Description
Film and Cinema Spectatorship provides a clear and wide-ranging introduction to different debates and traditions of viewing cinema. In this new book, Jan Campbell offers a comprehensive account of the different theoretical perspectives on film and cinema spectatorship, situating these in their cultural and historical contexts. Among the perspectives covered are those of feminism, modernism and cultural studies, with chapters dedicated to important topics such as early film, stars and film aesthetics. Campbell also provides accessible explorations of the importance of key themes to film and cinema spectatorship, such as mimesis, melodrama, performance and time. The timely and comprehensive text will be essential reading for anyone interested in debates on film theory, psychoanalysis and film, and the history of cinema. This book will be of special interest to students of film studies, media studies and cultural studies.
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This book explores film theory and spectatorship through the concept of phenomenological mimesis, emphasizing a phenomenological reading of psychoanalysis and unconscious experience where there is no division between the imaginary and the real. It contends that film spectatorship is an imaginary hysterical identification and a social, creative dreaming with which people reconstruct experience. It addresses film within the context of psychoanalysis and a mimesis that moves between hysteria and social memory/mourning. It rejects the idea that equates early cinema with the pre-Oedipal and classical cinema with Oedipal narrative and argues for film spectatorship as disembodiment and embodiment, showing that Oedipal sexuality cannot explain how people move from a hysterical identification with the film text to a more social dreaming. It follows a chronology of film theory and spectatorship, rather than a linear film history, and discusses the debates on feminist film theory and sexual difference in the 1970s in relation to Mildred Pierce, Weimar cinema, and Boys Don't Cry; the phenomenological spectator within debates of early film and modernity, including the debate between perception, cinema, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience in the late 19th century, early film spectatorship, and the theories of Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Béla Balázs, and André Bazin; and more contemporary debates on film spectatorship in relation to experience, memory, and time, including approaches of cultural studies, contemporary debates on film in relation to stars, fandom, and melodrama, and the aesthetics of film in the context of melodrama and cultural and social re-memory. Distributed by Wiley. Annotation ©2020 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
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