Stiry/Discourse

Story/Discourse
A Note On Two Kinds Of Voyeurism

The author describes a balance of physical absence and presence in the cinema: when the actors are acting, the audience is not there, and when the audience is watching, the actors are gone, leaving their performances captured on film. They position this relationship as typical of cinema, and parallel it with the historical rise in the importance of the private individual vs. the community, by suggesting that the spectator doesn’t need to be seen while watching nor does the person being watched need to see the “see-er”. Both understand their specific roles, though there is not an activity that is shared between them, and a dialogue or interaction is impossible.
I think that this distancing of the subject (active, watcher) from the object (passive, actor) in this equation facilitates some of the “magic” of movies. It, along with the specific characteristics of film as a medium, allows the construction of a more “believable” world, a faraway fantasy world, where the viewer can see the actor and watch their every (calculated, edited, scripted) move with no real physical consequence, though they still engage emotionally with the story. Different from plays or live musical performances, movies can allow for a closer-than-normal/hyper real understanding of a situation or story, by specifying a frame for the viewer. Using cinematography, musical scores, sound editing, and special effects, movies have a one-way communication out of the screen and into the eyes/ears of the audience. The actors never hear the clapping at the end of the screening (which I always think is an odd thing to witness and points to a sort of collective audience experience) – and yet they never fail to be motivated to perform.