Researching into Spectatorship and Reality
For my presentation, I’ve settled on researching the ideas of “spectatorship” and how it concerns animation and the design choices filmmakers choose when producing animation.
In understanding what spectatorship is, it’s important to understand what a spectator is. I’ve been reading Introduction to Film Studies, where Jill Nelmes defines the spectator as “an abstract concept”, a being or self that consumes film alone in front of a screen. She’s particularly careful to note that in coming up with this definition, “spectatorship studies tries to generalise about how all spectators behave” (2012, P.115-116).
… a spectator who tries to understand a negotiate meaning out of a film …
In discussing the role of a spectator, both Nelmes and Reinhard and Olson break down the spectator into two separate roles: ‘active’ and ‘passive.’ Nelmes defines ‘active’ as a spectator who tries to understand and negotiate meaning out of a film as they consume it (2012, P.115-116). Reinhard and Olson back this up with an anecdote from Sergei Eistein, who was concerned that his films could be misread if the audience did not “share the same historical and contextual background”, and didn’t negotiate meaning out of it (2016, P.4).
Erin C. Heath breaks down the audience interaction with the film further, arguing that when the spectator watches a film, they establish a relationship with it through “engagement, identification, sympathy or empathy” with the world and characters of the film” (2013, P.62-63). Nelmes defines this idea as cognitivism, when the spectator makes an effort to understand a film’s meaning, narratives, themes, visual and audio designs and tries to find a reference point within their own life experiences or similar films experienced prior.
… overwhelmed by the film screening and are made vunerable to the messages and “ideological effects” of the experience.
In the case of ‘passive’ spectator, Nelmes defines this as a “dominant” mode of the 60s and 70s, where spectators are overwhelmed by the film screening and are made vulnerable to the messages and “ideological effects” of the experience (2012, P.115-116). Reinhard and Olson’s research that looked into early theories of spectators backs up this notion of passive. Early studies looked at concerns that audiences could be susceptible to “mediated” messages and be influenced by mass communication media (2016, P.3-4), arguing ideas of being influenced by films and radios of the time.
As interesting as this research into passive and active spectators has been, I unfortunately will not be using it for my presentation. With 8 minutes to presenting time, I’d worry that rushing through these concepts would ironically confuse the audience, hence why I’m leaving these here on the blog instead.
I now move onto the ideas of spectatorship and how filmmakers take this relationship in regard to making their films. I’ve been bringing up the notion of spectators either making an effort to understand or being forced into submission the narratives of film. Heath builds upon Stephen Prince’s arguments in his book True Lies, on the ideas of visual realism and reality. Animators and filmmakers can approximate reality as closely as they want, but if they want to persuade the audience the world “feels” real, they have to persuade them by getting them to recall their own experiences or places they’ve been (2013, P.65-66). Motion, texture and lighting are all defined specifically by Prince, but I’d like to throw in audio and sound design amongst those.
To demonstrate what Heath and Prince are arguing, let’s take a scene from an animated film and apply that logic to it.
I’ve chosen the Kanto Earthquake scene (2014, P.68) from one of Miyazaki’s more recent films “The Wind Rises”, a fictional biopic of airplane designer Jiro Horikoshi.
I want to start off with the sound design. Whilst with additional context that this is based on a real earthquake that took place early in the 20th Century, the sound design isn’t “real”. Ghibli decided to go for using human voices for most of the sound effects, which almost adds character to the earthquake. We start up with the earth splitting, and the voices all breathing an ‘a’ sound, before they constantly fluctuate up and down octaves. It’s like the cataclysm has a chaotic personality to it and almost feels unnatural as a result.
In terms of motion, the animators have adapted the movement of the earthquake very well, animating it as realistically as possible. You can see the vibrations echo across the Japanese town before rows of houses go up and down in smoke to simulate wave propagations. This is only enhanced by the sound design mentioned earlier where the voices too go up and down to emphasise the waves. There’s this purple like smoke that almost has liquid-like properties to its shape. Whilst it isn’t explicitly stated what it is, one could interpret it as the blood of the earth in pain from this earthquake.
As art director Yoji Takeshige notes, the scene involves all sorts of motion from the rising fires to clouds of dust and smoke to the wind travelling in various directions. (2014, P.68) Attention to detail was paramount, as the supervising animator, Kitaro Kasaka notes that they spent time making sure the tiles flew properly alongside the motion of the houses and the earthquake (Ibid).
We can also talk about lighting in this scene. As the earth splits, the screen cuts to a dark brown, only highlighted by the red impending danger of the crack, rocketing its way forward across the screen. Immediately, we cut back to a cool, warm shot of the city from faraway, which darkens with each vibration passing over the town. Once the earthquake takes place, we can see The palette darkens and the sky goes from blue to brown as if the smoke has blocked it, and becomes murkier as a result. Takeshige notes by the end of the scene that the sun was setting, and intentionally left this scene with “a kind of disturbing feel.” (2014, P.68).
Amongst all of the spectacular, if not cruel, visuals to represent an earthquake, we have all the human characters who attempt to react to what’s going on around them. They hold on for dear life, they’re left speechless by what’s just happened, and they run out for their loved ones, often stumbling along the way. Their response is conveyed very naturally through their motion. As Kosaka notes, the scenes of people feeling was drawn from Miyazaki’s own experiences of the air raids in Utsunomiya as a youth, and this was incorporated into the scene’s adaptation (2014, P.71).
… the general aesthetic of the film was a lot more cartoonish early on, but gradually switched up to a more real live-action film …
I’d like to talk about the sense of reality that has been a persistent factor of spectatorship. In an interview with Takeshige notes that originally, the general aesthetic of the film was a lot more cartoonish early on, but gradually switched up to a more real live-action film as the narrative becomes tonally more serious and real. (2014, P.88) Takeshige notes that it’s during this Earthquake scenes that the movie shifts closer to a sense of reality, with the colour design feeling more grounded, the texture of the oil painted smoke and clouds becoming more prevalent in the background, the background design in general moves from the more dream-world like look to something grittier, darker, perhaps more real for anyone who has ever read or heard about earthquake experiences.
The team at Studio Ghibli have taken a real-world event, experienced by one of their own in person, and recreated reality faithfully in some ways, but heightened both the emotion and and chaos of what an earthquake experience would be like. The audience is left unsettled, uncomfortable through the carefully crafted design of the scene, and left understanding the impact of the Great Kanto Earthquake.
… the Syntagmatic Dimension and the Paradigmatic Dimension.
The last piece of knowledge regarding spectatorship that I’d like to leave here is something mentioned by Mark Collington relating to icons and meanings, and how they can help audiences recall their own experiences as Nelmes previously mentioned.
Collington looks at what are called the Syntagmatic Dimension and the Paradigmatic Dimension. Originally used for linguistic analysis, these collectively look at signifiers or objects that together in a group can be classified (2016, P.23).
As Collington defines, the syntagmatic dimension is often a collection or group of objects that have no specific meaning alone, but when grouped up together hold collective meaning. He points towards Roland Barthes’ example with a ‘garment system,’ where wearing a selection of clothes typically associated together may suggestion an occupation (2016, Ibid). For example a tie, a blazer, smart trousers, buttoned shirt and shiny polished shoes show you’re looking at a suit.
Now the paradigmatic dimension is “essentially the overarching context” that connects this collection of objects together (2016, Ibid). So if we go back to the idea of a suit, we may find a paradigmatic context to be working in an office job or heading out to a party.
I had considered weaving this idea into spectatorship, and how filmmakers might use a series of objects or identifiers that the audience may be familiar with prior. Again, I felt this convoluted my subject matter in the presentation, so I’ve opted to leave it out to avoid too much confusion.
That’s all from me on spectators and spectatorship. Through the careful crafting of a scene, we can read emotions, narratives, themes and more intended by the filmmaker, as spectatorship deals with the relationship between film and a single audience member. I’ll be covering my research into the world of animated documentaries and their significance later.
Sources:
Nelmes, J., (2012) Introduction to Film Studies, 5th Ed., London: Routledge
Reinhard, C. D., Olson, C. J., (2016) Making Sense of Cinema: Empirical Studies into Film Spectators and Spectatorship, Bloomsbury Academic
Heath, E. C., (2013) In Plane Sight: Theories of Film Spectatorship and Animation, Available at: https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/45478/Erin_Heath.pdf?sequence=1
(2014) The Art of the Wind Rises: A Film by Hayao Miyazaki, Viz Media, China
Collington, M., (2016) Animation in Context: A Practical Guide to Theory and Making, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, London