Cinematic Spectatorship Research Articles

The Phenomenology of Animation

This paper presents a framework for a phenomenology based on pure transcendental phenomenology that examines the nature of both the experience of viewing and creating animation. The technological innovation of film and cinema in general is based upon two overarching principles. The first is the phenomenon of the captured frame and the second is the spectator’s phenomenological experience of sequences of such captured frames. It is argued among animation and film theorists alike that the insights offered by the consideration of the phenomenon of the cinematic frame should form the nexus of all film theories. This paper argues that a complete theory of film and cinema should start by explaining this fundamental conceptual bedrock, and that the ‘already-created’ frame of film restricts insight into the phenomenology of cinema spectatorship. The article also shows how the practice of animation is instrumental to the proposition and elaboration of a phenomenology of animation.

Imperial Residues and the Birth of the Russian Federation: Maternal Care, Racialization and Economic Migration in <em>Ayka </em>and<em> Mama</em>

Taking as its objects of study two contemporary films, Sergei Dvortsevoy’s 2018 Ayka and Anastasia Borisova’s 2019 film Mama, this article considers the vicissitudes of life as a female economic migrant and young mother in Moscow, with Mama representing the internal migration of its main protagonist from Sakha (known also as Yakutia) and Ayka the experience of a new mother from Kyrgyzstan. Both films engage the themes of pregnancy, childcare and racialised labour within post-Soviet Moscow, and they do so in analogous ways, each employing a documentary style that we might see as gesturing towards the ‘ethnofictions’ of Jean Rouch. Central to my inquiry is that both Ayka and Iye appeared at a time when pronatalist policies were actively being pursued within the Russian Federation, as part of the highly conservative agenda of V.V. Putin, and yet the dire material conditions of the films’ migrant heroines leave them unable to fully ‘assent’ to their new maternal roles. My article considers each film’s attempt to document the unequal access to postpartum care in Russia’s metropolis and draws upon theories of cinematic spectatorship to ask whether ‘intersectional’ Russophone films can transcend the violence of voyeurism and play an active role in feminist advocacy.

Part II–(Re)imagining Cinematic Histories of Africa: African Women, Cinema, and the Tale of Kadidia Pâté

Abstract: "Le dit du cinéma africain" (The Tale of African Cinema), by the inimitable griothistorian Amadou Hampâté Bâ, is an extraordinary tale of Mali's early encounter with cinema, revealing an equally fascinating story of an early instance of an African woman and cinematic spectatorship. In his tale, he recounts in her own words, his mother Kadidia Pâté's first experience with cinema. This enchanting and edifying rendezvous with the moving image provides us not only with a unique introduction to the histories of African women's encounter with cinema but also to the trans-global nature of these cinematic experiences. As Toni Cade Bambara reminds us, as early as 1897, "operators for Lumière, Meliès, and Edison were presenting, in various countries, programs of flickers shot from all over the world." And in the case of Mali in this tale, movies imposed on the inhabitants who refused to look. This section relates her extraordinary story.

Danger! Do Not Touch: Viral Transmission, Tactile Object Disrecognition, and the Annabelle Series

Abstract: Horror films, according to conventional wisdom, excite in their audiences certain tactile or somatic responses: for example, they might make our skin crawl or cause us to flinch. However, the three installments of the Annabelle series represent a class of films with an anti-phenomenological tenor, one that disrupts the sense of community or shared experience that often results from multiple viewers simultaneously screaming or fidgeting in their seats. These films feature a demonic children's doll that figuratively inflicts on the characters in each film three different types of touch disorder, muddling for them the sensual, tangible, and associational dimensions of the objects onscreen. The series, then, warns us not to "touch" these objects (starting with Annabelle), conveying the idea that visually caressing them might endanger us or make us susceptible to demonic influence. For, in the Annabelle films, to engage in these common tactile-kinesthetic modes of cinematic spectatorship is to risk contamination and even insensateness: more than scaring us out of our wits or out of ourselves, the monster scares us out of our usual ways of making sense of the world's material realities.

The spectator thinks: cinema, education and film reception in the classroom

What are the external repercussions of a representation that is diegetically constructed? How a film can be understood by the audience? What a cinema experience is able to mobilize? By means of a research-action method and from the perspective of Hermeneutics, Cultural Studies and theories of perception, which places the spectator as an active agent in the understanding and communication process, this article seeks to reflect on cinema spectatorship in its educational dimension, taken as object the reception of Through the Olive Trees (1994), by the iranian film-maker, Abbas Kirostami, from the classroom experience, in a postgraduate course at a public university. After an introductory and conceptual discussion on the relation between reality and fiction, and between cinema and education, the students’ interpretations were analyzed, revealing the active, imaginative, educational and formative character of the cinema experience.

In the Infinite Pool: The Cinematic Spectatorship of Sleep Has Her House (2017)

Scott Barley’s Sleep Has Her House is a recent landmark of experimental cinema, combining recent trends in the landscape and slow cinema movements to produce a painstakingly crafted meditation on nature and the viewer’s gaze upon it. Characterized by its manipulation of light and temporality, the film draws upon the various modes of viewing established by preceding experimental movements, as exemplified by the work of Warhol, Deleuze, and Brakhage, amongst others, to test the relationship between viewer and viewed. The film’s further environmental concerns, as filtered through its landscape focus, are explored through the recent writings of Plumwood, Kimmerer, and Heidegger and their concerns with animacy and human–nature relations. The result is a film that tests the relationship between man and environment through its manipulation of viewing and seeing, prompting a more animate and holistic view of the natural world.

Joshua Neves. Underglobalization: Beijing’s Media Urbanism and the Chimera of Legitimacy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. ix, 272 pp. Hardcover $99.95, ISBN 9781478007630. Paperback $26.95, ISBN 9781478008057.

Joshua Neves. Underglobalization: Beijing’s Media Urbanism and the Chimera of Legitimacy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, . ix,  pp. Hardcover $., ISBN . Paperback $., ISBN . Focusing on the distribution of the social along the dividing lines between the legal and the illegal, between the legitimate and the illegitimate, and between legality and legitimacy, Underglobalization: Beijing’s Media Urbanism and the Chimera of Legitimacy examines the frictional forms, technologies, practices, and infrastructures of these dividing lines. The book’s author Joshua Neves argues that “illegality and illegitimacy as global techniques and techniques of being global” (p. ) frame norms of Chinese citizenship. The book’s title “underglobalization” refers to “the ways social actors undermine or underperform” (p. ) the implementation of procedures and protocols of globalization at different scales. The concept is intended to address “the illicit or underworldly practices—often illegal but valid in their own contexts” (p. ). Neves demonstrates an impressive engagement with an interdisciplinary body of scholarly works. Compared with most of the books in Chinese studies written for a small audience in a specialized field, this book is written for a broader spectrum of readers from such fields as film studies, media studies, urban studies, anthropology, postcolonial studies, intra-Asia cultural studies, and popular culture studies. Chinese studies readers should appreciate the ways in which Neves assembles diverse prominent scholarly works: for example, Chinese film and literature (Chris Berry, Lu Xinyu, Yomi Braester, Yingjin Zhang, Sheldon Lu, Mi Jiayan, Zhen Zhang, Michael Berry, Rey Chow, Jason McGrath, Lisa Rofel), television studies (James Lull, Hong Junhao, Ruoyun Bai, Geng Song, Ying Zhu, Michael Curtin, Anna McCarthy), intellectual property rights related media studies (Ackbar Abbas, Laikwan Pang, Andrew Mertha, Shujen Wang, Fan Yang, Winnie Wong), labor and technology studies (Pun Ngai, Aihwa Ong, Cara Wallis), and “postsocialism” studies (Arif Dirlik, Xi Chen, Ralph Litzinger, Xudong Zhang). Neves proposes “Beijing as method” (p. ) by using Chen Kuang-hsing’s concept of “Asia as method,” that is, Asia as an anchoring point for understanding the ways in which diverse historical and social practices in Asia become reference points for each other. While the author acknowledges a large body of scholarly Review©  by University of Hawai‘i Press works on Chinese cities (e.g., Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Taipei), his analysis mostly engages ideas generated by studies of cities in the Global South, for example, Mumbai (Nikhil Anand), Delhi (Ravi Sundaram), Jakarta (Neferti X. M. Tadiar), and Johannesburg (AbdouMaliq Simone). Thus, the book demonstrates the relevance of pursuing comparative urban studies of globalization by connecting Beijing to cities in Asia and Africa from the perspective of critical media studies. Neves uses Partha Chatterjee’s “political society” to examine “the workings of democracy in zones marked by informality, illegality, weak entitlements, fractured citizenship, and other uncertain relations below and beyond the law” (p. ). This concept serves as an alternative to the theme of the state–society relations in Chinese studies (e.g., from Philip C. C. Huang to Craig Calhoun). It offers a productive discussion of “fake” and “piracy,” which commonly refer to counterfeit goods and intellectual property piracy, especially copyright and related violations in the legal context of business practices. The book aims to reorient this kind of research toward “concrete failures in legality, democracy, and globalization” (p. ). That is, rather than legal issues of informal and illicit practices, the book focuses on the sociality of these practices. The book’s examples include issues of housing demolition, relocation of Beijing residents; claims on the city shaped by ambient television, cinematic spectatorship, and piracy; and mundane and informal forms of creativity that are “widely dismissed as mere imitation and yet drive social infrastructures and urban belonging” (p. ). The book’s organization corresponds to the three stages of the author’s fieldwork in Beijing between  and . The first two chapters cover research at the initial stage that focuses on a “representational and ethnographic study of Beijing’s film and TV cultures and their relationship to Olympic-era development” (p.). Chapter  addresses both the production of Beijing as “a set of competing vectors—partitioned between the fading past and the future perfect” and the circulation of Beijing “across subnational and transnational scales as/in media” (p. ). The...

Introduction

Introduction Eszter Zimanyi (bio) and Emma Ben Ayoun (bio) Since the mid-2010s, humanitarian organizations, journalists, and artists have increasingly been turning to virtual reality (VR) and immersive filmmaking for its ostensibly unprecedented ability to conjure empathic feelings that lead to humanitarian action.1 Technology companies and charitable institutions alike have touted immersive storytelling's "potential for good"; prominent examples include the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees virtual reality program, UNICEF's Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality for Good initiative, and Oculus's VR for Good project.2 These initiatives emphasize the power of immersive media in a variety of instructive contexts, including medical training and diagnostics, physical and psychological therapy, interactive historical education modules, and philanthropic fundraising for humanitarian causes.3 Scholars including Kate Nash, Mandy Rose, and Sasha Crawford-Holland have attended to the possibilities and pitfalls of experiments in immersive media within the context of documentary filmmaking; however, these analyses [End Page 154] primarily focus on immersive media's visual components.4 In the context of VR filmmaking, scholars such as Adam Daniel, Sarah Jones, and Steve Dawkins have drawn attention to the spectator's ability to enact a sovereign gaze within 360-degree spherical images, leaving other bodily sensations un(der)accounted for.5 Although immersive nonfiction media depends in part on the believability of virtual environments, the fantasies at play in immersive media—which attempt to make viewers feel that they have participated in something real—are not only about creating convincing ocular illusions. They are also about generating persuasive haptic sensations and legible bodily responses from viewers. As such, the embodied experience of engaging with and navigating these environments demands sustained attention from media scholars studying immersive nonfiction. This is especially pertinent within the context of humanitarian media, which aims to inspire direct action from viewers and to foment wide-scale social change. What political and ethical concerns arise when rendering humanitarian crises not merely visible but also tangible for public consumption?6 In recent years, industry specialists, journalists, and early adopters of VR have heralded VR filmmaking as an unparalleled breakthrough in narrative storytelling, overshadowing an important element of its lineage: nonfiction media's long history of experimentation with interactivity and immersion.7 In the context of traditional cinema spectatorship, immersion has traditionally been defined as the loss of one's self to the narrative; however, Alison Griffiths defines immersion as "the sensation of entering a [End Page 155] space that immediately identifies itself as somehow separate from the world and that eschews conventional modes of spectatorship in favor of a more bodily participation in the experience."8 Following Griffiths's attention to bodily participation, we conceptualize nonfiction, humanitarian immersive media as media that makes a documentary claim to the real while seeking to directly mobilize spectators' bodies through the use of interactive and engrossing tactics.9 Throughout this introduction, we consciously engage the language used in promotional materials and interviews by the creators of many of these works—language that is often steeped in histories of exclusion and a very abstracted, and limited, understanding of VR's typical viewer. The fact that the majority of VR exhibition takes place in broadly inaccessible spaces—such as museums and festivals—means that the audiences who get to experience these works are imagined to be not only able-bodied but also correspondingly privileged in their modes of access to new technologies and artistic works. We define humanitarian media broadly to include projects engaged with both human and environmental concerns; likewise, our conception of nonfiction media includes contemporary digital projects that use personal testimonies and statistical data to ground their virtual representations of real-world characters and locations. Through this framework, our dossier re-centers and historicizes embodiment across maps, gallery installations, interactive web-based projects, and contemporary VR filmmaking in order to ask how immersive nonfiction media engage, discipline, destabilize, and erase the spectatorial body. What types of humanitarian responses can nonfiction media provoke when viewers are tasked with mastering (virtual) spaces through a mastery of their own bodies? The ethical implications of immersive nonfiction media, particularly virtual reality, have received a great deal of attention in recent years, both within media studies and beyond...

The Peasant, The Pagan, and The Christian: Landscape and Cinematic Spectatorship in Michelangelo Frammartino's Le Quattro Volte

As human relationships to the natural world become increasingly abstract and antagonistic, the need to find new modes of being and being-in-common is more urgent than ever. This means re-conceptualizing not only human positionality within larger environments and ecologies, but also re-thinking how we understand the world itself. Filmmaker and installation artist Michelangelo Frammartino offers one such re-conceptualization with his 2011 film Le Quattro Volte, in which he sequentially takes up the modes of being of human, goat, tree, and charcoal in the Southern Italian region of Calabria. Frammartino invites the viewer to temporarily dwell in the spatialities, temporalities, and ontological truths of Calabria which include, but exceed human activity. I examine Frammartino’s film through the lens of Jean-Luc Nancy’s essay “Uncanny Landscape,” in which Nancy presents three modalities of engagement with land and world: peasant, pagan, and Christian. Nancy contrasts peasant and pagan engagement with the land, in which the land is understood and co-existed with in accordance with its omni-presence, with Christian relation to landscape in which presence is withdrawn, replaced by absence and distance. I argue that in Le Quattro Volte, Michelangelo Frammartino, with the aid of the viewer, develops a set of representational strategies that signify cinematic “presence”, suggesting a “pagan” mode of spectatorship in which all things (animal, vegetable, and mineral) are revealed as having autonomy, perspective, temporality, and unity. Furthermore, I contend that this “alternative” reality is not self-enclosed, as the film world opens onto the spectatorial world. Le Quattro Volte offers an opportunity for a mode of embodiment that places us in and among the world rather than at a distance.

Sleeping in the Cinema

Abstract In the 1940s and 50s, Weegee shot a considerable number of photographs in New York City's movie theaters. These photos contribute important insights on the history of cinema spectatorship in the form of visual arguments about the movie audience. This article places the images in dialogue with theories and histories of the disembodied spectator. It discusses the photographer's particular fascination with sleeping moviegoers. The sleepy filmgoer embodies simultaneously the model and counter-model of spectatorial attention. This figure focalizes a strand of theory that associates filmic reception with scattered, dispersive forms of attention that stray from aesthetic or disciplinary norms of absorption.

A dispositif of wonder: cinema spectatorship, pedagogy and the avant garde in 1930s Spain

A <i>dispositif</i> of wonder: cinema spectatorship, pedagogy and the avant garde in 1930s Spain

Sonic Space and Echoes of the Flesh

This essay argues that the cinematic experience for audiences be reconsidered as a cinesomatic experience. Theorists such as Vivian Sobchack (1992; 2000; 2005) and Jennifer Barker (2009) have done much to conceptualise and theorise a sensory, embodied experience of cinema. These scholars, mainly drawing from either a Merleau-Pontian phenomenology or a Spinozist/Deleuzian theory of affect, have led the wave of new writings probing the ways in which audience engagement with film is corporeal. Their work explores cinema in terms of visual and haptic engagements, congruous with a broader move in scholarship towards the sensorial. However, despite the growth of embodied film theory in recent years, there is an even greater need to take the sensorial model of cinema spectatorship to film sound. This essay addresses cinema sound in specifically corporeal terms, demonstrating how audience experiences of film sound can be reconsidered as cinesomatic. By drawing a textual and phenomenological reading of the sound design in Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón, 2013), this essay aims to reveal new insights into the materially rich experience of a film’s soundtrack and demonstrate how a multiplicity of ‘narratives’ converge during and beyond the cinema encounter.

Helga Crane’s camera obscura: Nella Larsen, Garbo’s face, and the modernist longing for plot

ABSTRACT Through an examination of Nella Larsen’s repeated viewings of George Cukor’s 1936 film Camille, this paper argues that we must understand modernism’s troubling of realist Bildung within the context of the classical Hollywood cinema and its invocations of nineteenth-century literature. Starring Greta Garbo and Robert Taylor, Camille is based on the stage adaptation of Alexandre Dumas fils’s The Lady of the Camellias (1848), a novel critical of the Balzacian Bildungsroman, predicating the self-possessing, bourgeois individualism of its protagonist Armand Duval on the expulsion of the consumptive courtesan Marguerite Gautier. Cukor’s Camille, to the contrary, integrates Marguerite, through the legerdemain of classical Hollywood style, into a bourgeois liberal plot of social arrival and self-becoming. Larsen’s fascination with Cukor’s Camille offers a new way to read her first novel Quicksand (1928), not as a rejection of novelistic plot and its racialized promises of social belonging, but as a deeply vexed and ambivalent longing for it. Building on the speculative turn in the historiography of Black literature, film, and cinematic spectatorship–as well as recent work in asynchronic literary historiography–this essay suggests that it may have been a complicated form of desire and longing that brought Larsen again and again to Camille, since she would have been primed to detect the remarkable ease with which the film stylises out of existence the skepticism about Bildung that animated Dumas fils’s novel, and the resolute impossibility of Bildung that her own Quicksand so systematically laments.

A Cinema of Boredom: Heidegger, Cinematic Time and Spectatorship

Boredom, in cinema as well as in our everyday experience, is usually associated with a generalised loss of meaning or interest. Accordingly, boredom is often perceived as that which ought to be avoided. In Martin Heidegger's philosophical inquiry, however, boredom is posited as one of the fundamental existential dispositions that provide access to the possibility of philosophising. My contention is that boredom can be a tool for understanding spectatorship in cinema and, in contrast to the ordinary perception of boredom as something to escape, it can be a stimulus for reflecting on the images before us. To this end, I focus on Heidegger's tripartition of boredom – “becoming bored by something,” “being bored with something,” and “profound boredom” – and the ways in which these forms can be significant to cinema. I then consider boredom's potential for film spectatorship, differentiating between mainstream entertainment cinema as a means to evading boredom and less immersive forms of cinema which allow for boredom to remain present. On the one hand, “profound boredom” disrupts the potentially alienated relationship between spectators and spectacle-images by opening up a time which becomes long – something which Isidore Isou's On Venom and Eternity (Traité de Bave et d'Éternité, 1951) and, less manifestly, Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Eclisse (1962) and Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers (Viskningar och rop, 1972) deliberately arouse. Thus, profound boredom can be a tool to criticise the spectacularised image in the cinema, promoting a pensive spectatorship. On the other hand, the escapism endorsed by mainstream narrative cinema can dialectically reveal the contemporary anxiety of horror vacui, therefore turning boredom into a means for investigating our relationship with time and the image. This article ultimately argues that boredom – that from which we daily try to shy away – has the potential to un-conceal the ways we understand and interact with moving images in the world we currently inhabit.

Trust and Truth inShutter Island

This article examines questions of trust in cinema through the lens of Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese, 2010). With its self-referential allusion to the mechanical “eye” of a camera, a stage-managed fantasy embedded within its plot and image of a dark lighthouse, Shutter Island explores its spectators' and its own cinematic sense of suspicion. The plot revolves around a protagonist who has locked himself out of certain memories and into a fantasy world. The article links pathological and therapeutic aspects of trust with interpersonal and institutional trust issues in ways that blur distinctions between trusting others and trusting oneself, and shows how reliant each is on the other. Construing trust as a type of participant attitude and highlighting techniques used to render it cinematically, the article tracks its emergence and erosion, both in terms of the diegesis and its bearing on film spectatorship. As a post-classical commentary on film-making, Shutter Island is viewed as intricately exemplifying what Robert Sinnerbrink (2016) describes as an action-driven film with “a highly reflective consciousness of cinematic spectatorship” (p. 70), as well as what Thomas Elsaesser (2009) describes as a “mind-game film”. To make sense of its ending, which may strike viewers as baffling and unnerving, and show how the protagonist's seemingly irrational decision is part of its film-philosophical point, traumatic disturbances in subjectivity and “monstrosities” depicted in the film are linked to Jean Epstein's notion of “something monstrous” in cinematic imagery. The protagonist's deliberately chosen fate is interpreted as a reparative gesture, expressing a desire for psychological healing and a way of helping him to marshal and recover a semblance of moral order and integrity under demoralizing circumstances.

“Continuous Performance”: Silent Film and Plebeian Spectatorship in Dorothy Richardson’s Film Writing, 1927-1933

The advent of cinema at the dawn of the twentieth century profoundly ruptured the nineteenth-century notion of spectatorship as a constituent of bourgeois male subjectivity by allowing marginalized social groups such as working-class women, child vagrants, and rural people to have access to a new public sphere. This paper focuses on the British modernist writer Dorothy Richardson’s film writing, which appeared in the avant-garde lit erary magazine Close Up (1927-1933), to show how the silent cinema spectatorship in the 1920s challenged gendered, class-bound notions of spectatorship. In particular, this paper explores the representation of spec -tatorial practices in her film writing and the ramifications of a particular mode of perception she valorizes: contemplation. Throughout the column she wrote for Close Up, Richardson, writing from the perspective of one of the spectators seated in a movie theatre, committed herself to theoriz ing spectator subjectivity in the early sound era. By taking up a position similar to that of the nineteenth-century male urban investigator, Richardson revises the dominant imaginative mappings of London through her dis cussion of the spaces of the movie theaters and the demographic makeup of the cinema audience. Challenging dominant views on cinematic per ception, Richardson associates absorptive, contemplative modes of per ception with plebeian spectatorship to highlight the cinema’s therapeutic, emancipatory function for the underprivileged. Richardson also contends that silent films, when accompanied by simple piano music and per formed in a small, garage-like movie theater, should be the norm to secure and nurture contemplation.

Shock and Astonishment: The Rise of Cinema Spectatorship and What Maisie Knew

Shock and Astonishment: The Rise of Cinema Spectatorship and What Maisie Knew

Outside the Lettered City: Cinema, Modernity, and the Public Sphere in Late Colonial India by Manishita Dass (review)

Reviewed by: Outside the Lettered City: Cinema, Modernity, and the Public Sphere in Late Colonial India by Manishita Dass Anila Gill Manishita Dass, Outside the Lettered City: Cinema, Modernity, and the Public Sphere in Late Colonial India. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015, 248 pp., US$ 29.95, ISBN: 9780199394395 On an initial reading of Manishita Dass’s Outside the Lettered City: Cinema, Modernity, and the Public Sphere in Late Colonial India one might place the book within the existing South Asian literature on vernacular and colonial print publics,1 but a closer study of her research methods reveals a break with modernist divisions between educated elites and illiterate masses. Dass identifies a challenge to the notion of Habermasian publics as arenas of social engagement, noting that a vision of the Indian city as a literate, urbane forum that conversed exclusively in print ignores the influence of uneducated populations and the subsequent modern crowd anxiety that constituted everyday life amongst film-going Indians from the 1920s–40s. Cinema, poised to traverse such class distinctions, offers a newfound social power to the consumer crowd within Dass’s book. The structure of this book reflects shifting perspectives taken of and by the masses, beginning with early mythological films that drew on the cultural cache of popularly circulated folklore and the attractions of cinematic special effects to draw audiences to the cinema. Later, Dass analyzes governmental records [End Page 44] characterizing cinema as a polluting contagion in need of prophylaxis, and then investigates the pedagogical power ascribed to the photographic image that fueled such fears. In conjunction with the archival research necessary for such a historical overview of cinema and mass culture as they coalesce under the social and economic changes dictated by “modernity,” Dass has diligently recovered celluloid films, publicity booklets, ethnographic government reports, and film journalism from research sites in Calcutta and Bombay to bring the study of early Indian cinema outside the lettered city. Early mythological films lend themselves well to the study of cinematic origins in India for their purchase on both traditional and modern narratology, yet Dass’s formal analysis of these films paired with their history of reception connects the spiritual meaning embedded in mythological archetypes to a potential for national allegory. In her estimation, early spectators willingly submitted to the sublime illusion of movement inherent in projection, mirroring the suspension of disbelief required of faith-based Hindu mythology and Parsi Zoroastrianism. Citing contemporaneous ads for the Madan Theatre in The Times of India that deployed sensational language to attract audiences to the cinema, Dass observes how print journalism socialized and produced cinematic audiences. She continues to trace this genealogy of spectacle to the Parsi theater, noting the same trust in illusion that its stage machinery demanded from audiences. Phalke’s Sri Krishna Janma (1918) and Kaliya Mardan (1919), fragments of which Dass was able to access in the National Film Archives of India in Pune, locate the magical quality of cinema and myth at the center of this study of cinematic origins. After a description of the opening scene from Sri Krishna Janma in which Lord Vishnu addresses an awestruck crowd, Dass foregrounds “the act of vision, melding the pleasures of darshan with the delights of cinematic spectatorship, inviting the audience to revel not only in the spectacle of the divine, but in the spectacular possibilities of the cinematic medium and in the pleasure of identifying themselves in the images of the diegetic audience.”2 The colonial state’s characterization of such pleasures is evident in one bureaucratic instance that Dass offers as an antecedent to the formation of the Indian Cinematograph Committee (ICC) of 1927, in which the British Social Hygiene Council alerted the Government of India to cinema’s disregard for chastity, which would lead to an increased circulation of disease. The ICC was then introduced as a moral authority to suppress the supposed vulgarity of cinema, and offered an elite perspective on filmmaking and film-going practices. A number of ICC documents as Dass analyzes them indicate a history of upper class disdain for Indian films that anticipated Hollywood’s Hays code and its moral stand against the representation of violence and sex...

Open-Air Cinemas of Istanbul From the 1950s to Today

This article explores open-air cinema spectatorship in Istanbul from the 1950s to the contemporary era. Since the 1990s, literary authors, actors, and film critics have been depicting open-air cinemas in their memoirs with a certain sense of nostalgia. This nostalgic sentiment is largely driven by multiplex cinemas, which have changed the spectatorship experience in Istanbul. Besides the post-1980s urban gentrification that led to the building of multiplexes, Istanbul’s cinema-going urbanites encountered a similar, yet less frequently discussed, experience of urban gentrification around the 1950s. This research first examines how urban gentrification projects caused the disappearance of open-air cinemas after the 1950s. It then explores how today’s nostalgic conception of open-air cinemas was formed, and how it is commodified in the new luxury open-air cinemas in hotels, art centers, and shopping malls.

Pleasure, Ambivalence, Identification: Valentino and Female Spectatorship

-Kracauer, The Little Salesgirls Go to the Movies (1927)' In the context of discussions on cinematic spectatorship, the case of Rudolph Valentino demands attention, on historical as well as theoretical grounds. For the first time in film history, women spectators were perceived as a socially and economically significant group; female spectatorship was recognized as a mass phenomenon; and the films were explicitly addressed to a female spectator, regardless of the actual composition of the audience. As Hollywood manufactured the Valentino legend, promoting the fusion of real life and screen persona that makes a star, Valentino's female admirers in effect became part of that legend. 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. This conjunction was to inform Valentinian mythology for decades to come-as the following cover prose from various biographies illustrates: Lean, hot-eyed and Latin, Valentino was every woman's dream....