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1
The actor and the spectator: Foundations of the theory of human action. Thoemmes Press, 1998.
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2
Kulp, Christopher B. The end of epistemology: Deweyand his current allies on the spectator theory of knowledge. Greenwood Press, 1992.
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3
Kulp, Christopher B. The end of epistemology: Dewey and his current allies on the spectator theory of knowledge. Greenwood Press, 1992.
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4
Franco, Susanne, and Gabriella Giannachi. Moving Spaces Enacting Dance, Performance, and the Digital in the Museum. Fondazione Università Ca’ Foscari, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.30687/978-88-6969-534-6.
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This collection of essays investigates some of the theories and concepts related to the burgeoning presence of dance and performance in the museum. This surge has led to significant revisions of the roles and functions that museums currently play in society. The authors provide key analyses on why and how museums are changing by looking into participatory practices and decolonisation processes, the shifting relationship with the visitor/spectator, the introduction of digital practices in collection making and museum curation, and the creation of increasingly complex documentation practices. The tasks designed by artists who are involved in the European project Dancing Museums. The Democracy of Beings (2018-21) respond to the essays by suggesting a series of body-mind practices that readers could perform between the various chapters to experience how theory may affect their bodies.
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Suriano, Alba Rosa. al-Farāfīr. Edizioni Ca' Foscari, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.30687/978-88-6969-240-6.
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Based on the Hegelian dialectic of the servant-master, this comedy represents, with the sarcasm and irony typical of its author, a profound reflection on the relationships between human beings. Starting from the local, with a pungent criticism on the social and political condition of Egypt in the Sixties, the two protagonists Farfūr and the Master guide and involve the spectator in a consideration on humanity and on the meaning of life that reaches universality. Divided into two acts, the comedy has no precise indications about time and space, which is confused with the time of representation, also thanks to the involvement of actors who are among the spectators. Discussing each other on names, trades and interpersonal relationships, the two protagonists criticise corruption, poor management of public health, social inequalities, but also the intellectual class that fails to give answers to people’s practical needs. The division in two of human society is even more evident with the second act, when the author’s reflection moves towards the existing organisational and economic systems, dismantling the complexity and reducing them again to a mere servant-master relationship. The other characters of the play are functional to the discourse of Idrīs: wives and children, spectators-actors and especially the figure of the author, who gradually disappears and abandons his own creatures to their fate.
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Subjectivity: Filmic representation and the spectator's experience. Amsterdam University Press, 2011.
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8
D'Aloia, Adriano. Neurofilmology of the Moving Image. Amsterdam University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.5117/9789463725255.
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A walk suspended in mid-air, a fall at breakneck speed towards a fatal impact with the ground, an upside-down flip into space, the drift of an astronaut in the void… Analysing a wide range of films, this book brings to light a series of recurrent aesthetic motifs through which contemporary cinema destabilizes and then restores the spectator’s sense of equilibrium. The ‘tensive motifs’ of acrobatics, fall, impact, overturning, and drift reflect our fears and dreams, and offer imaginary forms of transcendence of the limits of our human condition, along with an awareness of their insurmountable nature. Adopting the approach of ‘Neurofilmology’—an interdisciplinary method that puts filmology, perceptual psychology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive neuroscience into dialogue—, this book implements the paradigm of embodied cognition in a new ecological epistemology of the moving-image experience.
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Comanducci, Carlo. Spectatorship and Film Theory: The Wayward Spectator. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.
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10
Comanducci, Carlo. Spectatorship and Film Theory: The Wayward Spectator. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
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11
1947-, Newman Donald J., ed. The Spectator: Emerging discourses. University of Delaware Press, 2005.
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12
Murray, Terri. Studying Feminist Film Theory. Liverpool University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/liverpool/9781911325802.001.0001.
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This book is aimed at helping media and film studies teachers introduce the basics of feminist film theory. No prior knowledge of feminist theory is required, the intended readers being university undergraduate teachers and students of film and media studies. Areas of emphasis include spectatorship, narrative, and ideology. Many illustrative case studies from popular cinema are used to offer students an opportunity to consider the connotations of visual and aural elements of film, narrative conflicts and oppositions, the implications of spectator 'positioning' and viewer identification, and an ideological critical approach to film. Explanations of key terminology are included, along with classroom exercises and practice questions. Each chapter begins with key definitions and explanations of the concepts to be studied, including some historical background where relevant. Case studies include film noir, Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days and the work of directors Spike Lee, Claire Denis, and Paul Verhoeven.
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Schoene, Adam. Sentimental Conviction: Rousseau’s Apologia and the Impartial Spectator. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474422857.003.0009.
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Where Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) extends the domain of spectatorship beyond the ocular realm and claims that we must become the impartial spectators of our own character and conduct, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques, Dialogues (1776) also attempts to probe beyond the visual surface to examine through careful study the constitution of another, who is actually himself. This chapter traces a Smithian sentiment in the radical division of the self dramatized in Rousseau’s fictional autobiographical Dialogues, emphasizing Rousseau’s attempt to liberate his own gaze and render an unbiased judgment upon himself. Although Rousseau does not write in direct discourse with Smith, he applies a strikingly similar rhetorical device to the spectator within the dialogic structure of his apologia. Reading Rousseau alongside Smith resituates the Dialogues not as a work of madness, as it has frequently been interpreted, but rather as an unrelenting struggle for justice.
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A, Cucinotta Francis, Langley Research Center, and United States. National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Scientific and Technical Information Division., eds. Corrections to the participant-spectator model of high-energy alpha-particle fragmentation. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Office of Management, Scientific and Technical Information Division, 1991.
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15
American Literature, Lynching, and the Spectator in the Crowd: Spectacular Violence. Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2015.
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16
Lelekis, Debbie. American Literature, Lynching, and the Spectator in the Crowd: Spectacular Violence. Lexington Books, 2019.
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17
Baker, Tabitha. Julie’s Garden and the Impartial Spectator: An Examination of Smithian Themes in Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474422857.003.0008.
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This chapter explores the similarities between Smith and Rousseau’s moral philosophy through a discussion of the Smithean aspects of Rousseau’s 1761 novel La Nouvelle Héloïse. Focussing the analysis on the motif of the eighteenth-century English landscape garden, this chapter reveals the extent to which Rousseau’s novel reflects Smith’s principles of arriving at moral behaviour and true virtue. The author argues that it is within the space of Julie’s garden that Rousseau and Smith’s theories are reconciled in order to produce a blended social model in which Smith provides responses to Rousseau’s failed utopia. An examination of La Nouvelle Héloïse alongside Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments demonstrates that the symbol of the landscape garden in Rousseau’s novel is an experimental setting in which Rousseau and Smith’s theories are merged, and it is through Rousseau’s fiction that the complicated relationship between the two thinkers’ thought can be most evidently sourced.
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Parreñas Shimizu, Celine. The Proximity of Other Skins. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190865856.001.0001.
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Transnational films representing intimacy and inequality disrupt and disgust Western spectators. When wounded bodies within poverty entangle with healthy wealthy bodies in sex, romance and care, fear and hatred combine with desire and fetishism. Works from the Philippines, South Korea, and independents from the United States and France may not be made for the West and may not make use of Hollywood traditions. Rather, they demand recognition for the knowledge they produce beyond our existing frames. They challenge us to go beyond passive consumption, or introspection of ourselves as spectators, for they represent new ways of world-making we cannot unsee, unhear, or unfeel. The spectator is redirected to go beyond the rapture of consuming the other to the rupture that arises from witnessing pain and suffering. Self-displacement is what proximity to intimate inequality in cinema ultimately compels and demands so as to establish an ethical way of relating to others. In undoing the spectator, the voice of the transnational filmmaker emerges. Not only do we need to listen to filmmakers from outside Hollywood who unflinchingly engage the inexpressibility of difference, we need to make room for critics and theorists who prioritize the subjectivities of others. When the demographics of filmmakers and film scholars are not as diverse as its spectators, films narrow our worldviews. To recognize our culpability in the denigration of others unleashes the power of cinema. The unbearability of stories we don’t want to watch and don’t want to feel must be borne.
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Wagner-Pacifici, Robin. From Moral Sentiments to Civic Engagement: Sociological Analysis as Responsible Spectatorship. Edited by Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ronald N. Jacobs, and Philip Smith. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195377767.013.7.
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This article proposes an entirely different understanding of the goals of cultural sociology, arguing that the subject position of the “spectator” should replace that of the “social scientist.” It contends that cultural sociology should aspire for fidelity—to moods and experiences, to locations and dramas, and to the truth of experience—and that this fidelity can be achieved through witnessing. In order to build the case for a new kind of cultural sociology, the article cites the works of Adam Smith, and especially his theory of social morality founded on the figure of the “impartial spectator.” It also examines four initial problems, including the problem of the alleged distinction between social action and spectatorship and the problem of identifying the appropriate “spectacle.” It concludes by highlighting some important lessons that need to be taken into account so that cultural sociology will continue to flourish.
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Aebischer, Pascale. Technology and the Ethics of Spectatorship. Edited by James C. Bulman. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199687169.013.4.
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This chapter revisits debates regarding the use of technology to enhance or remediate performances in the light of Emmanuel Levinas’s understanding of the ethical encounter as a face-to-face encounter between a subject and her/his other. Building on these debates and Robert Weimann’s distinction between locus and platea, it suggests that performance theory’s emphasis on the physical co-presence of spectator and performer undervalues the experience of the spectator. Using three productions that use digital media as examples, the chapter demonstrates how online live streaming (in Cheek by Jowl’s Measure for Measure), digital hologram projection (in the McGuires’ Ophelia’s Ghost), and the use of an online stage (in the RSC’s collaboration with Google+ on #dream40) each harness the affordances of digital media to create conceptual spaces in which spectators can experience ethical encounters. Digital media thus open up distinct ways of experiencing dilemmas explored by Shakespeare’s plays.
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George, Doran. The Hysterical Spectator. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199377329.003.0005.
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Looking at select works from Manhattan’s Lower East Side dance scene, this essay analyzes how distinct strategies for staging femininity procure feminist, queer, and transgender viewership. A reading of Jennifer Monson and DD Dorvillier’s diptych RMW(a) & RMW frames the essay, whereby the author emerges as a hysterical spectator who can settle with none of the distinct strategies. Contemporary dance thus becomes a medium through which identity boundaries, and accompanying tensions, as they have historically emerged within feminist, queer, and transgender theorizing, get revealed and transgressed. The examples of dance analyzed are seen sometimes to resolve the tensions and sometimes to reaffirm patriarchal gender asymmetry and exclusionary normative identity. The privileging of the female body, as Western concert dance’s proper vehicle of expression, serves as a point of departure through which femininity’s critical staging in different works is assessed, alongside the identity struggles the dances procure in the hysterical viewer.
22
Chateau, Dominique. Subjectivity. Filmic Representation and the Spectator's Experience. Amsterdam University Press, 2011.
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23
White, Bretton. Staging Discomfort. University Press of Florida, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.5744/florida/9781683401544.001.0001.
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Staging Discomfort examines how queer bodies are theatrically represented on the Cuban stage in order to re-evaluate the role of categorization as one of the state’s primary revolutionary tools. These performances concentrate on an aesthetics of fluidity, and thus upset traditional understandings of performer and spectator, and what constitutes the ideal Cuban citizenry. New affective modes are produced when performing bodies highlight—often in uncomfortably intimate, grotesque, or raw ways—the unavoidability of spectators’ bodies, and their capacity for queerness. Here the imagining of new continuities and subjectivities can lead to a reconfiguration of forms of Cuban citizenship. The affective responses from the closeness experienced in the performances in Staging Discomfort are challenges to the Cuban state’s self-designated role as primary provider for the needs of its citizens’ bodies. Through the lens of queer theory, the manuscript explores the body’s centrality to the state’s deployment of fear to successfully marginalize gay life, which this group of works seeks to defuse through an articulation of intimacies, shame, the death drive, cruising, and failure. These affective experiences shape Cuban subjectivities that emerge out of queerness, but whose focus on inclusivity necessarily involves all Cubans. Several of the central questions that guide Staging Discomfort are: How is Cuban theater agile in its critiques considering the state’s limitations on expression? How do queer performances allow for new understandings about the effects of the state’s failing socialist utopian contract with its citizens? And, can Cuban bodies that come together in queer ways re-imagine Cuban citizenship?
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Plantinga, Carl. Immersion and Emotion. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190867133.003.0007.
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This chapter discusses both immersion and emotion in the context of an ethics of engagement. I defend both against criticisms leveled by estrangement theory, which tends to be suspicious against the effects of each. The purpose is not merely defense, however, but to make positive claims about how immersion and emotion function in the viewing of screen stories, and beyond that to suggest how an ethics of engagement might approach them. The chapter suggests that immersion in itself is not necessarily harmful, and the immersive experience is sometimes coextensive with the sort of critical spectator experience favored by estrangement theorists. With regard to emotion, I argue that the blanket dismissal of emotion by estrangement theorists is wholly counterproductive. Instead, the ethical critic ought to understand what emotions are and how they function in order to distinguish their ethical effects.
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Berliner, Todd. Hollywood Storytelling. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190658748.003.0003.
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Chapter 3 studies the aesthetic pleasures of Hollywood cinema’s approach to storytelling. It examines the cognitive processes at work when a film cues spectators to construct a film’s story in their minds, and it explains the ways in which Hollywood movies both facilitate and complicate the spectator’s process of story construction. The chapter offers a new theory of Hollywood storytelling aesthetics—illustrated with examples from whodunits, screwball comedies, twist films, and mysteries—that film viewers take pleasure not just in narrative unity and easy understanding, as previous scholars have argued, but also in narrative disunity and cognitive challenge. With support from experimental psychology, the chapter argues that viewers enjoy narratives that stimulate moments of free association, insight, and incongruity-resolution.
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Radner, Hilary, and Alistair Fox. Hypnosis, Emotions, and Animality. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474422888.003.0011.
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In this section of the interview, Raymond Bellour explains why he thinks hypnosis is superior as a model for explaining the effects of cinema, on the grounds that it involves a somatic displacement that comes from outside the spectator. At the same time, he explains his objections to cognitivist film theory. Finally, Bellour recounts how his interest in animals, which began in the 1970s, derived from his perception of the way in which animal figures were being used in American cinema in films like Howard Hawks’s Bringing up Baby and Monkey Business and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, which in turn led him to consider the issue of animality itself.
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Sen, Amartya. Our Obligation to Future Generations. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198825067.003.0007.
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Our reasoned sense of obligations to others can arise from at least three possible sources: cooperation, having caused harm, and effective power to improve suffering. The last source, this chapter argues, is particularly important in considering our obligations to future generations. It draws on a line of reasoning that takes us well beyond contractarian motivations to the idea of the “impartial spectator” as developed by Adam Smith. The interests of future generations come into the story because they are important in our attempt to be impartial spectators. The obligation of power contrasts with the mutual obligations for cooperation at the basic plane of motivational justification. In the context of climate concerns and intergenerational justice, this asymmetry-embracing approach seems to allow an easier entry for understanding our obligations.
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Storr, Virgil Henry. The Impartial Spectator and the Moral Teachings of Markets. Edited by David Schmidtz and Carmen E. Pavel. Oxford University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199989423.013.27.
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Market skeptics have persuasively argued that the market is a social arena that is not simply amoral but that has negative moral consequences. Market apologists have offered two basic responses to this kind of charge: that the market is amoral, and that it transforms private vice into public virtue. This chapter discusses the moral teachings of the market—that is, the moral sentiments individuals are likely to acquire and develop as they engage in the market. Relying on Adam Smith’s discussions of the “impartial spectator,” that imaginary figure that each of us constructs to offer us moral guidance as we negotiate our lives, it is argued that there are good reasons to believe that our impartial spectators might be changed by our dealings in the market. Rather than celebrating selfishness and greed, the market tends to punish both vices. While the market is unlikely to promote the traditional virtues in the form that they are promoted in other contexts, the market is a moral teacher that rewards and so encourages virtuous behavior.
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Vamplew, Wray. Industrialization and Sport. Edited by Robert Edelman and Wayne Wilson. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199858910.013.17.
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This chapter considers three main aspects of sport and industrialization. First, it challenges the conventional wisdom that the British Industrial Revolution was the catalyst for the development of modern sport in Britain and that subsequently Britain’s industrialization led to the cultural export of sport to the rest of the world. In doing so it critiques Guttmann’s theory of modernization in sport; unravels the various influences of industrialization, urbanization, and commercialization; and notes several different models of sport development that emerged around the world. Second, it examines the economic history of sport becoming an industry itself, looking at equipment manufacture, gate-money spectator sport, the role of the professional player, and the various objectives of the entrepreneurs involved. Finally, it considers sport in the industrial workplace, particularly the motives of employers who provided sports facilities for their workers. It emphasizes that sport was often offered to both male and female employees.
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Friedman, Michael T., and Jacob Bustad. Sport and Urbanization. Edited by Robert Edelman and Wayne Wilson. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199858910.013.3.
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Since the start of the nineteenth century, the processes of urban development and the development of modern sport have been dialectically linked. With critical masses of potential participants, spectators, and media, the city provided the necessary ingredients for the development of sport as a structured activity and viable enterprise. With concerns over the social and public health impacts of rapid urbanization, sport helped to shape urban growth through the development of major metropolitan parks; the creation of small parks, playgrounds, and gymnasiums; the provision of resources for recreation; and the placement of facilities for spectator sports. To better understand the dialectical relationship between sport and urbanization, this chapter focuses on two time periods: 1800–1870 and 1870–1940. The period between 1800–1870 was a time of rapid change with both cities and sport developing into their modern forms. The period between 1870–1940 evinces a more instrumental relationship between sport and the city.
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Schliesser, Eric. Philosophy of Science. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190690120.003.0011.
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This chapter articulates Adam Smith’s philosophy of science. The first section emphasizes the significance of Smith’s social conception of science—science takes place, not always comfortably, within a larger society and is itself a social enterprise in which our emotions play a crucial role. Even so, in Smith’s view science ultimately is a reason-giving enterprise, akin to how he understands the role of the impartial spectator. The second and third sections explain Smith’s attitude to theorizing and its relationship, if any, to Humean skepticism. Smith distinguishes between theory acceptance and the possibility of criticism; while he accepts fallibilism, he also embraces scientific revolutions and even instances of psychological incommensurability. His philosophy is not an embrace of Humean skepticism, but a modest realism. Finally, the chapter explores the implications of Smith’s analysis of scientific systems as machines.
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Hanaway-Oakley, Cleo. Tactile Vision and Enworlded Being. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198768913.003.0005.
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Stephen’s musings on the pre-cinematic ‘stereoscope’ are discussed in relation to Bloom’s contemplation of parallax and his mention of the ‘Mutoscope’. The three-dimensionality, tangibility, and tactility of stereoscopic perception is analysed alongside Bloom’s and Gerty’s encounter in ‘Nausicaa’ and the Merleau-Pontian concepts of ‘flesh’ and ‘intercorporeity’. The bodily effects of projected cinema—achieved through virtual film worlds, virtual film bodies, and the intercorporeity of film and spectator—are discussed through reference to panorama, phantom ride, and crash films. The dizzying effects of some of these films are compared to the vertiginous nature of the ‘Wandering Rocks’ episode of Ulysses; these cinematic and literary vestibular disturbances are elucidated through gestalt theory and the phenomenological concepts of ‘intention’, ‘attention’, and the ‘phenomenal field’. Finally, the relationship between the self and the other is considered, through a discussion of cinematic mirroring in Ulysses and in Mitchell and Kenyon’s fin de siècle Living Dublin films.
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Mee, Sharon Jane. The Pulse in Cinema. Edinburgh University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474475846.001.0001.
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This book builds on Jean-François Lyotard’s concept of the dispositif, Gilles Deleuze’s work on sensation and Georges Bataille’s economic theory to conceptualise a pulse in cinema. Its aim is to rethink the affective force and economy of film spectatorship better understood by Lyotard’s concept of the dispositif than the formulation of the cinematic apparatus of 1970s film theory. The dispositif recognises the distribution of the pulse – the force of intensities in the body of the spectator and in the image – in terms of an energetic exchange and expenditure. Charting prototypes of the pulse in cinema’s rhythmic forms through Étienne-Jules Marey’s protocinematic experiments from the nineteenth-century and experimental film from the twentieth-century, the book goes on to advance a theory of the pulse in an analysis of body horror films such as Georges Franju’s Le Sang des bêtes/Blood of the Beasts (1949), William Castle’s The Tingler (1959), George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978), Lucio Fulci’s L’aldilà/The Beyond (1981), and Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession (1981). Drawing on ideas of movement, intensity and expenditure, this book argues that blood in the images of body horror films has the unseen intensity of vectors of the pulse. It contends that what the pulse communicates is affect.
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Sherman, Stuart. Finding Their Accounts. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199580033.003.0022.
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This chapter focuses on the peculiarities of the Spectator, a publication which began in 1711. The Spectator is neither autobiography nor novel; it offers, starting with its first number, a useful map through the maze of their intertwining. That the two genres were intimately enmeshed during the decades of their first emergence is a proposition at once self-evident and much canvassed. But the chapter shows how the Spectator may provide a route worth further canvassing. In the peculiar characteristics of its wildly popular authorial persona, it plays out as paradigm (and as parody too) core patterns of transaction between author and reader which had already begun to establish the narrative of ‘my own History’ (whether factual or fictive) as a newly hypnotic cultural artefact — and as a mode of writing whose powerful appeal resides in ‘separations’.
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Cannon Harris, Susan. Mobilising Maurya: J. M. Synge, Bertolt Brecht and the Revolutionary Mother. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474424462.003.0005.
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This chapter examines the impact on modern drama of the establishment of the Soviet Union, through in-depth investigation of a special case: Bertolt Brecht’s transformation of J. M. Synge’s 1904 Riders to the Sea into a 1937 Spanish Civil War play called Señora Carrar’s Rifles. Synge and Ireland were not, for their own sakes, important to Brecht; he was drawn to Riders as a model which might help him solve the problem of how to radicalise the working-class mother. After the disastrous 1935 production of Brecht’s The Mother by the New York City-based Theatre Union, Brecht concluded that the technical demands of epic theater were beyond the capacity of these amateur ensembles. Synge’s unusual treatment of maternal grief in Riders helped Brecht envision a means of producing the effects of epic theater while using the techniques of realism. Helene Weigel’s performance as Teresa Carrar was crucial to his later thinking about acting and spectator emotion. Re-presenting Maurya’s refusal to grieve for Bartley in both Senora Carrar’s Rifles and Mother Courage helped Brecht refine his understanding of alienation in ways which made epic theater more pleasurable for spectators without requiring Brecht to acknowledge that pleasure as a desired effect.
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Cooper, Sarah. Film and the Imagined Image. Edinburgh University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474452786.001.0001.
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Film and the Imagined Image explores the extraordinary ways in which film can stimulate and direct the image-making capacity of the imagination. From documentary to art house cinema, and from an abundance of onscreen images to their complete absence, films that experiment variously with narration, voice-over, and soundscapes do not only engage the thoughts and senses of spectators in a perceptually rich experience. They also make an appeal to visualise more than is visible on screen and they provide instruction on how to do so as spectators think and feel, listen and view. Bringing together philosophy, film theory, literary scholarship, and cognitive psychology with an international range of films from beyond the mainstream, Sarah Cooper charts the key processes that serve the imagining of images in the light of the mind. Through its navigation of a labile and vivid mental terrain, this innovative work makes a profound contribution to the study of spectatorship.
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Plantinga, Carl. The Rhetoric of Screen Stories. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190867133.003.0003.
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This chapter argues that screen stories are often didactic; either explicitly or implicitly, they make a sociomoral or political case. They cue spectators to judge, believe, and feel in certain ways toward characters, situations, and other entities, both fictional and actual. They also promote certain moral sensitivities, actions, responses, and beliefs. Stories are like trolley problems more fully narrativized. Screen stories offer evidence and affective incentives to make judgments, and to have sensitivities, beliefs, and responses, cued by the narration. Chief among these incentives are various sorts of affective pleasures that reward spectators for their cooperation and the fact that public narratives may draw on the forces of social attunement. The chapter ends with a discussion of the qualities of stories that make them persuasive, according to contemporary social science.
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Carvalho, John. Communications and Journalism. Edited by Robert Edelman and Wayne Wilson. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199858910.013.18.
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As sport increased in popularity in the nineteenth century, the emerging mass media were there to both contribute to public interest and then to benefit from it, creating a synergism that has lasted until the present. The media–sport partnership mainly promoted the development of spectator sports, both amateur and professional, submerging (though not ignoring) participant sports.
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Gallese, Vittorio, and Michele Guerra. The Empathic Screen. Translated by Frances Anderson. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198793533.001.0001.
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Why do people go to the movies? What does it mean to watch a movie? To what extent does our perception of the fictional nature of movies differ from our daily perception of the real world? The authors, a neuroscientist and a film theorist, propose a new multidisciplinary approach to images and film that can provide answers to these questions. According to the authors, film art, based on the interaction between spectators and the world on the screen, and often described in terms of immersion, impressions of reality, simulation, and involvement of the spectator’s body in the fictitious world he inhabits, can be reconsidered from a neuroscientific perspective, which examines the brain and its close relationship to the body. They propose a new model of perception—embodied simulation—elaborated on the basis of neuroscientific investigation, to demonstrate the role played by sensorimotor and affect-related brain circuits in cognition and film experience. Scenes from famous films, like Notorious, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, Persona, The Silence of the Lambs, and Toy Story are described and analyzed according to this multidisciplinary approach, and used as case studies to discuss the embodied simulation model. The aim is to shed new light on the multiple resonance mechanisms that constitute one of the great secrets of cinematographic art, and to reflect on the power of moving images, which increasingly are part of our everyday life.
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Hill, Mark J. Actors and Spectators: Rousseau’s Contribution to the Eighteenth-century Debate on Self-interest. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474422857.003.0005.
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A debate between virtuous self-interest and social morality emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The historical narrative of these ideas has been touched on by others – such as Albert O. Hirschman, Pierre Force, and Eric MacGilvray – with nuance and detail, but broadly one can recognize two camps: those who saw public utility in self-interest through the positive externalities of commerce, and those who had serious concerns over the political outcomes of the entanglement of commerce and virtue. This chapter follows these studies and attempts to locate Rousseau (primarily) and Smith (secondarily) within this debate. By looking at how their particular moral philosophies interact with their political thought it is argued that Rousseau is distinct from Smith in an important, but often confused, way: while some have argued that Rousseau is a moralist and Smith a philosopher of the political and social value of self-interest, it will be argued here that the opposite may be true. That is, despite Rousseau's “general will” and Smith's “impartial spectator” having been identified as similar moral tools used to overcome the negative aspects of self-interest through externalized self-reflection, it is argued that Rousseau is a moral rationalist who is skeptical of reason as a moral motivator, and thus dismisses the general will as a tool which can encourage personal moral action, while Smith is a moral realist, but a particularly soft one in regard to the motivational force of morality, and instead turns to rationality – through the impartial spectator – as a source of moral action. The upshot of this distinction being, Rousseau does not deny the power of commerce and self-interest as motivational forces, simply their social utility; social institutions like English coffeehouses – centres of politeness and doux commerce – should exist, and self-interest should motivate, but both need to be cleansed of the vice of commerce. That is, this chapter argues that Smith is moral realist who relies on reason – specifically that one must be a spectator who can impartially and rationally reflect on situations in order to will moral ends – and Rousseau is a moral rationalist who relies on sentiment – one must have an interest in situations if they are to be a moral actor.
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Parfitt-Brown, Clare. An Australian in Paris. Edited by Melissa Blanco Borelli. Oxford University Press, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199897827.013.005.
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Reviewers of Baz Luhrmann’sMoulin Rouge!(2001) often claimed to be bombarded, overloaded, or pathologically infected by the film’s rapid-fire imagery and eclectic cultural references. This chapter explores these visceral experiences of spectatorship, focusing on the film’s dance sequences. It argues that in these sequences, choreography and digital technology (including computer-generated imagery and editing) combine to allow spectators to physically experience on-screen bodies that are historically and culturally complex, distant, and “other.” Alison Landsberg’s notion of “prosthetic memory” (2004) suggests that films can physically connect spectators with pasts and memories they have not directly experienced. This chapter argues thatMoulin Rouge!achieves this physical connection by tapping into, and updating, a bohemian tradition of cross-cultural and transhistorical self-performance.
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Berliner, Todd. The Hollywood Aesthetic. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190658748.003.0001.
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Chapter 1 explains Hollywood’s general principles for creating aesthetic pleasure for mass audiences. The chapter introduces the book’s two main theses: (1) Hollywood cinema targets an area, between boredom and confusion, that is optimally pleasing for mass audiences. It seeks to offer enough cognitive challenge to sustain aesthetic interest but not so much that it would jeopardize a film’s hedonic value or cause average spectators to give up the search for understanding. (2) Many of the Hollywood films that offer exhilarating aesthetic experiences beyond a single encounter and over extended periods operate near the boundaries of classicism, veering into areas of novelty and complexity that more typical Hollywood films avoid; however, they do so without sacrificing a mass audience’s ability to cope with the challenge. Such films take risks, and exhilarated pleasure results when they seem on the verge of overburdening or displeasing spectators in some bold and extraordinary way.
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Cartelli, Thomas. High-Tech Shakespeare in a Mediatized Globe. Edited by James C. Bulman. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199687169.013.9.
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Abstract In successive single-set productions of Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, and Antony and Cleopatra, Ivo van Hove’s Roman Tragedies transforms the stage into a high-tech version of Shakespeare’s Globe, mimicking how global media stage political debates and generate the simulacrum of war and social conflict. Mixing live actors with video projections displayed on monitors spaced on and above the stage, van Hove encourages spectators to move from one viewing space to another, to order drinks, check email, or tweet on desktop computers. Extending Shakespeare’s ‘all the world’s a stage’ conceit to a world connected by ‘clouds’ of information transported on viewless wings and deposited in airy drop boxes, van Hove’s stage is everywhere and nowhere at once. But in replicating the aesthetic design of global media, while suppressing the populist components of Coriolanus and Julius Caesar, van Hove arguably extends only the illusion of emancipation to spectators ‘immersed’ in competing demands on their attention.
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de Beauvoir, Simone. Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252039003.003.0017.
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On New Year’s Eve, Brigitte Bardot appeared on French television. She was got up as usual—blue jeans, sweater, and shock of tousled hair. Lounging on a sofa, she plucked at a guitar. “That’s not hard,” said a woman.1 “I could do just as well. She’s not even pretty. She has the face of a housemaid.” The men couldn’t keep from devouring her with their eyes, but they too snickered. Only two or three of us, among thirty or so spectators, thought her charming. Then she did an excellent classical dance number. “She ...
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Fan, Victor. Extraterritoriality. Edinburgh University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474440424.001.0001.
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This book examines how Hong Kong filmmakers, spectators and critics wrestled with a perturbation: What is Hong Kong cinema? Framed between the Leftist Riots (1967) and the aftermath of the Umbrella Movement (2014), this book scrutinises the interdependent relationship between cinema and politics by rethinking how Hong Kong cinema has been historically in-formed by dispossession and exclusion, rather than identity and belonging. It traces how Hong Kong’s extraterritoriality has been framed: in its position of being doubly occupied and doubly abandoned by contesting juridical, political, linguistic and cultural forces. It argues that filmmakers and spectators actively define and reconfigure Hong Kong cinema and media by fostering them as a public sphere, where contesting affects associated with these political lives’ shifting extraterritorial conditions and positions can be negotiated. Based on a combination of archival research, industrial studies, textual analysis and media and political philosophies, Extraterritoriality studies how creative works in mainstream cinema, independent films, television, video artworks and documentaries – especially those by marginalised artists – actively rewrite and reconfigure the way Hong Kong cinema and media are defined and located. These stylistically and political diverse works and practices seek – in their respective manners – to foster new ways to live with Hong Kongers’ double occupancy and double ostracisation that constantly deindividuate, desubjectivise, and deautonomise them, and how they can survive in their constant state of exception.
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Redmon, Allen H., ed. Next Generation Adaptation. University Press of Mississippi, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.14325/mississippi/9781496832603.001.0001.
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Next Generation Adaptation: Spectatorship and Process explores the ways in which cross-cultural adaptations often stage a collusion between competing cultural capital. The collusion conceals and reveals commonalities and differences between these cultural traditions before giving way to the differences that can distinguish one textual expression from another, just as it ultimately distinguishes one set of readers from another. An adaptation of any sort, but especially those that cross accepted stereotypes, or geographic or political boundaries, provide spectators space to negotiate attitudes and ideas that might otherwise lay latent in the text. Spectators are left to parse through each, often with special attention to the differences that exist between two expressions. Each new set of readers, each generation, distinguishes itself from an earlier set of readers, even as they exist along the same family tree. Given enough time, some new shared organizing strategy emerges until a new encounter or new expression of a text restarts the adaptational process every adaptation can trigger. Taken together, the chapters in Next Generation Adaptation each argue that the texts they consider foreground the kinds of space that exists between texts, between political commitments, between ethical obligations that every filmic text can open when the text is experienced as an adaptation. The chapters esteem the expansive dialogue adaptations accelerate when they realize their capacity to bring together two or more texts, two or more peoples, two or more ideologies without allowing one expression to erase another.
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Mazer, Sharon. Professional Wrestling. University Press of Mississippi, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.14325/mississippi/9781496826862.001.0001.
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Professional wrestling is one of the most popular performance practices in the United States and around the world, drawing millions of spectators to live events and televised broadcasts. The displays of violence, simulated and actual, may be the obvious appeal, but that is just the beginning. Fans debate performance choices with as much energy as they argue about their favorite wrestlers. The ongoing scenarios and presentations of manly and not so-manly characters—from the flamboyantly feminine to the hypermasculine—simultaneously celebrate and critique, parody and affirm, the American dream and the masculine ideal. Sharon Mazer looks at the world of professional wrestling from a fan’s-eye-view high in the stands and from ringside in the wrestlers’ gym. She investigates how performances are constructed and sold to spectators, both on a local level and in the “big leagues” of the WWF/E. She shares a close-up view of a group of wrestlers as they work out, get their faces pushed to the mat as part of their initiation into the fraternity of the ring, and dream of stardom. In later chapters, Mazer explores professional wrestling’s carnivalesque presentation of masculinities ranging from the cute to the brute, as well as the way in which the performances of women wrestlers often enter into the realm of pornographic. Finally, she explores the question of the “real” and the “fake” as the fans themselves confront it. First published in 1998, this new edition of Professional Wrestling: Sport and Spectacle both preserves the original’s snapshot of the wrestling scene of the 1980s and 1990s and features an up-to-date perspective on the current state of play.
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Klugman, Matthew. “Get excited, people!”. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252038938.003.0007.
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This chapter examines how sport fansites can be mined by sport historians as “a wonderfully rich resource.” Each week, “thousands, if not millions” of sport fans congregate online to “read, chat, and blog” about their favorite teams. Importantly, these sites exist as free-standing histories produced and consumed voraciously by contributors in collaboration with one another and subject to their own internal rules, protocols, and modes of expression and meaning. As such, engaging with this massive digital archive of fan postings and discussion can offer insight into new communities surrounding sports teams, fantasy engagement, and humor, as well as gendered, racial, and sexualized aspects of spectator sports culture. Indeed, sport fansites provide opportunities to consider questions of sporting memory and popular history.
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Slocum, Karla. Black Towns, Black Futures. University of North Carolina Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469653976.001.0001.
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Some know Oklahoma’s Black towns as historic communities that thrived during the Jim Crow era—this is only part of the story. In this book, Karla Slocum shows that the appeal of these towns is more than their past. Drawing on interviews and observations of town life spanning several years, Slocum reveals that people from diverse backgrounds are still attracted to the communities because of the towns’ remarkable history as well as their racial identity and rurality. But that attraction cuts both ways. Tourists visit to see living examples of Black success in America, while informal predatory lenders flock to exploit the rural Black economies. In Black towns, there are developers, return migrants, rodeo spectators, and gentrifiers, too. Giving us a complex window into Black town and rural life, Slocum ultimately makes the case that these communities are places for affirming, building, and dreaming of Black community success even as they contend with the sometimes marginality of Black and rural America.
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Schlapbach, Karin. Dance and Interpretation in Longus and Apuleius. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198807728.003.0006.
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This chapter focuses on dance scenes from two ancient novels which are both informed by Platonism. It argues that dance, which is dynamic and involves human protagonists, raises with particular insistence the (Platonic) question of how the work of art interferes with the real world. It discusses first how the dance in Book 2 of Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe prepares the way for the mythical pattern of male predominance to shape the protagonists’ relationship in their real lives. Turning to Apuleius’ pantomime of the Judgement of Paris (Met. 10.29–34), the chapter explores the spectator’s display of connoisseurship and aesthetic distance, which eventually collapse when he proceeds to a moralizing interpretation. A glance at a short dance scene in Book 1 and a discussion of the mechanisms that trigger the spectator’s curiosity conclude the chapter.