ABSTRACT
This chapter takes the reader to the heart of film study: the practice of watching and responding critically to film. Drawing from debates about literary reception and canon-formation, the opening section, “The best films,” tackles the issue of value: how the institutions and discourses of film reception (box office performance, tie-ins, awards and festivals, “best” lists and fan activity) adjudicate films’ worth. This section returns to ideas of film authorship and film signatures, as well as to film history, to address the phenomenon of the film review: the genre of writing on film most familiar to you. Although the film review can tell us much (who looks great, what’s stupid, what’s funny and what’s not), it limits its task largely to evaluation rather than other forms of engagement that are the provenance of academic film studies. Assessing at the start some of the classic texts of reception studies, the second section, “Watching closely,” surveys the range of approaches undertaken in film studies to examine modes of response, from the pedagogy of shot-by-shot analysis to the activities of film fandom. It revisits that first commandment of cinema, “Thou shalt deceive,” in order to raise questions about how to understand and enrich the experience of watching films and to think about what it means to watch critically. From models of close
analysis to phenomenological reflection to philosophical meditation, this section means to expose the reader to a variety of likely surprising and, I hope, stimulating ways of considering cinematic response, in bold contrast to the model of passive entertainment many bring, noses in the air, to commercial narrative film. The final section, “Spectatorship as bridge,” emphasizes links to categories of production and exhibition, by examining how genre, for example, is as much an industrial logic of production as it is a system for selection. Questions of spectatorship are also questions of political and social commitments; this section closes with a discussion of feminist, queer, and critical race studies insofar as these discourses catalyze further reflection on fundamental relations between subject and object, looking and being-looked-at. Who looks? At whom? And what are the limits of a regime of knowledge derived from the gaze?
