Cinema as the eye, the gaze, and establishment of spectator identity

Prospectus Draft – Junbo He

Prompt: Question 4: Pick a sensory area to explore in more depth and scope. Consider the contributions of this particular sense (and sensory frameworks) to film theory.

Prospectus Content:

The purpose of choosing the eye and the gaze as the focus of the paper is because I wanted to focus on one of the most influential senses in the spectator’s experience when watching cinema. This paper aims to understand the established theories with regards to how cinema affects the viewer’s experience of “seeing” and then understand how it is then manipulated to create the perceived reality around the viewer themselves. With the establishment and understanding of how perceptions are solidified it will then seek to apply it onto the human body. The sociopolitical implications of the viewed experience through the framework of Mulvey’s feminist theory frame work. If space allows the goal is to also explore the implications on the male body.

This paper will explore the notions of how the gaze is manipulated but simultaneously political. The hopes of being able to achieve in the exploration of this essay is to be able to make connections between the spectator identity through the manipulation of the ontological experiences in montages or the editing of scenes to understanding the interpretations of the surrounding reality of the spectator themselves. This essay is curious about the poltical implications of a manipulated frame through the following theorists: Lev Kulshov, Laura Mulvey, Sergei Einstein, and John Berger.

Annotated Bibliography

Thomas Elsasser and Malte Hagener – Cinema as Eye – Look and Gaze (Pg. 94-123)

An essay on how the spectator experiences cinema through the look and the gaze. This article will be used as a support to the analysis I will be making on how the perception and the eye is not only subjective but holds power. “the eye is the privileged point of convergence for various structures of visibility and looks that in film find their articulation in shot, framing, and montage”, furthermore on how that theoretically affects the experience of the spectator.

Lev Kuleshov – principles of montage – Critical Visions - Page 135-144

Kuleshov’s theory identifies film as the most important art and also a powerful social tool that is capable of changing perceptions of the world. This theory focuses on the power of editing and the effects on the spectator experience. It will be paired to be analyzed with Sergei Einstein’s theories around Collison or conflict between successive shots to complete the analysis of montage and the dialectical montage.

Laura Mulvey – Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema – Critical Visions - Page 713- 724

Destruction of the narrative and visual pleasure as a way to create the most objective cinema. Used to counter the notions of the creating of identity in Berger’s theory and also Einstein and Vertrov’s assertions about the montage having the most spectator centered experience. This article is used to provide a range of how cinema theory on the gaze and the experience of the view is interpreted and how it plays on out the spectator experience.

Sergei Einstein – the Dramaturgy of Film Form (The dialectical Approach to Film Form)

This article will be used to build towards the argument around how the viewed experience can be politicized into creating the realty of the spectator with a ontological centered experience.

John Berger – Ways of Seeing – Critical Visions - Page. 116-124

Seeing is a way of establishing the spectator in the world or cinema. It affects what the spectator too believes and that the eye of the other (lens) combined with the spectator’s own perception is what makes the experience and the viewed “reality” credible as that the spectator’s own identity is established within the visible world in the experience of viewing. This article will be used to argue and establish the existence of the spectator and the manipulation of the lived ontological experience into the spectator’s interpreted (manipulated) understanding. That film holds a reciprocal nature that is more fundamental than spoken dialogue

The Man with a Movie Camera (SU 1929, Celovik Kinoapparatom) by Dziga Vertrov (Film)

An avant-garde film that focuses on giving expression to the jubilant eye. This film is used to show how the sense organ – the eye- is one that helps the spectator discover the world. This film will be one of the films explored in the essay to incorporate the theory analysis.

The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks (1924) – Lev Kuleshov (Film)

This will be used as a way to study not only the montage but how the capacity of editing can alter a person’s interiority simply by reordering a sequence and enhance the micropolitics of the screen into the reality of the viewer. But to also explore the potential of establishing the spectator’s own take and interpretation of how the “reality” produced through their viewed experience from Berger’s theory.

Jeanne Dielman (1975) by Akerman – Film

To apply the notions of feminist theory from Mulvey on the house wife but also to further compare the notions of how editing and the montage affects the perception of the spectator from Einstein and Kulshov’s theories around the notions of montage.

Email：jh7193@nyu.edu