Chapter 5

EZGİ GÜNİNDİ

                                                                                                               DOĞAÇ KUTLU

                                                                                                              MELİS YAZLAR

                                                                                                            MERVE CANBAZ                  

   CHAPTER 5: The Film Spectator


Spectator:  the individual responding to a film, as distinct from the collective response of an audience. Spectator study concentrates on the consumption of films that are ‘popular’ and are geared towards providing typical forms of cinematic pleasure-spectacle, emotion, plot, resolutio-with conventional narrative and generic forms.  For example: Home Alone Movie was filmed in 1990. Then, spectators had an important role to reshoot this movie. After the first one, Home Alone 2 Movie was filmed in 1992 (Nelmes 497).

close-ups: Normally defined as a shot of the head from the neck up (Nelmes 487).

Mise en scéne: A theatrical term usually translated as ‘staging’ or ‘what has been put into the scene’. In film, mise en scéne refers not only to sets , costumes, props and position of actors, but also to how the scene is organized, lit and framed for the camera. Mise en scéne is one way of producing meaning in films which can be both straightforward and extremely complex, depending upon the intentions and skill of the director (Nelmes 493).

Hegemony:  A set of  ideas, attitudes, or  practices becomes so dominant that we forget they are rooted in choice and the exercises of power. They appear  to be ‘common sense’  because they are so ingrained, any alternative seems ‘odd’ or potentially threatening by comparison. Hegemony is the ideological made invisible. In relation to the development of cinema, it can be seen how Hollywood developed hegemonic status and power. The Hollywood form of genre-based narrative realist film  is considered a ‘common sense’ use of the medium. Other forms of cinema, by comparison, are more or less ‘odd’. In looking at the early history of cinema we can begin to understand how and why Hollywood assumed this position (Nelmes 490).

Apparatus: The term describes the technical process and the effects produced in the act of projecting images on to large screens in darkened auditoria (Nelmes 137).

Interpellate: The word was brought into film studies from the writings of the French philosopher Louis Althusser, himself influenced by the psychoanalytical theories of Jacques Lacan. Althusser argued that we are all ‘subjects’ of ideology through the ways in which we are interpellated or positioned into society by its structures and systems. Interpellation is both one of the basic pleasures of  the movie experience and one of the most obvious ways in which popular  narrative realist cinema can be said to have ideological effects (Nelmes 137).

 Voyeuristic: It is associated in Freud’s work with the sadistic and exhibitionism with the masochistic. 

             For example; In The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996) Geena Davis performed Samantha Caine character. It can be example of voyeuristic. 

Pulp Fiction (1994): The lives of two mob hit men, a boxer, a gangster's wife, and a pair of diner bandits intertwine in four tales of violence and redemption. It is useful film to use in exploring spectatorship and audience. And also, it is a very self-aware film which plays with some of the basic conventions of narrative realist film  (Nelmes 148).

Realist Film: Cinematic realism is neither a genre nor a movement, and it has neither rigid formal criteria nor specific subject matter. But does this mean that realism is simply an illusion. Realism has designated two distinct modes of filmmaking and two approaches to the cinematographic image. In the first instance, cinematic realism refers to the verisimilitude of a film to the believability of its characters and events. This realism is most evident in the classical Hollywood cinema. The second instance of cinematic realism takes as its starting point the camera's mechanical reproduction of reality, and often ends up challenging the rules of Hollywood movie making.

For example : Auguste and Louis Lumière’s Earlier Movies. 

Mainstream: Feature-lenght narrative films created for entertainment and profit. Mainstream is usually associated with "Hollywood", regardless of where the film is made (Nelmes 492).

Manipulative Model: It is based on the view that media effects are consequence of lorms of stimulus carefully calculated to hit their target. Response is highly determined. 

Pluralist Model: It is not opposite of a manipulative model – but proposes that effects are more varied and less predictable. Media sophisticated audiences are well capable of resisting the preferred responses. 

Gangster genre: Greed, deception, money and murder; these are the basic themes of a gangster film. Gangster films present a story of criminal life through struggles with the law or rival gangs. Film gangsters are street smart, dishonest, powerful, respected and sometimes comical. Gangsters in the films use brute muscle and fear in the pursuit of power and wealth

Allegiance: We show allegiance. In so doing, we make evaluations about the appeal of the character to us. This may well be a moral/ideological allegiance.

For example: If a spectator expresses a strong allegiance with Micky and Malory in Stone’s Natural Born Killers, this involves a positive evaluation of their wild anti-social, anarchic moral positions.

Cultural Studies: Cultural studies is an academic field grounded in critical theory and literary criticism. Characteristically interdisciplinary, cultural studies provides a reflexive network of intellectuals attempting to situate the forces constructing our daily lives. Cultural studies have provided useful alternative approaches to the question how we respond to media messages. In particular, the terms ‘’preferred’’, ‘’oppositional’’ and ‘’negotiated’’ proved valuable.( 140)

Realist Form: The concept of the ‘’real’’ is problematic in cinema, and is generally used in two different ways: First, the extent to which a film attempts to mimic reality so that a fictional film can appear indistinguishable from documentary. Second, the film can establish its own world and can, by consistently using the same conventions, establish credibility of this world. In this later sense science fiction film Robocop can be realistic as a film set in contemporary and recognizable world such as Sleepless in Seattle ( Nelmes 496). 

Ideological Form: Ideology may be seen as the dominant set of ideas and values which inform anyone society or culture, but which are imbued in its social behavior and representative texts at a level that is not necessarily obvious or conscious. Karl Marx and Louis Althusser are two important key facts people for this terminology ( Nelmes 491).

Psychoanalytic Theory: Based on theories of Freud and, more recently, Lacan. Feminists argue that aspects of psychoanalysis are questionable because they are based on patriarchal assumptions that woman is inferior to man. Freud found female sexuality difficult and disturbing. Lacan argues that mother is seen as lacking by the child because she has no phallus (Nelmes 496).

Structuralism: This was founded on the belief that the study of society could be scientifically based and that there are structures in society that follow certain patterns or rules. Initially, most interest was centered on the use of language; Saussure, the founder of linguistics, argued that language was essential in communicating the ideology, the beliefs, of a culture. Structuralists have applied these theories to film, which uses both visual and verbal communication, and pointed out that text conveys an illusion of reality, thus conveying the ideology of a society even more effectively (Nelmes 498). 

Hand-held camera or hand-held shooting  is a filmmaking and video production technique in which a camera is held in the camera operator's hands as opposed to being mounted on a tripod or other base. 

Competence : A complementary way of trying to explain different responses is again in relation to the concept of spectator. In some respect competence and evaluative judgment are clearly separable from one another.  For example, I may be perfectly capable of appreciating artistically, cinematically what Tarantino is doing and despise it morally ideologically (Nelmes 154).

Central imagining and a-central imagining: In The Tread of Life, Richard Wollheım makes a fundamental distinction, corresponding to a big divide between two modes of imagination; ’central’ imagining and ’ a-central’ imagining. A rough guide to the distinction can be found in linguistic clues. While central imagining is often expressed in the form ‘ I imagine…’, a-central imagining is expressed  in the form  ‘I imagine that…’ (Nelmes 155).

Disinhibition: It refers to the gradual wearing –down of the moral/ideological rules that the spectator adheres to as a member of a particular society. For example, the effect of sexual crime represented on film may appear negligible, but watching such events repeatedly within film fiction will, according to the argument, wear down the natural inhibition the spectator has grown up with and which protects him/her from any tendency within themselves to carry out such an action (Nelmes 158).