To say that cinema has been occupied with reality for all its history would seem fair. Much of the very earliest cinema—short, silent, black-and-white—simply captured reality as it happened, or at least operated from that pretense. The events caught on camera may sometimes have been staged to a greater or lesser extent, but it is worth emphasizing how great the novelty just of seeing persons and objects appear in motion itself once was. As the medium matured, it became more and more that film constructed reality (or realities) through increasingly complex processes of recording and manipulating footage. In varying exact forms, narrative construction–the presentation of scenarios as events bound by some continuity—has now dominated filmmaking for most of the years since moving pictures became a noteworthy attraction for mass audiences.
But, even in an age where sound and color have long since come to the movies, Mary Anne Doane reminds us that the product of cinematic construction is “the ‘hallucination’ of a fully sensory world.” What is seen on film is not tangibly present on the screen, and, especially in fictional or dramatized narrative, may not tangibly exist anywhere once the film has gone to screen. Proximity and angle of camera serve to also distort the relative size of visible things. Sound and color can be manipulated in various ways, or withheld, further distancing what is seen and heard in film from what it would have looked like and sounded like to “really be there.” Most of all, again, in the realm of fictionalized cinematic narrative, it cannot be generally said that anything appearing on screen is passively captured or passively distributed.
Excepting, perhaps, for very small children, what might be generalized is that viewing publics understand the constructedness of film, and even have a rough grasp on how the work of this construction is done. The commercial audience for cinematic and televisual motion-picture art is enormous anyhow, and that may be understating it. In the twenty-first century, to flat not engage in consumption of film art would seem more strange than the opposite by far. This brings us to the work in film theory that has been done on the matter of spectatorship—that is, the matter of how viewers interpret and relate themselves to cinematic art. Key work in this field includes Christian Metz’s writing on film as a “mirror,” whereby the viewer identifies themself with the screened material as they would with their own likeness. Laura Mulvey famously complicated this kind of thinking with her analysis of gender in “classical” narrative cinema, finding the construction of female roles there overwhelmingly reflective of an objectifying “male gaze.”
In parallel to such analysis of gender in film, we will focus ourselves here on analyis of race. In “Black Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and Resistance,” Manthia Diawara endeavors “to suggest that the components of ‘difference’ among elements of race, gender and sexuality give ruse to different readings of the same material.” While doing so, he develops a concept of spectator “resistance” to the “rhetorical force” of racially demeaning cinematic content. Taking up The Birth of a Nation (1915) and The Color Purple (1985), seemingly such very distant pictures, as cinematic texts, Diawara finds in both instances of material where “the Afro-American spectator is denied the possibility of identification with black characters as credible or plausible personalities.” By consequence of that denial we might say the racially Black (or otherwise critically aware) spectator is “taken out of the movie.” Put another way, the “hallucination” of cinematic reality (to borrow again from Doane) is broken by it.
Further, then, for Diawara, the denial of spectatorial identification along lines of race becomes the cause and the target of what he terms “resistance.” In his text, he argues “that the dominant cinema situates black characters primarily for the pleasure of white spectators (male or female).” (770) As Diawara utilizes the term, “resistance” is to be understood as a refusal to identify with Black characters who are constructed in this war, and a drive to rebut that construction. By Diawara’s own description of the situation, it is worthwhile to observe that the “resisting” spectator in this context is not the initiator of opposition. Rather, through Diawara we see “spectator” already opposed by “author,” and thus see the spectator making that opposition between the author’s cinematic reality and their own lived reality mutual.
Relative to Diawara, Michael Boyce Gillespie gives greater attention to authorship in his text Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film (2016). Gillespie’s interest lies with the “how” of constructing a Black identity in film. In his characterization, “the idea of black film is always a question, never an answer.” Gillespie foregrounds here an important reminder of the nature of “race as a constitutive, cultural fiction.” On those grounds, he takes some issue with “hypostatic and canonical ideas of black film” or an overreliance on degree of origination from “a black means of production” for classifying what makes a “black film,” in that both would seem to promote the idea of a fixed character about what it means to “be Black.”
Instead, Gillespie instead offers an understanding of “the idea of black film as a highly variable and finalizable braiding of art, culture, and history.” In such cinema he suggests we would find an “art of creative interpretation and not merely the visual transcription of the black lifeworld.” It is to be taken that such a “transcriptive” cinema would again imply something settled about the nature of blackness. When Gillespie writes that “black film is always a question, never an answer,” that “nature” is the subject of the question. The purpose given to Black film here is for “authors” to engage “spectators” in critical interpretation of what a “Black” racial identity means. By his thinking, we might fairly say that cinematic reality is not merely hallucinatory, but emphasized as highly subjective and continuously under construction.
Director Steve McQueen’s film 12 Years a Slave (2013) provides much material to place in conversation with these readings. Adapted from the 1853 memoir of the same title by Solomon Northup, it recounts his experience as a free African-American man from New York kidnapped and enslaved in the Antebellum South. Keeping Gillespie in mind, we can certainly trace through the film a treatment of race as “cultural fiction” that is actively being constituted before us. Repeatedly, it explores a tension between being a dark-skinned person of African descent and (in the language of Black and White characters, alike) and being a “nigger.” Even as much as that identity is imposed in 12 Years a Slave, we also find it often adopted. If “film blackness” should be thought of as “always question, never answer,” this is among the most interesting questions posed by the film.
Meanwhile, it is very evident that the 12 Years a Slave means for the spectator to identify with Northup, as a Black character. Throughout Northup’s ordeal with White slavers, White plantation gentry, White overseers, White slave patrols, and so on, the satisfaction he seeks is the satisfaction we are to desire—that being flight to freedom and validation of personhood. Toward that end, Northup employs varying shades of resistance and deference to the circumstances of his enslavement and to the intense race prejudice that surrounds it. When it finally comes, Northup does not directly affect his own deliverance, but rather it comes to him through the beneficence of White people—crucially, through none other than a long-haired, bearded, wandering carpenter who speaks his mind freely even to unreceptive ears.
This raises many questions. Referring to identity-of-spectator, who is this film for? What is the spectator to extract from this film? What is to be made of Northup’s agency in the film, in relation to the film’s project of reconstructing his “reality” as a true historical person? Why does it matter that this narrative should have been adapted to film? To what extent is this film “transcriptive,” and to what extent is this film a work of creative interpretation? Given that Northup’s enslavement lasted a dozen years, and that he lived an established adult life prior to this ordeal, what is implied by that which the film chooses to depict within the space of a couple hours on screen?
After viewing 12 Years a Slave in conversation with Diawara and Gillespie, we might consider some broader questions as well. Is there a universal cinema, in that all spectators could identify with it? Is it possible to “author” a universal cinema? Could there be such as thing as a universal spectator? To what extent can cinematic reality be shared? What would be required of a “definitive” cinematic reality? Does authorship or spectatorship determine who cinema is “for”? Is the meaning of a film constructed by its author, by its spectators, by neither, or by both? How does the collaborative effort behind much of cinematic and televisual filmmaking complicate the determination of meaning?—or does it matter at all? How much bearing does author’s, or authors’, meaning-making have on the spectator’s meaning-making?
[1] Mary Anne Doane, “The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space,” in Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, eds., Film Theory and Criticism, Eighth Edition (2016), 327
[2] Christian Metz, ”Identification, Mirror,” from The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, in Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, eds., Film Theory and Criticism, Eighth Edition (2016)
[3] Laura Mulvey, ”Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, eds., Film Theory and Criticism, Eighth Edition (2016)
[4] Manthia Diawara, “Black Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and Resistance,” in Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, eds., Film Theory and Criticism, Eighth Edition (2016), 768
[5] Ibid, 769
[6] Ibid, 771
[7] Ibid, 770
[8] Michael Boyce Gillespie, Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film (2016), 16
[9] Ibid, 2
[10] Ibid, 7
[11] Ibid, 10
[12] Ibid, 6
[13] Ibid, 5