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Dissertation Literature Review

By

Peter O’Brien

Word count: 3,289

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Research Title

Film and Multimedia: Reconfiguring the Spectator

Rationale

The topic will be an examination of the different modes of film exhibition to determine how the

introduction of new technologies and techniques is transforming the cinematic experience into an

immersive commodity, less about the gaze and more about satisfying a full-body experience. The

contemporary nature of this subject, in regards to the changes the film industry has been

experiencing for many years now and will continue to experience for many years to come, is the

primary incentive for the study of this subject. To provide a fresh approach, it will absolutely avoid

the “digitalisation is heralding the death of cinema” argument and focus more on how the

technology of cinema is evolving, how cinematic exhibition is embracing these changes and how the

spectator’s experience is changing as a result. The second point that makes this topic worthy of

academic study is the impact this continually changing state of spectatorship is having on film

theory, how film theory has been responding to these changes and how the spectator’s position in

this theoretical debate is shifting. Ultimately, the topic will endeavour to provide an up-to-date

definition of the spectator’s position within the cinematic experience; this topic is worthy of study

because it is focused on re-affirming the primary purpose of cinema – the spectator.

The academic approach will be non-empirical and will focus, in the broadest sense, on an

examination of spectatorship. However, gaze theory will inform a large part of the discussion; as well

as apparatus, ideological, technological, philosophical, psychoanalytical and physiological disciplines.

Key Reading List

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Allen, R. (1997) Projecting Illusion: Film Spectatorship and the Impression of Reality. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Allen, R.C. Maltby, R. Stokes, M. (2008) Going to the Movies: Hollywood and The Social Experience of

Cinema. Exeter: University of Exeter Press.

Balcerzak, S. and Sperb, J. ed. (2009) Cinephilia in the Age of Digital Reproduction, Vol. 1: Film,

Pleasure and Digital Culture. London: Wallflower Press.

Balcerzak, S. and Sperb, J. ed. (2012) Cinephilia in the Age of Digital Reproduction, Vol. 2: Film,

Pleasure, and Digital Culture. New York: Columbia University Press.

Berenstein, R. J. Clover, C. J. Crary, J. Friedberg, A. Gunning, T. Hansen, M. Mayne, J. Schwartz, V. R.

Sobchack, V. C. Williams, L. (1994) Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film. New Brunswick: Rutgers

University Press.

Elsaesser, T. and Hagener, M. (2012) Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses. New York:

Routledge

Klinger, B. (2006) Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies, and The Home. Berkeley:

University of California Press.

McGowan, T. (2007) The Real Gaze: Film Theory after Lacan. New York: State University of New York

Press, Albany.

Rombes, N. (2012) Cinema in the Digital Age. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Sobchack, V.C. (1992) The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princton, New

Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Detailed discussion of 3 key texts

Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film is an anthology compiled by Linda Williams and, in regards to

spectator theory or its sub-theory that is more precisely termed as gaze theory, William’s central aim

is revisionist: “many of the insights into what I am calling gaze theory are still relevant to film

studies. There is still the need for a theoretical understanding of relations between films and

viewers” (Williams 1994:4). As the book’s title suggests, John Berger’s highly influential assertions in

his Ways of Seeing documentary series and companion book form the starting point of Viewing

Positions. While acknowledging Berger’s pioneering influence in how traditional film theorists came

to understand the gaze in the traditional film studies of the 1970s and 1980s: “what all these

theorists shared was the belief that in most seemingly natural or beautiful of visual images, there is

an invisible ideology that affords the gaze it surveys both mastery and equilibrium” (Williams

1994:1); ultimately, Williams is saying that the gaze theory of Berger, Metz, Baudry, Mulvey, Doane

and Silverman is largely outdated because their arguments are too narrow: “the concept of a

singular, dominating, voyeuristic male spectator-subject is in as much need of revision as that other

stereotype: the spectator as passive subject, as pure absorber of dominant ideology” (1994:4).

To this end, Williams expands gaze theory with multiple ways of seeing and, through the nine essays

that make up Viewing Positions, provides an overview of the: “general debate about relations

between spectators and films in important new directions without opting to speak only for the

interests of specific audiences” (1994:4). Each with their own author, these nine essays are split

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between three sections, the first section, Vision and Apparatus, most directly challenges traditional

gaze theory: “by asking whether there really has ever been such a thing as a continuous tradition of

a centred, unitary, distanced and objectifying gaze” (Williams 1994:5). The three theorists of the

three essays offer up three primary conclusions: “Crary and Sobchack eschew the disembodied,

distanced control and mastery of a classical gaze and reenvision vision as a bodily implicated in what

it sees… Friedberg maintains a gradual slide into postmodernity” (Williams 1994:10). Section two,

Historians View Spectators, builds on this by examining the wider contexts of pre-, early and late

cinema to determine how spectator theory has actually already evolved: “much more than

technology was involved in the invention of cinema, and… cinema as we know it was not necessarily

what audiences of early cinema saw” (Williams 1994:10). Ultimately, these three essays are

presented with the aim to dispel the classical model as the dominant and only model: “It is possible

that the homogeneity of classical cinema and of classical spectatorship will one day seem more like

the aberration than the norm of cinematic history” (Williams 1994:13). The final section, Viewing

Antithesis, is the most radical, because this one dares to explore the different types of spectators

who make up an audience: “the classical model of spectatorship, which too easily assumed fixed

ideological and psychic effects on spectators, needs to be viewed… as a more complex set of

paradoxes” (Williams 1994:14). Indeed, the three essays of this section assert that any theory of the

spectator must: “be historically specific, grounded in the specific spectatorial practices, the specific

narratives, and the specific attractions of the modilized and embodies gaze of viewers” (Williams

1994:19), only then will gaze theory be in a position to adequately factor in a reliable account of the

spectator.

Similar to Williams’ approach with Berger, In The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan Its author Todd

McGowan’s draws on the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan to re-examine spectatorship. While not a

film theorist himself, Lacan was a hugely pioneering influence In the film studies of the 1970s:

“Lacan’s theory of the mirror phase and the formation of the ego… was taken by many film theorists

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as a model for the relationship between the film projected on the screen and how this affected the

film viewer or cinematic spectator” (Homer 2005:2). McGowan is less of revisionist towards Lacan’s

views and more of a revisionist towards how traditional film theorists have developed Lacan’s

thinking. Ultimately, McGowan asserts that the traditional gaze theorists have misinterpreted

Lacan’s understanding of the gaze: “Lacan’s conception of the gaze has been almost completely

absent from the world of film theory” (2007:5). Accordingly, it is McGowan’s opinion that Lacan’s

concept of the gaze is highly beneficial to film theory when properly understood: In Lacan’s view the

gaze is an object-cause of desire (objet petit a) – it can no longer be associated with an active

process but acts to visually trigger our desire:

“This special term objet petit a indicates that this object is not a positive entity but a lacuna

in the visual field. It is not the look of the subject at the object, but the gap within the

subject’s seemingly omnipotent look. This gap within our look marks the point at which our

desire manifests itself in what we see. What is irreducible to our visual field is the way that

our desire distorts that field, and this distortion makes itself felt through the gaze as object.

The gaze thus involves the spectator in the filmic image” (McGowan 2007:6).

This definition is significant because by focusing on the unfilled space between spectator and film

text it moves the concept of the gaze beyond “the male observer” and “absorber of ideology” which

the traditionalists were defining it as: “By following Lacan and conceiving of the gaze as an objet

objet petit a in the visual field, we can better avoid the trap of differences in spectatorship that

snared traditional Lacanian film theory” (McGowan 2007:7); which is exactly what is being addressed

in Viewing Positions: “There is, as the contributors to Post-Theory rightly point out, an unlimited

number of different possible positions of empirical spectatorship” (McGowan 2007:8). However,

now that McGowan has used his re-examination of Lacan’s theory to move the gaze away from the

narrow thinking of the traditionalists: “This conception of the gaze entails a different conception of

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desire than the one that has predominated in the early Lacanian film theory. As the indication of the

spectator’s dissolution, the gaze cannot offer the spectator anything resembling mastery”

(McGowan 2007:8); he goes even further and explores: “the various relations that film can take up

to the gaze… The way in which a film deploys the gaze is, I would argue, the fundamental political

and existential act of cinema.” (2007:18). Ultimately, the way a film deploys the gaze is the focus of

the book and McGowan splits the book into four sections: “films that make the gaze present through

fantasy, films that sustain the gaze as a fundamental absence, films that obfuscate the gaze through

a turn to fantasy, and films that enact a traumatic encounter with the gaze”(McGowan 2007:18);

under each of these headings McGowan selects various films and filmmakers to illustrate the

different ways in which a film can deploy the gaze. Using the re-examined psychoanalytical teachings

of Lacan, it is McGowan’s ultimate aim to provide a new means by which film can be considered and

categorised: “Instead of grouping films by genre, nation, historical epoch, or some other category,

we can group films in terms of how they approach the gaze.” (2007:18).

Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses by Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener offers up a

radically revisionist take on all the major film theories when considering: “the relationship between

the cinema, perception and the human body” (Elsaesser et al. 2012:4). While film theory of the early,

classical and post-classical cinema has always been aware of this relationship, Elsaesser and Hagener

argue that it has neglected to examine and understand the relationship as being something

inherently significant throughout the process by which a film text is experienced: “there are

additional ways the body engages with the film event, besides the senses of vision, tactility and

sound: philosophical issues of perception and temporality, of agency and consciousness are also

central to the cinema, as they are to the spectator” (Elsaesser et al. 2012:4-5). While accepting the

post-theory validity of Viewing Positions and The Real Gaze, Film Theory: An Introduction Through

the Senses is about moving beyond gaze theory in regards to understanding cinema (especially

spectatorship) and integrate a wider logic.

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Crucial to understanding this argument are: “the dynamics connecting the diegetic and the non- and

extra-diegetic levels of the “world” of the film and how they intersect with the “world” of the

spectator.” (Elsaesser et al. 2012:5). To this end, the argument and sub-arguments of the book have

been configured to focus on the key contact points with the body and human senses of the spectator

in relation to the film text: “despite covering core arguments from very disparate and seemingly

incompatible theories, the chapters – on window/frame, door/screen, mirror/face, eye/gaze,

skin/touch, ear/space and brain/mind – nonetheless tightly interlace with each other” (Elsaesser et

al. 2012:6). However, by the very nature of its integration, the success of Elsaesser’s and Hagener’s

goal to understand the role of the body: “involves the beginnings of a re-classification of film

history… based on the premise that the spectator’s body in relation to the moving image constitutes

a key historical variable, whose significance has been overlooked, mainly because film theory and

cinema history have been kept apart” (Elsaesser et al. 2012:7); as well as re-conceptualising

established film theory: “we want to probe the usefulness of the various theoretical projects of the

past for contemporary film and media theory… thus of fashioning, if not a new theory, then a new

understanding of previous theories’ possible logics” (Elsaesser et al. 2012:7). While their argument

goes a long way in affirming the body’s presence in the understanding of film theory, Elsaesser’s and

Hagener’s conclusion is by no means absolute: “Our mission – to condense a hundred years if history

with thousands of pages of history with thousands of pages of theory – necessarily involves losses,

biases and omissions” (2012:7). However, this is the book’s redeeming strength – it proposes a

radical new way to look at film theory and then leaves it open to be built upon. This is clear in what

Elsasser and Hagener hope will be its eventual and startling outcome:

“Our initial premise of asking film theory to tell us how film and cinema relate to the body

and the senses thus may well lead to another question… namely whether-when putting the

body and senses at the centre of film theory-the cinema is not proposing to us, besides a

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new way of knowing the world, also a new way of ‘being in the world’, and thus demanding

from film theory, next to a new epistemology also a new ontology” (2012:12).

In his preface, McGowan claims: “Film theory today is almost nonexistent. The universalizing claims

about cinematic experience made by figures such as Sergei Eisenstein, Andre Bazin, Christian Metz,

and Laura Mulvey have disappeared. Contemporary film scholars are increasingly content to make

local, particular claims about film” (2007:ix), of course The Real Gaze was published five years before

Film Theory and this assertion may have gone a long way in assisting Elsaesser and Hagener to

develop their argument. However, while this claim could also be seen as an expression of

McGowan’s own self-importance, it does raise the question of just how universalising the film theory

of the last twenty years has actually been. The collection of ideas that makes up Viewing Positions,

published nearly twenty years ago, certainly shows a universalizing claim to the contrary – in this

case that spectator theory needs to be re-thought to actually consider the spectator and the

different ideologies which are generated from a plenitude of spectators. In this light, Viewing

Positions is cut from the same theoretical cloth as The Real Gaze and, therefore, probably is not

what McGowan is referring to when claiming film theory is dead. However, this stance is indicative

of McGowan’s whole approach and exposes a fault – he believes his argument to be absolute!

Viewing Positions and Film Theory are both very clear in establishing themselves as introductions for

further discussion. While McGowan does want his system of categorising films according to how a

films deploy the gaze to be utilised, in his mind there are only four ways in which a film can deploy

the gaze; at no point is the question of more raised. In his preface McGowan says the reason why

the universalising claims have disappeared is because what used to be film theory has become:

“focus on particularity-that is, the analysis of isolated phenomena-completely dominates the field of

film studies” (2007:ix). However, it is this analysis of isolated phenomena in the last twenty years

that has been gradually picking apart the arguments of the traditional theorists and identifying their

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faults. A picking apart which The Real Gaze would be well served by, not least with McGowan’s

criteria for how a film deploys a gaze!

However, universalising claims are still healthy for film studies and the single unifying cause that

permeates throughout Viewing Positions, The Real Lacan and Film Theory is the search for the

spectator and an understanding of the influence that spectator, in his ideological multitudes, has on

the filmic experience – this is a truly huge universalising goal! Certainly, each of the books can be

seen as making particular or isolated investigations of a larger theory or paradigm and, ultimately,

the particular claims of the books build on each other and through their interesting series of shifts

come together to form the universalising claim in regards to understanding the spectator and the

spectator’s relationship to the cinema in the context of the contemporary. Viewing Positions takes

the traditional gaze theory and shows it as fatally lacking the spectator and proposes integrating the

entirety of spectator theory back into our understanding of the gaze. The Real Gaze pushes this one

step further and, by re-examining the pioneering psychoanalytical ideas of Lacan, not only offers a

place to include the spectator in the filmic experience but endeavours to refine the concept of the

gaze into something closer to the intentions of Viewing Positions. Finally, Film Theory pushes things

into the physical dimension and asserts, we not only have to consider the ideology implications of a

multitude of spectators, we also have to factor in the actual physical presence of the spectator and

the implications this creates in regards to the filmic experience. Elsaesser and Hagener argue this is

the most important variable missing from the understandings of the spectator and of cinema as a

whole:

“The idea of the body as sensory envelope, as perceptual membrane and material-mental

interface, in relation to the cinematic image and to audio-visual perception, is thus more

than a heuristic device and an aesthetic metaphor: it is the ontological, epistemological and

phenomenological “ground” for the respective theories of film and cinema today” (2012:6).

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In a satisfyingly roundabout fashion these lines of thought restore spectator theory back to the

intentions of its unintentional pioneers, Berger and Lacan. While Lacan’s original intentions for the

gaze as including the spectator have already been explained, as represented in McGowan’s reading,

Berger’s might still seem lost within the rigid framework of the traditionalist theorists, but as

William’s points out Berger asserted: “that spectators are somehow ‘in’ the work” (1994:4);

certainly, the logic of this line of thought is plain to see after examining the three volumes.

Throughout this gradual shift from the narrow thinking of traditional gaze and/or spectator theory to

its modern equivalent that absolutely integrates the ideologies of a multitude of spectators, the

theory of the spectator has become something much more fluid. Not fluid in the sense that anything

goes but rather that the theory of the spectator is able to adhere to the changes in film exhibition

which, at the moment, is experiencing an array of new innovations and evolving tastes. The kind of

changes which makes the views of the traditionalists appear incredibly prehistoric! This

demonstrates the importance of the endeavours of Viewing Positions, The Real Lacan and Film

Theory – they contest film theory and, ultimately, either change it or open up the discussion with the

eventual aim of producing a refined theory that applies to the contemporary. The purpose of the

cinema is the spectator and, because of this, it could be argued that spectator theory is the most

important film theory. Therefore, it needs to adhere to the constantly shifting profiles and ideologies

of the spectator in regards to the filmic experience; Viewing Positions, The Real Lacan and Film

Theory provide three strong theoretical shifts, in regards to this essential standpoint.

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Bibliography

Berenstein, R. J. Clover, C. J. Crary, J. Friedberg, A. Gunning, T. Hansen, M. Mayne, J. Schwartz, V. R.

Sobchack, V. C. Williams, L. (1994) Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film. New Brunswick: Rutgers

University Press.

Berger, J. (1972) Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin.

Elsaesser, T. and Hagener, M. (2012) Film Theory: An Intorduction through the Senses. New York:

Routledge

Homer, S. (2005) Jacques Lacan: Routledge Critical Thinkers. New York: Routledge.

McGowan, T. (2007) The Real Gaze: Film Theory after Lacan. New York: State University of New York

Press, Albany.

Filmography

Ways of Seeing (1972); directed by Mike Dibb. 120 minutes. UK: British Broadcasting Corporation.