spectators in film

[sdeboer]

Greetings, and thank you for your responses about films depicting film
spectators, Pete and Jonathan.  Jonathan's particular response to my (very
broad) question allows me to think a bit more about my question--one that,
since I was sending another message to the list anyway, I decided to add
to the end of it.

Obviously, as you say, curiosity is motivated by something!  In this case,
I think I was more motivated by questions of a "socio-historical" nature
(depictions of film-going/theater practices) but I'm also not so sure that
such questions can be divorced from other questions of thematization and
its politics.

Maybe going back to the object that started my train of thought will
help:  For a discussion on earlier film spectatorship last week, I made a
presentation on Yuan Muzhi's (Chinese) *Cityscape* (dushi fengguang,
1935).  In it is a scene depicting a Shanghai audience watching a Mickey
Mouse (?) cartoon.   I decided to talk about this scene to expand the
boundaries of the discussion out of its North American examples.  But as I
was preparing for this, it became obvious to me that the question of
spectatorship becomes very messy here, because what was depicted in
this instance was really a stereotype--a modern girl (and her modern
date) watching a western film--that was ultimately presented as an
(enjoyable) problem within Yuan's leftist film.    My example, of
course, wasn't pointing to another example of spectatorship, but rather a
problem of it. 

So perhaps the problem I was vaguely thinking about was how one might come
to understandings of film spectatorship when representations of it are
so tied to thematics or politics  (as well as, I would also add now, when
resources are scarce, as, for example, in cases of prewar Chinese or
Japanese film).  Is this possible?  Do we even want to ask this
question?  Is there a better way to phrase it?  And is it enough to point
to it as a problem?          

THUS, my request for other films that might use other strategies for
depicting spectatorship...

Hm, didn't know I was thinking all that (!)  Hope my ramblings are helpful
in pointing to the kinds of questions that motivated my message.

Thanks,

Stephanie DeBoer        


On Sun, 15 Oct 2000, J. M.  Hall wrote:

> Stephanie
> 
> So many, many scenes in so many, many films.  Where to start?  I think it
> would be helpful to hear what your driving question or project is---is
> curiosity ever so simple?  As you can imagine, there are too many scenes to
> simply start listing them all!
> 
> For example, does one look at a thematization of spectatorship and its politics?
> Matsumoto Toshio's DOGRA MAGRA uses filmmaking and film-viewing in a
> mind-twisting, story-turning fashion.  Underground filmmaking (angura) also
> features in his FUNERAL PARADE OF ROSES.  YOSHIDA Yoshishige's EROS PLUS
> MASSACRE weaves film into the story regularly.  In the latter, one impotent
> male literally trusses himself up on film.  And who could forget the famous
> shot in Oshima's THE STORY OF MAN WHO LEFT HIS WILL ON FILM of the film
> being projected onto Yasuko's body?
> 
> Or are we trying for a socio-historical portrait of spectatorship? 
> A far more predicatable response to your question, but  OZU's I WAS BORN
> BUT would be a good start.  Also, Nakajima Takehiro (of OKOGE infamy) has a
> delightful scene in his much more respectable first feature, KYOSHU, where
> the smoking  spectators have to wait for the arrival of the next reel when
> the European film they are watching is being simultaneously screened in the
> next village. The film is both a humorous and nostalgic (as the title
> tells) portrayal of a remote part of postwar Shikoku, and the director
> claims, a fairly autobiographical representation of his youth there.
> 
> Can you help us by narrowing down the question?
> 
> Jonathan Hall
> 
> >Also, the following question is more motivated by curiousity than
> >anything, but I'm wondering if anyone can think of any Japanese films that
> >depict scenes of spectators watching films (or even entering film
> >theaters)--any films of any time period would be welcome.
> >
> >Many thanks in advance.
> >
> >Stephanie DeBoer
>