Film Studies- Spectatorship

Spectator VS Audience

Spectator - someone who is watching as an individual.

Audience - a group of people watching.

Active Spectatorship

The spectator engages with a film by questioning its messages and values, recognising the patterns in the film that we are familiar with.

When an active spectator watches a film, they watch it as an individual, and can take their own meaning from it due to their personal experiences.

Passive Spectatorship

A passive spectator is someone who, when watching a film, reacts in the same way that a mass audience would.

They accept the director's intended meaning and don't question the messages presented to them.

Hall's Reception Theory

Media products are encoded with ideas to convey a message (to be decoded by the audience) - readings depend on the wider contexts.

1. Dominant (preferred/encoded meaning).

2. Oppositional (rejects the preferred/encoded meaning)

3. Negotiated (blends elements of the dominant and oppositional reading)

Spectating Selves

Social Self: How viewers relate to their social roles and identities.

Cultural Self: How viewers connect with their cultural background.

Private Self: The personal, internal aspects of viewers' identities.

Desiring Self: Viewers' desires, fantasies, and aspirations.

Spectator Positioning

Spectator positioning is the process by which filmmakers use various techniques to guide and influence how viewers perceive, understand, and emotionally engage with a film.

Eg., through camera work, narrative structure, character development, editing, sound, and cultural context, all working together to create a specific viewing experience.

Uses and Gratifications (Blumler & Katz)

Audiences are active and they use the media for different reasons:

- Escapism and entertainment

- Education and information

- Social interaction

- Personal identity

Identification (Smith)

Recognition - how do we identify the protagonist? Is there an alteration in the style of cinematography or editing when we 'notice' this character?

Alignment - we are given spatio-temporal proximity (we gaze at them closer and for longer) to our protagonist in order to create an emotional bond.

Allegiance - the spectator is ultimately required to make a choice; do we agree with the choices of the protagonist - or not? How the camera moves around the character at this point of our decision is important.

The Camera's Gaze (Chandler)

Spectator's Gaze - The camera is your eyes. How does the camera offer voyeuristic pleasure? Does it linger or gaze on the subject?

Intra-Diegetic - How do characters look at each other? Is the audience positioned within this look? When is the shot reverse shot used and why?

Extra-diegetic - Do characters break the 4th wall and look at the spectator? How do we react to it? Is it threatening? Is it to involve us in a joke? Is it combined with a voice over? Camera's Gaze - Do we see the process of filmmaking? Do you see the crew? Or is the spectator invited into the edit suite?

'Text-within-a text' - are the characters in the film making a film? Or do they watch a film? Are we watching them watching? Or watching them creating?

The Male Gaze (Mulvey)

Traditional cinema portrays women from a masculine, heterosexual perspective, objectifying them as passive subjects of male desire and reinforcing patriarchal power dynamics.

The Female Gaze (Soloway)

A way of filming that centres the female perspective, prioritizing the emotional, physical, and psychological experiences of women, and challenging the objectifying and patriarchal norms of the traditional male gaze in cinema.

Hypodermic Needle Theory

The hypodermic needle theory is a communication model suggesting that media messages are directly injected into the passive audience's mind, influencing their behaviour and beliefs without any resistance or critical thinking.