ABSTRACT
Throughout this book I have stressed that the distinction between “viewers” and “subjects” is the foundation for contemporary theories of spectatorship in film studies. At the same time, this distinction too often hardens into a rigid abstraction. It seems altogether fitting, then, that in this last chapter I turn to the subject of film audiences. The distinction between subject positions and real film viewers (for whom the activity of watching the movies can mean many different things) has acquired different inflections in the course of the past two decades of film theory. During the heady years of apparatus theory, the film viewer was bracketed altogether, while in more recent years pronouncements about those viewers have been more visible, in direct proportion, it seems, to the waning influence of apparatus theory.
