All powerful spectator

After reading the passages for this week’s class, I became fascinated with Metz’s concept of the “all perceiving subject”. For Metz, the fact that the viewer is absent from the screen, or mirror, but is aware of the subject’s context makes the viewer both “all perceiving” and “all powerful”. The “all powerful” viewer becomes an integral part of the film, as Metz points out:

“…I am entirely on the side of the perceiving instance: absent from the screen, but certainly present in the auditorium, a great eye and ear without which the perceived would have no one to perceive it, the instance, in other words, which constitutes the cinema signifier (it is I who make the film)” (823).

This stood out to me because this is the first time in our readings that the viewer has been incorporated into film theory in a positive way. By saying that it is the viewer who makes the film, Metz is equating watching the movie to the level of making the movie. Almost as if the audience and auteur were on equal footing. The closest we have come is discussion of the critic though they were always placed well above the audience.

It seems appropriate that we are discussing psychoanalysis in film, at the same time as spectatorship. I feel that the two are intrinsically linked because of the human presence behind all aspects of the film making process. Though film is made through mechanical reproduction, as discussed in class, there is human/artistic manipulation behind the creation. From framing to editing, the human hand plays a part in every aspect of film. I think it is about time that the spectator received a little respect from the film critics. After all, what would a film be if no one watched it?