Open Collections

"Cinema for where you live": spectatorship, subjectivity and space

University of British Columbia

Film theory's critical engagements with the spectator's relationships with the moving image have, over the last decade, reached something of a critical impasse. This impasse has crystallised around the inability of dominant psychoanalytic and ethnographic discourses to theorise "ways of seeing" and positions of desire that are neither completely hegemonic (structured by ideology) nor counter-hegemonic (fuelled by agency), but which fall into the space of contradiction and disjuncture that exists in-between their assumptions. In this thesis, I bring recent debates around subjectivity and geographical projects of "mapping the subject" to bear upon spectator ship. I explore the ways in which viewing spectatorship through this lens of space provides a critical language that interrogates the terrain of "in-betweenness" that marks spectatorship. I argue that, through its flexibility and inclusivity, a spatial approach to spectatorship allows us to theorise the notion of spectatorial hybridity, and conceive of alternative positions of desire in the cinema. In order to capture the multiple and mutable dynamics of spectatorship, this work contains two distinct but interrelated projects. First, it reveals and analyses the ways in which the language of space is already operative in film theory, uncovering the fabrics of spatiality that underlie existing theorisations of spectatorship. Second, it follows its own inquiry into the "spaces of spectatorship", measuring the validity of the project of "locating the spectator" against the real relations between played out between subjects, spaces and cinema in Vancouver.

Thesis/Dissertation

application/pdf

2009-03-10

For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use.

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/5819

Geography

University of British Columbia

UBCV

DSpace