THE CINEMATIC CONTRACT
"The Cinema exists in the
distance between the audience
and the screen."
Jean-Luc Godard
Recent critical theories of film, developed out of the rarified atmosphere of Marxist semiotics and Lacanian psychoanalysis, have proposed a model of the cinema that locates the spectator as an essentially passive figure acted on
by the film. The individual subject (the spectator) is deprived of his or her centrality by a theoretical assertion that he or she is constituted in a prior existing system,
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which may be identified as "a linguistic system," "the imaginary," or "ideology." The integration of these theoretical discourses by their originators and disciples suggests that we can take these various terms to apply to different aspects of "the system of ideas and representations which dominate the mind of a man or a social group." The individual subject, deprived of such false bourgeois attributes as free will by his or her restriction within a system of language which determines his or her consciousness, is seen as a receptacle for the various manifestations of this pre-existent and determinist system. The correlative of such a theoretical construction is that the primary object of study is seen to be the language system rather than any particular language event.
Despite its
immense complexities
as a theoretical and analystical discourse, such an approach to the cinematic experience seems to be
somewhat simplistic
, reducing the audience to a passive amalgam of individuated but not individual receivers of pre-determined messages.
This approach has two weaknesses, which ultimately derive from its origin as a theoretical systemic model. Firstly,
it discards Chaney's paradoxical relationship between shared form and private experience by describing the form as a system and singularizing the audience into separate spectators, to whom the system is applied
.
This singularization is the exact reverse of the cinema's optical process. The camera records a field of vision from a singular point of view, which is itself spatially contiguous to the space it records. In projection, however, the camera's point of view is abstracted from its original spatial context and universalized for the audience, who, wherever they are sitting in the cinema, see the field of view from the same, by now abstracted, point of view. By this process of spatial abstraction and universalization the camera/projector does not so much constitute the spectator as its subject as indicate the difference between perception inside and outside the camera. The single perspective is pluralized by its presentation to a plural audience.
Unmistakably, reproduction as offered by picture magazines and newsreels differs from the image seen by the unarmed eye. Uniqueness and permanence are as closely linked in the latter as are transitoriness and reproducability in the former.
[Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"]
In the third quarter of the seventeenth century, Samuel van Hoogstraten, a Dutch painter and theorist of perspec-
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tive, constructed a peepshow in which the spectator, looking through a hole in the side of the box, would see a three-dimensional view of the interior of a room. The painting, on five of the interior surfaces of the box, presents its illusion of monocular perspective only from the point at which the peephole is cut, and the box is designed so that it can be viewed from that point alone. Such an artefact, perhaps the archetypal product of the optics of bourgeois individualism, can precisely be said to constitute the viewer as its subject, since it obliges the spectator to adopt a precise geographical position in relation to the image. The cinema, on the other hand, does the very opposite in the way it establishes the spectator's spatial relationship to the screen. The camera records the scene before it from a unique optical position, which the projector then pluralizes and makes equally available to every spectator in the theatre. This pluralization of the image in part accounts for the experiential differences between cinema and theatre, and also emphasizes the distinction between the spectator's perceptions within the cinema and those he or she experiences outside it. The result is to mark a distinction between the fiction of the image and the corporeal, material reality of the spectator, which, Walter Benjamin suggests, "permits the audience to take the position of the critic, without experiencing any personal contact with the actor."
One example of this distinction is an audience's reaction to point-of-view shots taken through car windshields in chase sequences, or the switchback ride sequence in This Is Cinerama. The audience will react physically to such
scenes, jumping up and down in their seats as the car hits bumps. But
at the same time that they are most obviously viscerally associating with the image before them,
the spectators are most concretely aware that they are watching an illusion
. The motion might make them sick, but they do not think themselves in danger of falling off the rollercoaster. Chaney describes this "feature of the spectacle" as fulfilling the audience's "desire for vicarious authenticity," and providing "an opportunity for a member of the audience to participate in and yet be distanced from someone risking his life crossing the Niagara Falls, an organization spending many millions of pounds, and Christians actually being eaten by lions." It is not a matter so much of the camera/projector's imposing a point-of-view on the audience as a question of their adopting the camera's perspective. The distinction is between a diktat and a voluntary agreement, but the distinction is essential. If the individual spectator
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is irredeemably fixed in position by the image, then the possibilities of his or her relation to its signification are at best limited to what Stuart Hall describes as "preferred," "negotiated" or "subversive" decodings or readings. If, on the other hand, the audience's role of participant witness is a voluntary one, then their relationship with the image is open to much wider, polyvalent, interpretations. I am suggesting that
such polyvalence is implicit in the pluralized nature of the cinematic image as presented to the audience, and that attempts to describe the cinema as constituting its subject misinterpret the nature of the exchange between the
audience and the screen
.*
To this description of the audience's relation to the image as polyvalent it might be objected that they in fact have no choice as to what they look at. The film preexists its audience in its selection and ordering of images. But in that selection and ordering, it also offers the audience a multiplicity of fictional perspectives. Within any sequence of the most conventional Hollywood fiction the camera may cut among half a dozen distinct spatial placements and provide as many different viewpoints on the events. The cut, for which there is no literary or linguistic equivalent, is an even more obvious instrument to distinguish between the process of cinematic and non-cinematic perception. Only in the cinema can we move our viewpoint without moving physically. The task of the spectator--which is an active task, and a necessary one for even the most basic comprehension of film--is to correlate the separate visual viewpoints, comprehend their spatial relationship, and construct a fiction out of their juxtaposition. Those who propose that the cinema constitutes its subject are in a sense giving no more credit to the audience's capacity than the producers who objected to the introduction of the close-up because the spectators would be confused as to what had happened to the rest of the character. Rather than convert it into a determinist relationship between film cause and spectator effect, we should try to preserve the paradox that the camera's presentation encourages the view-
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*It is worth noting that detailed analyses of the proposition that the film constitutes its audience subject have concentrated almost exclusively on the atypical visual rhetoric of the direct point-of-view shot. Even from its own theoretical position, this approach has a great deal more of the image stream to account for than it has yet done.
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er's participatory identification with the performances it presents at the same time that it demonstrably reveals itself as artificial.*
It might be more useful to offer a model of the film-audience relationship based on a model of contractual relations. There is, of course, a legal contract established between spectator and exhibitor by the sale of an admission ticket; that is why box offices display notices announcing that "the management reserves the right to..." The obligations under this contract are, however, limited: try demanding our money back on the grounds that you didn't like the film! However, the broader notion of a contractual relationship between film and audience serves first of all to make the point that the audience's commitment to the film is a voluntary one, particularly since they have already fulfilled their part of the contract by paying the price of admission before seeing the film.** In one sense, the cinematic contract may be taken to be the arrangement by which the filmmakers consent to provide the sequential materials necessary for the construction of a fiction, and the spectator consents to undertake its construction, remaining free to determine significance wherever he or she may choose to locate it. David Bordwell and
Kristin Thompson's distinction between plot and story may make the point clearer:
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*Walter Benjamin concisely expresses the paradox of the camera: "In the studio the mechanical equipment has penetrated so deeply into reality that its pure aspect freed from the foreign substance of equipment is the result of a special
procedure, namely the shooting by the specially adjusted camera and the mounting of the shot together with other similar ones. The equipment-free aspect of reality here has become the height of artifice; the sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology."
**We can distinguish two levels of performance participation (negotiation). The first is those social skills displayed in buying tickets, finding one's seat, observing the conventions of attention and applause and managing exiting.
The second level is only analytically distinguishable from the first, but it relates to the development of identity involved in attending performances of a distinct style... By patronizing a certain type of performance an individual is asserting a conception of self with distinctive aesthetic tastes and communal
commitments.
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The story, then, is a mental reconstruction we make of the events in their chronological order and in their presumed duration and frequency. The plot is the way in which these events are actually presented in the film.
[Bordwell and Thompson, Film Art]
I will elaborate on this distinction and add other terms to it later, but for the moment it is enough to observe that
it is obviously possible to construct a wide variety of stories from one plot, simply by varying the emphasis placed on different plot events
. Anyone who has ever tried to tell someone else the story of a film, or, even worse, tried to explain "what's happened so far" to someone who has come in late, will know what I mean.
The process of constructing a fiction is formally retrospective
: it requires a distance between the fictional events and the spectator who puts them to use. In practice, the audience construct the fiction as they go along, relying on their individual powers of memory and observation to locate the material the film provides them with in the overall pattern of the fiction they construct.
Two things should by now be clear. First,
the spectator is not a passive recipient of the film
. He or she is assigned a task which must be performed if he or she is to
elicit any meaning from it. The audience, then, have to work at their entertainment; they have, in fact, to entertain themselves from the material provided on the screen.*
The work involved may not be very hard, and a knowledgeable spectator performs it as unconsciously as he or she might perform a simple task on a factory production line, but the fact that the cinematic contract does provide the spectator with a task to perform if the fiction of the film is to be brought into being is empirically demonstrated every
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*They may, for example, choose to do this in "deviant" ways quite contrary to the filmmakers' expectations: the Camp appreciation of B-movies is one example; the repeated viewings of cult films like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, in which audiences dress up as their favorite characters in the film and recite the dialogue with them, is another; tearing up cinema seats during screenings of Rock Around the Clock is a third; and adolescent sexual experimentation in the back row or the drive-in is obviously an extreme possibility in constructing your own entertainment in the cinema.
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time a cinematic convention is ruptured and the spectator has to negotiate a new spatial or character relationship.*
My second point is that an alternative description of the audience's activity is to call it a process of performance.
Entertainment is not a system or a material object, it is an activity.
The product the American film industry sold in its movie theatres was entertainment, but that commodity was a process in which the audience was contractually obliged to perform a function. Kaplan's distinction between play and entertainment does not, in this analysis, hold. Applying my earlier definition of performance as an act of self-assertion the audience becomes not simply an active presence in the process of cinematic articulation, but necessarily a self-conscious presence. I shall argue later that the cinema of
the consensus (which to some extent coincides with what is now commonly, if vaguely, called "the classical Hollywood narrative") seeks to construct a mode of articulation in which the self-conscious role of the audience is reduced to a minimum so that its cinematic fictions may be consumed with as much ease and as little work as possible. To a degree this makes my empirical interpretations of the effects of the consensual mode on fictional construction similar to the conclusions of the theorists I am criticizing. But there are, or at least there seem to me to be, several crucial points of methodological difference, which reveal themselves in terminology. I shall argue that the cinema of the consensus effectively restricts its products to a unilateral mode of communication, in which the spectator is encouraged to construct the fiction
intended by the filmmakers because of the conventional arrangements of the fictional material. But I emphatically do not accept that such a procedure is inherent in the cinematic process, or within the Hollywood cinema. The Interludes on Dissent exist precisely to make this point: that it was and
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*Recent developments in the theory of motion perception have invalidated the idea that the cinematic illusion results from persistence of vision, and suggest that the spectator is involved in a much more complex unconscious process. "Just as film theorists have supplanted naive notions of cinema as a simple copy of the world with an attempt to come to grips with the medium as a system of representation and signification, so too must the naive notions of persistence of vision and of direct perception be replaced with an effort to
understand visual perception itself as a transformational and representational process."
[Joseph and Barbara Anderson, "Motion Perception in Motion Pictures"]
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is possible to make films that contest the assumptions of the consensus by questioning, breaking or exposing its conventional arrangements--and still remain within the Hollywood system.
My second point of disagreement with the systematizers is a discrepancy in the objects of our inquiry. I am much less concerned with the language system of cinema than I am with the language event; that is, with the film as experienced by its audience and as located in its specific historical and ideological context. I am unconvinced that the cinema is either a language or a language system because its production of meaning is both too mimetic and too connotative to be systematized. A science of connotations strikes me as an inherently contradictory proposition. I do not deny the value of a great deal of recent semiological analysis, and it will, I hope, be clear that my own methodlogical techniques have been influenced by formalist and structuralist approaches to film. But I am inclined to think that the study of the cinema is at the moment more in need of historical and textual research than it is of further theoretical speculation.
Finally, I disagree with the assumptions about ideological intention and effect in much recent theoretical writing. European presumptions about ideology cannot be imported unproblematically into the analysis of a culture which has so steadfastly refused to acknowledge their existence. Of course, American society can be subjected to class-based European modes of analysis, but in the process, some acknowledgment should be made of the fact that American institutions do not recognize themselves in these terms. The concept of a dominant ideology fits more readily into a society that consciously operates class divisions than it does in one which propounds its egalitarianism. America's Great Refusal of Marxism is a curious cultural fact the ramifications of which go far beyond the scope of this book. But while the English or French cinemas can clearly be seen to be operating class-based ideologies, I am less convinced that such assumptions can be readily recognized in Hollywood. Equally, the conventional structures of Hollywood which determine its unilateral mode of communication cannot automatically be regarded as hegemonic in purpose even if they
achieve that effect. The evolution of the mechanisms of consensus cinema was not concerned with the establishment of an ideological hegemony or the imposition of a particular, ideologically conditioned perceptual system. It was rather a
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technological evolution geared to the production of more efficient entertainment.* Hollywood sought to minimize its audience's effort both because it was economically more effective for it to do so, and because that was what it presumed its audience wanted. Within the contractual framework I have proposed, there is good reason for thinking that it was correct in its presumption. The development of Hollywood's fictional conventions was a gradual process, conducted progressively in film after film, and took the form of an economic dialogue between filmmakers and audience at the box-office. Innovations in form or content were negotiated by their financial success or lack of it; a crude mechanism of consultation, no doubt, but a mechanism nevertheless.**
My proposition, then, is that while the American cinema of the consensus may have established itself as a hegemonic and unilateral system of communication, it did so not out of a conscious or unconscious desire to impose a dominant ideology on its audience, but with the active participation of that audience, which was also maintained through its products.
If Hollywood films governed the perception of their audiences, they did so with "the consent of the governed."
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*In contrast to Europe, the private business sector in American history has been a more and more important factor in affecting activities, attitudes, and tastes for leisure... education or quality are not primary goals of business.
The leisure dimension of American life, inasmuch as a portion of it is dominated by goods or services provided for financial, profit, is efficiently served instead of purposefully elevated.
[looks like a quotation whose marks and endnote have accidentally been omitted]
**I am, of course, making certain assumptions about the legitimacy of capitalist procedures that many Marxist critics would dispute. This seems to me exactly the problem in much critical analysis of the American cinema. I do not
seek to defend monopoly capitalism as an economic or ideological institution.
I merely intend to acknowledge that that was the condition within which the American cinema operated. Any analysis of its products must place it within that condition rather than insisting against history that it ought to have operated under different conditions.
