An Ambitious Project: Understanding the Interface of the Spectator and the Spectacle

This is an unpublished and unused blog post from late 2013 that was originally intended as one of the introduction posts for the Ways 2 Interface project.

Ways of Understanding

Ways 2 Interface is the continuation of a research project that I initiated in October 2012 and which culminated in Ways of Being: The Spectator and the Spectacle, my graduate theoretical dissertation. 

The 30,000 word paper was praised for its boldness, progressive thinking and received the highest mark that has ever been awarded to a Film and Screen Studies dissertation at Bath Spa University; as well as being awarded the Media Futures Research Award for Excellence in Film and Screen Studies research.

 

The primary content (Introduction, Chapter One, Chapter Two and Conclusion) was only half the paper!

"This is a well researched, conceptually sound and cogently argued dissertation which is striking in its originality of argumentation and in its nuanced reading of a wide range of film and critical material. It draws on a plethora of examples from traditions of visual culture from prehistoric cave art to contemporary film, the IMAX experience and future practices of audio‐visual consumption in order to examine traditional and contemporary theories of spectatorship and the spectator’s relation with the spectacle. The introduction clearly sets out the structure and methodology of the dissertation and provides a useful overview of the technological shifts which have resulted in a reconfiguration of the relationship between the viewer and the viewed. This is clearly an ambitious project. It makes a passionate case for the revival of grand theory in studies of Spectatorship in particular and Film Studies in general and sustains this case through argumentation of an exceedingly high order. It acknowledges the need to expand the scope of such studies beyond film, in its reference to a wide range of media texts as much as to critical literature, all of which are directed towards an understanding of spectatorship from points of view as diverse as the sensory, experiential, philosophical, spiritual, metaphysical and neuorological."

(Dr Suman Ghosh, Lecturer in Film and Screen Studies).

However, as I commented in the paper, Ways of Being only served as an introductory speculation and there was a great deal of research material and other speculative thinking that I was not able to deal with in the paper. Futhermore, I continued to conduct research for the project even after I had submitted the paper in June 2013. Hence, my incentive to orchestrate Ways 2 Interface.

Looking Beyond Seeing

While my intentions for my theoretical dissertation were originally very different, a deep-seated inclination (intensified by my first exposure to IMAX) steered me towards a reconsidertation of our understandings of the relationship of the spectator and the spectacle. 

This reconsideration was first centered on film, but very quickly broadened to include all forms of audio visual content. This inclination was further intensified (as the choice of titles for my paper and this platform will testify) when I was introduced to John Berger's Ways of Seeing.

“I want to question some of the assumptions usually made about the tradition of European painting. That tradition that was born about 1400, died about 1900. Tonight, it isn’t so much the paintings themselves which I want to consider, as the way we now see them. Now, in the second half of the 20th century, because we see these paintings as nobody saw them before. If we discover why this is so, we shall also discover something about ourselves and the situation in which we are living.” (Berger, 1972).

Berger's considerations are very much steeped in the theoretical traditions of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Like other radical thinkers, Berger was infleunced by the explanations a psycoanalytical account could provide for the spectator's relationship with any type of spectacle and, in turn, Berger served as a pioneer in the establishment of a wider academic grounding of spectatorship study in the 1970s. 

Seeing the Gaze

Key among these areas of study was that of the Gaze, as pioneered in Film Studies. Gaze theory argued that there is an ideology: 

"a ‘way of seeing,’ structured into visual representations and the way those presentations address spectators” (Williams, 1994:1). 

Therefore, the gaze refers less to the process the spectator employs to view a film and  more to the way in which a film is a constructed gaze - a particular way of seeing something - that the spectator adopts while watching a film. 

The gaze was wholly reliant on a psychoanalytical explanation and it posited that a spectator is a sumissive componant of a larger cinematic/spectacle apparatus and adopts whatever mindset or ideology a particular cinematic/spectacle apparatus embodies: 

"film theorists argued that the kind of deception that cinematic illusion wrought upon the film spectator was a precise instantiation of the kind of deception wrought by ideology upon the individual” (Allen, 1998:7). 

Two-and-a-half thousand years old, Plato's simile of the cave acts a surprisingly good illustraion of the apparatus, gaze theory and classical film theory's somewhat complacent treatment of the spectator and spectacle as a whole.

“Imagine an underground chamber like a cave, with a long entrance open to the daylight and as wide as the cave. In this chamber are men who have been prisoners there since they were children, their legs and necks being fastened that they can only look straight ahead of them and cannot turn their heads. Some way off, behind and higher up, a fire is burning, and between the fire and the prisoners and above them runs a road, in front of which a curtain-wall has been built, like the screen art puppet shows between the operators and their audience, above which they show their puppets… Imagine further that there are men carrying all sorts of gear along behind the curtain-wall, projecting above it and including figures of men and animals made of wood and stone and all sorts of other materials, and that some of these men, as you would expect, are talking and some not.” (Plato, 2003:241)

However, the theory of the gaze and the apparatus was heavily critisised with the emergence of cognitive film theory. The main criticism was that the gaze and the apparatus provided a one-sided explanation and delegated the spectator to a function where the actual audience member was non-existent. 

The gaze and the apparatus did not account for the cognitive input a spectator brings to a film or spectacle experience - it did not provide an account of both sides of the relationship.

Ways of Thinking and Feeling

Cognitive Film Theory presents a two-sided account of the spectator and spectacle, where the actual audience member, based on their individual life experience, is just as much as involved in the creation of a way of seeing a film or spectacle: “Viewers cannot absorb cinematic images any more than they can absorb reality. Instead they undertake a perceptual dialogue, seeing in part what their schemas encourage them to seek out, and in part what the artist’s shaping of cinematic form encourages them to see" (Nadaner, 1984:126).

Repositioning Botticelli's Venus and Mars.

While Berger does favour a psychoanalytical approach, there is something of a cognitive pronouncement in his theorising: 

“The invention of the camera has changed not only what we see, but how we see it. In a crucial but quite simple way, it has even changed paintings painted long before it was invented. The painting on the wall, like a human eye, can only be in one place at one time. The camera reproduces it, making it available in any size anywhere, for any purpose. Botticelli’s Venus And Mars used to be a unique image which it was only possible to see in the room where it was actually hanging. Now its image or detail of it, or the image of any other painting which is reproduced, can be seen in a million different places at the same time. As you look at them now, on your screen, your wallpaper is around them. Your window is opposite them. Your carpet is below them. At this same moment, they are on many other screens, surrounded by different objects, different colours, different sounds. You are seeing them in the context of your own life” (Berger, 1972).

While cognitive film theory flourished throughout the 1980s and 1990s, developments in Film Studies, over the past ten years, have been pushing the boundaries of understanding even further.  

Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses by Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener serves something as the culmination of this expanded thinking and of all previous film theoretical thinking besides. 

However, Elsaesser and Hagener posit that all lines of thought in film theory have been at fault by not considering the human body as a required variable and construct in the study of the spectator and the spectacle: 

"Each type of cinema (as well as every film theory) imagines an ideal spectator, which means it postulates a certain relation between the (body of the) spectator and the (properties of the) image on the screen, however much at first sight the highlighted terms are "understanding" and "making sense", "interpretation" and "comprehension". What is called classical narrative cinema, for instance, can be defined by the way a given film engages, addresses and envelops the spectatorial body. Films furthermore presuppose a cinematic space that is both physical and discursive, one where film and spectator, cinema and body encounter one another. This includes the architectural arrangement of the spectatorial space (the auditorium with its racked seating), a temporal ordering of performances (separate sessions or continuous admission) and a specific social framing of the visit to the movie-theater (a night out with friends, or a solitary self-indulgence), the sensory envelope of sound and other perceptual stimuli, as well as the imaginary construction of filmic space through mise-en-scene, montage and narration. Likewise, bodies, settings and objects within the film communicate with each other (and with the spectator) through size, texture, shape, density and surface appeal, as much as they play on scale, distance, proximity, color or other primarily optical markers. But there are additional ways the body engages with the film event, besides the senses of vision, tactility and sound: philosophical issues of perception and temporality, of agency and consciousness are also central to the cinema, as they are to the spectator. One of the challenges of our task was to tease out from formalist and realist theories their respective conceptions of cinema's relation to the body, whether formulated normatively (as, for example, in the approaches of both Sergej Eisenstein and Andre Bazin, however opposed they might be in other respects) or descriptively (more typical, at least in rhetorical strategy, of phenomenological and other contemporary theories)" (Thomas Elsaesser & Malte Hagener, Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses, pages 4-5)

Study in bed, not in the library. Especially when it's cold!

Furthermore, Elsaesser and Hagener argue that by reconsidering classic and contemporary film theory in relation to the inclusion of the bodily perspective will enable a greater and unifying understanding of the spectator and the spectacle:

"The idea of the body as sensory envelope, as perceptual membrane and material-mental interface, in relation to the cinematic image and to audio-visual perception, is thus more than a heuristic device and an aesthetic metaphor: it is the ontological, epistemological and phenomenological "ground" for the respective theories of film and cinema today" (Thomas Elsaesser & Malte Hagener, Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses, pages 11)

Upgrading Our Understanding

Ultimately, these four components - Ways of Seeing, the gaze, cognitive film theory and Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses - served as the 'way in' for the Ways of Being project; they provided an essential account of the explanations of the spectator and spectacle relationship which already existed in the academic sphere. 

My aim, as was Berger's and Elsaesser's and Hagener's, was to reconsider these established presumptions and, through doing so, construct a greater understanding of a our larger ways of being: "the situation in which we are living.” (Berger, 1972). 

In Ways of Being I proposed a case to transition the academic study of film and the spectator from its cave-like complacency and re-position it firmly in the current age of the upgrade. 

My aim is the same for Ways 2 Interface.