Abstract
The cinema viewer is described as a spectator, whereas the viewer in a gallery or museum is a visitor. Stationary and wandering figures onscreen provide a reference point in the landscape and a mirror image of the visitor in the gallery, suggesting a mode of address based on location and movement in space. Film theorists and art historians have drawn on phenomenology and neuropsychology in their accounts of embodied viewing, but few have done so from a perspective that takes account of cultural identity. This chapter explores viewing relationships in a group of works that are structured by cultural perspectives that are neither white nor putatively unmarked. Thematically, the figures in these works often appear as strangers, travellers and migrants. Through a range of examples, including John Akomfrah’s The Airport (2016), Yang Fudong’s The Fifth Night (2010), and Isaac Julien’s Ten Thousand Waves (2010), I explore the use of motionless and wandering figures in multi-screen works to provide structure, coherence and a point of view for the visitor, and to thematise mobility and migration.
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Notes
- 1.
See ‘Mark Boulos Symposium—Professor Olaf Blanke,’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6t1MprvaP8.
- 2.
John Akomfrah, Vertigo Sea, Artist Talk, Talbot Rice Gallery, University of Edinburgh, 20 October 2017. Online at https://www.ed.ac.uk/talbot-rice/exhibitions/archive/exhibitions-2017-2018/vertigo-sea-john-akomfrah. Accessed 21 February 2019.
- 3.
See David Gritten, ‘Isaac Julien on Ten Thousand Waves,’ The Telegraph, 6 October 2010. Online at https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/filmmakersonfilm/8045498/Isaac-Julien-on-Ten-Thousand-Waves.html. Accessed 1 December 2018.
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Butler, A. (2019). The Visitor, the Wanderer and the Migrant. In: Displacements. Palgrave Close Readings in Film and Television. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30461-4_4
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