Cinema and Spectatorship is the first book to focus entirely on the history and role of the spectator in contemporary film studies. While 1970s film theory insisted on a distinction betweeen the cinematic subject and film-goers, Judith Mayne suggests that a very real friction between "subjects" and "viewers" is in fact central to the study of spectatorship. In the book's first section Mayne examines three theoretical models of spectatorship: the perceptual, the institutional and the historical, while the second section focuses on case studies which crystallize many of the issues already discussed, concentrating on textual analysis, the `disrupting genre', `star-gazing' and finally the audience itself. Case studies incude the place of the spectator in the textual analysis of individual films such as The Picture of Dorian Gray; the construction of Bette Davis' star persona; fantasies of race and film viewing in Field of Dreams and Ghost; and gay and lesbian audiences as "critical" audiences. The book provides a very thorough and accessible overview of this complex, fragmented and often controversial area of film theory.

Madness and Cinema offers a radical approach to the issue of what happens when we watch films. By exploring cinema's relationship to meaning and proposing new ways to read cinema through psychoanalysis, this book develops the idea that the spectator engages in what has previously been described as an act of madness. By considering some of the key concepts from Freud and Lacan, as well as ideas from Derrida and Foucault, we are shown the common features that cinema and madness share. The film spectator is shown as the psychotic, neurotic and hysteric, as the book examines the ways in which the foundations of culture and meaning are challenged when we become the spectator of a film.

In a historical investigation of the pleasures of cinema, Star Gazing puts female spectators back into theories of spectatorship. Combining film theory with a rich body of ethnographic research, Jackie Stacey investigates how female spectators understood Hollywood stars in the 1940's and 1950's. Her study challenges the universalism of psychoanalytic theories of female spectatorship which have dominated the feminist agenda within film studies for over two decades. Drawing on letters and questionnaires from over three hundred keen cinema-goers, Stacey investigates the significance of certain Hollywood stars in women's memories of wartime and postwar Britain. Three key processes of spectatorship - escapism, identification and consumption - are explored in detail in terms of their multiple and changing meanings for female spectators at this time. Star Gazing demonstrates the importance of cultural and national location for the meanings of female spectatorship, giving a new direction to questions of popular culture and female desire.

Film and Cinema Spectatorship provides a clear and wide-ranging introduction to different debates and traditions of viewing cinema. In this new book, Jan Campbell offers a comprehensive account of the different theoretical perspectives on film and cinema spectatorship, situating these in their cultural and historical contexts. Among the perspectives covered are those of feminism, modernism and cultural studies, with chapters dedicated to important topics such as early film, stars and film aesthetics. Campbell also provides accessible explorations of the importance of key themes to film and cinema spectatorship, such as mimesis, melodrama, performance and time. The timely and comprehensive text will be essential reading for anyone interested in debates on film theory, psychoanalysis and film, and the history of cinema. This book will be of special interest to students of film studies, media studies and cultural studies.

Cinema and Spectatorship is the first book to focus entirely on the history and role of the spectator in contemporary film studies. While 1970s film theory insisted on a distinction betweeen the cinematic subject and film-goers, Judith Mayne suggests that a very real friction between "subjects" and "viewers" is in fact central to the study of spectatorship. In the book's first section Mayne examines three theoretical models of spectatorship: the perceptual, the institutional and the historical, while the second section focuses on case studies which crystallize many of the issues already discussed, concentrating on textual analysis, the `disrupting genre', `star-gazing' and finally the audience itself. Case studies incude the place of the spectator in the textual analysis of individual films such as The Picture of Dorian Gray; the construction of Bette Davis' star persona; fantasies of race and film viewing in Field of Dreams and Ghost; and gay and lesbian audiences as "critical" audiences. The book provides a very thorough and accessible overview of this complex, fragmented and often controversial area of film theory.

Scott Curtis draws our eye to the role of scientific, medical, educational, and aesthetic observation in shaping modern spectatorship. Focusing on the nontheatrical use of motion picture technology in Germany between the 1890s and World War I, he follows researchers, teachers, and intellectuals as they negotiated the fascinating, at times fraught relationship between technology, discipline, and expert vision. As these specialists struggled to come to terms with motion pictures, they advanced new ideas of mass spectatorship that continue to affect the way we make and experience film. Staging a brilliant collision between the moving image and scientific or medical observation, visual instruction, and aesthetic contemplation, The Shape of Spectatorship showcases early cinema's revolutionary impact on society and culture and the challenges the new medium placed on ways of seeing and learning.

Although cinema was invented in the mid-1890s, it was a decade more before the concept of a “film spectator” emerged. As the cinema began to separate itself from the commercial entertainments in whose context films initially had been shown—vaudeville, dime museums, fairgrounds—a particular concept of its spectator was developed on the level of film style, as a means of predicting the reception of films on a mass scale. In Babel and Babylon, Miriam Hansen offers an original perspective on American film by tying the emergence of spectatorship to the historical transformation of the public sphere. Hansen builds a critical framework for understanding the cultural formation of spectatorship, drawing on the Frankfurt School’s debates on mass culture and the public sphere. Focusing on exemplary moments in the American silent era, she explains how the concept of the spectator evolved as a crucial part of the classical Hollywood paradigm—as one of the new industry’s strategies to integrate ethnically, socially, and sexually differentiated audiences into a modern culture of consumption. In this process, Hansen argues, the cinema might also have provided the conditions of an alternative public sphere for particular social groups, such as recent immigrants and women, by furnishing an intersubjective context in which they could recognize fragments of their own experience. After tracing the emergence of spectatorship as an institution, Hansen pursues the question of reception through detailed readings of a single film, D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916), and of the cult surrounding a single star, Rudolph Valentino. In each case the classical construction of spectatorship is complicated by factors of gender and sexuality, crystallizing around the fear and desire of the female consumer. Babel and Babylon recasts the debate on early American cinema—and by implication on American film as a whole. It is a model study in the field of cinema studies, mediating the concerns of recent film theory with those of recent film history.