Spectatorship

Spectatorship in Film Studies

Theories of film spectatorship are related to philosophical inquiries about human subjects and literary criticism perspectives on how texts produce ideal readers. In film theories, the spectator is not a real person, but is generally understood to be an artificial construct that is produced and animated by the apparatus (e.g., screen, projector) and by cultural beliefs. This cinematic structure suggests who spectators are, what they see, and what they desire. For instance, the gyrating female bodies in a music video indicate that the ideal spectator is a heterosexual man. These constructed spectatorial positions do not describe the experiences of specific individuals, but all viewers are addressed and shaped by media forms.

Most film theorists differentiate between the subject, which is the idealized position assigned to viewer, and the actual viewer, or the person who watches a film. However, the differences in these two have never been fully resolved. Mary Ann Doane distinguishes between the subject and the individual and relates the cinematic subject to psychoanalytic investigations of the spectator. Judith Mayne notes that the term spectator indicates some level of distrust in fully separating the subject from people.

Although students may challenge this idea of spectatorship because their unique experiences differ from these models, these theories of spectatorship argue that individual readings do not change the dominant messages of texts and that media forms are culturally significant and continue to influence viewers long after they disengage from a particular representation.

In the 1970s, film theorists, and especially feminist psychoanalytic film theorists, argued that Hollywood cinema represented the desires and beliefs of modern Western industrial countries. These theorists showed how viewing influences and enables individuals, especially White heterosexual men, to participate in mainstream desires and beliefs. For instance, the straight man's presumed right to possess women visually and sexually is validated when the Bond Girl in James Bond films is introduced with an erotic musical soundtrack; her movements and clothing make her the focus of Bond, the camera, and the viewer, and she acquiesces to their seduction. Feminist psychoanalytic film theorists also indicate that it is not a coincidence that film and psychoanalysis—the study of the unconscious—developed at the same time. According to this view, the development of psychoanalysis within capitalist consumer society makes it particularly productive as a way of analyzing film. A site for this kind of investigation is often the classical cinema, which includes Hollywood films after the employment of sound in the late 1920s and before the demise of the studio system in the 1950s. Spectatorship offers models for understanding these institutions and their associated patterns of viewing.

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