Spectatorship Flashcards
(22 cards)
What is the spectatorship model?
Active and Passive
Name the three readings of a film
Preferred, negotiated, oppositional /aberrant
The Frankfurt School (1920s-30s Germany)
Their theory discusses how cinema gives the illusion of proximity, making the audience feel immersed and part of the scene.
Christopher Metz
His theory states that the cinema screen acts as a mirror to the spectator, creating an idealised character within the distorted reality of the film, believing the spectator was ‘constructed’ by the film itself.
Laura Mulvey
Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1973) the Male Gaze Theory: the darkness of the cinema creates a sense of privacy which allows men to gaze at female characters without shame.
“men act, woman appear”.
What do Psychoanalytic film theorists think?
Inspired by Surrealists, they believe that cinema is the closest art form to dreaming. Dreams reveal hidden meanings and desires, so they believed they could reveal the subconscious of a film.
What is ‘libido’ and ‘thanatos’.
Sexual desire and power, which the male characters have a combination of in films over female characters which “reinforce the neurotic male sexual ego.” -Laura Mulvey
Define passive spectatorship
The idea that spectator response is fixed and created by the techniques of the filmmaker.
Define active spectatorship
The idea that spectator response is individualised and influenced by cultural capital.
Blumler and Katz- Uses and Gratifications
Proposed that audiences actively select media to use for their own benefits, and the uses offer specific pleasures/ gratifications such as watching a film genre you know you enjoy.
Name the four Multiple Spectating Selves
Social Self
Cultural Self
Private Self
Desiring Self
What is social self?
gaining satisfaction from having a similar response to other spectators
What is cultural self?
understanding references and meaning generated by memory from other media
What is private self?
generates personal and unique meanings based on personal memories
What is desiring self?
brings un/conscious responses that have little to do with surface content.
Stuart Hall and ‘Encoding/Decoding’
The readings of a film
The idea that the filmmaker encodes an intended meaning which the spectator decodes and the preferred reading is the one created by the filmmaker.
A negotiated reading is where the spectator recognised the intended meaning but may no accept it.
An oppositional/aberrant reading is where the spectator deliberately reinterprets the film, creating a new meaning.
David Chandler and the Gaze
He identified a number of different ways that the ‘gaze’ can be produced and represented in a film.
Spectator’s Gaze (David Chandler)
the viewpoint from the camera
Intra-Diegetic (David Chandler)
the character’s look at each other
Extra-Diegetic (David Chandler)
the characters look directly at the camera
Camera’s gaze/ self relexive
the film reveals the mechanics of the gaze and reminds us that we are watching a film.
Text-within-a-text
the characters are also watching/making a film
