An Invention with a Future: Collective Viewing, Joint Deep Attention and the Ongoing Value of the Cinema (original) (raw)
Related papers
Watching a Film With Others. Towards a Theory of Collective Spectatorship
Screen. Vol. 55, Issue 3, 2014, 2014
In this essay I suggest that collectively watching a film with quiet attention should be considered a kind of joint action. When silently watching a film in a cinema the viewers are not merely engaged in individual actions – watching a film with others often implies a shared activity based on a collective intention in which the viewers jointly attend to a single object: the film. Drawing on recent debates about collective intentionality and shared feelings in analytic philosophy and phenomenology, I show that this import of social philosophy can have important ramifications for film theory and history. Proponents of diverse film theoretical approaches like cultural studies, cognitive film theory, film phenomenology or reception aesthetics consider the viewer actively involved with the film. If this is true and the spectators are all active, sitting in the same movie theatre watching the same film in a quiet, attentive way, it seems reasonable to argue that in some important sense they act jointly. My argument will serve as a step towards a more comprehensive theory and phenomenology of collective spectatorship at the movies, an aspect undervalued in the history of film theory.
2021
In the use of a spectator to formulate film theory, theorists have inadvertently made spectatorship a subjective experience rather than a universal one. Without addressing the individuality of this spectator, the theory generalizing spectatorship faces an identity crisis. Who is the spectator? Are they a character experiencing the trespasses of the filmic body as their own? Or, are they a ghost possessing a consciousness already there, reliving someone else's life? Film theory does not offer us a concrete answer to any of these questions, and neither will I. Instead, I will use this indefinite identity of the spectator to reverse the paradigm of cinema as mirror and discuss the spectator as a mirror through which film, art, and nature are perceived. Over the course of this paper, I will explore the philosophical implications of self in Gilles Delueze’s "Cinema 1" and "Cinema 2" and Vivian Sobchack’s “Phenomenon and Film Experience'' (guided by Hugo Münsterberg and Judith Mayne’s conceptions of the spectator) to arrive at the final metaphor: “cinema as self”. These concepts of “cinema as self” and “spectator as mirror” really derive from a series of immersive practices in film. Filmmakers have been experimenting with the direct inclusion of the spectator since the point of view (POV) shot was introduced. Through this shot, the filmmaker would momentarily place the spectator in the character’s position, melding existence with experience. Over the years, filmmakers continue to extend the length of the POV shot and, through other point of view devices, invoke visceral cognitive and perceptual responses in the fusing of spectator and character. As a result, I will use two films experimenting with POV and nostalgia, "Lady in the Lake" (Robert Montgomery, 1947) and "LoveFilm/Szerelmesfilm" (Istvan Szabo, 1970), to cross-examine the inclusive spectatorship discussed in Deleuze and Sobchack and bridge the gap between the metaphysical and the corporeal self/spectator.
The Audience Effect: On the Collective Cinema Experience
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018
NOW ALSO AVAILABLE AS PAPERBACK! In this book I try to systematically describe the experiences spectators have when they watch a film collectively in a cinema. Watching a film in the presence of others is different from watching a film alone: The collective constellation always has an effect on the way viewers experience the film, be it positive or negative. And this is all the more obvious once strong emotions and affective expressions come into play: laughter, sadness, shame, anger, screaming, being moved to tears... This audience effect has been largely overlooked in film studies. My book tries to enrich film theory and film phenomenology by giving more weight to the complexity and concreteness of what viewers feel with or against their co-viewers.
Image-Space and Space of Experience: Rethinking Community in the Cinema
Rethinking Community through Transdisciplinary Research, 2020
Drawing on Michel de Certeau, Hauke Lehmann claims that the ‘ordinary man’ or ‘common hero’ is a paradigmatic figuration of the cinema audience: an anonymous plurality of no-one-in-particulars, in whose aesthetic experience the worldwide circulation of audio-visual images becomes concretely embodied. Lehmann contends that understanding the cinema audience in this way opens up a pathway of thinking about how the cinema conceives of the possibility of community. In an attempt to link film studies and social sciences, Lehmann’s chapter responds to anthropologist Vered Amit’s notion of ‘watchful indifference’. It explores how the idea of appropriating a given way of structuring space can be linked to the realm of aesthetic experience, more precisely: to the experience of cinematic images. Lehmann starts his investigation by analysing an example from the film "Kebab Connection" (Anno Saul 2004). On this basis, he then engages with the question in what way appropriation can contribute to creating what Richard Rorty calls a ‘sense of commonality’. Finally, having established that link, Lehmann returns to the domain of the social and poses the question how the aesthetic modulation of commonality might affect the project of ‘staying apart together’ (Amit).
The cinema is dead, long live the cinema!: Understanding the social experience of cinema-going today
2017
This empirical study of contemporary film watching motivations and cinema-going experiences was set up to come to an understanding of the nature of the sociality of cinema-going, in an age when watching film is absorbed in convergence culture. The open question survey questioned 472 young moviegoers on their consumption of films, in both past and present. The identification of specific (extra-)theatrical practices results in perceptible patterns and understandings of cinematic experiences. At first, the notion of the embodied place comes to the foreground as a key factor of the cinematic experience. The discourse of the respondents aligns with theories on immersiveness and the technological superiority of the cinema experience over other modes of watching film. But respondents also construct a non-technologically centered (remembered) social engagement. The social site of cinema-going is constructed through social activities (companionship and leisure), contacts (unique heterogeneit...
2020
In the past decades, the field of cinema has undergone several transformations. The digital turn increasingly called for new forms of production, distribution, and exhibition, which imply different ways of thinking, doing, and experimenting cinema. These new forms also reduced the gap between cinema to other so-called visual arts. If cinema and visual arts were already in the process of merging, the last years forced the naturalization of thinking in similar theoretical grounds. This special issue aims to be a forum for the discussion of new practices of researching cinema, and the changes in cinema's forms of experience and production.
Attempts at theorizing film have long stressed the potential of this medium to generate new forms of intersubjectivity and of sociality. In early film theoretical accounts like Béla Balázs’, for instance, the silent cinema’s emphasis on facial and gestural expressivity was praised for bringing about a novel “visibility of man”. At the same time, Walter Benjamin noted that film viewing itself engendered novel types of collective awareness, introducing unprecedented means of mass communication. These two aspects of the relation between sociality and film – film as a vehicle for new forms of intersubjectivity and of sociality, on the one hand, and as an object for novel types of collective awareness, on the other – are today regaining attention from philosophers of film employing phenomenological, analytic, or cognitive approaches. The conference aims to re-evaluate and re-examine these issues specifically in view of the recent remediation and relocation of film experience.
Every individual is collective: how can we save cinema’s future?
PAAKAT: Revista de Tecnología y Sociedad, 2019
In today’s audiovisual ecosystem, one of the recurring themes is drug use. The Congress (dir. Ari Folman, 2014) is a film that approaches this topic in a particular way, by offering a reflection from science-fiction on the relation between individual, drugs and society in a movie about the future of cinema. This text presents an analysis of this piece, taking categories from the psychoanalytic theory of cinema proposed by Slavoj Žižek (suture, Real, interface), reflections from futurologist Jacques Attali, and some ideas from Marxism and clinical psychoanalysis to establish the importance of saving the cinematographic process from collectivity instead of the exaltation of individual experience.