Rushton, Richard
2009
Deleuzian spectatorship

Explores Deleuze’s views on spectators. Read properly if to be cited.

45
“At one level, Deleuze was felt to have introduced a perspective on film studies that was at odds with Screen Theory’s insistence on the passivity of the cinema spectator, the latter being a notion indebted to theories of psychoanalysis […]. Rather than spectators passively deprived of their bodies and held in thrall to an ideological apparatus, Deleuze’s writings gave rise to the possibility of spectators who engaged their bodies and senses in ways that made Screen Theory seem incorrigibly shortsighted.”

53
“Deleuze throws down a quite extraordinary and risky challenge: that we lose control of ourselves, undo ourselves, forget ourselves while in front of the cinema screen. Only then will we be able to loosen the shackles of our existing subjectivities and open ourselves up to other ways of experiencing and knowing.”