Inside Gaze the Fiction Film and the Spectator.Pdf
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The Society for Cinema Studies Translation Series Peter Brunette, George Mason University Series Editor EDITORIAL BOARD! Richard Abel, Drake University Dudley Andrew, University of Iowa Julianne Burton, University of California, Santa Cruz Miriam Hansen, University of Chicago FRANCESCO CASETTI Inside the Gaze: The Fiction Film and Its Spectator TRANSLATED BY NELL ANDREW WITH CHARLES O'BRIEN PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION BY DUDLEY ANDREW INTRODUCTION BY CHRISTIAN METZ INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS Bloomington and Indianapolis This book is a publication of Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, IN 47404-3797 USA http://www.indiana.edu/~iupress Telephone orders 800-842-6796 Fax orders 812-855-7931 Orders by e-mail [email protected] This translation copyright 1998 by Indiana University Press. Published in Italian as Dentro lo sguardo: ilfilm e il suo spettatore (Milan: Bompiani, 1996). In accordance with the author's preference, this translation was prepared from the French edition, D'un regard Vautre: lefilm et son spectateury trans. Jean Chateauvert and Martine Joly (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1990), with reference to the Italian edition. All rights reserved The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Casetti, Francesco. [Dentro lo sguardo. English] Inside the gaze : the fiction film and its spectator / by Francesco Casetti; translated by Nell Andrew with Charles O'Brien. p. cm. — (The Society for Cinema Studies translation series) Includes index. ISBN 0-253-33443-8 (hardcover : alk. paper). — ISBN 0-253-21232-4 pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Motion picture audiences. 2. Motion pictures—Influence. 3. Motion pictures—Semiotics. I. Title. II. Series. PN1995.9.A8C3713 1998 302.23'43—dc21 98-34481 12 3 4 5 03 02 01 00 99 98 Contents PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION Dudley Andrew vii CROSSING OVER THE ALPS AND THE PYRENEES . Christian Metz xi AUTHOR'S NOTE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION XVU 1 In Search of the Spectator 1 2 The Figure of the Spectator 16 3 The Place of the Spectator 45 4 The Spectator's Journey 84 5 At an Opening 124 GLOSSARY OF TERMS 135 NOTES 143 INDEX 169 Preface to the English Edition Dudley Andrew In an introduction that is now, sadly, doubly touching, Christian Metz pays tribute to Francesco Casetti's work by situating it at the intersec• tion of psychoanalytic and linguistic approaches to the cinema. Of course this is just where Metz would situate himself; indeed, as he notes, Casetti's effort points in a direction Metz assumed he would need to follow, and that resulted in his final book, bearing the most apt of titles: VEnonciation impersonnelle ou le site du film. In effect Casetti helped bring Metz back to his home in semiotics and linguistics, after the Freu• dian excursions of The Imaginary Signifier and the unpublished opus on jokes. Metz's career likewise served as a model for Casetti, in its leg• endary generosity and amplitude first of all, and in the topics and method of investigation. One can only admire in these scholars the dis• ciplined way they traverse in both directions the partly imaginary boundary of the screen. Anglo-Americans will sense a different context than the rather purely "scientific" one that Metz details where positions are staked out, attacked, defended, and altered by newer ideas, seemingly outside the larger social environment that buys into them. Our film scholarship, tied rather explicitly to a constantly debated pedagogical mission, has been sensitive to the social consequences, as much as to the arguments, of ideas about films and how to study them. Thus the path for the study of cinematic enunciation in England and the USA was opened not so much by the fascinating claims of narratology (as laid out by Genette, Eco, and the others whom Metz mentions) as by the academic climate (admittedly floating over from the continent) that promoted the study of systems over individuals, and thus of enunciative mechanisms over authors. Enunciation theory helped bring about the death of the author by locating a film'sprincipl e of organization and address within the text rather than in the mind of an artist. When it came to studying the spectator, we see the same difference in tone. Metz's trenchantly Freudian essay aThe Fiction Film and Its Spectator" is characteristic in analyzing the hypothetical film viewer that suited French and Italian scholarship. West of the English Channel, on the other hand, a con• cern for something like "real spectators" ultimately led to the prolifera• tion of historical and cultural approaches that are with us today. These somewhat distinct contexts permit us to see why Casetti's book may have intercepted Italian and French debates in a productive way when it appeared in those countries in 1986 and 1990 respectively, but had it come out in English at that time, during the first euphoria of "reception studies," it would doubtless have been ignored. Today, however, its reinsertion into film scholarship is far more promising and, I believe, absolutely salutary. For one thing, Casetti has always been conversant—and sympathetic—with the American turn of mind. Reading widely in English, teaching here on occasion, he came to appreciate the way film studies here responds to quite specific peda• gogical functions on our college campuses. In fact, the version of "semio-pragmatics" that Inside the Gaze provides or leads to can be seen deftly to combine continental and Anglo-American work, in that it ex• amines in detail those textual features that direct the experience anyone has of a film, while at the same time it pays attention to socio-cultural realities that activate a text in any given viewing of it. This makes Casetti doubly useful. Metz needs him to stand as the perfect interface between semiotics and psychoanalysis. We need him to anchor recep• tion studies, to keep it from floating free of the flimsy breakwater that cinema studies keeps constructing so as to harbor its work; otherwise film scholarship may be in danger of entering the waters patrolled by sociology, or of just floundering in the vast sea of the anecdotal, the tendentious, and the merely "interesting." While wary of the sense of security that his methodical approach extends, I nevertheless extol the clarity of Casettfs project. And I imag• ine the benefits that reading him will bring to our students. Not that they need emulate Casetti's highly European style or even follow up on his topics, as interesting as these are. What is more important—and what he models so splendidly for all of us—is the aspiration to articu• late as cleanly as possible the factors entering into complex phenomena, in this case a phenomenon as amorphous as the experience of a film. His method for doing so is traditional. Subordinating lesser to greater ideas, he produces an elegant tree of concepts. Detours there are, but always announced in advance and drawn upon, like a letter of credit, when the time comes. Casetti also makes judicious use of exam- viii Preface to the English Edition pies, analyzing brilliantly clear illustrations in a way that encourages his readers to come up with other examples on their own to test or con• firm his points. In the era of cultural studies, we need to be reminded of the value of this kind of precise and progressive, rather than lateral, understanding. Casetti gives us a vocabulary that is learnable and teachable and that, over the course of five carefully structured chapters, ultimately renders a vision of cinematic vision itself. Metz aptly terms this method a "mise en sc&ne" of ideas, an opera almost, where con• cepts become figures in a drama that every film plays out and that ex• cites Casetti to no end. This is how he puts it: "The film offers itself to sight: it establishes its destination—and its destiny—as both an ulti• mate goal and a surface from which to spring." Casetti has learned how to specify the goal of cinematic discourse without constricting the spectator to a mere processor of pre-established codes. And he defi• nitely shows us how to spring from a film like an acrobat, in what• ever direction we choose. He renders semiotics dynamic, so that the terms "text" and "game" suggest genuine interaction and productive variability from the outset, not the injection of meaning into the spec• tator via codes. Cinema studies has spread itself out to encompass many types of endeavors. But shouldn't everyone claiming to talk about film under• stand this primary interaction? Should we not all first become reason• ably conditioned acrobats able to spring from texts in the most imagi• native of ways? Understanding what is Inside the Gaze should be a sine qua non for anyone who really cares what the cinema has been or can be. We can thank Francesco Casetti for taking us so precisely, so insis• tently, and so deeply "inside." Iowa City, June 1997 Preface to the English Edition ix Crossing Over the Alps and the Pyrenees ... Christian Metz I am delighted to write an introduction to the French and Spanish edi• tions of Francesco Casetti's fine book, because this book, for me, is not simply an intellectual object, but has forced its way without warning into the personal development of my own work. For some time now, the theme of filmic enunciation has been rat• tling around in my head. I wasn't alone in watching with great inter• est the various contributions that, sometimes happily, sometimes tes• tily, nudged this issue toward the center of the network of discussions of our little cinematographic circle—a circle whose perimeter is fortu• nately overstepped from time to time.