The Chronotopic Restructuring of Gaze in Film

TACEY A. ROSOLOWSKI The Chronotopic Restructuring of Gaze in Film In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot, and history . This intersection of axes and fusion of indicators characterizes the artistic chronotope. M. M. Bakhtin, TL· Dialogic Imagination What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more. Susan Sontag, "Against Interpretation" The prevailing schools offilm criticism—in particulat, psychoanalytically -informed feminist film criticism—have constructed a rigid view of the spectator's relation to the filmic text. Film is not merely what is seen, but, as Jean-Louis Baudry explains, it is a process and structure where the viewer's eye melds with the camera eye such that "the world will not only be constituted by this eye but for it" ("Ideological " 43). Not surprisingly, in this view, the appropriative activity of the cinematic apparatus is coded so that filmic gaze becomes a masculine reference point, fixed on viewed objects positioned as feminine and other.1 A small number of feminist critics have questioned the inflexibility of this gendered polarity, arguing, as does Carol Clover in her discussion of horror film, that the spectatotial position is far from masterful. Other theorists such as Gaylyn Studlar, Kaja Silverman, and Tania Modleski cite examples in which the spectator becomes the object ofassault, Arizona Quarterly Volume 52, Number 2, Summer 1996 Copyright © 1996 by Arizona Board ofRegents ISSN 0004-1610 io6Tacey A. Rosohwski rather than the source of appropriation. Thus, psychoanalyticallygrounded feminism is both that theoretical model that has rigidified spectatorship and the source subverting that rigidity within specific parameters . This essay will focus on the flexibility of film in structuring gaze and subjectivity, but I will approach its analysis from a different direction . I will use M. M. Bakhtin's concept of the chronotope as a critical tool to open up readings of the image-track to visual elements and devices that manipulate gaze and the subject.2 While my fundamental intent is to demonstrate the impact of the chronotope as a tool for understanding film structure and gaze, an implicit concern is that both the otthodox and revisionist perspectives miss a level of specificity and detail in reading image-ttacks. Susan Sontag has warned of ideological modes ofreading in which a text's sensuous form is ignored or suppressed in favor of content that will reinforce theoretical presuppositions and ideological investments (8).3 Some sensuous detail will always seem "unmasterable" and threatening to organized critical structures (8-c>).4 My fundamental concern rests with film theory's strategic blindness to image-track detail, which translates into a myopia regarding film's variable spectatorial and subject positionings. This blindness is further reinforced because the psychic phenomenon of looking is sepatated from viewer experience, despite the fact that (or, in some cases, precisely because) experiential components of film viewing—responsiveness to moment-by-moment features of the image-track—can signal that established spectatorial positions are being manipulated or challenged . Here I will refer to a specific level of detail—a level to which Bakhtin's concept ofthe chronotope draws insistent attention. Bakhtin conceives of the chronotope as an analogical relation between space and temporality. In designating the organizational center of a work of art, Bakhtin argues that the chronotope "provides the ground essential for the showing-forth, the representability of events . . . [and] emerges as a center for concretizing representation . . ." (250). Critically, this representational system also controls the "showingforth " ofthe "hero." Because ofhis particular Marxist perspective, Bakhtin avoids the term "subject," a notion conjuring up the privatized, idealist construct. But his notion of "hero" goes beyond the intra-textual figure of the human being. Positioning himself in relation to Kant, Bakhtin insists that while he takes space and time to be "indispensible The Chronotopic Restructuring ofGaze in Film107 forms of cognition," he "differs from Kant in taking them not as 'transcendental ,' but as forms of the most immediate reality" (85, note 2). Well before Kant, the linked structures...