Major Theories of Spectatorship
(With a Focus on Hitchcock)
Oral examination list
Examiner: Professor Brigitte Peucker
Exam administered March 2005
Apparatus Theory
Baudry, J.-L. “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematic Apparatus.” In P. Rosen, ed., Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.
Cahiers du Cinéma (collective text). “Young Mr. Lincoln.” English trans. in Screen 13 (Autumn 1972), 5–44.
Psychoanalysis
Doane, Mary Ann. “Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator” and “Masquerade Reconsidered.” In Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 1991.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” and “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’: Inspired by A Duel in the Sun.” In Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.
Bergstrom, Janet. “Enunciation and Sexual Difference (part I).” Camera Obscura, Summer 79; p.32-69.
Brent, Jessica. “Beyond the Gaze: Visual Fascination and the Feminine Image in Silent Hitchcock.” Camera Obscura, May 2004 i55 p77(36).
Modleski, Tina. The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory. New York and London: Methuen, 1988.
Williams, Linda. “When the Woman Looks,” in Re-Vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism, Eds. Doane, Mellencamp and Williams (American Film Institute Monograph Series, l983) 83-99.
——. “Discipline and Distraction: The Care and Handling of Psycho,” in “Culture” and The Problem of the Disciplines, ed. John Carlos Rowe (Columbia University Press,1998).
Zizek, Slavoj. “The Hitchcockian Blot.” In Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture (MIT Press, 1998.
Zizek, Slavoj. Everything You Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock). London: Verson, 1992.
Semiotics
Casetti, Francesco. “Face to Face.” In Warren Buckland, ed., The Film Spectator: From Sign to Mind. Chicago: University of Amsterdam, 1995.
Silverman, Kaja. “Suture.” In The Subject of Semiotics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.
Historical/Empirical
Stacey, Jackie. “Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship.” The Audience Studies Reader. Eds. Will Brooker and Deborah Jermyn. London: Routledge, 2003. 150-58.
Staiger, Janet. Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception. New York: New York University Press, 2000.
Hawkins, Joan. “”See It from the Beginning”: Hitchcock’s Reconstruction of Film History.” Hitchcock Annual [1999-2000] 13-29.
Smith, Bob. “The Birds as a Pre-Stonewall Parable.” Gay & Lesbian Review v8, n2 (March, 2001):25.
Cognitive
Bordwell, David, ed. Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996.
Synthetic/Surveys
Aumont, Jacques. Aesthetics of Film. “Film and its Spectator.”
Doane, Mary Ann, and Janet Bergstrom, ed. “The Spectatrix.” Special issue of Camera Obscura, v. 20-21.
Gottlieb, Sydney, and Christopher Brookhouse, ed. Framing Hitchcock: Selected Essays from the “Hitchcock Annual.” Detroit: Wayne State University, 2002. (Esp. Bertollini, “Rear Window, or the Reciprocal Glance”; Leitch, “The Hitchcock Moment”; and Allen, “An Interview with Jay Presson Allen.”)
Hesling, W. “Classical Cinema and the Spectator.” Literature/ Film Quarterly, vol. 15 no. 3. 1987. pp: 181-189.
Mayne, J. Cinema and Spectatorship. London and New York: Routledge, 1993.
White, Susan M. “Review Essay: With Regard to Female Spectatorship.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video v. 12 (Sept. ’91) p. 93-105.
Queer perspectives
Corber, Robert J. “Reconstructing Homosexuality: Hitchcock and the Homoerotics of Spectatorial Pleasure.” Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, vol. 13 no. 2. 1991 Spring-Summer. pp: 58-82.
——. “Hitchcock’s Washington: Spectatorship, Ideology, and the ‘Homosexual Menace’ in Strangers on a Train.” Hitchcock’s America. Ed. Jonathan Freedman and Richard Millington. NY: Oxford UP, 1999. 99-121.
Phenomenology
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Eye and Mind.” The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenology, Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1964.
… And, Finally, the Films
The Birds (1963)
North by Northwest (1959)
Psycho (1960)
Rear Window (1954)
Strangers on a Train (1951)
Vertigo (1958)