Read more
A study of the "returned gaze" from the cinema screen, demonstrating that the films that we watch watch us, guide us, control our gaze, and enforce societal codesThis book is a study of one of the most insidious and pervasive phenomena in the study and reception of cinema: the "returned gaze" from the screen, in which the audience is actually surveilled by the film being projected on the screen. Rather than the usual process of watching a film, in those films which return the gaze of the viewer, the film looks at us, confronting our voyeur's embrace of the spectacle it presents. The book cites examples as diverse as Andy Warhol's Vinyl, Laurel and Hardy two-reel comedies, the films of Jean-Marie Straub, Jean-Luc Godard, Roberto Rossellini, and Wesley E. Barry's Creation of the Humanoids. It also discusses the history of the returned gaze in video, pornography, surveillance systems, and the related plastic arts.
About the author
Wheeler Winston Dixon is the James Ryan Endowed Professor of Film Studies, coeditor in chief of
Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and chairperson of the Film Studies Program at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. His many books include
The Second Century of Cinema: The Past and Future of the Moving Image;
The Films of Jean-Luc Godard; and
The Transparency of Spectacle: Meditations on the Moving Image, all published by SUNY Press; and
Collected Interviews: Voices from Twentieth-Century Cinema.
