Film and Cinema Spectatorship: Melodrama and Mimesis

by Jan Campbell
Polity Press, Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA, 2005
256 pp. Trade, $59.95; paper, $25.95
ISBN: 0-7456-2929-6; ISBN: 0-7456-2930-X.

Reviewed by Jan Baetens
KU Leuven, Faculty of Arts

jan.baetens@arts.kuleuven.ac.be

Jan Campbell’s book provides us with an extremely useful and well-informed overview of a specific aspect of film theory whose importance is at the same time universally acknowledged and permanently put into question: spectatorship. Since the fading-out or even the collapse of the psychoanalytically inspired "apparatus theory", which certainly represented the acme of spectatorship theory in film studies, the central place of the notion of spectator has either been given a strong empiric swift (instead of studying "the" spectator, one started to make surveys of statistical audience reactions) or been strongly historicized (the traditional distinction between male and female spectators tended by be replaced by heavily contextualized analyses that abandoned all universalizing pretences). Campbell’s intentions or, more exactly, ambitions in Film and Cinema Spectatorship are twofold, since the gathering and critical discussion of most of the spectatorship theories in film studies is also the opportunity to give a new impulse to what had been abandoned, not to say explicitly rejected since the empirical and historical turn of the last two decades: psychoanalysis as a kind of cultural master narrative. This strong ambition to update psychoanalytical film theory demonstrates both the strength and the weakness of this book. Its strength, for it prevents Campbell’s work to be a mere survey of existing theories. Its weakness, for the reader is not necessarily convinced by exactly this part of the author’s argument.

As a historical survey of spectatorship theories, this book can be welcomed as an excellent contribution to modern and postmodern film studies. Although it focuses heavily on the last three decades, it appears also very sensible to the historical context of much of the films studied in these "recent" theories. As a survey on these topics, Film and Cinema Spectatorship will no doubt do a wonderful job. The book is divided in three sections, which cover almost all-important discussions in the field. First the idea of sexual difference (i.e. the various theories on the textual gendering of the audience), second the question of early film spectatorship (i.e. the discussions on the possible distinction between spectatorial attitudes in the cinema of attractions as opposed to the attitudes determined by the so-called classic or narrative cinema), third the wide range of topics studies by cultural film studies (such as for instance the matter of star-watching and the problematic relationship of passive consumption and explicit or implicit resistance). In all these matters, Campbell’s presentations are clear and cleverly written, with a great emphasis on the didactic aspects of the demonstration (although the list of "key points" that are given at the end of each subsection may not always be as readable as she herself would like to have them). Almost all major theoreticians all there (yet no Zizek, which is strange, and no Cavell, despite his paramount study on melodrama, a genre that constitutes one of the main threads of Campbell’s book), and their main ideas are rendered in a pleasant and faithful way.

Campbell’s attempt to update and save psychoanalytical film theory is less convincing, however. Not only because the reader is more or less invited to share a whole set of beliefs whose universal relevance is not seriously discussed but also, and much more, because the concrete results of the Campbell’s own readings seem a little flawed in comparison with the work of the authors she presents. One has, therefore, the impression to being offered two books in one, instead of one book with a double dimension. Sections and subsections on spectatorship theories alternate with a priori statements and ideas on psychoanalysis, whose concrete surplus value are not always very clear, since the more abstract passages (on hysteria, phenomenology, embodied spectatorship, etc.) remain too general to be really useful and the more straightforward readings tend to empty the films of the historical and material density that less psychoanalytically approaches had managed to disclose (I am thinking here in the first place of Campbell’s critical discussion of the close reading of Intolerance by Miriam Hansen).

In short, Film and Cinema Spectatorship will prove very useful for all readers eager to rehearse, update, and complete their knowledge of spectatorship theory, but one may doubt that it will offer a new start to psychoanalytical theory in film studies.