Afterword: Objects in the Theater

The field of film studies has often considered excess as a way to understand the cinema.¹ Neither self-contained sphere nor object entirely of the world, cinema and its powers have been explained through dichotomies and ambivalences.² This can be illustrated through a series of questions: Is cinema dream, phantasmagoria, parallel universe? Is the image on the screen a doorway to another place, a window onto the world, an inspiration for dreams and fantasies, a culmination of ideologies and discourses? How should spectators interact with the cinematic object: through absorption, transportation, or distraction? Are the viewer’s senses engaged equally, in turn, or hierarchically; are they disciplined, controlled, or directed? Does film teach spectators how to see, experience, or feel? What constitutes the cinema’s primary goal: sensation, thought, contemplation, or reaction?

Any suggestion that film studies has arrived at satisfactory answers to these questions stifles lively debates within the discipline, not to mention ongoing attempts by filmmakers, moving-image artists, and other creative practitioners. But if film studies generally accepts its ties to ambiguity and paradox, it too frequently ignores cinema’s physical excess: the spaces of exhibition where image and sound meet the messiness of the world. That particular moment of encounter and the multiplicity of things therein that misshape, reenact, and reconsider the relationship between film and spectator bear a historical and theoretical urgency. In response, this special issue has pondered many of these questions that currently animate the discipline from the perspective of exhibition studies. The approach of the authors here has been to demonstrate how attention to the objects that populate the spaces of cinematic exhibition illuminates the importance of environments beyond the screen for a more incisive understanding of the film experience. As theorists of cinema, we insist that the untangling of relationships between objects, bodies, and image evinces some of the most essential questions film theory seeks to address. As historians of cinema, we argue that the presence of these objects in cinematic spaces speaks to the discourse of ideal spectatorship; in other words, we can extrapolate what exhibitors, theater patrons, and film producers thought spectatorship should, could, or might be. The implications extend past the smaller niche of exhibition studies into film studies in general.

In attending to manifold times and places of exhibition, the scholars gathered here have considered the space of aesthetic encounter as well as the physical objects within that space as potential directives or distractions for spectatorship. Such detailed and careful exploration of the influence of objects requires a broader definition of exhibition and suggests ways to develop bridges between the theatrical and nontheatrical. We have argued that objects between viewer and image must be considered in addition to, alongside, or in concert with the screen. Our approach is, of course, thoroughly congruous with current understandings of spectatorship as a multifaceted process that can be alternately or simultaneously stable and mobile, individual and communal, seamless and chaotic. Yet we also seek to push the boundaries of exhibition studies and insist on its position not as an addendum to film aesthetics but a necessity for the construction of a thorough history of film.

Traditionally, and for good reason, the screen and its relationship to the eye hold central importance in the study of spectatorship. From Sergei Eisen-stein and Dziga Vertov to André Bazin, Jean-Louis Baudry, and Laura Mulvey, film theory often tacitly assumes that the aesthetic encounter takes place at the moment of conjuncture between screen and eye.³ Even scholars operating on the margins of film theory, such as Jonathan Crary, Giuliana Bruno, Anthony Vidler, and Beatriz Colomina, treat the cinema as image-centric;⁴ while studies of film sound by scholars such as Emily Thompson and Jacob Smith have gained considerable traction in the field,⁵ the primacy of the eye and the screen frequently goes unquestioned. Recently, Richard Maltby, Daniel Biltereyst, and Philippe Meers have proposed the term new cinema history as a category that articulates conditions of production, exhibition, and reception through examinations of audiences, sociality, technology, law, markets, and global circulation.⁶ In keeping with this...