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This book is about the relationship between emergencies and the spectator. In the
early twenty-first century, ‘emergencies’ are commonplace in the newsgathering
and political institutions of western industrial democracies. From terrorism to
global warming, the refugee crisis to general elections, the spectator is
bombarded with narratives that seek to suspend the criteria of everyday life in
order to address perpetual ‘exceptional’ threats. I argue that repeated exposure
to these narratives through the apparatuses of contemporary technology creates a
‘precarious spectatorship’, where the spectator’s ability to rationalise
herself, or her relationship with the object of her spectatorship, is
compromised.
In terms of the ways in which emergencies are dramatized for
the spectator, this book focuses primarily on the framing and distribution of
images. Because images are cheap and easy to produce; because they can be
quickly and limitlessly distributed; because they are instantly affective and
because they can be easily overwritten, they have become a pre-eminent tool in
the performance of emergencies. In response to this, the book proposes
theatrical performance as a space in which the relationship between the
spectator and emergencies may be critically examined, and I analyse a range of
contemporary theatrical pieces which challenge the spectator under the aegis of
emergencies.
Ever Since Laura Mulvey identified the visual pleasures of narrative cinema, the objectification of the female body on screen has been a staple of film criticism. 2 Our chapter argues that Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga complicates that story of spectatorship by positioning the female heterosexual viewer as ambivalent agent, not just victim. The Twilight Saga, both books and
147 5 u Immersive spectatorship at the panorama and the aesthetics of the sublime While academic painting could accommodate the aesthetics of the Enquiry by conflating the great style with terrifying, supernatural or irrational subject matter, it did not initially respond to the call for formal innovation that was implicit in Burke’s criticism of painting. The confidence given by neoclassical precepts –but also by the new status conferred on artists by the Royal Academy –made it possible to overlook Burke’s argument that, as a literal and mimetic medium
In Ann Radcliffes The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian, the sublime in nature represents a benevolent patriarchy which works in tandem with ‘the heightened awareness’ that characterizes sensibility in order to educate and empower Emily St Aubert and Ellena di Rosalba. Both of these forces work symbiotically within the gazes (read ‘spectatorship’) of the heroines. Conversely, these forces are threatening to the heroes, in that they limit Valancourts and Vivaldis ability to gain their desires and to influence the events surrounding their beloveds. This gender-based disparity reflects eighteenth century familial politics and suggests that, despite Radcliffes apparent protofeminism in giving her heroines agency over the patriarchal weapons of the sublime and sensibility, her reinventing these forces to empower her heroines at the expense of the heroes actually buys into and supports patriarchal ideals of the roles of difference and sameness in heterosexual desire.
This article examines the post-millennial popularity of the found footage movie, in particular its engagement with the representational codes of non-fiction media. Whilst the majority of critical writings on found footage identify the 11 September attacks on the World Trade Centre as a key visual referent, they too often dwell on the literal re-enactment of the event. This article instead suggests that these films evoke fear by mimicking the aesthetic and formal properties of both mainstream news coverage and amateur recording. As such they create both ontological and epistemological confusion as to the reality of the events depicted. Rather than merely replicating the imagery of terror/ism, these films achieve their terrifying effects by mimicking the audiences media spectatorship of such crisis.
Brian Hill’s musical documentaries embody the essence of Judith Butler’s notion of ‘performativity’ as the discourse used in identity formation. By asking his characters to sing their stories in addition to traditional interviews, Hill creates multiple screen identities, which elicits an embodied intimacy that is as much about freeing marginalised people to enact themselves in front of the camera as it is about revealing the director’s own performance. This article uses a cognitive framework to explore how Hill’s documentary, Pornography: The Musical (2003), leads the spectator to challenge existing social stereotypes of sex workers, as well as schematic ideas about traditional documentary form and function.
This introduction to the Film Studies special issue on Sex and the Cinema considers the special place of sex as an object of inquiry in film studies. Providing an overview of three major topic approaches and methodologies – (1) representation, spectatorship and identity politics; (2) the increasing scrutiny of pornography; and (3) new cinema history/media industries studies – this piece argues that the parameters of and changes to the research of sex, broadly defined, in film studies reflect the development of the field and discipline since the 1970s, including the increased focus on putatively ‘low’ cultural forms, on areas of film culture beyond representation and on methods beyond textual/formal analysis.
The stadium century traces the history of stadia and mass spectatorship in modern France from the vélodromes of the late nineteenth century to the construction of the Stade de France before the 1998 soccer World Cup, and argues that stadia played a privileged role in shaping mass society in twentieth-century France. Drawing off a wide range of archival and published sources, Robert W. Lewis links the histories of French urbanism, mass politics and sport through the history of the stadium in an innovative and original work that will appeal to historians, students of French history and the history of sport, and general readers alike. As The stadium century demonstrates, the stadium was at the centre of long-running debates about public health, national prestige and urban development in twentieth-century France. The stadium also functioned as a key space for mobilizing and transforming the urban crowd, in the twin contexts of mass politics and mass spectator sport. In the process, the stadium became a site for confronting tensions over political allegiance, class, gender, and place-based identity, and for forging particular kinds of cultural practices related to mass consumption and leisure. As stadia and the narratives surrounding them changed dramatically in the years after 1945, the transformed French stadium not only reflected and constituted part of the process of postwar modernisation, but also was increasingly implicated in global transformations to the spaces and practices of sport that connected France even more closely to the rest of the world.
images being disseminated, one can hardly do better than Sontag’s remark on the photo by Eddie Adams from February 1968 of the chief of the South Vietnamese national police, Brigadier General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, shooting a Vietcong suspect in a Saigon street at point blank: ‘We can gaze at these faces for a long time and not come to the end of the mystery, and the indecency, of such co-spectatorship’ (60). Acknowledgements The author would like
, 31 – 69 . Chouliaraki , L. ( 2006 ), Spectatorship of Suffering ( London and Thousand Oaks, CA : Sage ). Chouliaraki , L. ( 2013 ), The Ironic Spectator ( Cambridge : Polity Press