Spectatorship and Film Theory: The Wayward Spectator

Springer Verlag (2018)
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Abstract

This book interrogates the relation between film spectatorship and film theory in order to criticise some of the disciplinary and authoritarian assumptions of 1970s apparatus theory, without dismissing its core political concerns. Theory, in this perspective, should not be seen as a practice distinct from spectatorship but rather as an integral aspect of the spectator’s gaze. Combining Jacques Rancière’s emancipated spectator with Judith Butler’s queer theory of subjectivity, Spectatorship and Film Theory foregrounds the contingent, embodied and dialogic aspects of our experience of film. Erratic and always a step beyond the grasp of disciplinary discourse, this singular work rejects the notion of the spectator as a fixed position, and instead presents it as a field of tensions—a “wayward” history of encounters.

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Chapters

The Spectator as a History of Encounters

The final chapter begins by retracing the main arguments of the book, highlighting the creative aspects of spectatorship as an interpersonal relation and moving from a critique of the allegory of the cave as a model of film spectatorship to Leo Bersani and Ulysses Dutoit’s ideas of homoness and aest... see more

The Indeterminacy of Embodiment

This chapter is dedicated to the concept of embodiment as well as to the status of spectatorship and of the spectator’s body after the phenomenological turn in film theory, seen both as an attempt to break free from the normativity and the disembodiment of the apparatus and as a more bodily form of ... see more

The Process of Free Association and Film as an Evocative Object

This chapter addresses how contingency can become a creative part of language, dialogue and spectatorship, through a discussion of the free associative dimension of film experience and of film as an evocative object. A return to the theoretical import of the method and the process of free associatio... see more

Situatedness and Contingency of Film Experience

This chapter discusses the idea of contingency in relation to film experience and film studies. On one hand, contingency individuates a tension between the situatedness of spectatorship and its intelligibility. On the other, contingency also defines a network of connected discourses and impressions,... see more

Everyday Film Theory

This chapter is dedicated to theory as an aspect of the everyday practice of spectatorship and examines how film experience fundamentally escapes the grasp of authoritarian and pedagogical theory. More specifically, the chapter highlights the negative role of a pedagogy of emancipation in the theory... see more

The Heteronomy of Subjectivity and the Spectator’s Emancipation

The chapter revises the connection between ideology and the unconscious in apparatus theory in order to question the passivity of spectatorship, and argues that the fundamental emancipation of the spectator corresponds to the radical heteronomy of the subject—a condition of relational dependency in ... see more

Introduction: Film Theory, a Divided Passion?

The introduction illustrates the relation between the look of the spectator and the look of the theorist in apparatus theory as a way to criticize the authoritarian and pedagogical assumptions on which this theory is based and the consensual understanding of spectatorship that it sustains.

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