SPECTATORSHIP THEORY

• Active vs Passive viewership.

  Active = interact with the text - challenging the directors imposation of meaning

  Passive = audience as a homogenous group, accepting the directors meaning.
• Uses and Gratification theary: Bulmer and Katz.

  It's a communication theory that suggests audiences are not passive consumers of media but actively seek out specific media to satisfy their individual needs and desires.
• list the five factors that draw an audience to a film

  
  

  information and education

  entertainment

  personal identity

  integration and social interaction

  escapism
• Stuart Halls reception theory: preferred reading:

  How the director wants the audience to view the text.

  Audience members will accept the reading if the messages are clear, if they are of the same age and culture and if it has an easy narrative to follow and deals with relevant themes.
• Negotiated reading

  A compromise between the dominant and oppositional readings, where the audience accepts part of the producers views but has their own views on parts as well.
• Oppositional reading

  Audience rejecs the preferred reading and creates their own meaning for the text.
• Many factors could affect whether the audience takes the preferred, oppositional or negotiated reading include?

  Age, belief, culture, gender, sexuality, life experience, mood at the time of viewing.
• Utopian Theory - Richard Dyer

  Utopian theory involves the idea that audiences consume media texts and products with a clear set of pleasures to draw from the experience.

  Dyer suggests that audiences turn to media texts to make up for the deficiences that they inherit in their lives, and to fuel their obsessions of keeping up with society.
• 'the notion of entertainment as in some sense utopian - expressing ideals about how human life could be organized and lived - is implicit in widespread assumption about entertainment, that provides an escape.' Dyer.
• Utopian solutions to social inadequacy

  Poverty - Abundance of wealth

  Tired - Energy

  Manipulation - Transparency

  Fragmentation - Community
• White spectatorship - Jacqueline Bobo

  Cinema is often a projection of the assumed dominant spectator: white male.

  Bob demonstrates that AA women view cultural products in a unique way, they have an importance in recognizing their lack of voice, they bring an oppositional stance to mainstream media.
• The Male Gaze - Laura Mulvey 1975 


  Mulvey states 'the gender power asymmetry is a controlling force in cinema and constructed for the pleasure of the male viewer, which is deeply rooted in patriarchal ideologies and discourses.'
• The Male Gaze - Lauren Mulvey 1975 


  Says that the male viewer is the target audiencce, therefore their needs are met first
• 'men do the looking, and women are to be looked at.' Mulvey
• Ways of seeing - John Berger

  He argued that everything in art depicting naked womens shaped the way men look at women : 'feed the appetitie of male sexual desire'
• Spectating and female desires - Mary Ann Doane (1987)


  Argued that even female- led films are for male spectatorship. The femme-fatale archetype is not empowered but a projection of masculine insecurites and should not be viewed as a 'character with agency' (links to winters bone)
• 'i've always felt that movies are an emotional medium... we become voyeurs. We become people who are absorbed into the story, if the story is working. And its an emotional experience'


  Roger Ebert
• Emotional impact of films falls into two camps

  Identification - spectator can imagine themselves in the character + ultimately emphathise

  Assimiliation - real identification is rare, spectators tend to experience sympaphy or antipathy. an external observer.
• Cognitive Theory (Murray Smith)

  Recognition- the construction of characters the way spectators see as individual subjective humans

  Alignment - spatial - temporal attachment (visually glued through film form) and subjective access (characters emotional state)

  Allegiance - the moral orientation and structure of character. Links to the way spectators sympathise by moral values.
• Llewelyn challenges cultural ideologies of law (allegiance) as we are positioned as an audience with him despite him being a criminal (as a society we do not expect to sympathise with a criminal – challenges our moral foundations).
• Chigurh and Carla Jean: she searches for a moral reasoning behind Chigurh’s actions, questioning his morals and why he does what he does: this is the same thing that the audience through a negotiated reading will do (accepting Chigurh’s character and actions but not understanding why he does what he does)
• Preferred reading: audience is meant to side with the Sherriff and agrees/sympathises with the lack of understanding of modern day criminals
• Oppositional reading: audiences may reject the meaning behind the plot and engage more with the action elements as these provide more traditional entertainment.