Spectatorship: The Power of Looking On, Michele Aaron (2007)

London: Wallflower Press, 144pp., ISBN: 9781905674015 (pbk), £12.99.

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In Filmosophy, the self-proclaimed and broadly discussed ‘manifesto for a new understanding of cinema’, its author Daniel Frampton elaborates on who is present in front of the screen: ‘Questions about the person or persons who experience film have always been slightly steered by the choice of name for those individuals. What do we call the meaning-producing film-cognitiser? Spectators seem to dumbly sit in awe; readers coldly deconstruct; viewers are obviously deaf; while experiencers (?) sound like they are on drugs. 'Filmgoer' is fairly neutral, perhaps somewhat archaic and certainly cinema-centric. Later I will outline the make-up of a “filmosopher”’.ⁱ

While Frampton's provocative claim emphasises the filmgoer's investigation of the film's image before its interpretation, Michele Aaron chooses to thoroughly interpret ‘the spectator's submission within an interaction of textual, social and psychic processes’ in her study Spectatorship: The Power of Looking On (3). Unlike Frampton, who concentrates on the highly attentive, fully involved and definitively active filmgoer's experience of film as thinking without privileging ethical, political and sexual implications, Aaron decides ‘to retell the discussion of spectatorship as a story of agency which prioritises the spectator's response and responsibility to reveal spectatorship as an intrinsically politicised subject’ (4). For Aaron, the spectator is a ‘principal player‘ who is retained and ‘can sustain the interplay of unconscious desires, social influences and textual provocations’ (2). As she notes on the same page in the introduction, the main influence upon her book is reader-response theory, mainly coming from the field of cultural studies and pointing to the experience of reading as an experience causing ‘the self to undergo some kind of transformation’: The film is seen as a text, the spectator reads the film as a text, the ‘power of looking on’ originates in the power of the text. Analyzing a text, Aaron stresses, the spectator is safe at a distance within an ‘act of engagement’ that is understood as ‘a need in terms of the unconscious anxieties and desires that the text provokes’ (3). She adds psychoanalytic convictions to reader-response theory, arguing for a tension between both approaches when also referred to in a social sphere and ‘its imposition of the mores and morals that govern or at least guide our public behaviours’ (3). Within these contents and contexts, Aaron wants to provide an update of the debate on spectatorship and film and correspondingly starts the attempt chronologically in the first of the four chapters with ‘the birth of the spectator’: Maintaining writings on film after May 1968 to be directly influenced by the major political protests of students, workers and intellectuals against authorities at that time, she is subsequently interested in structuralist film theory that ‘would come to emphasise the pre-structure of film and the conventional, or rather, ideologically pre-determined position of the spectator that it produces’ (7): In the late 1960s and the early 1970s, writings on film developed ideologically, discussing the subject, namely the spectator. Marxist theorist Louis Althusser initiates such an understanding with his rethinking of state control that ‘would instate the notion of the “subject” into the functioning of ideology’ (7). Aaron makes her point convincingly and offers insightful comments on theories of Jean-Louis Baudry, Christian Metz and Roland Barthes throughout the chapter. But, she appears to be selective when omitting nearly half a century of early film theory, as, for example, the remarks on the spectator from Siegfried Kracauer. In his writings from the 1920s, culminating in Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, first published in 1960, he reflects: ‘Let us assume that, unlike the other types of pictures, film images affect primarily the spectator's senses, engaging him physiologically before he is in a position to respond intellectually’.ⁱⁱ

Kracauer is interested in the ability of cinema to stimulate the consciousness of the spectator about his own corporeality and his own senses, and elaborates on the spectator's ‘power of looking on’ in a detailed way.

In the second chapter ‘spectatorship and difference: gender and the rub of submission’, Aaron continues the short history of film theory and intensely reconsiders the well known Screen article ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ from 1975, written by Laura Mulvey.

Discussing characters ranging from, among others, the one of Grace Kelly in Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954) to the one of Madonna in Uli Edel's Body of Evidence (1992), Aaron draws on issues like fetishism, possession and punishment in male spectatorship and highlights Mulvey's ‘impact and enduring status’ on the topic, hence stressing: ‘the woman in the audience disappeared behind the predominating male storyline, characters and gaze as well as the urgency of classifying film as patriarchal’ (34-35). While the male spectator and his gaze especially dominates classical narrative cinema, the female spectator ‘emerges as a contradictory figure grounded in the complexities of her social formation which were articulated on-screen and lived off-screen’ (43). Here, with the help of Linda Williams and others, Aaron introduces the move from psychoanalytic analysis of the female spectator as a sexual subject to cultural studies of the female spectator as a social subject and, by that means, achieves a more detailed understanding of spectatorship and difference within the revision of classical models. In the third chapter, titled ‘spectatorship as masochism: the pleasure of unpleasure’, these revisions are identified as interventions establishing both the male and the female spectator to make active choices that ‘cater to specific desires’ in a ‘socio-historically meaningful’ way (51). Turning to masochistic, perverse and other pleasures of spectators of film noir such as Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944) and neo noir such as Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct (1992), the author points to a ‘delicate balance’ between these pleasures and their acknowledgement, suggesting the ‘spectator's response after the fact’ not always being ‘in league with the spectator's experience’ – because of his unreliability, the spectator's comments on his experience are texts themselves, texts to be read in audience studies that ‘must incorporate an understanding of the social and psychic complexities of spectatorship’ (85).

The fourth and final chapter, ‘ethics and spectatorship: response, responsibility and the moving image’ directly attaches itself to these complexities and discusses their ethical dimension: As Aaron remarks, ‘people love to look’, and they love to look at things they normally do not see in everyday life, including obscene and socially unacceptable things in film and other media. Watching films of ‘moral indifference’ from directors like Lars von Trier (The Five Obstructions, 2003), Michael Haneke (Funny Games, 1997) and Quentin Tarantino (Kill Bill Vols. 1, 2, 2003, 2004) challenge and disturb the spectator, his pleasure of unpleasure is in question, the ‘exchange between film culture, spectatorial response and reality is ethically entangled and socially pressing’ (120).

For the reason of pushing theories of looking on in the direction of immediate understanding of the pure formal image, Frampton's spectator is ‘dumbly sitting in awe’, unless he becomes a ‘filmosophical filmgoer’. Aaron's spectator, however, is responsively and responsibly sitting desiringly, while he or she has become a ‘principal player’. With the analysis of this player's ‘submission within an interaction of textual, social and psychic processes’, Aaron contributes to the introductory texts of the Short Cut series at Wallflower Press in an eloquent manner and therefore presents a useful reference for students and scholars alike who want to work in the diverse field of film and spectatorship from different perspectives.

Contributor

Joerg Sternagel is Visiting Lecturer in Film and Media Studies at the Institute for Arts and Media at the University of Potsdam. He has been postdoctoral research fellow of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation in Cologne from December 2007 to November 2008 and was visiting scholar at the Department of Film, Television and Digital Media at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) in spring 2008. His research focus is film and philosophy and acting in film. He is author of a book on method acting, Methodische Schauspielkunst und Amerikanisches Kino (Berlin, 2005), based on his doctoral thesis. He is currently working on his second book, There Is More Than Meets The Eye: A Phenomenology of the Film Actor, and has presented papers on this project in Berlin, Bochum, Bristol, Budapest, Chicago, Jena and Los Angeles in 2007 and 2008. An excerpt from his book is forthcoming at Film International in 2009: "From Inside Us: Making Sense with the Film Actor in Michael Haneke's Caché". Joerg Sternagel’s writing has appeared in bestattungskultur, Cinetext – Film and Philosophy, Film Criticism, Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht and Mitteilungsheft der Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft.

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