The essays in this volume represent some of the best new thinking about the crucial relations between visual representation in film and human subjectivity. No amount of empirical research into the sociology of actual audiences will displace the desire to speculate about the effects of visual culture, and especially moving images, on viewing subjects. These notions of spectatorship, however hypothetical, become extremely compelling metaphors for the workings of vision within the institution of cinema. Viewing Positions examines the tradition of a centered, unitary, distanced, and objectifying spectator's gaze; investigates the period when film spectatorship as an idea began; and analyses gender- and sexuality-based challenges to the homogeneous classical theory of spectatorship. It makes available critical understandings of spectatorship that have, until now, largely eluded cinema studies.
Author(s): Linda Williams (editor)
Series: Depth of Field Series
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Year: 1994
Language: English
Pages: 290
Tags: Viewing, Cinema, Theory, depth, field
Table of contents
Introduction - Linda Williams
1 - Vision and the Apparatus:
Modernizing Vision - Jonathan Crary;
Phenomenology and the Film Experience - Vivian Sobchack;
Cinema and the Postmodern Condition - Anne Friedberg.
2 - Historians View Spectators
Cinematic Spectatorship before the Apparatus: The Public Taste for Reality in Fin-de-Siecle Paris - Vanessa R. Schwartz;
An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Eilm and the (In)Credulous Spectator - Tom Gunning;
Early Cinema, Late Cinema: Transformations of the Public Sphere - Miriam Hansen;
3 - Viewing Antitheses
Pardoxes of Spectatorship - Judith Moyne;
The Eye of Horror - Carol J. Clover;
Spectatorship as Drag: The Act of Viewing and Classic Horror Cinema - Rhona J. Berenstein;
Annotated Bibliography
Contributors
Index
