spectatorship

Death 24x a Second by Laura Mulvey

by

via GIPHY Psycho by Alfred Hitchcock

Mulvey, Laura. 2006. Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image. London: Reaktion Books.

Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?

Mulvey’s project in this book is to rethink spectatorship through the lens of the new possibilities opened by home video technologies like DVD and so on, which she argues returns the notion of stillness to the otherwise moving image. Because the spectator now has control over pausing, rewinding, and revisiting only certain scenes of a film, Mulvey argues, the spectator is made more undeniably aware of the cinema’s inherent stillness (in the material form of being composed of still images played in quick sequence to simulate motion). That stillness, she continues, opens the spectator’s potential line of engagement with a film not only as a story but also as a historical document of the indexical (or, broadly, real) aspects of the film image that are usually hidden behind the story’s iconographic impulses. In other words, recognizing that film is basically made up of photographs via technological manipulation of the film image enables both what Mulvey calls a “possessive” and a “pensive” spectator.

The possessive spectator is one who uses their ability to pause, rewind, and repeat images to sadistically, in Mulvey’s terms, control the object of their spectatorship. They develop a fetishistic attachment to the image that was once only possible with the help of extratextual aids like production stills or calendar images. Interestingly, she points out that this new control over the image basically negates the strong masculine voyeuristic tendency she saw in Hollywood films in her formative “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” essay. Or, if not outright negating the voyeuristic part, it demasculinizes the gaze and turns it towards a more individualized and therefore less-gendered form. This happens for women as well as men, she claims. She also notes that the possessive spectator is one who is attuned to the star persona’s complicated balance of energy/motion (which drives the action of the film and the gaze of the camera) and stillness, which is embodied in the pose which is either captured in still images like the production photos or in the span of time when a star pauses on screen, or when a spectator pauses the action at their own whim.

The pensive spectator is less interested in control and more interested in observing how the stillness they create in a film reflects back within the film when it is played in its normal capacity. What attention does the pensive spectator bring to the film during their pauses, delays, and repititions? It is similar to the attention a film scholar brings to films, and Mulvey convincingly argues that the ability to manipulate the time of a film has turned anybody who wants to be into a film scholar who can almost automatically understand the strange play of tenses that occurs when one watches an older film. The old film plays out in what Barthes calls a time of “this was now” where the index (again, reality, kinda) is captured at a particular moment in time. He had argued that this only works with the singular photograph, while the film tends to blur that indexicality into nothingness. Mulvey rescues his assertion for film by claiming that the ability to pause it and so on snaps spectators into a position where they can recognize the indexicality of the image and the historical nature of it. This, she argues, is crucial for political readings and uses of films to bridge the gap between the present and the past in a world which tends to want to insist on the immediacy of the moment.

Crucially for Mulvey, these ways of seeing films as containing stills was not only excavated via video control. It was always hidden, from the very early experiements of the Lumière and Méliès films, in the moments of slow motion and “still” frames achieved by the repetition of cells in sequence to create the illusion of stillness within a technically still moving medium, a phenomenon she calls “delayed cinema.” These traditional filmic techniques opened opportunities to see stillness on film and recognize the importance of stillness to the medium of film. Mulvey ties this to the narrative death drive she notes motivates many films. Hence the trope of ending on a static shot to, symbolically at least, represent the death of the story being told. With this association between stillness and death, Mulvey continues to pull at the cinema’s relationship between time passing, which is inherently captured on film but now can be paused by spectators and even reversed given the right technological tools, and the ability to see beyond death. When we see old movie stars on our home screens, we are not only watching old movies, we are conjuring ghosts and that is yet another reminder that time passes and the present always comes from the past.

Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?

Mulvey is in closest conversation with the twin pillars of Bazin and Barthes, each of which form a crucial part of her argument about stillness via their writings on photography and its properties. In addition to the two of them, Mulvey also engages with Miriam Hansen’s augmentations of her ideas from “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” which Mulvey also engages with several times. Of course, Freud and various readings of his ideas form the foundations of Mulvey’s fundamentally psychoanalytic approach to spectatorship. I tend to bristle at psychoanalysis, but I was able to dig around in Mulvey’s version of it and find what seemed to be most crucial so I didn’t have to throw the baby out with the bathwater there.

The other bit of crucial contextual info is Mulvey’s writing at the dawn of the 21st century. She uses this temporality to position her argument within conversations about the cinema’s centenary and the nearly concomitant discussions around the “death” of cinema thanks to the invention and propagation of digital filming and projection technologies. Mulvey largely dismisses this later idea, noting that the loss of the direct materiality of film’s imprint of light and shadow is retained in all but a literal sense when what happens is instead a numerical translation of the same data. The indexicality is not fundamentally lost, she claims, and I tend to agree. Otherwise, her arguments tend to rest on the affordances of the DVD, which was picked up and expanded upon by Benson-Allott less than a decade later.

via GIPHY Journey to Italy by Roberto Rossellini

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

Mulvey’s is a largey theoretical text, working mostly with other theorists who wrote on similar subjects to develop her own thoughts. She does, however, spend three chapters dedicated primarily to close readings of Psycho, Journey to Italy, and the works of Abbas Kiarostami. Here she draws out the ideas developed in the first half of her book about the role of stillness in cinema and how it connects or doesn’t to the death drive/passage of time inherent in cinema and narrative. She also delves into some smaller close readings in several of the other chapters, but those are used mostly to demonstrate ideas rather than as the primary purpose of her text.

Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?

Mulvey devleops her points by first talking about how the video spectator’s ability to pause a film is an extension of the filmmaker’s ability to maniuplate the flow of time in their film. After showing that the spectator’s manipulation is related to the filmmaker’s manipulation, she traces how filmmakers used the manipulation of time to their own ends in metaphorical expressions of death and connects it to the uncanny of both Freud and Jentsch. She goes on to connect these ideas to narrative theories of death as a metaphorical ending to stories. After exploring this idea in her three close reading chapters, she comes back to develop a theory of spectatorship based on the ability to pause, rewind, and reorder a film via technology, which she claims creates a two new kinds of spectators, the possessive and the pensive.

Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?

Though I don’t buy most psychoanalytic theories, Mulvey was still quite convincing in her explanation of the way that home video opens new possibilites in recognizing the stillness at the center of film as a medium, and in the implications thereof. She also inspired a new way of thinking about the legacyquel that I’ll have to ponder on. Ultimately, her work is not only salvageable from the psychoanalysis but likely crucial to some of my upcoming work.

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

stillness, movement, death, uncanny, spectatorship, pensive spectator, possessive spectator, fetish, voyeur, the death drive, narrative, video, delayed cinema, aesthetic of delay, automata, cinephilia, star, star system, pose, control, power

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

Delayed cinema works on two levels: first of all it refers to the actual act of slowing down the flow of film. Secondly it refers to the delay in time during which some detail has lain dormant, as it were, waiting to be noticed. There is a loose parallel here with Freud’s concept of deferred action, the way the unconscious preserves a specific experience, while its traumatic effect might only be realized by another, later but associated, event. (8)

A dialectical relationship between the old and new media can be summoned into existence, creating an aesthetic of delay. In the first instance, the image itself is frozen or subjected to repetition or return. But as the new stillness is enhanced by the weight that the cinema’s past has acquired with passing time, its significance goes beyond the image itself towards the problem of time, its passing, and how it is represented or preserved. At a time when new technologies seem to hurry ideas and their representations at full tilt towards the future, to stop and to reflect on the cinema and its history also offers the opportunity to think about how time might be understood within wider, contested, patterns of history and mythology. Out of this pause, a delayed cinema gains a political dimension, potentially able to challenge patterns of time that are neatly ordered around the end of an era, its ‘before’ and its ‘after’. The delayed cinema gains further significance as outside events hasten the disappearance of the past and strengthen the political appropriation of time. (22-3)

The dialectic between old and new produces innovative ways of thinking about the complex temporality of cinema and its significance for the present moment in history. As the flow of cinema is displaced by the process of delay, spectatorship is affected, reconfigured and transformed so that old films can be seen with new eyes and digital technology, rather than killing the cinema, brings it new life and new dimensions. The process of delay not only bring stillness into visibility but also alters the traditionally linear structure of narrative, fragmenting its continuities. (26)

To look back into the reality of that lost world [of the early 1900s] by means of the cinema is to have the sensation of looking into a time machine. However cliched the concept, the presence of that reality, of the past preserved, becomes increasingly magical and uncanny. Furthermore, as electronic and digital technologies have overtaken the cinema and, as a new ‘new’ arrives, the old ‘new’ becomes relegated to ‘the old’. Paradoxically and incidentally, the new technologies have contributed further to bringing the uncanny back to the cinema. The ease with which the moving image can now be halted exposes the cinema’s mechanisms and the illusion of its movement, as though the beautiful automaton had become stuck in a particular pose. (52)

Cinema’s forward movement, the successive order of film, merges easily into the order of narrative. Linearity, causality and the linking figure of metonymy, all crucial elements in story-telling, find a correspondence in the unfolding, forward-moving direction of film. […] But at the end, the aesthetics of stillness returns to both narrative and the cinema. Death as a trope that embodies the narrative’s stillness, its return to an inanimate form, extends to the cinema, as though the still frame’s association with death fuses into the death of the story, as though the beautiful automaton was to wind down into its inanimate, uncanny, form. In this sense, endings present different kind of aesthetic exchange between narrative and cinema. Freud’s concept of ‘the death drive’ negotiates between the two, including, as it does, movement towards an end as the desire to return to an ‘earlier’ state. (69-70)

While the flow of the image at 24 frames a second tends to assert a ‘now-ness’ to the picture, stillness allows access to the time of the film’s registration, its ‘then-ness’. This is the point, essentially located in the single frame, where the cinema meets the still photograph, both registering a moment of time frozen and thus fossilized. (102)

As people and history recede into the past, the traces they leave on the world mark their absence, the impossibility of regaining time, but also bear witness to the reality of their once-upon-a-time presence. With the cinema, the past is preserved in the full appearance of reality. In the Pompeii sequence [of Journey to Italy], filmed in 1952, with the living presence of the anonymous workmen as well as Hollywood stars, another layer of fossilized history is superimposed on the ruins of the city. Those alive in the scene, then, are now as fossilized in their screen image as the plaster casts of the Pompeiian couple. (107)

The discovery of a particular sequence or segment that responds to textual analysis necessarily leads to questions of film form both in terms of material and language. To halt, to return and to repeat these images is to see cinematic meaning coming into being as an ordinary object becomes detached from its surroundings, taking on added cinematic and semiotic value. But delaying the image, extracting it from its narrative surroundings, also allows it to return to its context and to contribute something extra and unexpected, a deferred meaning, to the story’s narration. (150-1)

New ways of consuming old movies on electronic and digital technologies should bring about a reinvention of textual analysis and a new wave of cinephilia. But the cinema is deeply affected by the passing of time itself. Now, to look at films such as those made by Douglas Sirk is to have the impression of looking into history. Even studio sets and stars take on the status of document, and close readings inevitably lead to questions of context as well as text. But reflection on film now leads not only to its surrounding history. To see Imitation of Life now, after Lana Turner’s death and, no doubt, the death of many of the extras surrounding her on the set, is to see time itself caught and fossilized into the illusion of movement. Now, as Lana Turner runs down the steps onto the Coney Island set, conjuring up the meanings inscribed into Sirk’s film and her performance, she also shifts between the ghostly and the living. Her presence brings with it the cinema’s unique ability to return and repeat the past, which becomes both more real and more mysterious as the film’s fragment is itself subject to repetition and return. (160)

When a film industry streamlines its star system, instantly recognizable, iconic screen actors produce a highly stylized performance, enhanced by an equally highly stylized star-focused cinema. Start performance is, not inevitably but very often, the source of screen movement, concentrating the spectator’s eye, localizing the development of the story and providing its latent energy. But the great achievement of star performance is an ability to maintain a fundamental contradiction in balance: the fusion of energy with a stillness of display. However energetic a star’s movement might seem to be, behind it lies an intensely controlled stillness and an ability to pose for the camera. Reminiscent, figuratively, of the way that the illusion of movement is derived from still frames, so star performance depends on pose, moments of almost invisible stillness, in which the body is displayed for the spectator’s visual pleasure through the mediation of the camera. (162)

Watching Hollywood films delayed both reinforces and breaks down these oppositions. The narrative drive tends to weaken if the spectator is able to control its flow, to repeat and return to certain sequences while skipping others. The smooth linearity and forward movement of the story become jagged and uneven, undermining the male protagonist’s command over the action. The process of identification, usually kept in place by the relation between plot and character, suspense and transcendence, loses its hold over the spectator. And the loss of ego and self-consciousness that has been, for so long, one of the pleasures of the movies gives way to an alert scrutiny and scanning of the screen, lying in wait, as it were, to capture a favorite or hitherto unseen detail. With the weakening of narrative and its effects, the aesthetic of the film begins to become ‘feminized’, with the shift in spectatorial power relations dwelling on pose, stillness, lighting and the choreography of character and camera. Or, rather, within the terms of the ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ model, the aesthetic of pleasure of delayed cinema moves towards fetishistic scopophilia that, I suggested, characterized the films of Josef Von Sternberg. These films, most particularly the Dietrich cycle, elevate the spectator’s look over that of the male protagonist and privilege the beauty of the screen and mystery of situation over suspense, conflict or linear development. The ‘fetishistic spectator’ becomes more fascinated by image than plot, returning compulsively to privileged moments, investing emotion and ‘visual pleasure’ in any slight gesture, a particular look or exchange taking place on the screen. Above all, as these privileged moments are paused or repeated, the cinema itself finds a new visibility that renders them special, meaningful and pleasurable, once again confusing photogénie and fetishism. (165)

The possessive spectator commits an act of violence against the cohesion of a story, the aesthetic integrity that holds it together, and the vision of its creator. But, more specifically, the sadistic instinct is expressed through the possessive spectator’s desire for mastery and will to power. In the role reversal between the look of the spectator and the diegetic look of the male protagonist, the figure that had been all powerful both on and off the screen is now subordinated to manipulation and possession. Film performance is transformed by repetition and actions begin to resemble mechanical, compulsive gestures. The cinema’s mechanisms take possession of the actor or star and, as their precise, repeated gestures become those of automata, the cinema’s uncanny fusion between the living and the dead merges with the uncanny fusion between the organic and the inorganic, the human body and the machine. (171)

Bellour makes the crucial point that a moment of stillness within the moving image and its narrative creates a ‘pensive spectator’ who can reflect ‘on the cinema’. Not only can the ‘pensive’ spectator experience the kind of reverie that Barthes associated with the photograph alone, but this reverie reaches out to the nature of cinema itself. This pause for the spectator, usually ‘hurried’ by the movement of both film and narrative, opens a space for consciousness of the still frame within the moving image. Similarly, the pensive spectator who pauses the image with new technologies may bring to the cinema the resonance of the still photograph, the association with death usually concealed by the film’s movement, its particularly strong inscription of the index. These reflections are not lost when the film is returned to movement. On the contrary, they continue and inflect the film’s sense of ‘past-ness’. And the ‘pensive’ spectator ultimately returns to the inseparability of stillness from movement and flow; in Bellour’s words, ‘two kinds of time blend together’. (186)

Sometime after writing ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, I tried to evolve an alternative spectator, who was driven, not by voyeurism, but by curiosity and the desire to decipher the screen, informed by feminism and responding to the new cinema of the avant-garde. Curiosity, a drive to see, but also to know, still marked a utopian space for a political, demanding visual culture, but also one in which the process of deciphering might respond to the human minds long standing interest and pleasure in solving puzzles and riddles. This curious spectator may be the ancestor of the pensive spectator and the cinema of delay unlocks the pleasure of decipherment, not only for an elite but also for anyone who has access to the new technologies of consumption. Of particular interest is the relation between the old and the new, that is, the effect of new technologies on cinema that has now aged. Consciousness of the passing of time affects what is seen on the screen: that sense of a ‘sea-change’ as death overwhelms the photographed subject affects the moving as well as the still image. There is, perhaps, a different kind of voyeurism at stake when the future looks back with greedy fascination at the past and details suddenly lose their marginal status and acquire the aura that passing time bequeaths to the most ordinary objects. (191-2)

The tape creates a dialogue between the cinema of the past and video, between the special insights of a 1960s critic and the new technology that makes critics as of us all. This exchange creates a dialectical relation between the old and the new, breaking down the separation from the past from which nostalgia is derived. But at the same time, it is elegiac: there is no escape from passing time and death itself. (194)

Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens by Caetlin Benson-Allott

by

David Cronenberg’s Videodrome

Benson-Allott, Caetlin. 2013. Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens: Video Spectatorship from VHS to File Sharing. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?

Caetlin Benson-Allott writes persuasively that the old theories of film spectatorship should now be adjusted based on the fact that the cinematic experience is no longer the most dominant form of filmic consumption. She argues that home video now holds the position of being the primary way one sees films (and that’s certainly true in the very present moment of Summer 2020, thanks to the dangers of COVID-19). She argues that because much of spectatorship theory is based on the cinematic apparatus as a structuring metaphor, the fact that most people now watch movies at home should trigger a revision of spectatorship based on the aspects of home video as the structuring metaphor. She continues to claim that the shift to home video has changed the way filmmakers compose their films and address their audiences, which covers everything from the prevalence of over-the-shoulder shots (that, she claims, provides a presence within the film that excuses the outside attention grabbers like a partner walking in front of the tv or other such distractions) to color changes (which, she argues comes with other shifts in the political nature of the films that have changed).

Similar to Connor‘s claims that films are always about their own making, Benson-Allott uses horror films, which are always about cultural anxieties, to show how many films within that genre are places where filmmakers worked through the anxieties related to the shift to home video viewership. This comes in the form of 5 close-reading-based chapters, which follow a general historical/temporal path. The first, a series of readings of George Romero’s Dead series sees how one filmmaker shifted storytelling and filmmaking techniques in response to changes in distribution models. Then Benson-Allott reads Videodrome and The Ring for their focus on the VHS as a space for thinking through anxieties of cultural imperialism and reproduction/piracy, with the former coming at the start of the home video phenomenon and Canada’s fears of US media imperialism and the latter coming at the inflection point between VHS and DVD, a supposedly more secure home video format which allowed the filmmakers to truly demonize the easy reproducibility inherent in VHS. Then Benson-Allott looks at the Grindhouse film(s) and how they create a simulacrum of what she calls “cinematicity” or the “unique process and experience of theatrical exhibition” as a singular cinema object even as they also prepare for their eventual permanent home on separate home video discs, a fate which would render that simulacrum even more visible and pointed in an effort to bring attention to the falseness of the cinematic “truth” (133). Benson-Allott wraps up her close readings with a chapter on what she calls “faux footage” horror films, from The Blair Witch Project to Cloverfield, each of which, she claims, calls attention to the dangers of peer-to-peer file sharing as a place where unverifiable footage (files) could lead to hauntings and other dangerous outcomes. 

Benson-Allott closes her book in a brief but dense conclusion, thinking through the supposed “freedom” that home viewers feel in relation to the films they watch. She claims that the freedoms associated with home viewership are still largely structured and controlled. In other words, you get some limited temporal control over the film you watch (you can choose when to start it, and to pause it for a moment or overnight if necessary, and you can of course rewind and fastforward and jump around) but that the temporal freedom is not total in that you are not able to choose different orders or takes or events to happen. The movie is still the movie. She also claims that things like DVD menus and the like are used to put your viewership of the film in a particular context, a certain limited perspective on the film. In other words, though the home video spectator is more empowered than the cinema spectator, who is traditionally seen as subjecting themselves before a film, that power is still quite limited and used to turn the spectator into a subject, just one of a different variety.

Benson-Allott’s readings and claims are largely persuasive, as she calls attention to a platform that has largely been either ignored or only marginally considered. I hope that my own work in the future can further extend some of the claims she makes here into the streaming age.

Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?

Benson-Allott’s major task is to decentralize spectator theory put forwards by apparatus theorists like Christian Metz, Laura Mulvey, and company. She does so not by following other critiques of that theory on the grounds of its totalizing vision of the cinematic apparatus from which nobody can escape but by historicizing it as once being somewhat explanatory in its concept of the way films position their spectators but that movies now position their spectators differently because those spectators are most likely to be spectating at home. In the process of this project, she also responds to D. N. Rodowick’s musings on the “end of cinema” to claim that movies aren’t dying, just changing. She uses Vivian Sobchack’s phenomenology to talk about the way VHS and bodies interact in Videodrome, Barbara Creed’s concept of the monstrous feminine to write about the abject horror of the VHS tape as womb, and Derrida’s simulacrum to think about what it means for something to have cinematicity. Each of these theorists are given their due and woven into the larger work Benson-Allott is doing here.

As is becoming a refrain here, though, Benson-Allott’s book has its limitations in that it doesn’t quite come up to the present anymore. What does the proliferation of streaming channels, especially now that companies are consolidating many of their back catalogues under their own service mean for what she lays out here? In many ways her text is easily extensible to the present moment, which marks it as a very valuable text indeed. But it is limited in that she is necessarily unable to address the things that have come to be after the time of her writing.

Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick’s The Blair Witch Project

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

Benson-Allott takes the concept of spectator theory and apparatus theory under a microscope using horror films for close readings in an effort to understand how spectatorship changes when one is sitting on their couch watching a movie on their tv instead of in a movie theater. Each close reading has several subsections, which usually revolve around explaining one aspect of the film-in-question’s nature, from the filmic techniques to the political and technological context, including often one major relevant film theorist as noted above.

Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?

Benson-Allott gets most of her rhetorical power from the strength of her close-readings and the context she provides in each chapter for those close readings. She adds on to spectator theory in a valuable and important way, critiquing it for being too narrowly focused and not adapting to the realities of spectatorship over time. In tracking how home video spectatorship was thought about through the films themselves, Benson-Allott is able to provide examples of how this work can be done beyond what she covers in her book as well, opening the door for further work done in her model after the fact. In that way, Benson-Allott provides a great example of scholarship, one to emulate.

Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?

This one really opened some doors for me. For one, it triggered a breakthrough in my conception of the legacyquel as designed for home viewership on platforms like Disney+ (which houses all of the Star Wars films and much of the ancillary material) and HBO MAX (which houses many of the DC universe films). I’m excited to work through the details and consequences of this new area and way of thinking for my project.

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

home video (as an expansive term encompassing basically any technology/platform that allows movies to be watched outside of a theater), spectatorship, apparatus, formats, spectator, simulacrum, cinematicity, postcinematic, control, power, film subject, video subject, phenomenology, abject

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

This study takes the polemical position that video distribution changed and is changing spectatorship and that film and new media theorists must attend to these changes. We must attend to the ways video platforms affect the motion picture experience if we want to continue to comment on the ideological significance of motion pictures for contemporary culture, politics, and subjectivity. (2)

Like movies about video and movies made possible by video (such as the aforementioned 1980s horror cycle or the concomitant increase in children’s features, or “kid vid”), movies made in periods of technological change offer a deep well of material for new theories of motion picture spectatorship in an age of multiplatform distribution. The producers and artists working within the US and Canadian entertainment industries know that most viewers approach their products through one video format or another; only “film studies” continues to insist on the primacy of the cinematic experience, and we do so in spite of our own video-enabled research and pedagogy. (6-7)

[…] I examine how innovations in motion picture exhibition have changed the way filmmakers imagine and address the spectator. What one can show influences what one can say, so the effect of video platforms on filmmaking matters not only because they influence production (as Janet Wasko, Frederick Wasser, and David Bordwell have shown) but also because they shape the transmission of ideas. By examining how the movies’ production design, cinematography, and editing anticipate video distribution, we begin to recognize new patterns and how they interpellate the spectator. By reading these formal innovations in conversation with the narratives they convey, we can see how filmmakers negotiate story, platform, and form to achieve a particular response and a viewer. (26)

Thus I argue (contra Neale and Bordwell) that the allegedly disposable shoulder represents not a concession to but a thematization of video exhibition, specifically of the other video viewers whose bodily presence remains irritatingly visible during televisual exhibition and so must be psychically repressed from one’s movie experience. This need does not exist in the same way at the cinema, where silhouettes of heads tend to block the bottom of the screen instead. Hence Romero’s “over-the-disposable-shoulder shot” – which was nowhere near as prevalent in Day of the Dead and non-existent in Dawn of the Dead and Night of the Living Dead – must be recognized as a new video convention that reflects the current mode of consumption. Indeed, it could even be read as creating a spectatorial continuum between the video viewer and the diegetic look that further involves the spectator in the narrative. (56)

Unlike remakes, reboots rarely follow the narratives of their antecedents and typically create new mythologies for the old horrors, mythologies that can then produce a new line of sequels. In some cases such reinventions can lead to innovations in the horror genre – such as the attention to feminine class markers in the new Texas Chain Saw Massacre – but most reboots merely cash in on name recognition. (59-60)

Videodrome (1983) was among the first narrative representations of home video and develops preexisting anxieties about the technology’s capacity for surveillance, psychic violence, and espionage. As early as 1977, movies like Demon Seed began to suggest that viewers beware lest their new consumer electronics consume their lives and identities. Yet few of the movies about video address the machines of exhibition themselves, much less our embodied encounters with them. Cronenberg’s Videodrome and Gore Verbinski’s The Ring (2002) are unique in their willingness to focus on videocassettes as material objects we manipulate – and are manipulated by. These two movies bookend the videotape’s reign as the dominant motion picture platform, and both use cassettes as metaphors for larger media takeovers (specifically the Americanization of Canadian media and the threat of digital piracy). They do not bear the traces of video distribution in the same ways that Romero’s later zombie movies do, but they do advance the artistic tradition of self-reflexive filmmaking by turning the camera on the VCR and the cultural battles it catalyzed. Through unsettling narrative and formal techniques they ask how home video reconstructs the film spectator and in whose interests these changes occur. (70)

As this chapter will show, Videodrome uses the story of Max Renn’s involvement with Videodrome to contend that video spectatorship forces the viewer to adapt physically to suit a new technological environment. It will then explore how the movie imbricates Max’s story in a series of explicit references to Canadian media history and uses these connections to ground its reading of consumer electronics in a surreal critique of the United States’ technocultural imperialism. After outlining this political intervention, I will argue that Videodrome offers its spectator a phenomenology of new media through a radically destabilizing form of first-person filmmaking. (71-2)

Grindhouse invokes cinematic abjection to emphasize the historical contingency of spectatorship. Its simulacrum of suboptimal viewing conditions thus brings the spectator’s attention to the here-and-now-ness of spectatorship and utopian fantasies about the cinema. For inasmuch as the movie depicts a cinematic utopia – and its idealized theatrical nonplace that never was – it drags the spectator into this fantasy as well, since she is also part of the motion picture apparatus. Indeed, the motion picture apparatus and the simulacrum interpellate the spectator similarly. (146)

By emphasizing the thrills of illicit viewing but associating it with inevitable death, [faux footage] movies make pirate spectatorship horrifying. Taken on their own, these movies can seem innocuous, far-fetched, even silly, but read within their industrial context, including the MPAA’s war on piracy, they offer intimations about the dire consequences of illicit spectatorship that may scare viewers away from the pleasures of piracy. Like Videodrome and The Ring, they promise death to pirates, yet they do so by uniting tropes from horror films, reality television, and MPAA public service announcements. Indeed, they teach the spectator not to go searching for underground videos, because what she finds could be deadly. (168)

Whereas cinema and television immerse the spectator in the illusion of voyeurism or indulge her in narcissistic fantasies of panoptical vision, the prerecorded video apparatus replaces such powers with temporal control. That is, all video playback technologies give their subjects (limited) temporal control over the motion picture and sustain the subjects fantasy of coherence and autonomy through an illusion of temporal mastery. (204)

Prerecorded video compromises some of those [cinematic spectatorial] pleasures by making the apparatus visible to the spectator and foregrounding her participation in it. Indeed, it can be rather difficult to prostrate oneself to a thirty-inch screen when other people, noises, or technologies keep interrupting. The prerecorded video apparatus compensates for these losses by allowing the viewer to fantasize that she is in possession of the text instead of being possessed by it. Not only can the spectator physically possess her video tape or disk, but she may experience similar feelings of possession regarding her digital files. […] Through possession, prerecorded video gives its spectator a powerful illusion that she can control time and marshal outside events to suit her schedule. (206-7)

In foregrounding pre-recorded video as an apparatus, I am suggesting that the video subject internalizes the prerecorded video interface much as she does the remoteness of the cinematic projector or the flow of various television channels. More than any individual technology, the persistence of the basic functions of video playback has come to unify and define the spectator’s experience of video. The video spectator possesses temporal control over a movie, but that is not the same as the power of self-determination, the power to imagine what it means to be a video subject. (207)

Thanks to prerecorded video, it now seems that we can watch what we want when we want, but who we understand ourselves to be in that moment remains a function of the motion picture apparatus, because spectatorship is always a power play. (208)

Feminist Film Studies by Janet McCabe

by
McCabe, Janet. 2004. Feminist Film Studies: Writing the Woman into Cinema. Short Cuts 23. New York: Wallflower Press.

Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?

In this book, Janet McCabe uses some broad themes and modes of thinking as ways of temporalizing the history of feminist film theory. Since, as she notes in her conclusion, each new way of practicing feminist film theory tended to criticize the way that came before it for its biggest failures, there is little (that I know of) left out, except for developments that have happened since the book’s publication in 2004 (one area that I know of being the further expansion of theorization surrounding gender with trans and non-binary identities becoming an increasingly popular area of study recently).

Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?

McCabe proposes very little in way of new theory or even a point of view on the scholars and ideas she writes about here. Only her conclusion has a real thesis to it, one which emphasizes the need to study feminist film theory as a discourse to fully understand what is going on with it both in its past and present configurations. This fits with how she structures the book, putting different authors in conversation with each other via either explicit or thematic connections between their works, with a roughly continuous temporal development.

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

As McCabe moves from one method of performing feminist film theory to the next, she begins each chapter with a brief summary of what will be covered and how changing analytical and cultural trends influenced the direction of the writing done in that time period. Sometimes that change might be the introduction of a new kind of criticism (the introduction of cultural studies, for example) or a group of writers insisting that attention must also be paid to them and their representation/ways of seeing (black women, lesbians). This grounds McCabe’s historical project in material realities and creates a context for what will come in the chapter. Then each chapter proceeds by laying out the ground level theory (often originally written by men like Metz or, god help us, Freud) before showing how feminist film theorists used that theory to write about women, who were often ignored by the men who wrote the high theory. Finally, she concludes each chapter by recapping what major changes happened during the time period covered and looking a little bit at what was missing, to be filled in by scholars in the next chapter.

Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?

Here I’ll just list out the large thematic shifts and some representative scholars that McCabe capsulizes in each chapter.

1973-79 – Structuring a language of theory: In this period, feminist film theorists adopted theoretical approaches (psychoanalysis and semiotics, mostly) to talk about how women were conceived of as a symbol, specifically a symbol of lack such that they really only existed to be looked at on film. Prominent scholars: Laura Mulvey, Claire Johnston

1985-1997 – Textual Negotiations: Female Spectatorship and Cultural Studies: In this period, feminist film theorists looked to cultural studies to see how real audiences engaged film in specific times and places. This allowed for a greater understanding of the various negotiations that happened between author, text, and audience as well as a pathway towards understanding how the makeup of an audience will influence how that audience responds to different texts. Feminist film theory here becomes more focused on context, history, and lived experience rather than the generalizing tendency of psychoanalysis. Prominent scholars: Christine Gledhill, Tania Modleski, Annette Kuhn, Jackie Stacey, bell hooks

1991-2000 – Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonialism/Modernism. In this period, which overlaps significantly with the previous period, scholars began to correct feminist film theory away from its singular focus on white female existence towards trying to understand what happens when gender isn’t the only way a character, creator, or audience member is othered from the dominant cis-white-het norm. Using Frantz Fanon’s psychoanalytic theory of race as a jumping off point, scholars of this era theorized that black women were doubly absent, doubly sexualized, doubly lacking on film. Some scholars also looked at the way colonialism created a gaze towards black and brown women that was wrapped up in an imperialist (as well as misogynist and racist) mindset. Finally, scholars and creators of this era also used ways of creating and documenting the previously overlooked history of people like them. Daughters of the Dust is the primary example here. Prominent scholars: Jane Gaines, Mary Anne Doane, Lola Young, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Tania Modleski

1987 – 2000 – Conceiving Subjectivity, Sexual Difference and Fantasy Differently: Psychoanalysis Revisited and Queering Theory: In this period, scholars returned to psychoanalysis to rethink female sexuality and how women might desire differently through film. Taking as their primary concern the ideas of desire and fantasy, scholars of this era tried to dig deeper into pscyhoanalysis through Freud’s ideas on female sexuality and masturbatory practices to understand what connection spectators had to the spectacle of women on film. Additionally, lesbian/gay and queer theorists questioned why we were even paying attention to Freud in the first place, positing instead an attention to how queer audiences opened a doorway to alternative spectator positions not theorizable in a film theory dominated by heterosexual norms. Prominent scholars: Mary Anne Doane, Elizabeth Cowie, Linda Williams, Carol Clover, Kaja Silverman, Judith Mayne, Judith Butler

Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?

This is most useful in to me in the above form, as a kind of overview of the different methodologies and conversations that have happened with regards to feminist film theory. I’m not sure much of the theorists individual ideas will stick with me for very long after reading them in this format, as there’s not enough to really grasp here. But it is useful as something to go back to when I need a refresher or a quick recap before diving into some related readings.

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

psychoanalysis, spectator, desire, fantasy, race, ethnicity, cultural studies, historical materialism, queer theory, feminist film theory, discourse, postcolonialism, postmodernism

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

Studying the field of knowledge known as feminist film studies allows us to read it as a set of statements about the institution of cinema and cultural production, about representational categories and gendered subjectivity, about identification and spectatorship practices, about cultural authority and historical (in)visibility, about desire and fantasy, and about the interaction between these areas. (1-2)

I suggest we may in fact have reached a point when it might be more important to gain knowledge about the features of feminist writings on film and cinema; for in understanding what feminist film theory wants us to know exposes the workings of a discourse as well as the difficulties that still remain in articulating it. (113)

I identify feminist film theory as a discourse; that is, a discursive formation made up from a series of statements within which, and by which, debates related to gendered representation, female subjectivity and spectatorship can be known. […] By analyzing the statements that constitute the making of a field of knowledge, we can see how the speakers and listeners, writers and readers come to know who they are within the social world. (118)

The more feminist film theory gains respectability within the academy, the more its methodological differences/difficulties are revealed as problems of legitimacy and credibility and speaking from inside the discipline. It is discourse about (rather than in) crisis, in which the female subject – as film protagonist, cinema spectator and academic scholar – continues to trouble. (120)