Abstract
The final chapter begins by retracing the main arguments of the book, highlighting the creative aspects of spectatorship as an interpersonal relation and moving from a critique of the allegory of the cave as a model of film spectatorship to Leo Bersani and Ulysses Dutoit’s ideas of homoness and aesthetic illumination. In the second part of the chapter, Paul Auster’s novel Man in the Dark is presented as an example of the everyday, situated, free associative and embodied practice of spectatorship. If spectatorship is a matter of a scene of dialogue and of the scene of looking at the same time, then the experience of the spectator is, at its core, always a matter of more than one viewer and a viewer is, conversely, always already the history of its different encounters with film.
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Notes
- 1.
Jean-Louis Baudry, “The Apparatus ,” Camera Obscura 1, no. 11 (1976): 110.
- 2.
See Jacques Rancière , Le Philosophe et ses Pauvres (Paris: Flammarion, 2007), xi. Preface to the French edition.
- 3.
See Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, “Beauty’s Light,” October 82 (1997): 17. See also Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Caravaggio’s Secrets (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1998); Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Caravaggio (London: British Film Institute, 1999).
- 4.
See Bersani and Dutoit, “Beauty’s Light,” 27.
- 5.
Bersani and Dutoit, Caravaggio, 57.
- 6.
Bersani and Dutoit, Beauty’s Light, 27.
- 7.
Leo Bersani , Is the Rectum a Grave? (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010), 70.
- 8.
Ibid., 43–44.
- 9.
Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 120.
- 10.
See Leo Bersani , “Psychoanalysis and the Aesthetic Subject,” Critical Inquiry 32, no. 2 (2006): 145–146.
- 11.
James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work (London: Michael Joseph, 1976), 67.
- 12.
Bersani, “Psychoanalysis and the Aesthetic Subject,” 152–153.
- 13.
Ibid., 150.
- 14.
“Immanent in every subject is its similitude with other subjects (and other objects).” Bersani and Dutoit, Forms of Being, 8. “Universally immanent” connections that are in turn made to correspond to a “limitless extensibility [of the subject] in both space and time.” Ibid., 9.
- 15.
Kaja Silverman, Flesh of My Flesh (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 4. See also Kaja Silverman, World Spectators (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 2.
- 16.
See Judith Butler , Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London: Routledge, 1999), 152.
- 17.
Bersani and Dutoit, “Beauty’s Light,” 28.
- 18.
Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave? 43, 87.
- 19.
Leo Bersani , The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1990), 86, 100.
- 20.
Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 346.
- 21.
Ibid.
- 22.
Ibid., 349.
- 23.
In Victor Burgin and Alexander Streitberger (ed.), Situational Aesthetics: Selected Writings by Victor Burgin (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2009), xiii.
- 24.
Jean-Bertrand Pontalis , Avant (Paris: Gallimard, 2012), 23.
- 25.
Jean-Bertrand Pontalis , Fenêtres (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), 106.
- 26.
Pontalis, Avant, 25.
- 27.
Christopher Bollas , Cracking Up: The Work of Unconscious Experience (London: Routledge, 1995), 11.
- 28.
Paul Auster, Man in the Dark (London: Faber and Faber, 2008), 2.
- 29.
Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude (London: Faber and Faber, 1982), 161.
- 30.
Christopher Bollas , Free Association (Cambridge: Icon Books, 2002), 10.
- 31.
See Pontalis, Avant, 50–51.
- 32.
Auster, Man in the Dark, 15–22.
- 33.
Ibid., 15–16.
- 34.
See Christian Metz , The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema (London: Palgrave, 1982), 10.
- 35.
Vittorio de Sica, Ladri di Biciclette [Bicycle Thieves or, in the United States, The Bicycle Thief] (ENIC, 1948), 35 mm.
- 36.
Auster, Man in the Dark, 16.
- 37.
Ibid.
- 38.
Ibid.
- 39.
Jean Renoir, La Grande Illusion (RAC, 1937), 35 mm.
- 40.
Auster, Man in the Dark, 17–18.
- 41.
Secondary identification —identification of the spectator with some identifiable feature of the characters on screen—clearly works in the other direction as well: in our experience and memory of film, characters assume subjective features that only we, as specific spectators, can project in them. Semiological film studies preferred to concentrate on the first kind of movement of identification , and on the spectator ’s primary identification with the camera, clearly because they allow to downplay the permeability of the space of film and to make film experience and the position of the spectator more intelligible.
- 42.
Pontalis, Fenêtres, 110–111.
- 43.
Auster, Man in the Dark, 118.
- 44.
Ibid., 21–22.
- 45.
Ibid., 153.
- 46.
Ibid., 73.
- 47.
Yasujirô Ozu, Tokyo Story (Shôchiku Eiga, 1953), 35 mm.
- 48.
Auster, Man in the Dark, 73–79.
- 49.
Ibid., 75.
- 50.
Ibid., 79.
- 51.
Ibid.
- 52.
Ibid., 86.
- 53.
Ibid., 102.
- 54.
“Un homme parmi d’autres plongé le temps d’une séance dans le noir et vivant la vision de sa mémoire intime dans celle que le film lui propose.” Raymond Bellour, Le Corps du Cinéma: Hypnosis, Émotions, Animalités (Paris: P.O.L., 2009), 17. Translation mine.
- 55.
Paul Auster, The Red Notebook (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), 111.
- 56.
Ibid., 117.
- 57.
See Bersani, The Culture of Redemption, 10.
- 58.
Auster, The Red Notebook, 143–144.
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Comanducci, C. (2018). The Spectator as a History of Encounters. In: Spectatorship and Film Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96743-1_7
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