Spectatorship of screen media : land of the zombies?
- Authors: Raubenheimer, Landi
- Date: 2013
- Subjects: Active spectatorship , Passive spectatorship , Spectatorship , Screen media
- Identifier: uj:5429 , ISSN 1020 1497 , http://hdl.handle.net/10210/12042
- Description: This article investigates spectatorship of screen media. Early screen media is often thought to necessitate passive spectatorship, with thinkers such as Siegfried Kracauer (1987) and Walter Benjamin (2004) focusing on film. Such theories are later supported by critiques such as those by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (2003) on the mass media, and Laura Mulvey’s (2004) text on the gaze in film, along with ideas around the flaws of the Cartesian position as spectatorship formulated in aesthetics. More recently, with the advent of digital media, spectatorship has been re-formulated as more active in terms of meaning making. Following earlier theorists, I argue here that screen spectatorship is not in fact as active as it now appears to be, and that spectators are often performing dialectical zombie-like spectatorship; appearing active when spectatorship is more distracted than before. Overwhelming spectacle catering to the ‘eye lust’ (Gunning 2004:871) and interactive elements convince spectators that they are acting with agency, but as I aim to show, also lead to an exacerbated collapse of contemplative distance, which paradoxically often renders spectatorship uncannily zombie-like. When spectatorship reveals itself as a strangely passive activity, it may be understood as uncanny in the manner that Freud (1955) formulated it.
- Full Text:
- Authors: Raubenheimer, Landi
- Date: 2013
- Subjects: Active spectatorship , Passive spectatorship , Spectatorship , Screen media
- Identifier: uj:5429 , ISSN 1020 1497 , http://hdl.handle.net/10210/12042
- Description: This article investigates spectatorship of screen media. Early screen media is often thought to necessitate passive spectatorship, with thinkers such as Siegfried Kracauer (1987) and Walter Benjamin (2004) focusing on film. Such theories are later supported by critiques such as those by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (2003) on the mass media, and Laura Mulvey’s (2004) text on the gaze in film, along with ideas around the flaws of the Cartesian position as spectatorship formulated in aesthetics. More recently, with the advent of digital media, spectatorship has been re-formulated as more active in terms of meaning making. Following earlier theorists, I argue here that screen spectatorship is not in fact as active as it now appears to be, and that spectators are often performing dialectical zombie-like spectatorship; appearing active when spectatorship is more distracted than before. Overwhelming spectacle catering to the ‘eye lust’ (Gunning 2004:871) and interactive elements convince spectators that they are acting with agency, but as I aim to show, also lead to an exacerbated collapse of contemplative distance, which paradoxically often renders spectatorship uncannily zombie-like. When spectatorship reveals itself as a strangely passive activity, it may be understood as uncanny in the manner that Freud (1955) formulated it.
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Black mirrors and zombies : the antinomy of distance in participatory spectatorship of smart phones
- Authors: Raubenheimer, Landi
- Date: 2018
- Subjects: Spectatorship , Smart phones , Participation
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10210/290271 , uj:31510 , Citation: Raubenheimer, L. 2018. Black mirrors and zombies : the antinomy of distance in participatory spectatorship of smart phones.
- Description: Abstract: Spectatorship has been investigated in film and media studies, aesthetics and art history, and has gained prominence from the 1990’s with the focus on digital media in these fields. In this article I investigate the implications of two notions of contemporary spectatorship for viewing moving images on smart phones, by studying how they are depicted in popular representations; television series, an advertisement and social media. The first is participation1, with new technologies such as smart phones linked to supposedly more empowered participatory practices than those that preceded these technologies. The second is the cinema dispositive2, which in current theory is often dismissed as leading to passive spectatorship. I aim to interrogate the complexity and contradictions inherent in both concepts and how they have recently been theorised in film and media studies, by focusing on two aspects that seem to facilitate participation through smart phones. The first is distance; I investigate whether and how it is reconfigured as a factor that may feature in participatory spectator practices. The second is mobility, where I consider some limitations of the physical body-screen relationship between spectators and smart phones.
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- Authors: Raubenheimer, Landi
- Date: 2018
- Subjects: Spectatorship , Smart phones , Participation
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10210/290271 , uj:31510 , Citation: Raubenheimer, L. 2018. Black mirrors and zombies : the antinomy of distance in participatory spectatorship of smart phones.
- Description: Abstract: Spectatorship has been investigated in film and media studies, aesthetics and art history, and has gained prominence from the 1990’s with the focus on digital media in these fields. In this article I investigate the implications of two notions of contemporary spectatorship for viewing moving images on smart phones, by studying how they are depicted in popular representations; television series, an advertisement and social media. The first is participation1, with new technologies such as smart phones linked to supposedly more empowered participatory practices than those that preceded these technologies. The second is the cinema dispositive2, which in current theory is often dismissed as leading to passive spectatorship. I aim to interrogate the complexity and contradictions inherent in both concepts and how they have recently been theorised in film and media studies, by focusing on two aspects that seem to facilitate participation through smart phones. The first is distance; I investigate whether and how it is reconfigured as a factor that may feature in participatory spectator practices. The second is mobility, where I consider some limitations of the physical body-screen relationship between spectators and smart phones.
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The cultural politics of adaptation : fools and the politics of gender
- Authors: Mngadi, Sikhumbuzo
- Date: 2015-04-01
- Subjects: Gender , Masculinity , Spectatorship
- Type: Article
- Identifier: uj:5594 , ISSN 1754923x , http://hdl.handle.net/10210/14295
- Description: The shifts in the priorities of literary and cultural theory and criticism were already underway in the South African academy by the end of the 1980s, with the gathering momentum of the mass political movement reaching its apotheosis with the release of Nelson Mandela from prison in 1990. Whereas creative literary and cultural expression has often lagged behind advances in theory, there was nevertheless a steady acknowledgement of the necessity for a corresponding shift in the discursive character of the creative arts, even if the material conditions on the ground remained largely unchanged. Ramadan Suleman’s film Fools, which appeared in 1997 as an adaptation of Njabulo Ndebele’s 1983 novella by the same title, entered the fray with its argument for a new or, as it were, broader consciousness of the deeper, more complex legacy of ‘sexual violence’. This legacy included the weak ‘place of women in the everyday life of the township’ (Suleman 1995: 1), and indeed in the very idea of ‘the everyday’ that some in literary and cultural circles sought to inscribe. This article provides an assessment of the nature and extent of the film’s intervention in the context of the systematic breakdown of the old certainties of race, identity and nation post-apartheid, together with the literary-critical cultures and apparatuses that presided over their coherences and raptures. I take as my starting point Robert Stam and Louise Spence’s (1983: 3) assertion that ‘[a]though […] those questions bearing on the cinematic industry, its processes of production, distribution and exhibition’ – in short, questions bearing on ‘the contextual’ – are of ‘crucial importance’, they need to be tempered with those bearing on the ‘textual and intertextual’ (emphasis in original). Fools is a film that enters the textual and contextual terrain of Ndebele’s novella, but in doing so contests its textuality by shifting its narrative ground and voice.
- Full Text:
- Authors: Mngadi, Sikhumbuzo
- Date: 2015-04-01
- Subjects: Gender , Masculinity , Spectatorship
- Type: Article
- Identifier: uj:5594 , ISSN 1754923x , http://hdl.handle.net/10210/14295
- Description: The shifts in the priorities of literary and cultural theory and criticism were already underway in the South African academy by the end of the 1980s, with the gathering momentum of the mass political movement reaching its apotheosis with the release of Nelson Mandela from prison in 1990. Whereas creative literary and cultural expression has often lagged behind advances in theory, there was nevertheless a steady acknowledgement of the necessity for a corresponding shift in the discursive character of the creative arts, even if the material conditions on the ground remained largely unchanged. Ramadan Suleman’s film Fools, which appeared in 1997 as an adaptation of Njabulo Ndebele’s 1983 novella by the same title, entered the fray with its argument for a new or, as it were, broader consciousness of the deeper, more complex legacy of ‘sexual violence’. This legacy included the weak ‘place of women in the everyday life of the township’ (Suleman 1995: 1), and indeed in the very idea of ‘the everyday’ that some in literary and cultural circles sought to inscribe. This article provides an assessment of the nature and extent of the film’s intervention in the context of the systematic breakdown of the old certainties of race, identity and nation post-apartheid, together with the literary-critical cultures and apparatuses that presided over their coherences and raptures. I take as my starting point Robert Stam and Louise Spence’s (1983: 3) assertion that ‘[a]though […] those questions bearing on the cinematic industry, its processes of production, distribution and exhibition’ – in short, questions bearing on ‘the contextual’ – are of ‘crucial importance’, they need to be tempered with those bearing on the ‘textual and intertextual’ (emphasis in original). Fools is a film that enters the textual and contextual terrain of Ndebele’s novella, but in doing so contests its textuality by shifting its narrative ground and voice.
- Full Text:
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