Film Spectatorship Research Articles

The Politics of Film Aesthetics: Filmososphy, Post-Theory, and Rancière

The question of aesthetics in film-theoretical discourse today is split between, on the one hand, a film-phenomenological or “filmosophical” approach that values the putatively immanent relation between film and the mind and, on the other, the naturalizing epistemology of post-theory, which reduces the question of film aesthetics to one of poetics. What unites these otherwise disparate projects is the consideration of aesthetics divorced from the question of politics; in both cases, the social or political significance of the film–spectator relationship has been summarily purged. In this article, I will offer an alternative account of film aesthetics that draws on Jacques Rancière’s theory concerning the mutually determining relationship between aesthetics and politics. In particular, I will consider the relevance of Rancière’s thesis concerning what he calls the distribution of sensible to current accounts, as well as taking up his novel consideration of aesthetic distance and the “emancipated” spectator. With respect to film phenomenology, I will examine how its film-theoretical program rests on the flawed concept of a de-politicized spectator enchained by the film image. With respect to post-theory, I will examine how its appropriation from cognitive science of the rational agent model of meaning making inappropriately limits the political potential of film aesthetics.

The ‘Queer Woman’ between Shanghai and Nanyang, 1920s–1930s

This article examines the actress Yang Naimei and a movie produced by her film company entitled Qi nüzi (A Queer Woman, dir. Shi Dongshan, 1928), based on the recent suicide of Yu Meiyan, a headline-making femme fatale. Premiered in Shanghai in October 1928, Yang took the film on tour in British and Dutch colonies across Nanyang (today’s Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia) between 1929 and 1931. This first film company founded by a woman in China and its sole film output have sunk into oblivion in Chinese film historiography. I argue that this disappearance reflects two acts of negligence: the negligence of the ‘queer woman’ (qi nüzi) vis-à-vis the canonical ‘new woman’ (xin nüxing), and that of diasporic/Sinophone film spectatorship outside China proper. Drawing on a miscellany of texts, this article excavates the forgotten ‘queer woman’ in Chinese film and inquires into the historical conditions that contributed to her omission. It also charts the cultural exchanges of films, performances, and discourses between Shanghai and Nanyang, illuminating the complexities and ambiguities of screening and performing in these interstitial spaces.

In the Mood for Heideggerian Boredom? Film Viewership as Being-in-the-World

In this article, I engage with Shawn Loht’s argument concerning film viewing as being-in-the-world, developed in his book Phenomenology of Film: A Heideggerian Account of the Film Experience (2017), focusing on the aesthetics of mood with particular attention to boredom. I elaborate on a phenomenological ontology of the film experience and its perceptual “rules” which hinge on aesthetic choices: what kind of world does the film open up for the viewer? Loht’s account of viewing Dasein enables us to deepen phenomenological approaches regarding the relationship between (cinematic) moods and (filmic) understanding, and through his engagement with Mitsein, to expand on film spectatorship conceived as a relation with a shared film world. I look at how Heideggerian boredom can elicit spectatorial experiences and disclosure of meaning, as well as allowing characters’ being in the film world. A broader engagement with cinematic moods is also conducive to exploring limits and potentialities of a possible Heideggerian film-philosophy. To illustrate some of these points, I discuss Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car (2021), wherein boredom is consistently awakened through aesthetic strategies of dead-time, silence, slowness and repetition. In the film, the mood of boredom, but also that of love and grief as world-disclosing moods which produce a radical change in our being-in-the-world, is a way to establish a sense of our embeddedness, orient our understanding and disclose our finitude and solitude.

Kino rinkodara ir prekės ženklo tęstinumas: „Redirected/Už Lietuvą!“ atvejo analizė

The analysis of the most successful cases in the Lithuanian film marketing, which has also been related with the use of social media and integrated marketing communication, should undoubtedly emphasise an example of Redirected: it reveals a consistent need to promote films in an innovative way which attracts the audience’s attention and motivates them to watch a film, especially in smaller film industries. As the Lithuanian film industry belongs to the smaller ones, innovative marketing communication strategy alone cannot suffice to motivate the audience to watch the film. Therefore, the film itself has to be either very significant (e.g., a sequel) or, as in the case of Redirected/Už Lietuvą, has to extend the sequel while at the same time be “something new, but still familiar” to the film spectators.

"They Are Just Girls": Clara Bow's Star Persona, Female Adolescence, and the Flapper Youth Spectator

Abstract: In the 1920s, a new type of adolescent femininity emerged in the US—the flapper. This article examines the connections between silent film star Clara Bow's flapper persona, feminine adolescence, and the flapper film spectator. The flapper spectator was not only the actual moviegoer, but also a structure of looking and feeling constructed by the organization of the flapper film, which demonstrated the potential of bodily movement to generate feelings of freedom. Testimonials from girls in the Payne Fund studies and fan letters are used to study flapper spectators' engagement with Bow's performance of the flapper.

“The Hum of the Conversing Audience”: Ordinary Criticism and Film Culture in American Early Film Theory

AbstractThis article seeks to explore the early stages of American film theory, wherecinephiliabecame a site of aesthetic interest and criticism thanks to the theorization of cinema as a conversational medium. Following Stanley Cavell’s analysis of a distinct form of moviegoing in America, based on the casual conversation about movies, I argue that a reinterpretation of Emerson’s ordinary aesthetics has been at the core of early film theory, especially in Vachel Lindsay’s writings. In order to illustrate the relation between the defence of a new medium and the attempt to define a quintessentially American art form, this article focuses on the concept of “conversation” that Lindsay uses to describe film spectatorship and to provide a new critical apparatus to grasp the specificity of film aesthetics.

PSYCHOANALYSIS OF SCENES THAT TRIGGER ALCOHOLISM AND SMOKING IN THE PAN INDIA FILM KGF 2

Psychoanalysis is a clinical treatment approach for psychopathology. Sigmund Freud used it to treat his patients by interpreting dreams and unconscious desires. It was later applied to film as a psychoanalytic film theory Margolis (2013). Many film theorists and critics support this theory because cinema has an irrational relationship with the spectator's subconscious. Neither view nor Psychoanalytic film theory can describe the film spectator's unconscious Allen (1999). The fiery treatment of heroic booze and smoking moments in the Pan-Indian Film KGF 2 affected many viewers unconscious. These scenes include powerful temptations that are suppressed over the spectator's psyche's shadow archetypes (dark or hidden personality); a suitable symbolic order (Lacan) is required to unveil persona archetypes (mask or reveal character). The film requires psychological investigation. Although many theorists have contributed to psychoanalysis theory, the researcher favours Carl Jung's psychoanalytic cinema theory of archetypes and the collective unconscious. The researcher uses purposive sampling to select KGF-2 as the sample. Smoking and alcoholic scenes were analysed using qualitative and quantitative content analysis (duration of consumption, consuming scene description, the character consuming, and the sense that suppresses the consuming behaviour overshadow archetypes), and five fellow scholars participated in a focus group discussion to interpret those scenes (scene interpretation and capacity of consuming behavior). Finally, the outcome was assessed using shadow archetype variables (desire, violence, heroism, joy, power, and so on) that were suppressed by the film sequences.

Film symbiosis: Embodied spectatorship and sensory (auto)ethnography in Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash’s Sweetgrass

This article explores the 2009 observational-ethnographic documentary film Sweetgrass by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash. Focusing on visual cues within the observational form (a film that documents the herding of sheep across the Absaroka-Beartooth Mountains for the last time), the article draws on ethnographic and autoethnographic strains to explore the relationship between the embodied spectator and on-screen animal. Sweetgrass, in addition to several moving image works, is explored as sensory ethnography that incorporates a form of spectator address based on the idea of symbiosis. The article situates ‘the nonhuman stare’ as fundamental to this, drawing on the film phenomenology of Vivian Sobchak to consolidate this view. Sweetgrass, the article maintains, aestheticizes the non-human for specific reasons. It adds an ethical purpose to the observational documentation of herding sheep across the mountains – a salvage operation of type – and a sensory experience of ‘living with’ associated with the farming culture represented on-screen. In addition to exploring the film as a sensory object in this way, the article devises a methodology bringing autoethnographic research concerning symbiotic human–non-human animal relationships, in line with explorations of the embodied film spectator.

Mary Pickford’s mugshot: early Hollywood celebrities and San Quentin Prison

ABSTRACT On a 1924 tour of San Quentin Prison, film star Mary Pickford sat to have her photograph taken in the studio of imprisoned photographer Sid Kepford, who was responsible for taking the prison’s mugshots. Pickford was far from the only motion picture celebrity to pass through the institution, however, and this article exposes the extent to which San Quentin was a destination for Hollywood’s actors and directors, who moved about the prison with great freedom due to the permission granted to them by star-struck wardens. This article places the Pickford photograph in a history of carceral images, outlines a history of film spectatorship at San Quentin, and reveals just how inviting the prison was to its panoply of Hollywood guests.

Falling into Pam's World

AbstractNarrative cinema holds the unique potential to absorb audiences in the sensory world of its characters. When mobilized in the service of depicting trans* experience, the specificity of the medium can generate deep empathy for trans* lives, an important ethical objective, especially in a society in which trans* lives are under attack. Through close formal analysis, this article shows how the 1997 film Ma vie en rose accomplishes this project by cinematically aligning film spectators with a transgender child's audiovisual perception. Ma vie en rose immerses the film spectator in Ludovic's fantasy world where they are completely accepted as they are, inspiring the spectator to become personally invested in Ludovic's well-being, and potentially contributing to a real-world social environment that fosters livable lives for gender-nonconforming children.

Algeria and the crisis of theimage-mouvement: checkingcinéma colonial’s imperial gaze inMuriel ou le Temps d’un retour(Resnais, 1963)

One of the most cryptic characters in Alain Resnais’s Muriel ou le temps d’un retour (1963) is a returning veteran who edits his own amateur video footage of North Africa while contending with his traumatizing memories of torturing a young woman in Algeria. This article’s fundamental argument is twofold: first, Bernard’s experience of editing and watching his footage is co-extensive with his private interrogation of the reductive, propagandist images of Algeria that he viewed in classic colonial cinema prior to serving in the war; second, Resnais’s portrayal of this process provokes spectators to reassess their own consumption of retrograde colonial culture and its impact on their perception of the colony. Key to this analysis is the imperial gaze that E. Ann Kaplan associates with colonial cinema’s reductive construction of the female colonial “other,” Stanley Cavell’s understanding of how film spectator’s “check” their engagement with cinematic narratives, and Gilles Deleuze’s understanding of politics in the image-temps. This article ultimately aims to deepen present understandings of questions regarding preservation, research, and interpretation that Muriel continues to raise sixty years after the signing of the Évian Accords.

[Rec] and beyond: Spanish cinema, digital technology and the transnationalization of horror

The horror franchise [Rec] (2007-2014) is one of the most remarkable accomplishments in 21st century Spanish cinema. While banking on transnational modes of address such as the ‘found footage’ aesthetics and the imperfect look of digital technology, these films also build upon existing traditions within Spanish cinema and television. At the same, from an financial standpoint, it is the most successful Spanish franchise ever in the international arena while obtaining sizeable box-office receipts in the domestic market. This article analyzes how the [Rec] saga deploys a variety of discourses to appeal to horror aficionados while utilizing popular cultural artifacts to engage national audiences. Firstly, it situates [Rec] within the history of recent Spanish cinema, scrutinizing the generic hybridity at the core of several post-1990 national film products to ultimately study how this interplay will turn central in the constant re-articulation of the franchise. Secondly, it positions [Rec] within the transnational rise of the ‘found footage’ horror subgenre, contextualizing it by analyzing other significant efforts such as The Blair Witch Project. Thirdly, it explores this transnational dimension through a detailed analysis of the different films’s marketing campaigns and how they relate to other products like Quarantine (2008), US remake of the first Spanish film. In this regard, it approaches how [Rec] conceptualizes film spectators as Internet, socially networked, users who participate in diverse, complementary, discourses across multiple online platforms.

Old West, New Audiences: Wildlife Documentaries, Non-Theatrical Exhibition, and the Us Wilderness Culture Industry, 1928–1930

In the 1920s and 1930s, Oregon conservationist and filmmaker William L. Finley toured the United States with films he co-produced that featured the wildlife and wild spaces of the western United States. Using Finley’s ‘Camera Hunting on the Continental Divide’ tour of 1930 as a case study, I explore the cultural context and media ecosystem in which it existed; one that included the bifurcation of filmic exhibition practices, growing a commercial synergy led by film spectatorship, and the post-industrial, 20th century commodification and construction of American ‘wilderness’.

The Neuroscience of Film

In the last decades, the contribution of cognitive neuroscience to film studies has been invested in at least three different lines of research. The first one has to do with film theory and history: the new attention, inspired by cognitive neuroscience, to the viewer’s brain-body, the sensorimotor basis of film cognition, and the forms of embodied simulation elicited by the cinematic experience has stimulated a profound rethinking of a relevant part of the theoretical discourse on cinema, from the very beginning of the twentieth century to the most recent reflections within cognitive film studies and the phenomenology of film. The second line has to do with the intersubjective relationship between the movie—its style, rhythm, characters, and narrative—and the viewer, and it is characterized by an empirical approach that yields very interesting results, useful for rethinking and problematizing our ideas about editing, camera movements, and film reception. The third line concerns a possible experimental approach to the new life of film, focusing on the digital image, the innovative forms of technological mediation, and the inscription of a new film spectatorship within a completely different medial frame. The goal of this special issue is to offer insights across these lines of research.

Triangulation Revisited

What is the relationship between detailed critical analysis and the background assumptions made by a given theory of film spectatorship? In this article, I approach this question by looking at Vittorio Gallese and Michele Guerra’s The Empathic Screen in the light of the method of triangulation—the coordination and integration of phenomenological, psychological, and neuroscientific evidence, as set out in my Film, Art, and the Third Culture. In particular, I examine Gallese and Guerra’s arguments concerning the role of camera movement in prompting immersive, embodied simulation, as well as critiques of these arguments from David Bordwell and Malcolm Turvey. I focus on the special, irreducible role of critical analysis in these arguments. Detailed analysis of film form and style plays an essential role, I argue, in demonstrating the plausibility (or otherwise) of the thesis advanced by Gallese and Guerra. Such analysis is where the rubber of theoretical assumptions meets the road of the material work.

Awakening the film censors’ archive in [CENSORED] (2018)

[CENSORED] (2018) is a feature-length collage of clips excised from international films by the Australian Film Censorship Board between 1958 and 1971, which historian and artist Sari Braithwaite uncovered in the National Archives of Australia. While the censored clips were archived alphabetically, Braithwaite curates them by motif, capturing the numbness generated by archivists’ and censors’ processes through repetitive bombardment of similar imagery in various categories of sex and violence. Compiling and re-categorising this trove of censored fragments produces a new perspective not only into past practices of censorship but more insightfully, into patterns of gendered dynamics and action in narrative cinema. Through feminist critical practice, Braithwaite deploys a ‘layered gaze’ and expands a critique of censorship to a critique of cinema. Braithwaite’s film mobilizes ‘productive misuse’ (Baron 2020), not for her original goal of damning censorship, but to reflect on cinematic fixations (including female nudity and sexual violence) and spectatorial implication. By suturing the censors’ excisions, Braithwaite draws attention to her own growing feminist ‘disenchantment’ (Elsaesser 2005) with cinema culture as she engages with the censors’ offcuts. [CENSORED] documents an awakening of – and from – the censors’ archive. The film evolves through sensory engagement with this archive, and in doing so, provides insight into the comparable – and sometimes complicit – processes of film spectatorship, censorship, and audio-visual archival research.

Być celebrytą, być paparazzim. Fellini i jego postaci w "Słodkim życiu"

In his essay the author discusses the question of film spectator of the particular movie, namely “La Dolce Vita”, directed by Federico Fellini. Since its premiere in February 1960, the movie has produced a lot of controversies, concerning both the artistic aspects, as well as manners and customs. The author concentrates on the extraordinary position of the spectator inside the film narration. He discusses the question of the intertextual place of the viewer both inside the narration and syuzhet. The viewer in many cases plays a role of authors porte parole. The different roles of protagonists are named: fallen aristocrats, petit bourgeois, artists, intellectuals, foreign celebrity. The one of the most important is the role of paparazzi, coined for the first time in the Fellini’s film. It created the aggressive photographer, the “bandit” of the camera. The variety of the roles, with emphasis of the paparazzi, produce the situation, where Fellini brilliantly makes an illusion of fully controlled narration by the spectator. But it is the artistic illusion, nothing more.

Kubrick’s audible bodies: unseen subjectivities in 2001 and The Shining

Abstract Stanley Kubrick is regarded as a filmmaker of complex imagery. Yet the vitality of his more metaphysical works lies in what is unseen. There is an embodiment to Kubrick’s films that maintains a sense of subjectivity, but one which is unapparent and non-visual. This opens another way into Kubrick’s works, that of conditions of audibility (hearing/listening), affectivity, and signs. To think of embodiment from such an audible perspective requires one to subvert film spectatorship (the frame) and instead enter the reality of the film’s immanent, borderless unfolding as itself. This essay applies Gilles Deleuze’s semiotic concepts of cinema, metaphysics, and subjectivity to conditions of audibility and unseeing, a connection Deleuze largely ignored in his writings. These dual concepts of audibility and unseeing break prevailing analytical norms in cinema discourse that affirm limitations via material, visual, textual, and spatial reification: subjective-objective delineations, the body and the gaze, sound as necessarily spatial/material, and the dominance of images in regard to aesthetics, surveillance, and evidence. Instead, this essay moves through Kubrick’s constructions of milieu that are unseen in the midst of an otherwise visual unfolding, and audible in the midst of an otherwise sonic unfolding. To consider Kubrick’s films through their audible embodiment, one must detach (1) the microphone from its adherence to space, (2) the body from its visual gaze. Here, sounds, images, and objects become secondary to hearing and signs in a temporal unfolding, resulting in a cinema that is experiential rather than representational. This opens to an actuality of spirit within the world of the film, offering new opportunities for creativity in the cinematic form.

Neural responses to shot changes by cut in cinematographic editing: An EEG (ERD/ERS) study.

In order to analyze and detect neural activations and inhibitions in film spectators to shot changes by cut in films, we developed a methodology based on comparisons of recorded EEG signals and analyzed the event-related desynchronization/synchronization (ERD/ERS). The aim of the research is isolating these neuronal responses from other visual and auditory features that covary with film editing. This system of comparing pairs of signals using permutation tests, the Spearman correlation, and slope analysis is implemented in an automated way through sliding windows, analyzing all the registered electrodes signals at all the frequency bands defined. Through this methodology, we are able to locate, identify, and quantify the variations in neuronal rhythms in specific cortical areas and frequency ranges with temporal precision. Our results detected that after a cut there is a synchronization in theta rhythms during the first 188 ms with left lateralization, and also a desynchronization between 250 ms and 750 ms in the delta frequency band. The cortical area where most of these neuronal responses are detected in both cases is the parietal area.

VR Stories of Travel and Exile: Forensic Storytelling and the Politics of Dynamic Framing

In this article, I analyse recent VR works that emphasize fictional or documentary stories of travel and exile, and thereby consider an active engagement with the environment crucial to the construction of narratives. In so doing, I re-examine and bring into dialogue three existing strands in film theory from the perspective of VR: an aesthetics of discovery (Andrew, 2007), the idea of liberal and embodied perception (Bazin 1953, Sobchack 2004) and an implied connection between film spectatorship and forensics (Benjamin 1931 & 1939). I then propose forensics as a narrative model for VR storytelling, and thereby emphasize broader epistemological and ideological implications of the discovering spectator. As in forensic research, a VR environment offers the spectator scenes in which each detail is potentially relevant to the story: meaning is then achieved through the discovery of relevant pieces information.