Viewing Positions
Ways of Seeing Film
Edited by Linda Williams
SERIES:
Rutgers Depth of Field Series
Rutgers University Press
The essays in this volume represent some of the best new thinking about the crucial relations between visual representation in film and human subjectivity. No amount of empirical research into the sociology of actual audiences will displace the desire to speculate about the effects of visual culture, and especially moving images, on viewing subjects. These notions of spectatorship, however hypothetical, become extremely compelling metaphors for the workings of vision within the institution of cinema. Viewing Positions examines the tradition of a centered, unitary, distanced, and objectifying spectator's gaze; investigates the period when film spectatorship as an idea began; and analyses gender- and sexuality-based challenges to the homogeneous classical theory of spectatorship. It makes available critical understandings of spectatorship that have, until now, largely eluded cinema studies.
LINDA WILLIAMS is professor of film studies at the University of California, Irvine. She has won a number of awards for her work as a film producer and director, and is author of several books, including Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the Frenzy of the Visible.
Introduction
Vision and the Apparatus
Modernizing Vision
Phenomenology and the Film Experience
Cinema and the Postmodern Condition
Historians View Spectators
Cinematic Spectatorship before the Apparatus: The Public Taste for Reality in Fin-de-Siecle Paris
An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator
Early Cinema, Late Cinema: Transformations of the Public Sphere
Viewing Antitheses
Paradoxes of Spectatorship
The Eye of Horror
Spectatorship as Drag: The Act of Viewing and Classic Horror Cinema
Annotated Bibliography
Contributors
Index
Vision and the Apparatus
Modernizing Vision
Phenomenology and the Film Experience
Cinema and the Postmodern Condition
Historians View Spectators
Cinematic Spectatorship before the Apparatus: The Public Taste for Reality in Fin-de-Siecle Paris
An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator
Early Cinema, Late Cinema: Transformations of the Public Sphere
Viewing Antitheses
Paradoxes of Spectatorship
The Eye of Horror
Spectatorship as Drag: The Act of Viewing and Classic Horror Cinema
Annotated Bibliography
Contributors
Index