What is Spectatorship?

Spectatorship:

What can affect Spectatorship:

Personal:

• Culture
• Language 
• ‘Taste’
• Knowledge 
• Gender
• Age
• Ideology 

Structure:

• Music
• Actors/stars- credibility 
• Narrative perspective 
• Characters
• Genders
• Setting

Where? When?

• Location 
• Choice
• Gender
• What’s happening in the world
• Who you see the film with

Types of viewer:

Passive viewer/viewing – Doesn’t engage with product. This view reinforces the idea that the spectator doesn’t resist different ways of viewing. 

Hegemony- ensures that we see the values of dominant groups as ‘natural’ and ‘common sense’. Process whereby the dominant groups in society remain dominant by exerting influence through cultural forms such as films to present their set of values/perspective as the ‘obvious’ and the ‘natural choice’ and only point of view. 

Popular cinema reinforces mainstream values/ ideology and not to question these values.

Psychoanalytic- we constantly seek a mirror in the film to fill a sense of lack by finding ourselves in the film.

Linguistic- Our thinking is limited by lexis and grammar of language available to us. 

Active viewer/ viewing- Engages with product which creates meaning.

Cognitive theory- Our brains compare the experience of the film to another experience by looking for similarities in genre or narrative.

Classic film theory:

E.g music, performance- may guide us to certain viewing of the film.

Reception studies:

How the audience take away/ makes meaning from it. 

British Cultural theory: 

Halls’ Preferred reading- matches ideology of what’s intended.

Opposition reading- reading against way intended by narrative 

Neglected reading- nuanced reading in own view/ideology 

Why film spectatorship and representation effects our lives, Jack Sheppard: TEDx Kings College London:

Spectatorship is watching our own films simultaneously but taking something different away from it based on our political, cultural, personal beliefs. 

How does this elate to Beasts of the Southern Wild?

Wink and the other people living in the Bathtub have been represented as a poorer, lower class community, that also has a strong set of moral values, different to the typical values of a developed modern society. Spectatorship affects this dependent on your personal moral views and beliefs as well as your political and culture views on eh way society should run and in which how communities should go about. This could be whether you are lower class or upper class or from where you are personally from that affects your reading of this and the level at which you sympathise with the characters. I believe the director Zeitlin wants us to sympathise with the characters, however may end up being judged by their audiences for their atypical lifestyle, disconnected from the more modern and developed world around them. The preferred reading/ what’s intended to be taken away from this film is the view that community is a strong part of the character’s lives in the bathtub and ultimately is what keeps them secure and what controls their lives.

Patrick Phillips’ Introduction to Spectatorship:

• Audience vs Spectator:

Audience- Of interest as an object of study before and after the film. Constructed by mass- media institutions. Concerned with large collections of people.

Spectator- Concerned with the way the individual is positioned between the projector and darkened screen. A spectator is singular, takes meaning from personal experience and what one person takes away. Spectatorship tires to generalise about how all spectators behave.

• ‘The look’

‘The look’ developed as a central concept in the control of the spectator and is closely linked to the theories associated with desire and pleasure. It can often be used by cinema to provide voyeuristic pleasures. 

To ensure that the meanings intended by the film’s makers were those taken by the spectator. This helps provide greater pleasure for the spectator and drives profits for the producers. This ‘look’ could be controlled by cinematography, mise en scene and editing. 

This increases emotional impact and the way the spectators are invited to align with the characters, to become invested in the emotional dimension if the narrative. This can be achieved via using POV shots, following one character or with a voiceover narration. The spectators therefore get pleasure from this. 

Stuart Hall’s reception reading theory-  the spectators reading of text falls into three categories: Preferred reading (what’s intended), an oppositional reading (against what’s intended) and a negotiated reading (between the two). 

Murray Smith– three stages of character process: recognition, alignment and allegiance.