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This opening chapter serves to introduce the principal focus of the book, which explores the felt experience of mental image-making while watching film. The introductory discussion positions the book first of all in relation to cognitivist work on imagination within film studies and points to the gap in scholarship on spectatorship regarding the experience of the image-making capacity of the imagination, situating it within a broader debate on mental imagery. The chapter engages with film theory and philosophy that anticipates the kind of image-making that will be focused on throughout the book and introduces what it means to imagine in images. It also justifies the book’s concentration on sound rather than silent cinema, since the verbal dimension and soundtracks are crucial to the kind of direction that produces the most vivid mental images, and the verbal dimension in particular permits introduction of the work of Elaine Scarry on guided imagining. It is the vivacity of such mental images that this first chapter outlines. In conceptual terms, this chapter and the following chapter serve to set up the key notion of ‘dual vision’ – of seeing what is on screen and ‘seeing’ what is in the mind – that informs the entire study.

This introduction chapter outlines the theoretical framework of the book, and the methodological potential of the act of “screening,” when exploring the interplay between image and idea, politics and culture, film talent and audience in postwar Hong Kong film culture. While concepts of reflecting and viewing imply a unidirectional relationship between film and subject, the author argues that “screening” focuses more on the processes through which cinema contributed to the building of Hong Kong’s postwar community and identity. By using the double meaning of “screening” as both revealing and concealing, the author argues that postwar Hong Kong cinema—which in this book include 1950s and 1960s official documentary films, leftist family melodrama, and youth films— both conceals the anxieties of the British colonial government during the Cold War, and exposes the different narratives constructed by local filmmakers about what it means to be Chinese citizens during the postwar period. This introduction also takes into consideration the importance of postwar Hong Kong audiences, both real and implied, whose spectatorship was negotiated at the intersection colonialist and nationalist “address” and a familial and localized “reception.” This study has implication for the fields of Hong Kong, Chinese cinema, Cold War, and film reception studies.

In “Worship at the Altar of Perry: Spectatorship and the Aesthetics of Testimony,” Brandeise Monk-Payton encourages us to think more richly about the relationship between affect and testimony that is available to fans of Perry’s content. Calling Perry’s affective effect on his audiences a “cinematic ministry” that is replete with scenes of pulpit-like testimony, Monk-Payton examines faith-based affect as a type of responsiveness that characterizes intimate encounters with Perry’s films. In her reading of Perry’s 2012 film, Good Deeds, Monk-Payton theorizes that Perry, as title character Wesley Deeds, “testifies” for his fans using a mode of “cinematic address” that is predicated on the affective desire for the audience to engage in a version of African American expressivity.

This chapter focuses on an expanded visual archive that is emblematic of the intermediality of early cinema: the electric light dance performances of late-nineteenth-century celebrity Loïe Fuller and their early film copies. The chapter argues that Fuller’s on-stage performances, and the cinematic remediations that imitated her disembodied modes of performance, represent a specific response to, and transformation of, conditions of vision, practices of looking, and modes of voyeurism that had until recently been cultural norms for women. Fuller’s visual archive suggests how the developing sexual subjectivities of female spectators were already bound up in proto-cinematic forms of spectatorship that turned on the visual pleasures of the moving female body. Appropriating and reorienting the sexuality effects of late-nineteenth-century visual culture, Fuller’s performances sustained a paradoxically disembodied and depersonalized homoerotic mode of spectatorship.

Analyses food films that invite audiences to visit the homes of ethnic others as vicarious tourists. The Joy Luck Club (Wang, 1993), Soul Food (Tillman 1997), Tortilla Soup (Ripoll, 2001), What’s Cooking (Chadha, 2000), and My Big Fat Greek Wedding (Zwick, 2002) operate as forms of mediated culinary tourism. While the previous chapters focus predominantly on the ambivalent representations and treatment of femininity and masculinity, this chapter suggests that mainstream food films carefully appeal to the ethnic groups they represent while offering them as object of culinary tourism of mainstream white audiences through the presentation of familiar—although vaguely exotic—food. The films provide an unstable means of educating audiences about the foodways of different ethnic groups in the U.S., as they reiterate stereotypes and lace ethnicity with expectations and biases, also in terms of gender and class.

Chapter Five is devoted to films that feature Pasolini in roles that evoke or directly address his authorial function. This is the case for his self-projections onto character-authors such as Chaucer in I racconti di Canterbury (The Canterbury Tales, 1972), or Giotto’s pupil in Il Decameron (The Decameron, 1971). The director’s on-screen performances contribute to the composition of the self-portrait of a multimedia author, and at the same time affirm the intimate bond between work and authorial corporeality. In The Trilogy of Life, Pasolini presents authorship like a corporeal, material element in the film, not a mere abstract function. In doing so, he also develops a discourse of cinematic spectatorship based on the spectator’s recognition of the film’s author. In the case of Il fiore delle mille e una note (Arabian Nights)’s night original screenplay, this recognition would have also included the open representation of Pasolini’s homosexuality, and his sexual encounter with three young Arabs guys. This explicit on-screen queer performance was ultimately not included in the version of Arabian Nights that was actually shot. However, even if the author’s body is not on the screen, through the mise-en-scène of his queer gaze and the explicit depiction of the male body, Pasolini obliges the spectator to participate in the dynamics of homosexual desire, thus challenging the allegedly tolerant society of the 1970s.

Viv Gardner’s essay begins with a discussion of ‘scuttling’ incidents in Manchester in the 1890s, originating in music hall and theatre venues and spilling onto the streets, and the debates in the press about these. This leads her into a study of the complex relationship of performance, performance sites and urban spectatorship in Manchester in the period, with a particular focus on theatre architecture and urban topography. The essay considers the supposed ‘rapprochement of polite and popular culture’, and offers a detailed study of the programmes and audiences at a variety of venues.

This chapter focuses on the lived reality of Shakespearean theatre-going, recording the author’s experience of a performance of As You Like It at Shakespeare’s Globe towards the end of the summer of 2015. Offering a moment-by-moment response to this stage production, the chapter moves to situate this within the larger contexts of everyday interactions and encounters, and in relation to broader and deeper currents of performance memory and reminiscence.

Alexander Champlin focuses on esports, one of the fastest-growing entertainment markets today. His essay specifically analyzes the relationship between esports franchises (i.e., teams), branded esports studio spaces, and video game franchises. Based on five years of site visits, Champlin examines the history of the North American League of Legends Championship Series studio and, to a more minor extent, the Blizzard Arena.

Taking as its point of focus E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire (2000), a cinematic mise-en-abîme homage to, and a self-referential twenty-first century commentary on F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, this essay examines vampire cinema as an emblem of ‘technological necromancy’ that mediates our ambivalent responses to modernity, its proliferating technologies, and death in the wake of the secularising Enlightenment whose driving ideal – rational empiricism – undermined long established Christian certainties about the existence and nature of a soul and an afterlife. This essay reads Shadow as a compelling and sedimented, twenty-first century meditation on the nefarious, desensitizing impact of our cultural addiction to visual technologies, in which the vampire is used to mirror its audience. Shadow is also assessed as an interrogation of the gender and racial politics of cinematic spectatorship – particularly the influence and impact of pornography and propaganda cinema.

The third chapter focuses on the stadium’s relationship to the efforts of French sporting elites to create a well-disciplined, deferential and masculine public at spectator sporting events in the period between 1918 and the mid-1950s. During this era, rugby, soccer and cycling became the pre-eminent spectator sports in France, promoted and analysed by a burgeoning media complex. Far from rejoicing at the burgeoning popularity of spectator sport, French sporting journalists and officials sought to ‘improve’ and reshape the crowd, both physically through the stadium and discursively in the narratives about ‘sporting education’ that surrounded it. However, these physical and rhetorical efforts to redefine the sporting public as respectable and masculine were continually undermined by the commercial logic of sport itself and the actual practices of male and female spectators present both inside and outside the stade. Faced with a public that resisted physical and rhetorical discipline and that created its own spectator experience, the journalists and sporting impresarios who promoted French sport slowly and somewhat begrudgingly came to recognize the crowd as a less overtly problematic public of male and female consumers which needed to be recruited and accommodated.

Chapter 2 houses material that relates to the Victorian preoccupation with display. It considers the moral, social and sexual implications of viewing in an age of material abundance and the cultivation of desire for consumer goods. The chapter also explores further the impact of Joseph Paxton’s glass building and the importance of phantasmagoria and spectatorship within the Palace. The chapter begins with a section on the logistics and physical arrangement of exhibits and the problems faced by the Commission in attempting to impose a conceptual classification on material objects.

Even more effectively than outdoor vistas, indoor galleries offered reformers the ability to manipulate what urbanites saw. Embracing the arts as a form of moral instruction, late-Federal Bostonians established public exhibition spaces to divert the city’s growing middle-class from more fashionable and sensualist attractions. Yet the 1820’s public exhibition culture that emerged at the Athenaeum and elsewhere was ridden with anxiety, as moralists warned that connoisseurship concealed a shallow and fashionable sensualism. To avert this danger, art gallery patrons absorbed themselves in visions that transcended the material art object and the social imposture of their fellow viewers. These supersensory flights from the urban gallery proved a key template for Transcendentalist encounters with nature, epitomized by Emerson’s famous “transparent eyeball” metaphor.

Chapter 5 contextualises Didi-Huberman’s contribution to Holocaust discourse and the polemics that erupted following the Mémoire des camps exhibition in 2001. Didi-Huberman’s accompanying catalogue essay provoked impassioned debates concerning the relationship between images, history, trauma and the Holocaust. This chapter argues Didi-Huberman’s important text Images malgré tout (Images in Spite of All) marked a significant intervention in Holocaust discourse that promoted the ineffable, unrepresentable nature of the event. Furthermore, it signalled a turn in Didi-Huberman’s research, as he becomes increasingly concerned with the political efficacy of images from this point onwards. This chapter argues that Didi-Huberman is now influencing a younger generation of filmmakers who are taking up the task of representing the Holocaust. By way of a close reading of László Nemes’s Saul Fia (Son of Saul, 2015), Chapter 5 demonstrates the film was developed explicitly in dialogue with the arguments Didi-Huberman advanced in Images in Spite of All.

Chapter 1 situates the action-based aesthetic of “fiery films” (1927 to 1931) as a response to Hollywood serialized thrillers mediated by the competition between stage and screen. I complicate the popular scene by looking at how New Heroism, a composite modernist discourse, reframed “fiery films” to foreground “resonance” as a theory of affect for its distinct social and aesthetic agendas.

Chapter 2 places “resonance” in relation to emergent media technologies—wireless technology and newly invented media as well as popular scientific imaginations of the diverse future of cinema—to consider renewed notion of the medium connecting the spectator’s body and a field of social experience.

Chapter 3 examines how left-wing spoken drama and films invoked fire, torrents, and other natural forces to politicize spectatorial affect through visual and sensory confrontations. I then revisit the dichotomy between left-wing and “soft” film advocates by problematizing the central question of medium specificity with an inquiry of the medium and intermedial aesthetic.