Jenn Thảo Nguyễn

This week’s readings synthesized several responses to questions that came up for me during last week’s sojourn into Baudry and Metz’s apparatus-theory, particularly in its examination of spectatorship. Apparatus-theory seems to lean on identification that comes from ideological capabilities of film apparatus. The eye participates, through the theory’s reliance on the ocular-apparatus alongside cinematic-apparatus, but to what degree?

Kuleshov submits his revision of his own montage theory, and places the filmmaker’s subjectivity — shaped by his class and societal ideology — at the forefront of artistic use of montage. The eye of the filmmaker, in this case, must be attuned to their raw materials, both montage cells and the internal montage of the actor, in order to construct successful ideological art. Eisenstein seems to provide the syntactical blocks for filmmakers to elucidate intended ideology, through semantic associations made by different montage formats. Creation and reception of films, as posited by these constructivists, suggests that the eye is subjective at both ends of the cinematic production, but such use of the eye seems more in line with the theories surrounding cognitivism rather than visual participation. Lacan’s ‘the Real’ and Foucault’s ‘Panopticon’ complicate apparatus-theory’s sustainability through its disembodying of the gaze from a subject, suggesting that the modular and nebulous forces of power and pleasure may override the spectatorship’s identifications within the ontogenetic experience created by the film’s visual stimuli and ocular-centrism. The disturbance of being the receiver of a gaze in the act of looking interests me greatly, and of feminist film theories that deconstruct the gendered gaze, I am most interested in the reverberation that exists between beholding the aesthetics in the male gaze as well as the empathic projections of identification in the female gaze. Giuseppe Tornatore’s film Malena is an apt representation of the tension and subversion that can be had from experiencing this friction. Though Malena exists as a hyperbolic representation of this phenomenon, recent reincarnations of this dual-gaze film can be seen in films like Sean Baker’s Anora and Paolo Sorrentino’s Parthenope. The repetitive use of the female protagonist’s mononym as the film’s title may also be pattern worth studying in order to disseminate the prolific nature of this kind of film, and I would be interested to read more theories that undergird these impulses.