ABSTRACT
Shaviro's view of film spectatorship recognises that cinema goers engage with films because they provoke and resolve fears, because they provide readers with moments of romantic excess or comedic release. To explain the effects of cinema as an experience of compensatory wish fulfilment, he argues, misses much of the varied emotional gratifications that film spectatorship provides. Jill Nelmes, for example, differentiates between the passive viewing experience induced by mainstream cinema and the more nuanced experiences of independent film spectatorship. Mainstream film, Nelmes argues, offers the readers, 'ever more spectacular forms of visual and aural cinema'. Films of this kind, Nelmes argues further, produce what Richard Wollheim calls 'central imagining' experiences in which the spectator is passively locked into a cinematic roller coaster ride of fast-paced, action-based direction.
