and The Thin Red Line reveals how technological innovations dating from Hale's Tours (pre-1910) to contemporary D-BOX and Dolby Atmos systems have enhanced the audience's sense of immersion and corporeal investment in the film experience. Building on the research of Vivian Sobchack and Vittorio Gallese, I argue that aesthetic techniques including the use of low frequency sound effects and wearable cameras facilitate shared affective engagement and a form of embodied simulation associated with kinaesthetic empathy and augmented narrative involvement.

<em>Electrocuting an Elephant</em> at Coney Island: Attraction, Story, and the Curious Spectator

At the heart of Tom Gunning’s concept of the cinema of attractions is the complex and contested relationship between attraction and narrative and their presumably different modes of spectatorial involvement. By situating early cinema spectatorship within the broader history of a nineteenth-century exhibition culture, I argue that popular attractions (cinematic and noncinematic) relied on story and narrative much more than the concept of the cinema of attractions allows. Correspondingly, I argue that the spectator’s experience of attractions is marked by an active intellectual curiosity stimulated through a variety of contextualizing discourses.

Memento and the Embodied Fabula: Narrative Comprehension Revisited

Abstract Although Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000) has been the subject of numerous critical examinations, the unique manner in which the film’s reverse-chronological dramaturgy interweaves the spectators’ cognitive-analytical attempts to ensure causal-linear coherency together with a corporal-affective sensation of temporal loss remains underexplored. This I believe is due to the inability of prevalent narratological terms of cutting across the current divide and uniting on the same conceptual plane the cinematic spheres of the cognitive-analytical, evaluative, and interpretative, on the one hand, with the visceral, haptic, and sensory-affective, on the other hand. As an attempt to carve out a conceptual ground where these key facets of the cinematic experience can be unified in a nonhierarchical and nonreductive manner, I propose an embodied reconceptualization of the cognitive-formalist concept of the fabula. In order to do so, however, it is necessary to dispute a series of dominant assumptions about cinematic spectatorship and narrative comprehension that automatically come with this narratological concept.

Contested territory: American film spectatorship, colonial mimicry and British Empire

This essay examines an account of cinema spectatorship in 1920s Jamaica as relayed by a British librarian's treatise advocating for the extended use of film in education. He details how African Jamaican women attended mission churches dressed in the flapper style, mimicking the American movie stars they had seen at the local cinema. Like similar stories of ‘primitive’ spectatorship, this account of movie mimicry is meant to function as evidence of the relatively new medium's unprecedented powers of persuasion over colonial subjects, children, women, and other individuals characterized as feeble-minded. As such, it seems to confirm the imperial fantasy of the superiority of the colonizing culture. But as I demonstrate, this instance of colonial mimicry also triggered anxieties about American cultural hegemony in the British Empire because the Jamaican women chose to mimic the American movie stars they saw on screen rather than the other, competing models of white femininity they were exposed to at the mission. I therefore argue these Jamaican women's mimicry may be read as an appropriation of an American popular cultural form as resistance against British colonial hegemony and suggest how further study of similar stories will open up new avenues for thinking about what constitutes resistant spectatorship.

“Gas Her”

The notion of identification in visual media that require user participation is problematic. When images become clickable and navigable, then the viewer is no longer a viewer but a participant in the unfolding of the narrative. Theories of visual representation and cinematic spectatorship cannot fully account for modes of interactive spectatorship because the more the viewer is kinesthetically implicated into the formation and progression of moving images, the more the interactive action moves towards the literal realm. In this article, I explore emerging forms of interactive spectatorship through Stanton Audemars’s controversial Stockholm: An Exploration of True Love (2008), and connect those to a broader critical history of the sociological aspects of cinema. Stockholm: An Exploration of True Love challenges the boundaries of a voyeuristic subjectivity that is free of the tension associated with acting out desires elicited by the images on the screen, by inviting the viewer to become complicit in the virtual performance of sadomasochistic acts. An exploration of the processes of conditioning and reorienting spectatorship in interactive films can offer profound insights into the pedagogical potential of interactivity, especially through examples that push the boundaries of both interactivity and cinematic representation.

The taming of the Bronies

The notion of identification in visual media that require user participation is problematic. When images become clickable and navigable, then the viewer is no longer a viewer but a participant in the unfolding of the narrative. Theories of visual representation and cinematic spectatorship cannot fully account for modes of interactive spectatorship because the more the viewer is kinesthetically implicated into the formation and progression of moving images, the more the interactive action moves towards the literal realm. In this article, I explore emerging forms of interactive spectatorship through Stanton Audemars’s controversial Stockholm: An Exploration of True Love (2008), and connect those to a broader critical history of the sociological aspects of cinema. Stockholm: An Exploration of True Love challenges the boundaries of a voyeuristic subjectivity that is free of the tension associated with acting out desires elicited by the images on the screen, by inviting the viewer to become complicit in the virtual performance of sadomasochistic acts. An exploration of the processes of conditioning and reorienting spectatorship in interactive films can offer profound insights into the pedagogical potential of interactivity, especially through examples that push the boundaries of both interactivity and cinematic representation.

A Social Zombie: The Performative Nature of Contemporary (British) Zombie Cinema Fandom

It may be tempting to brush zombies aside as irrelevant, pop cultural ephemera but zombies have followed vampires out, through film and into wider culture, as icon and metaphor. Zombie popular culture, in addition to movies, books, and video games includes individuals routinely donning complex homemade costumes to march in zombie walks and/or engage in role-playing games like Humans vs. Zombies (See companies like Zed events <http://www.zedevents.co.uk> paintballing, or airsofting). There is even a mobile phone application circulating around college and university campuses, that purportedly helps new students get to know each other through role-playing a zombie-themed game of tag (other mobile phone applications include Zombie, Run! which is a combination of pedometer, GPS, scary soundtrack & zombie newscasts to make jogging fun). This is not to mention zombie related merchandise, (for example undead teds <http://www.undeadteds.com> and living dead dolls <http://www.livingdeaddolls.com>) zombie music, (for example, Rob Zombie, White Zombie & Zombina and the Skeletones) and zombie fan-sites (all things zombie <http://allthingszombie.com> and the Zombie Media Database <http://www.zmdb.org>). The ways in which the cinematic spectatorship of the zombie has transformed, extending the spatial, experiential, interactive and phenomenological understanding of horror cinema within the digital context is an interesting one. In particular the relationship between bodies, spaces and technologies provides a philosophical interrogation of contemporary zombie experience. The performance-centric nature of this new zombie fandom can be seen as a new formulation of cinematic immersion and a new notion of interactive play. In this article I examine the ethnographic case study of combat-ops-UK’s airsofting (paintball, without the paint) event - The Hungry Games - in which I performed zombification. I explore how such fan practices enhance the possibilities of cinematic fandom, interrogating the use of new media technologies in enhancing the pleasures (and terrors) that performing as a zombie or zombie-victim add to the cinematic experience. KEY WORDS Horror, Film, Movies, Zombies, Zombie, Dead, Corpse, Living, Walking, British

MIMESIS AS A MODE OF KNOWING

:This paper explores a form of corporeal copying which it terms mimetic communication, and explores the way it is not limited to human communication but can and does operates across species. Focusing on the way movement and vision can be seen to be at work in this kind of mimetic communication, the paper argues that it constitutes an important form of affective knowledge about both human and non-human others. Taking the work of early twentieth-century documentary filmmaker Jean Painlevé, who worked extensively with marine creatures, as a case in point, it explores the way in which certain technologies – in this case, cinema – can make use of mimesis as a communicational strategy which comprises the key feature of an aesthetic practice. It examines the implications of this for the way we conceive of affective spectatorship in cinema and for the way we understand our relations with animals, especially as we seek to study them.

Valentino’s Lesbianism: Stardom, Spectatorship, and Sexuality in 1920s Hollywood Cinema

Valentino’s Lesbianism: Stardom, Spectatorship, and Sexuality in 1920s Hollywood Cinema Susan Potter (bio) The demand for the recognition of queer history as a viable practice is charged with a long history of similar claims for the viability of certain “hard to believe” modes of existence and desire. —Heather Love, Feeling Backward At first sight, this essay’s title might seem to invoke a fantasy in the sense of a whimsical historical fiction or even an unconscious critical wish—possibilities that haunt much queer history and historiography—since the 1920s matinée idol Rudolph Valentino is most commonly identified not with lesbianism but with a hyperbolical heterosexuality. The most well-known Orientalist romances that book-end his brief but volatile Hollywood career—The Sheik (George Melford, US, 1921) and The Son of the Sheik (George Fitzmaurice, US, 1926)—are often considered key film texts that first establish and then systematically sustain the male actor as heterosexual erotic spectacle. This reading of Valentino’s stardom is frequently buttressed by evidence of his extraordinary capacity to mobilize an audience seemingly dominated by women, a phenomenon of central interest to feminist film scholars concerned with the historical and gendered dimensions of cinema spectatorship.1 Miriam Hansen summarizes concisely the gendered aspects of Valentino’s stardom and spectatorship and [End Page 271] its significance in the history of Hollywood cinema: “Never before was the discourse on fan behavior so strongly marked by the terms of sexual difference, and never again was spectatorship so explicitly linked to the discourse on female desire.”2 The over-determined quality of those discourses that Hansen draws attention to indicates the extent to which Valentino’s disparate star image—both dominant and submissive screen lover, hyper-masculine and androgynous erotic spectacle, alternately sadistic and masochistic romantic lead—disturbed normative, predominantly white, middle-class conceptualizations and ideals of sexual difference and desire. While as a potent fantasy figure Valentino often confounded certain structural differences organizing dominant cross-gendered sexual culture, his heterogeneous image also made other forms of desire and erotic identification visually legible. Kenneth Anger, author of the now classic camp text Hollywood Babylon, was perhaps the first to reclaim Valentino as gay icon.3 Recently, Anger’s suggestive, fan-based perspective has been more explicitly historicized by Mark Lynn Anderson, who recuperates for Valentino spectatorship the fairies and queer men of urban same-sex cultures.4 But the multifaceted nature of Valentino’s stardom is not just a matter of acknowledging the historical context of his erotic appeal for male audiences and its difference from present cultural architectures of homosexuality. As I argue in this essay, Valentino’s stardom also generated a specific queer appeal for his female audiences, one that permitted the recognition not only of desire between women but also of an interest in same-sex eroticism that could be shared by both women and men, manifested as a sexual identity held in common. One of the more productive interventions in recent film studies scholarship that has enabled thinking about the possibility of such historical spectatorships has been the recourse to fantasy.5 As Patricia White notes in her study Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability, fantasy “allows us to detach processes of identification and desire—which are both involved but which are not collapsed—from an assumed correspondence between spectator and like-gendered character, an ideology of sexual difference governed by a heterosexual teleology even more relentless than that of Hollywood.”6 By loosening the determinative hold of what have tended to be totalizing and heteronormative accounts of identification, sexual desire, and subject formation, fantasy theory is able to preserve a sense of contingency, variability, and contradiction in the formation of modern sexual subjectivities. Nevertheless, fantasy theory, both generally and in relation to what I’m calling the lesbian dimension of Valentino’s 1920s spectatorship, does not authorize an open-ended, playful field of desire and identity formation.7 As Brett Farmer points out in relation to his theorization of gay male spectatorship, any cinematic fantasmatic is “produced in and by the determinate relations of culture and history.”8 [End Page 272] The responsiveness of fantasy theory to specific cultural and historical contexts can...

Reconfiguring film studies through software cinema and procedural spectatorship

Reconfiguring film studies through software cinema and procedural spectatorship