My research explores how spectatorship is a cultural and social construct and needs to be acknowledged as such in order to build a more rounded picture of spectatorship as a whole, as an experience which takes place beyond the cinema screen. This approach involves
an in-depth examination into spectatorship theory and an analysis of the different ways in which spectatorship has been theorised. The dynamic between the audience, spectator, viewer and subject is integral to film viewing and the way identity is shaped and constructed. When an audience is referred to it usually means a body of people who gather to watch a film, be it at the cinema or elsewhere: ‘[t]he cinema audience comprises people who assemble to watch films in cinemas and other venues, both public and private; and also those who consume films via alternative platforms’ (Kuhn and Westwell, 2012: 21). Spectatorship is a more abstract concept, referring to an audience member who has an interactive relationship with the film; interactive in that the spectator critiques and participates in an embodied and interconnected experience of film viewing. Though, as has been discussed previously, the experience is not solely dependent on film viewing and includes aspects such as anticipation and identification. As Kuhn and Westwell argue, ‘the study of film spectatorship and the study of cinema audiences derive from distinct disciplinary approaches and methodologies’, meaning that it is helpful to come to a ‘conceptual distinction between the two terms’ (Kuhn and Westwell, 2012: 22). Further, the notion of the viewer is drawn from reception studies where the ‘[e]mphasis is on the viewer in her or his interaction with a film or films, on the expectations and interpretive strategies brought to bear on reading films, and on how the latter are shaped’ (Kuhn and Westwell, 2012: 345). Being a viewer is a way of experiencing film where the emphasis lies on the viewer’s interaction with that particular film. Being a film viewer means interpreting the film and being shaped by what you have watched. Interaction, as I define it, is when the audience member actively searches for information on a particular film with the goal to acquiring an increased knowledge of that particular film. This is of particular relevance when discussing fans as the fan will actively seek out information on a franchise in order to interact with it. Though this does present a methodological problem with regards to knowing whether an audience member actively seeks out information or not I base this statement in the knowledge that this level of research was present throughout my own tracing of distracted spectatorship. Having the case study notebooks in place as an example of the self-reflexive process allows the cinematic experience to be seen as an experience which is mediated and framed by concerns and agendas which, in turn, impact spectatorship. For this reason the term spectator is preferable for this research as it implies that interactive relationship on which distracted spectatorship relies.
Spectatorship is, with regards to film theory, approached in a specific way and through a series of metaphors, as Sobchack argues:
The first two, the frame and the window, represent the opposing poles of classical film theory, while the third, the mirror, represents the synthetic conflation of perception and expression that characterizes most contemporary film theory. What is interesting to note is that all three metaphors relate directly to the screen rectangle and to the film as a static viewed object (Sobchack, 1995: 45)
Sobchack emphasises here how the cinema screen is presented as the viewed object, with the spectator as the subject who is doing the viewing. The preoccupation for Sobchack is often the importance of illustrating that the screen and the spectator have a kind of relationship to one another; what is not addressed is how this relationship is not confined to the cinema screen and not confined to a set timeframe. As discussed previously I define the cinematic experience as taking place both before and after the spectator sees the film which opens up the timeframe regarding experience. This timeframe is not set and one could conclude that all experience can be related to the cinematic. Expanding from this is how the experience does not only take place within the cinema, as the case study notebooks demonstrate, and the experience is spread across a variety of media. What this thesis emphasises is that the focus on the cinema screen and its relationship with the spectator is not the only way of approaching film analysis and that filmic terms are open to a number of meanings and have the capacity to be developed in new ways.
Writing on cinema and spectatorship, Judith Mayne examines and assesses major theories and ways in which these terms have developed. She does this in order to explore how the analysis of a dialogue between history and theory can establish how cinema engages its viewers. Mayne explains that spectatorship consists not only of the act of watching something but also ‘the ways one takes pleasure in the experience, or not’ (1993: 1). The term thus suggests that the act of ‘film-going and the consumption of movies and their myths are symbolic activities, [and] culturally significant events’ (1993: 1). An audience member or a viewer watches a film and then leaves the cinema; however, spectatorship is a question of ‘not just the relationship that occurs between the viewer and the screen, but also and especially how that relationship lives on once the spectator leaves the theatre’ (Mayne, 1993: 2-3). Mayne sees spectatorship as a two-way relationship that requires the viewer to interact with what they are watching: it includes ‘the acts of looking and hearing inasmuch as the patterns of everyday life are dramatized, foregrounded, displaced, or otherwise inflected by the cinema’ (Mayne, 1993: 31). This is brought to the fore in my discussions of distracted spectatorship which emphasises how the acts of viewing and interpreting are affected throughout the cinematic experience.
Rather than just interacting with films as though they are a passive medium whose purpose is merely to show the viewer things spectatorship allows us to understand that this relationship ‘involves an engagement with modes of seeing and telling, hearing and listening, not only in terms of how films are structured, but in terms of how audiences imagine themselves’ (Mayne, 1993: 32). The way audiences imagine themselves requires us to consider ideas of identification, which are discussed in Chapter Five, and can be used to discuss the ways in which the viewer and the subject can be understood. Mayne examines the area in which spectatorship occurs within the discussion of the subject and viewer relationship:
Spectatorship occurs at precisely those spaces where “subjects” and “viewers” rub against each other. In other words, I believe that the interest in spectatorship in film studies attests to a discomfort with either a too easy separation or a too easy collapse of the subject and the viewer (Mayne, 1993: 37)
The language Mayne uses suggests physical or embodied interaction between the two terms this is significant to the thesis as the distracted spectator is both subject and viewer. Mayne’s use of the term spectator is a reflection of both of these concepts and exposes the interplay of the cinematic institution on the real person. Distracted spectatorship involves a unique and specific combination of individual fantasy and social ritual. Individual fantasy relates to those elements of distracted spectatorship which impact the film viewing and lead the spectator to create their own personally and socially constructed cinematic experience. Expanding on how the cinematic experience is a combination of social ritual and individual fantasy are Mayne’s discussions of how spectatorship needs to be seen as ordinary. This is of importance to the thesis as distracted spectatorship is theorised as potentially occurring in all situations and as such should be seen as an integral part of the film viewing process:
Instead, spectatorship needs to be treated as one of those ordinary activities, and theorizing this activity can open up spaces between seemingly opposing terms, thus leading us to attend more closely to how stubbornly our pleasures in the movies refuse any rigid dichotomies (Mayne, 1993: 172).
Mayne uses the term ordinary here to emphasise how spectatorship is a way of life and should be understood as such. The argument presented in this thesis builds on this to argue that spectatorship of film should be seen as an activity that can leave the confines of the cinema and extend outwards into the everyday life of the spectator. This is an important point to make as it emphasises how the cinematic experience is not confined to the cinema itself.
By extending it outwards allows for an increased understanding of how the individual spectator understands the world around them in relation to a particular film franchise. This matters as it allows for the inclusion of the multiple identities that the spectator holds within themselves. Limiting the spectator to being understood in terms of the way they view films in the cinema in turn limits our understanding of that spectator. This makes spectatorship even more of an ordinary activity than that as examined by Mayne because if spectatorship can take place within the cinema, directed towards a particular film, then spectatorship can also take place when the film is not being directly viewed.
Spectatorship is not only the act of watching a film, but also the ways one is affected by the experience, or not. As explored by Mayne earlier on spectatorship refers to the way in which film viewing is invested with watching and listening. As well as this the cinema functions as a form of pleasure, entertainment and socialisation. As such spectatorship is not rigid but fluid and distracted spectatorship can aid in it being recognised as such. One way of theorising how audiences view films is through the theory of the passive spectator. Introducing terms such as this allow the concept of distracted spectatorship to be understood alongside other methods of spectatorship. Spectators have been theorised as having no involvement in what they are watching, as sitting immobile in their seats facing the screen. According to Christian Metz, a French film theorist who pioneered the application of Ferdinand de Saussure’s theories of semiology to film, spectators take in ‘everything with their eyes, nothing with their bodies: the institution of the cinema requires a silent, motionless spectator, a vacant spectator at once alienated and happy’ (Metz, 1977: 96). Here Metz proposes that the institution of cinema requires a motionless and inactive spectator as then no attention will be drawn away from what is on the screen. Robert Stam, a theorist of semiotics and poststructuralism alongside film theory, expands on this argument by stating how the spectator is shaped by what they view:
Any truly comprehensive ethnography of spectatorship must distinguish multiple registers: (1) the spectator as fashioned by the text itself (through focalization, point-of-view conventions, narrative structuring, mise-en-scene); (2) the spectator as fashioned by the (diverse and evolving) technical apparatuses (Cineplex, IMAX, domestic VCR); (3) the spectator as fashioned by the institutional contexts of spectatorship (social ritual of moviegoing, classroom analysis, cinématèque); (4) the spectator as constituted by ambient discourses and ideologies (Stam, 2000: 231)
Stam emphasises the ways in which the spectator is constituted by what they watch on the screen as well as through the environment with which they come into contact within the
cinema. Stam is proposing a different way of studying spectatorship by taking the above aspects into account. In order to truly acknowledge and understand how spectatorship has changed and shifted the aspects Stam mentions in the above quotation need to be analysed alongside the use of analytical film theory. Film theory, using an analytical approach, means the ways in which films are analysed as texts and the techniques related to this. For example, analytical film theory may focus on the impact of mise-en-scene, cinematography, sound and music on the audience rather than the reactions on the individual spectator. What the case study notebooks show is how the cinematic experience relies on the social and cultural background of the individual spectator. Though the case study notebooks are specific to my own cinematic experience as a PhD student undertaking a certain kind of research it stands as an example of how distracted spectatorship works throughout the cinematic experience. In stating how spectatorship should not be solely reliant on analytical film theory but should also take into account the spectator themselves, Stam goes on to discuss how other theorists have explored particular forms of viewing and what they do to make the spectator a part of the image, expanded on in the following:
Any contemporary analysis of the processes of spectatorship, furthermore, must deal not only with the fact of new venues (films seen in planes, in airports, bars etc) but also with the fact that new audiovisual technologies have generated not only a new cinema but also a new spectator. A new blockbuster cinema, made possible by huge budgets, sound innovations, and digital technologies, favoured a “sound and light show” cinema of sensation. What Laurent Julier calls “concert films” foster a fluid, euphorical montage of images and sounds reminiscent less of classical Hollywood than of video games, music video, and amusement park rides. Cinema of this kind becomes “immersive”, in Biocca’s expression; the spectator is “in” the image rather than confronted by it. Sensation predominates over narrative, and sound over image, while verisimilitude is no longer a goal; rather, it is the technology-dependent production of vertiginous, prosthetic delirium. The spectator is no longer the deluded master of the image but rather the inhabitant of the image (Stam, 2000: 317-318).
Alongside the advancement of technology and shifting condition of film viewing, theorists such as Stam begin to deliberate how spectators are moving away from being merely passive, as theorised by Metz, to interact with their own spectatorship. The spectator metaphorically becomes a part of the image rather than merely viewing it as sensations are emphasised which in turn make the spectator an active part of the spectatorial process. All the information which is sent through the screen to the spectator has to be interpreted in some way, each image brings to mind other images and all have a plethora of meanings that can be interpreted by different spectators in different ways.
It is because of this act of decoding, as identified by cultural theorist and sociologist Stuart Hall, that the theory of the passive spectator is untenable with regards to the cinematic experience. Hall theorised that, through the analysis of culture, connections can be made between the structures of society and their processes and the analysis of the more formal or symbolic structures, both are pivotal when it comes to analysing culture. He related his theory to television and argued how the ‘“object” of production practices and structures in television is the production of a message: that is, a sign-vehicle, or rather sign-vehicles of a specific kind organised, like any other form of communication or language, through the operation of codes, within the syntagetic chain of discourse’ (Hall, 1973: 1-2). What Hall meant by this was that television is the product of a particular kind of message and was used as the form from which to put that message across to the spectator, the quotation below elaborates on this process:
The apparatus and structures of production issue, at a certain moment, in the form of a symbolic vehicle constituted within the rules of “language”. It is in this “phenomenal form” that the circulation of the “product” takes place. Of course, even the transmission of this symbolic vehicle requires its material substratum – video-tape, film, the transmitting and receiving apparatus, etc. It is also in this symbolic form that the reception of the “product”, and its distribution between different segments of the audience, takes place. Once accomplished, the translation of that message into societal structures must be made again for the circuit to be completed (Hall, 1973: 2)
The process described is a cyclical one in which a particular message is taken up, transmitted, received and then translated by the spectator. This process was dubbed by Hall as encoding and decoding as at a ‘certain point in this particular dialogue the broadcasting structure must yield an encoded message in the form of a meaningful discourse to the waiting spectator’ (1973: 3). Hall argued that ‘for anything to be done with the message which has been encoded it first needs to be decoded’ and it was ‘this set of de-coded meanings which “have an effect”, influence, entertain, instruct or persuade, with very complex perceptual, cognitive, emotional, ideological or behavioural consequences’ (Hall, 1973: 3). It is only through the act of decoding that the message can have an impact, if it has not been decoded then it will not carry any meaning for the spectator. Hall relates this to specific codes surrounding the definition of genres in film, he uses the example of the Western film genre to demonstrate his point:
It means that a set of extremely tightly-coded “rules” exist whereby stories of a certain recognisable type, content and structure can be easily encoded within the
Western form. What is more, these “rules of encoding” were so diffused, so symmetrically shared as between producer and audience, that the “message” was likely to be decoded in a manner highly symmetrical to that in which it had been encoded. This reciprocity of codes is, indeed, precisely what is entailed in the notion of stylization or “conventionalization”, and the presence of each reciprocal codes is, of course, what defines or makes possible the existence of a genre (Hall, 1973: 6)
It is when the encoding and decoding are not in synchronisation with each other that a multitude of other interpretations can take place, this is where distracted spectatorship can be seen to work, to fill the gap where the decoding process has not been in line with the message at the encoding. This conveys the subjective nature of the cinematic experience as each spectator will decode the messages differently in relation to their own responses to what is shown on the screen. Even if the encoded message is decoded by the spectator in the “correct” way there is still room for the spectators own interpretation on what they are viewing. For example, Hall uses the Western which