KATHOLIEKE UNIVERSITEIT LEUVEN

Faculteit Letteren Master in Culturele Studies

The Film Inside Me, Inside Us.

The experience of My Own Private Idaho through a phenomenological lens Masterproef

Promotor Prof. Anneleen Masschelein

Sander Rosseels

Academiejaar 2010-2011

Contents
Once Upon a Time on a Gothic Forum Part 1: Theoretical Frame 1.1 The way I go to the movies: a phenomenological framework 1.2 The individual spectator 1.2.1 Isers gaps and other basic concepts 1.2.2 The image, its interpretation and its struggle A. The image itself B. The image and the text 1.2.3 Sobchack and the spectator, embodied-within-the-world A. The spectator and its relation to the world, the other and the film B. Our embodied being-in-the-movie-theatre 1.2.4 Images within the spectator A. The filmic image in context: before, during and after viewing B. Beyond a strictly cinematic notion of image interaction 1.3 The communal spectator 1.3.1 Interpretive communities 1.3.2 Creative communities 1.3.3 Cultural communities Part 2: Practical Study 2.1 Case study: My Own Private Idaho 2.1.1 Methodology 2.1.2 Notes on My Own Private Idaho: a selected reception 2.1.3 Audience research A. Personal background B. Gaps I. Conventional gaps II. Referential and critical involvement III. Personalising the text IV. The spark C. Interpretive communities 3 5 5 6 6 9 9 13 15 16 18 21 22 25 30 30 33 35 36 36 36 37 44 45 46 47 48 50 57 59

Part 3: Conclusions 3.1 The end of the road Bibliography Supplement 1: Questionnaire

60 60 61 64

I couldnt have done it without...

My promoter Anneleen Masschelein [for the hefty back-and-forth mailing on the LeuvenBerlin express way], prof. Baetens [even though I did not mention La Jete!], my parents and loving brother [despite being afraid to read the final result], all those brave girls and boys who wanted to partake in my experiments, my Norwegian reception studies teacher [with a difficult name!], Lars & Walt [for asking me time and again what exactly I was writing about], Palita [because even far away I could feel the N-R-Gee], Annelien [the mirror neuron expert closest to my heart], Ward [because I need someone to tell me: dont read psychoanalysis], Hannes, Femke and all the others [for providing me a warm home to read and write endlessly], Little M, the Han, Milady & Y [for nurturing the seeds of this thesis], Liesbeth & Lucie [BOZAR 4 life], Judith, Melissa [hope youre doing ok with your thesis!], the Wu-Tang Clan [represent! represent!], shadowpla7, The Coma-man, infrared, Ash, Lester Burnham & EyesintheCupboard [because they look cool on paper and are all wonderful people, no doubt, in their own right], the Dour gang and all those people who casually asked me what my thesis was about you know who you are! To all of them I would like to say: Have a nice day!

Once Upon a Time on a Gothic Forum One bright summer day a year ago now, I was sitting at some desk in the middle of Brussels to be more precise, in the office of BOZAR, Belgiums national Centre for Fine Arts and my traineeship place at the time. People at the office were setting up a festival on Asia, of which one of the main attractions to be promoted was Sankai Jukus Hibiki, a But1 performance. I was asked to look outside the box, to look for potentially interested groups to target and, after some time wandering outside and along the box, I stumbled across gothic communities, concentrated on internet forums. It was not a mere shot into the dark, however compare for example the following two stills:

One is Hibiki, the other is a renowned gothic band. However, when I posted the event on a Dutch gothic forum the responses were mixed at best, with members of the discussion board scribbling down that the above image seemed too theatrical for their taste (even though you will often find theatrical as a gothic characteristic), that they did not like going to theatre in general, that they preferred light-hearted plays, or after responding positively that Brussels was too far away to be able to attend. Perhaps Sopor Aeternus do not fare much better either over there. Though not exactly successful, the idea stuck with me. Promoting an event to a particular target audience try typing that without cringing is all too often initiated with a

But is a peculiar, Japanese dance genre, having its origins in the horrors that occurred in the Japan at the end of World War II. See for example Fraleigh, S. H. (1999). Dancing into Darkness: But, Zen and Japan. Pittsburg, University of Pittsburg Press.
3

caricature of the intended group in mind, especially during a one-off occasion. Things are being thrown at a wall to see what sticks. Such a segment of the audience, perceived as a cohesive group by means of some kind of shared identity, is then often approached as if they were a passive audience, interested in objects that reflect some characteristics cherished within the group. However, as the anecdote indicates, identities are not so easy to define and a large number of this particular gothic community might judge theatricality not to be a core characteristic of their subcultural identity. By utilising a limited, stereotypical set of what I thought to be gothic sensitivities, the internet group got superficially targeted for an event most were not interested in (or, at least, not in the way it was presented to them). Neither theatre, nor dance; neither the Japanese, nor the Gothic communities will be the focus of this work however. Instead, my eye is drawn towards film. In order to unravel aspects of how a concrete community functions, how it actively perceives and handles a certain cultural object (such as a particular movie), it is necessary to investigate the relation, the interaction between on the one hand the film object, on the other hand the audience. The topic at stake here is twofold: I am, firstly, interested in the film experience of a concrete, heterogeneously composed audience; secondly, in how the belonging of each member of the audience to a particular community, or set of communities, has an influence on (or, more strongly, perhaps even determines) the experience of the film. What I will defend in the course of this thesis is that gaps, indeterminacies in the text, are essential to the reading, viewing of any text in order to engage with it. After clearing out the positions of the spectator and the film text in this endeavour, which will turn out similar to the positions in a dialogue, I will connect Isers notion of the gap with Barthes studium-punctum distinction to differentiate between various kinds of gaps. A studium gap is more conventional within a certain culture, both in terms of subject (a commonly agreed upon interesting topic or issue) and in technique (we all know what a close-up is supposed to convey in a film). The first punctum gap would then be more personal: it is for the most part a conscious negotiation between the own position of the viewer and the position of the film, a distance that must be bridged in a way if one wants to engage with the text. The second, true punctum gap or what I will call the spark is far less conscious. It grabs a person, but she may not entirely understand why and will often go searching to understand it more thoroughly. It also has a transformative power, able to change a person and her point of view. Afterwards I will turn to the interpretive communities, groups of people who arrive at common interpretations, or at least basic assumptions by means of discussion. I will wonder,
4

however, whether the spark is purely individual, or whether it can be shared. In other words, is a spark entirely idiosyncratic, different for each individual and can people only later, through discussion, agree that it means this or that, or can people be sparked in similar ways? It is a question I will only shortly ponder on, but the section on interpretive communities will prove fertile grounds for elaboration. As will be explained in a minute, my main source is phenomenological, though through the course of my endeavour I will draw from various other domains such as philosophy, linguistics, psychology, cognitive science, gender studies and psychoanalysis, to enhance the description of film experience. Similarly to how I will link this experience to that of everyday dialogue, I primarily want to further discussion with this thesis: I do not hope for complete closure and hard facts. Many elements in the theory spring from associative links in my own mind, and other people may view this differently. May it fuel and feed the on-going dialogue, for like the road movie knowledge lays not in the destination but in the journey.

PART 1: THEORETICAL FRAME

1.1 The way I go to the movies: a phenomenological framework For the construction of the theoretical body I will opt for a phenomenological approach. More specifically, the domain of reception studies offers an insightful perspective on the reader (in the case, of course, a spectator), the filmic object, the interaction between both spectator and film text, as well as an array of contextual factors that play an alleged role in the whole process. In addition it provides a number of useful tools and concepts that will, from now on, prove to be crucial to the course of this inquiry. Two theorists in particular, two strongholds in the field of reception studies, will be touched upon frequently and in detail throughout, these two being Wolfgang Iser and Stanley Fish. The following two chapters each commence from the works of one of these theorists, Iser in [1.2], Fish in [1.3], and while they will remain central points to again and again return to, it will quickly become evident that their insights cannot directly be transposed to the field of film studies and reception. Rather, a number of other authors and texts closer to visual studies will be found poaching on the fundamental fields Iser and Fish set out. Evidently it does not take long before one arrives to the conclusion that reception studies, or at the very least the two theorists mentioned, mostly focus on literature and that their accounts are deeply intertwined with notions of textuality, which is only able to shed light on one particular part of film and cinema. Figures such as W. J. T. Mitchell, Vivian Sobchack, Laurent Jullier, Victor
5

Burgin, Teresa Ford and Henry Jenkins to name but the most proficient and heavily featured ones will gradually add weight, in a sense will flesh out (to put it in Sobchackian terms for a moment) the arguments laid out by Iser and Fish. Logically Iser serves as the vantage point to start from: not only does he provide initial positions of both text and reader (by means of his influential notion of the gap), he also sees the act of the reader as first and foremost, an individual act of interpretation though, to be sure, he is most definitely aware of various contextual factors. This clears the way for the more individual accounts of film spectators, found in texts by Sobchack and Jullier. Only later will Fish and his interpretive communities come into play, opening up the possibility to do away with the text and the individual and to replace them with more community-based explanations. All this will, I hope, evolve organically; it is easy to imagine how trying to fit together theories from different domains can just as well result in chaos. In case that happens though, I can still root for a kind of camp interpretation, engaged within certain communities. But let us not get this specific, this early on: it is time for the lights to dim, the doors to close and the audience, well, to do whatever it is it is doing.

1.2 The individual spectator 1.2.1 Isers gaps and other basic concepts The phenomenological theory of art lays full stress on the idea that [...] one must take into
account not only the actual text but also, in equal measure, the actions involved in responding to that text. [...] A literary work cannot be completely identical with the text, or with the realization of the text, but in fact must lie halfway between the two. (Iser 1972, 279)

Although Wolfgang Iser may have been heralding the reader, defending her against nasty New Critics focusing solely on the text in itself, the quotation above from The Reading Process clearly indicates he did not completely abandon the text, as existing outside the readers activity. In fact, the process of reading is halfway between text and reader: meaning does not arise solely from the text (thus discarding the reader altogether), nor does the reader reign in complete subjectivity (thus doing away with the text as entity). Borrowing from Ingarden, Iser coins the readers interpreting activity constituting meaning as a Konkretisation or a realization of the text. Formulating it in this way, an essential connection in Isers theory between text and reader is made apparent: a text without a reader is dead, because it cannot get realized, but likewise, a reader without a text is not a reader, because she needs something to realize. That something the text provides, is a number of perspectives, a series of views of the world which must be combined and related to one
6

another (Murphy R. 2004, 124), and this combining is, of course, up to the reader. These various perspectives are thus inside the text, which needs the readers imagination, but already foreshadow[s] in structure [the readers activity] (Iser 1972, 280): the reader is not completely without boundaries in the act of interpretation, she has to work with the raw material the text provides, thus textually limiting her activity. The reader is, however, free (for now) to connect these perspectives in meaningful units; the text itself contains many indeterminacies, semantic blanks or gaps, which she can fill in in various ways. Whether these various, but nonetheless limited ways are themselves anticipated by the text is touched upon by the notion of the implied reader. The implied reader is not so much the reader, as it is the various positions the text offers the reader. The reader is, however, not restricted to these positions: the implied reader is a textual structure anticipating the presence of a recipient without necessarily defining him (Iser 1978, 34), or applied to film, the spectator operates within and beyond the boundaries established in the reading/viewing position of the film. [If the film] sets up certain positions in order to be watched [...], then the spectator adopts these and alters, resists, changes certain attributes to them (Fuery 2000, 145). Generally, the reader observes the frame the film sets out, but the reader can freely choose whether to fit into one of the offered positions or not. It will be possible to start concentrating on the spectator as a concrete subject, embodied in the world, exceeding the contours of the text to bring in elements that are not anticipated by the text itself. In filling in gaps, the reader exposes (parts of) herself: [t]he manner in which the reader experiences the text will reflect his own disposition, [...] the text acts as a kind of mirror (Iser 1972, 285), gaps in the text elicit knowledge from the recipients own highly individualized store of experience (Murphy R. 2004, quoting Iser, 125), from the recipients own mmoire pisodique (Jullier 2002, 29), as we will later see, applied to film experience. Again, it is not entirely up to the individuals subjectivity, as Iser defines a text as offering the reader various perspectives that are still different than each particular readers own perspectives. At this point Isers views start demonstrating suspicious trains of thought. He introduces the notion defamiliarisation, which, to him, is characteristic for all truly aesthetic texts. Throughout the reading of the text, a reader is said to build up expectations, anticipations about what is to come. However, a good text Iser is not completely exempt from aesthetic judgements is one that tries to go against the readers previous, common sense interpretations, to establish a kind of unprejudiced state of the reader due to the reader distrusting her own expectations, which in turn makes the reader more willing to take up the unfamiliar elements of the text (Iser 1972, 291-92). Not only does this imply a sort of
7

manipulation of the reader by these good texts though, as already noted the reader exceeds the frame, and should be able to judge from a vantage point outside the text Iser also utilises the notion of unfamiliarity to herald the superiority of literature to film. In explaining how he understands gaps in literature, Iser gives the example of seeing a mountain and imagining a mountain, in which the reader in the latter case uses her imagination, which senses the vast number of possibilities; the moment these possibilities are narrowed down to one complete and immutable picture, the imagination is put out of action and moreover, with the film [the reader] is confined merely to physical perception, and so whatever he remembers of the [novels] world is brutally cancelled out (Iser 1972, 287). He puts forth that a visual image implies the presence of the object being pictured, is optically rich and complete,
and requires no participation from the spectator [while a] mental image [...] implies the absence of the object being imagined, is incomplete and semantically rich, and thus requires a lot of participation by the reader[: an] opposition between an active imagination and a passive perception (De Bruyn 2006, online)

I would argue that firstly, precisely because a visual image is optically rich, the readers interaction with it cannot be passive, since it is too complexly textured to take in completely: a selection needs to be made. Secondly, I do not believe the image to be complete, rather, the reader actively adds elements to it, from her own memory for example. I will touch upon this in respectively [1.2.2] and [1.2.3]. Isers train of thought is understandable, seen in the light of his theory on the unfamiliar, the unknown, which would allegedly end up in the following opposition: the unknown and the imagined appear to be natural allies against the known and the perceived (ibid, online). It is, however, peculiar that while coining mere perception as a non-active process, he would agree with Gombrich on the following: In the reading of images [...] it is always hard to distinguish what is given to us from what we supplement in the process of projection which is triggered off by recognition (Iser 1972, 287), a rather active description of that very same perception. It is also not true that Iser regards viewing film as entirely passive, considering the selecting and combining of a films scenes and cuts in meaningful wholes as actively filling in gaps and building consistency (Iser 1978, 196), though he does seem to neglect the possibility that also within and among the visual images themselves gaps may appear and require active participation from the spectator. This summons questions on the specificity of the film medium and perhaps especially, as the mediums eye-catcher, that

of the moving, visual image. The following chapter will briefly lodge into the nature of the image, as contrasted to logos, or the word. 1.2.2 The image, its interpretation and its struggle A. The image in itself We, as in: at the very least the Anglo-Saxon society, are undergoing a pictorial turn, by which Mitchell wants to assert a minimum of two phenomena. Firstly, the very resistance of the visual arts to the linguistic turn (Mitchell 1994, 15), a more generally accepted turn that places everything within language, stating that nothing is conceivable outside language. Images are, however, too complex to be entirely captured by language, by logos: language may be an almost necessary tool to express how an image affects us, but this expression is equally necessarily incomplete, limited. The effect, the interpretation of an image is always richer than the words that try to capture it: visual experience [...] might not be fully explicable on the model of textuality (ibid, 16), it exceeds that model. For example, in discussing Panofskys infamous primal scene, a three-layer hierarchy for analysing images in which one firstly encounters perceptual forms seen as objects (movement of a hat, mouth, etc.), secondly, objects seen as images (tipping of the hat and faint smiling as a means to salute an acquaintance on the street) and lastly, images seen as symbols (such a way of greeting each other is conventionalized within Western bourgeois societies in, say, the twenties), passing from a purely formal through an iconographic towards an iconological stage, Mitchell rejects this final step, in which the icon is thoroughly absorbed by the logos [...]. A critical iconology would surely note [...] the resistance of the icon to the logos (ibid, 28). That is not to say that the tools provided by textuality (as the ones by Iser and Fish) are not applicable to visual experience analysis, but rather that they are neither sufficient nor unproblematic. [T]he otherness [...] of image and text is not just a matter of analogous structure, as if images just happened to be the other to texts (ibid, 28), as if the image was the negative to the texts positive. The interpretation of an image calls for a different set of tools than those of texts. Image and text are hence not in binary opposition. It is easy to see that when one asserts images to resist language, the prototypical human system based on conventions, one could also proclaim images to be natural, not subject to convention. This is the kind of thinking that leads towards the notion of the image as a dangerous, manipulative tool, as if it has in some way more direct access towards our psyche than other signs mediated by language (subject to the linguistic turn). [T]here is, however, no essential difference between poetry and painting, between text and image, that is given for all time by the inherent natures of
9

the media (Mitchell 1986, 49). It is not because language is riddled with conventions that the image cannot be; in fact, the image might be just as conventional, though its conventions should be of a different kind. As Goodman, discussed upon by Mitchell, puts forth: Nonlinguistic systems differ from languages [...] primarily through lack of differentiation indeed through density (and consequent total absence of articulation) of the symbol system (ibid, 66). Images need to be read as well, and this reading needs to be acquired, but, as the argument goes, they are read super densely: relatively more properties are taken into account, but these properties cannot be differentiated to the same extent as the properties of linguistic texts can, in which particular units can easily be isolated. The boundaries of the images properties are in flux, not possibly to be measured in any absolute sense. It is, however, still arguable to what extent such image interpretations depend on conventions and to what extent they, perhaps, coincide with our embodied experience of our everyday environment. That experience in itself is not natural and had be culturally, socially acquired (an infant, for example, needs to learn that the behaviour of others is coded and may contain intentions towards other people (Tomasello 2000, 63)), but what is at stake here is whether the cinemas images have different conventions than those of our everyday experience, and to what extent they are similar or dissimilar. A possible example of a typical convention in cinema and photography is the distinction between the sharp and out-of-focus aspects in an image, or sequence of: Si toute lattention et lidentification cognitive portent sur le hros qui vide son verre, les clients du bar derrire lui sont des inconnus de niveau basique2 (Jullier, 39), in which the cognitively unfocused other clients of the bar could also, potentially, be graphically unfocused within the frame. Yet, Sobchack would argue that the primary level of meaning in film, the moving image with its indexical relationship to a profilmic event, [...] emerges analogously with the way we experience our environment meaningful (Bacon 2005, 8), and hence, that the use of the out-of-focus lens corresponds to the way we are also able to foreground a certain aspect from our environment, while blurring the rest, with a similar effect. It is precisely Sobchacks view that cinema, over all other media, relies heavily on the manner in which we bodily perceive our environment. Not unlike everyday reality, we would render film meaningful due to engaging with it in a dialogue (Sobchack 1992, 24), hence considering film as another subjective body. In [1.2.3] her ideas will come to the foreground or rather, I will foreground them.

My translation: In case all the attention and cognitive identification is placed upon the hero who empties his glass, the customers of the bar behind him are unknown people on the basic level.

10

An initial notion, as old-fashioned though perhaps recognisable as it may be, to draw a line between reality and its cinematic representation is photognie, pivoted by the French critic Louis Delluc in 1919. Photognie is, supposedly, that quality within the film image which aestheticises external reality, its source lying in the ability of the moving image to render an object or a character in an expressive way [...], a latent power lying within the moving image [...] based on the cameras ability to poeticise the ordinary and prosaic through the use of framing, light and shade, and directional movement (Aitkin 2001, 82). Of course, the term is injected with ideological concerns of the French Impressionist movement3, favouring formal innovation and the film medium as personal expression of an individual, the director (ibid, 82-83). Nevertheless, photognie can be generalized, explaining why certain people feel an attraction to the silver screen that is different from that of reality. It states that film adds something to the profilmic reality that is recorded: in its very selection and combination of shots a film differs from reality, and devices such as for example camera angles further make a difference apparent. Spectators allegedly gaze at the screen similarly to how one looks at tableaux, paintings (Jullier 2002, 178): the sheer artificiality and density of the visual image partly explains why it is so appealing to us. By means of its optical richness the image is able to capture our attention, and our gaze, so thoroughly and at times, so devastatingly. This, however, does not make for a passive (film) spectatorship, as it were enslaved to the screen, even though it is perhaps a common feeling to feel sucked into or glued to the screen just by utter fascination with the beauty on-screen. Precisely because of this abundance of properties within images, the reader will actively create relations between these elements, relations of contrast, reciprocity, coalition, etc. creating in turn complex clusters of meaning. According to Group , a batch of pictorial semioticians from the Lige School, two categories of signs usually simultaneously present in an image are distinguishable: iconic and plastic signs. Iconic signs are all those within an image that can be defined (and hence, be captured into language), while the plastic ones cannot4. By altering the common sense or our background knowledge on the iconic signs (an elephant for example, though with the legs of a giraffe), these plastic signs can influence our interpretation of an image. They may alienate certain people, but they are also the cause of pleasure (ibid, 174-75). Examples of

An avant-garde movement in the French twenties centred on the critic Louis Delluc and a number of innovative film directors such as Abel Gance, Germaine Dulac, Jean Epstein and Marcel LHerbier. 4 Based upon notes from a lecture on visual semiotics given by Jan Baetens, 4 th of March 2011. My knowledge on this particular domain is rather rudimentary, but it seemed useful for the course of my research project.

11

plastic signs are colour, materiality, spatial organisation, coherence, mystery (the invisible in the visible), etc. This seems to support Martinezs notion of separation between different kinds of images. She states that the image makes something accessible that is metaphysically absent we see a chair on-screen, but we know this chair, the actual object, was filmed before and is, in fact, absent in its presence. It is comparable to the madness Roland Barthes experienced in a photograph, as a present capturing in it a past but in the true image, as opposed to the simulacrum, a distance between the present representation and the past object it is depicting is perceivable: this kind of image would let us see, at the same time, the original model to which it refers, and also the distance that separates it from that model [while] the simulacrum, which is an image that tries to rival its model, thus [becomes] its substitute (Martinez 2008, 16). Precisely because the image proper is similar to, but different from the model, the human hand and mind in the construction of the image become visible. In cinema, it is possible to conceive both kinds of images. One can, for example, think of a scene in My Own Private Idaho (Van Sant, 1991), in which the two protagonists are driving a motorcycle and for several seconds the camera focuses on the steering wheel from a low angle, passing from sunlit to shadowy. Due to its rather unusual nature, this images plastic signs are more striking, precisely because they differ from how we usually perceive people driving motorcycles, reality. Other films opt for a more realistic, that is: less noticeable approach, but it is difficult to image a film that exclusively makes use of one or the other kind of image. Neither, to me, have an intrinsically positive or negative connotation, though it is understandable that people, namely philosophers fear their simulacra, since within their theory they are so similar to their referent that they can actually be mistaken for the real thing, rather than as representations of it. We know [...] that representations of violence on the TV screen are not violence but messages about violence (Hill 1973, 94-95); it is uncertain what is meant with we, the researchers or the audience at large, but we, that is: most of us viewers, seem to distinguish between violence and its representations on-screen. If we know that what we see is fictitious, that the profilmic event is not actual violence, it is easier to watch, more so than perceiving violence in real-life, or even in documentaries or news reports (which we believe to be more real). In documentaries and fiction films alike, messages about what is represented, selected, combined in a specific way are decoded by the spectator, and are not taken at face value. The very fact of watching a film, an artefact, makes our engagement with it is of a different kind: our interpretations will be more telic, towards a closure and in the course of the film, we are inclined to render elements meaningful
12

that we would perhaps not render meaningful in other contexts. Within a narrative, the purchase of a revolver has for correlate the moment when it will be used (and if not used, the notation is reversed into a sign of indecision [...])5; viewers expect this, not because that is the way things are, but through conventions and habituation. The same Martinez however, contrasts the films visual images (though, obviously, film relies more than simply on our vision) to the way we read literatures so-called mental images, which she describes as follows: [T]he perception of an object, for instance, a lamp, supposes a successive synthesis of diverse
takes or shots of the object. [...] But [...] if I close my eyes and try to represent to myself the image of the lamp [it] is given in my mind in a single shot, [...] which gathers together in a spatial projection all the diverse shots accumulated in the temporal succession of the perceptual act. Moreover [...], the perception of the lamp always overflows (goes beyond) the conscience that I can have of the thing: for instance, a dent in the base of the lamp [...] and other little particularities (Martinez 2008, 11).

If these mental images really belong to literature and literature only, film must be on the side of perception here: its images are super dense, full of detail and always overflow the conscience, while literature draws on the prototypes, the abstraction [LAMP] based upon the experience I have had of all the lamps saved in memory (Murphy G. 2002, 49-51), images given in a single shot. Filmic images here seem very much alike our everyday experience, which also involves perception of things that necessarily go beyond our conscience. Yet, are there mental images truly property of only literature? I am not yet arguing that mental images occur while watching a film, but already at this point it seems evident that after the film viewing mental images bubble up, drawing on our memory, and yes possibly with our eyes closed. I do not see why remembering a film afterwards would not be part of the film experience: it happens to all films we see.

B. The image and the text The pictorial turn signifies a second phenomenon, namely a shifting position of the image in its ideological, cultural battle with text, exemplified in a paradox in our contemporary society: On the one hand, it seems overwhelmingly obvious that the era of video and cybernetic technology [...] has developed new forms of visual simulation and illusionism with unprecedented power. On the other hand, the fear of the image [...] is as old as image-making

Barthes so-called functions and their correlates: http://www.units.muohio.edu/technologyandhumanities/narratology.htm

13

itself (Mitchell 1994, 15). What is most interesting, while focusing on film, is how both text and image interact within the medium: to what extent are images subordinated by text in film, but also, how can text and image complement each other within a movie? One possible stance is to see text as violating the image: Insofar as semiotics, for instance, treats every graphic image as a text, [...] it threatens to blur the uniqueness of graphic images (ibid, 156). The text is seen as subordinating images, restricting their potential polysemy. Moreover, these theoretical controversies (over the superiority of the silent film versus the talkies, for instance) have a way of insinuating themselves into the concrete practices of filmmaking (Mitchell 1986, 156). Even within the same film this can occur: in the recent, animated movie Wall-E (Stanton, 2008) a large amount of critics and audience alike praise the films nearly dialogue-free opening forty minutes, while the later story-heavy talky part is often seen as downgrading the film6. It is the oft-heard argument that by giving, say, an abstract painting a title, one restricts the possible meanings that may arise from the work of art itself. The word pinpoints a cluster of meanings and disfavours a number of others, while images in themselves are less forceful in their interpretations. That is, however, not to say that words always reduce meanings, quite the contrary sometimes. Recently I attended a screening of Handworth Songs (Akomfrah, 1987), followed by a lecture by Kodwo Eshun on the film and on the Black Audio Film Collective. One passage focused on a particular passage in the film, in which the images of (and now I am reducing meanings) desolate urban street views are accompanied by poetry being read. The images in themselves were already far from mute, summoning various meanings that could never be fully captured in words, but the poetry adds yet more layers of meaning, since it is not denotational it is not describing what it going on and how we should interpret it. Both image and text conjure up meanings that can, in turn, be combined to create even more complex clusters of meaning, never completely formulated but felt, experienced nonetheless. Eshun claimed that the poetry helps illicit within these images the invisible aspects that they cannot express themselves. I do not entirely agree with this: the image does express invisible meanings, the poetry makes these meanings more accessible, more articulated and solid, while simultaneously adding its own meanings which also works the other way around: the visuals add meaning to the poetic lines. In any case, this demonstrates that image and text can complement each other and do not necessarily need to be seen in opposition.
6

It is a common discussion topic on numerous internet forums: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/vine/showthread.php?t=682524&page=2; http://www.boxofficeprophets.com/column/index.cfm?columnID=11242

14

The pictorial turn is, however, more than a kind of emancipation phase for the image. It makes possible for research in various domains to tear away from language, from the texts tyranny: Through visual culture, we may once again revel in visual sensation and experiences, welcome the interdisciplinary, rejoice in the profundity of high art as well as the vitality of mass and popular culture (Homer 1998, 8), or a sensorial turn in anthropology, which aims to overturn linguistic hegemony (Monson 2008, 37). An emphasis is, once again, laid upon sensory and sensual experience on the part of a subject, while reading a text. Exactly this Sobchack, as well, argues for:
despite contemporary theory's major emphases on spectatorship and film "reception," the spectator's identification with the cinema has been constituted almost exclusively as a specular and psychical process abstracted from the body and mediated through language. Thus, if we read across the field there is very little sustained work to be found on the carnality and sensuality of the film experience and most of it is relatively recent (Sobchack 2002, online)

Not surprisingly, carnality and sensuality are two key concepts her fascinating phenomenological output revolves around.

1.2.3 Sobchack and the spectator, embodied-within-the-world In order to understand our relation as spectators to (a) film, what concretely takes places while indulging in a particular movie, one needs to rethink the relation film-spectator as it is often established, almost naturally: as a spectator engaging with a film, as her object of attention. In other words, as a relationship that is one-sided from film to viewer, leading in turn to accounts of a passive spectator, manipulated by the film-object, as often encountered in psychoanalytic literature. Quite convincingly, Sobchack argues for a dialogical relationship between spectator and film, in which film is seen as another kind of subject, rather than a mere object of attention. Intuitively, she puts forth that there would be no play were there not this mutual resilience and resistance I feel, this back-and-forth exchange I experience, in the encounter between myself and a film (Sobchack 1992, 24), and while one perhaps immediately recognizes a similar struggle while watching a film, a more accurate, theory-backed account of the relation is being called for. Before turning to the status of film as a subject and its intersubjective relation to the spectator, it is necessary to take a look at this spectator, to understand her bodily existence within this world as a crucial and, in fact, primary condition to engage in film.

15

A. The spectator in its relation to the world, the other and the film The body of the spectator is, traditionally, abstracted from in film studies, as a matter that is of no relevance to the film experience. Evidence would be the immobile, visibly rather passive status of the body while viewing a film and, to be sure, there are few things as heavenly as kicking back and relaxing behind the big, silver screen. Yet, that does not mean numerous bodily reactions do not come into play. Following Merleau-Pontys existential phenomenology, Sobchack believes the body to be not only the basis of cinematic experience, but of our experience in general. Since we cannot know the world outside of our own bodily experience of it, a world always exceeding us, the body is the essential component to be able to make meaning at all. Perception, then, is the bodily access [...] for being-in-the-world, for having both a world and a being. [It] is the bodily perspective [...] from which the world is presented to us and constituted in an always particular and biased meaning (ibid, 40). Our bodily being-in-the-world is situated at a preconscious stage; a baby for example, is not yet aware of her own body and her act of vision, it is only later on that we are able to reflect upon ourselves, as subjects in a world in which we are, also, visible to others (ibid, 52). It has been shown that conscious perception takes about 500 ms to be activated, but the body is already able to react after 250 ms, simply by recognizing a form or shape, and this at a preconscious stage (Jullier 2002, 45), a stage at which quite a number of things occur before passing into consciousness, as we will see later on. At a first stage, one tumbles into the world, mediated by ones own psyche the world is not knowable outside this psyche. At a moment in time, however, one becomes aware of the own psyche, and the own body and hence, forms a kind of introceptive image of ones own body, an image sensed from within by the psyche as also possessing an exterior modality of being-in-the-world (Sobchack 1992, 124). An exterior that is visible to others, in the same sense that the exterior, or the visual bodies of the others are visible to me, myself. In order words, it provides a link between the self and the others; one cannot see, objectively, the psyche of the other, much as the other can only guess at the selfs own psyche. But, knowing that one has an exterior body that behaves according to the own, subjective psyche, one analogically assumes the visual body of the other, and its behaviour, to be interpreted in terms of an invisible psyche (ibid, 124-126). How we gradually become aware of this is shed light upon by the fairly recent discovery of the so-called mirror neurons, that fire during both the execution and the observation of a specific action (Keysers & Gazzola, 353). While performing an action, all the neurons involved in executing this action will fire at approximately the same time as those involved in seeing, hearing and feeling ourselves
16

perform the action (ibid, 353-4), which seems to explain how we become aware of our own psyche as embodied in the world. Furthermore, [a]fter repeatedly performing and perceiving ourselves perform the action, [...] many neurons [are made that have] the property of being excitable both when we perform the action and when we see or hear someone else perform a similar action (ibid, 354), hence making it possible for the self to understand that its own actions and behaviour are comparable to those of the others, the other visual bodies and assuming other selves, other psyches behind them. Our relation with the others is established as an intersubjective relation, one between a self and another self. All this provides a stepping stone for Sobchacks innovative theory on the nature of the relation between film and spectator. Rather than defining it as a relationship of a subjective spectator to a film-object, she regards the spectator-film interaction as intersubjective as well, and hence, taking the form of a dialogue between two subjects. It is, however, a different kind of intersubjective relation (and not only because a film is, of course, only a pseudo-subject): while interacting with another person it is her visual body that is visible to me, and her psyche is what is invisible to me and hence, what I need to construct based on the behaviour of the visual body. A film, allegedly, presents to my psyche another psyche while the spectator cannot see its visual body: Unlike other viewing persons I encounter, the film visibly duplicates the act of viewing from within that is, the introceptive and intrasubjective side of vision (Sobchack 1992, 138). Of course, this does not mean that a film literally presents the psyche of a single being, except in a few extreme cases such as Lady in the Lake (Montgomery, 1947). In fact, it is almost necessary for all the different shots of a film to be interpreted as points of view from various sources all are supposedly interpreted as points of view from certain animated subjects, whether it is the protagonist, by-passer, helicopter pilot or bird (Jullier 2002, 159)! However, all these numerous vantage points are, at least according to Sobchack, at the service of, and combined by a single psyche of the film. This, however, does not mean that such a thing actually exists, neither does that really matter: Sobchacks point is that in order to be able to make sense of film at all, it is necessary for the spectator to interact with film as if it were a subjectin-itself. Accusations of anthropomorphism are, of course, easy to imagine: [F]ilm and cinema are personified, in an obvious mode of anthropomorphism, as quasi-living beings and subjects. Sobchack understands a film as literally being able to see; its vision implies a body (Stadler & Sobchack, 63). Sobchack, however, claims a different thing: the cinematic vision cannot be seen visibly materially as human vision even though its
17

essential structure and function [...] are enough like human vision to allow for the cinemas intelligibility (ibid, 65). In order to constitute a dialogue between film and spectator, the latter needs to engage with the film, almost as if she were engaging in a conversation with a person. Film is trying to tell and show us something (and people can get pretty irritated in case they do not dissolve the point the film is trying to bring across), at least that is according to Sobchack a general assumption we make when we see a movie. Nevertheless, since our interaction with film is psyche-based (my psyche is viewing the films psyche), one could say that manipulation takes place. Yet no matter how much we are captured by the film, we never mistake psyches: there is always a distance between the two, exemplified by the physical distance, and hence our awareness (however faint) of our own body, sitting in a theatre watching a film, which plays an important role in our cinematic experiences.

B. Our embodied being-in-the-movie-theatre Intuitively one might feel that, in interaction with a film, ones own body does not play much a role in the experience. Indeed, more often than not the bodies of moviegoers and buffs alike that one encounters in local theatres are in varying degrees of gracefulness mantled across seats, seemingly in a state of near-narcosis; not the most convincing position to be pushing for a central role for the body in film experience. Yet, it is precisely this, and more that Sobchack claims for the body. Not only should the subjective bodily experience be integrated in the objective analysis of film, the body is the primary foundation for and condition of cinemas intelligibility: [Films] provoke in us carnal thoughts before they provoke us to conscious analysis (Sobchack 2002, online). As already mentioned, when we watch a film it takes about 500 ms to perceive the moving images consciously, yet it only takes 250 ms for us to react to the images, at the stage of our attention visuelle preattentif (Jullier 2002, 45), at which we can already distinguish forms on the screen, in turn luring out bodily recognition and reaction. To describe our bodily engagement in film experience, Sobchack introduces the term cinesthetic body, which is a contraction of on the one hand cinema and on the other both (1) synaesthesia and (2) coenaesthesia. The latter denotes a kind of bodily state in which all the senses, its somatic perceptions are felt to be a sum of the parts, as a continuum not divided into several areas, or separate senses. This in turn, helps explaining the former term, synaesthesia, the connection of various senses in the brain which leads to, for example, experiencing sound (audio) as colour (vision), or as is often applied within cinema, vision (a culturally dominant sense) as taste (a lower level sense). Think for example of beautiful,
18

eye-popping renditions of food in certain films, appropriating vision to taste the food, which likewise activates certain aspects of taste (for instance, one starts producing saliva), which of course is also linked with background knowledge and domains (see Murphy, Big Book of Concepts). At the same time, our body relates with the other bodies on-screen, simulating what that screen-body is supposedly experiencing for example, when people on-screen make skin contact, our skin also perceives this touching yet it is not quite the same as experiencing it in real life. It is both an impoverished sensation since our bodys desire to experience what the bodies on-screen are experiencing is only partially fulfilled and enhanced our body falls back on itself, making it both the touched and the toucher. This increases the sensorial intensity, since the body feels itself feeling, smells itself smelling, etc. making for heightened consciousness of the own body (Sobchack 2002, online). Mirror neurons, again, shed light on how this might occur within the body. As already highlighted, when we see and hear some else, for example on-screen, perform an action, the same neurons are activated for perceiving the action and doing the action yourself, or put differently: sensory data obtained by observation is transformed in motoric data (Jullier 2002, 157). Why, then, do we not start imitating the actions we perceive on-screen? Next to mirror neurons, scientists have recently discovered the existence of anti-mirror neurons that sometimes deactivate [the primary motor cortex] when we see the actions of others (Keysers & Gazzola, R354), enabling us to experience the action on-screen (by means of mirror neurons), while preventing us to actually move or imitate the action. As the sometimes already indicated, the previous does not mean that motoric functions of the body are always and entirely disabled. I believe it could depend on the intensity of the impulses the spectators receives while viewing: timid arthouse films might not excite many overly visible body reactions. Film genres that thrive more openly on carnal, sensational input such as horror generally do so more extensively. I recently attended two horror movies at my local theatre: Tenebrae (Argento, 1982) and The Beyond (Fulci, 1981), both Italian but rather different in their approach. While not Argentos best film, Tenebrae is one of his more exuberant ones, with a number of highly suspenseful scenes. In one of such scenes, a girl is chased by a big, nasty Rottweiler, which she first provoked but which turned out, unfortunately, to be quite the jumper, leaping across high fences in grand athletic style. The mere premise of being chased by such a devil of an animal, stretched out in the film for more than a quarter of an hour, was such a strong impulse that practically the whole audience, me included, was nervously shifting in their seats, exclaiming excited shouts and laughter (of course, part of the fun is also derived from the
19

shifting to different perspectives, from the completely terrifying experience of the girl to the dogs providing a sense of sadistic glee; see Jullier 2002, 170-71), unable or unwilling to keep the body in place. The Beyond is an entirely different beast, depending heavily on extremely graphic depictions of torture, which exemplified Sobchacks idea of ones own body identifying with other bodies. In one of the more nasty scenes a man is nailed on a wall, his hands being pierced, which made me grab my own hand, which identified with the hand-onscreen and which, partially but in a different, enhanced manner, felt the pain of the man and eventually, I turned my eyes away from the screen because the impulse was too strong for me. This, however, does not mean that watching more low-key arthouse films does not involve the body of the spectator, but that the impulses are weaker and the body is more easily controlled, to behave less exuberantly than during one of the above horror movies. Yet, the nature of the dialogue coming into existence between film and spectator within a Sobchackian framework can differ and vary. She distinguishes about six primary, correlational possibilities both depending on various possible modes on the part of the film and on the part of the spectator, regarding the direction and destination of their intentionality (Sobchack 1992, 278-282). On the one hand, the film, whose intentionality may be directed either to the world (its viewed-view) or to itself as a medium (its viewing-view); on the other hand, a spectator may direct her attention to the viewed-view of the film (so, what it is depicting), the viewing-view of the film (that it is depicting) or to herself, as a spectator viewing the film. Six different modes of spectator engagement can be discerned. Sobchack explains this in greater detail, but let me give a couple of examples: when a film is directed at the world say, a stagecoach driving through vast desert plains a spectator may direct her attention to the stagecoach progressing through the landscape, casting clouds of dust in its way, or a spectator may direct her attention to the films techniques of framing the stagecoach this particular way, selecting what it is and what it is not showing, etc. In the latter case, the spectator, to an extent, positions herself outside the film, allowing for a perhaps more critical position towards its endeavour. A spectator can also direct her attention to herself viewing the film, not only in her own mental process of selecting bits to remember and combining them in meaningful wholes, but her bodily presence in front of the screen as well, potentially with other people in the room. When a film, alternatively, focuses on its own functioning, selecting, etc. as a medium, while a spectator for example is interested in what the film is depicting (its viewed-view), it might make for a confusing, opaque experience. It is when spectator and film have different directions of intentionality (as for instance in the last example) that it becomes more obvious that film is other than the spectator, and
20

that a dialogue takes place. Of course, a spectator (as well as a film) can shift modes throughout the viewing: when I saw The Beyond (Fulci, 1981), I was drawn into the film (ergo: paying attention to the films viewed-view), but my body recognised the agony some of the bodies on-screen go through and by doing so, the attention is thrown back on my own body, and my physical presence in the room surrounded by other visual bodies, which in turn draws attention to the mechanisms of how this kind of film works and what it is aiming for. One can get lost in the narrative one moment, while gazing at stylistic features the other, which, I feel, pulls you out of the narrative, and often serves a different purpose than strictly narrative (think for instance of Tarantinos hyper-stylization of violence). These various positions a viewer can occupy help explain different experiences of the same film or even scene: one spectator might marvel at a specific passages stylistic grandeur, while the other is annoyed at it interrupting the narrative flow. This is, however, not the whole picture since another aspect plays a role in this film experience: It is grossly partial to assert that the spectator has no viewing-view and moving images of her own that engage those of the film in a dialectical and dialogic structure of visual communication (ibid, 296). The author herself does not discuss these own moving images of the spectator in much detail, but others do, which I will turn to now, since only with these additional, mental images of the spectator does a true dialogue emerge with the films material images.

1.2.4 Images within the spectator Earlier on literature and film were contrasted, as the latter was supposedly based on perception, and thus containing concrete, optically rich (yet semantically singular) images, while the former was ascribed mental images, images entirely formed within the readers own mind, therefore endlessly more semantically rich and simply, better. It is undeniable that the visual image is exterior, and that it differs from literature if only because texts necessitate (almost) entirely internal image-formation. This partly explains why the visual image evokes more easily a more direct, a more carnal response from the perceiver than does the texts images though I believe it is only a matter a relative degree which in itself is already an internal process involving mirror neurons. But are mental images really the sole property of literary, textual signs? On a forum that I frequent I recently read the following: The fundamental difficulty I see with film, is the fact that unlike, reading, its a
completely passive experience and those frames are going to whizz by whether youre participating or not. I suppose thats why great films exist outside of the two hours you watch them, and take up residency in your thoughts from time to time. (Mac, AtEase, 19/07/11) 21

In his first sentence he seems to ascribe to cinematic images an autonomy that does not need a spectator, who merely chooses to perceive or not. His second sentence, however, contradicts this: the film, at least a great one, seems to exceed its objective, material boundaries. It is, in other words, not quite as autonomous since it exists, not in itself, but in the mind of the spectator, where it takes up residency. What is the nature of these mental images, of these remembered images that potentially haunt spectators? In which way are they remembered, are they the mere reoccurrence of images taken from a film or does a spectator transform them in some way? And why are some of the images kept while others are forgotten?

A. The filmic image in context: before, during and after viewing I. Before One never just watches a film: always does a decision to do so take place on beforehand. You may have heard a friend praise the new Die Hard, you may have read a particular article on Ozu, or you may even be that much of a Harry Potter fan to settle on looking forward to any of the new instalments in the film franchise, but you hardly ever enter a theatre as a blank page. Let us say that I decide to pay a visit to my local film theatre to see Dracula (Browning, 1931), I bring my expectations along: the meaning of the film is not self-contained within, only uncovered when actually participating with its narrative. In this particular case Dracula is a culture text, having its origin in literature, Bram Stokers novel, but quickly taken up in popular culture through several theatre and film adaptations. One of my tutors always used to say it is impossible to experience a text such as Frankenstein or Dracula for the first time and indeed: the vampire myth and the one of count Dracula in particular is integrated in our culture to such an extent that one has several notions of Dracula before encountering any of the actual texts on the vampire. This creates a horizon of expectations, the sense of prejudgement which already governs the spontaneous reading of a text (Jauss 1985, 19), which pre-shapes the experience that I have of the film. Beforehand I am paying the most attention to Dracula, I know that he does not want to go to England for the nice countryside, etc. Such expectations can have very concrete consequences for ones experience time, for example, passes by slower in a film for those already familiar with the genre, or the director (Jullier 2002, 153). All the prejudices I had formed play a role in how I engage with the film, though this horizon is gradually changed while watching Dracula, as the new bits of information given by the film interact with my already formed background.
22

II. During Not only my specific cultural knowledge on Dracula comes into play, various domains of knowledge are activated before and during watching: the relation between the viewer and the text encompasses the viewers own memories and a
circulation of meaning both related to the text itself and in terms of other social and personal influences upon the viewer. Audience members may remember when they first encountered a drama, what it is similar to or different from, how it relates to their lives and what they deem it to mean. (Ford 2011, 67)

According to Jullier all this is stacked in the mmoire long terme (MLT), the long-term memory which functions as a Generator of Difference: a large amount of background information, to an extent individualized and thereby explaining differences in interpretation (Jullier 2002, 29). It is possible to divide this faculty of our memory in two particular kinds of knowledge centres: (a) the semantic memory, which includes a number of domains shared within a certain culture or society (information which is absolutely crucial to understand and thus survive in a certain culture; general and symbolic knowledge in short) and (b) the episodic memory, which is more specific and individual and which includes personal memories, beliefs, etc. The MLT influences the other parts of the memory process, which clarifies how we seem to stock certain images while forgetting others. At the first, preconscious stage two kinds of short-term memory mechanism come into play: the iconic (for vision) and the echoique (for sound) memory, both lasting about 250 ms (ibid, 28). These mechanisms are already affected by experience stocked in the MLT that favours or censures the passage to consciousness by adding positive or negative emotive contexts to them. Afterwards the MDT, the conscious working memory kicks in selecting out of the iconic and echoique memory the passages that are not to be erased, based on what one thinks has merit, because it is deemed to be important for the further course of the film, or has for the particular spectator a certain emotional resonance, further aided by the information inside the MLT (ibid, 28). Such resonance may take place because the spectator believes to recognize an emotion on-screen, by perception and in turn simulate the emotion, if stocked in the MLT: Penser quelque chose de triste peut bouleverser les rglages homostatiques aussi bien que le vivre, condition bien sr que le mmoire pisodique du sujet contienne en stock des appariements

23

situation-motion dans lesquels la situation ressemble celle qui est imagine7 (ibid, 64). If one has experienced the emotion that one believes to perceive on-screen, remembering that emotion is like living, experiencing it. In other words: mirror neurons function on this level as well. Engaging with film is indeed quite similar to socially engaging with people: both are not merely perceptive, both demand apperception as well, both are based on a principle of empathy. Like in social interactions, spectators need to perceive traits and indications of emotions, in turn evoking these and potential other emotions within the spectators own body, which she then projects onto the screen, onto the characters. Apperception is not mere deduction: the viewer needs to simulate these emotions, drawing from the own imagination and memory Jullier calls this universe of belief. One believes to recognize a character in a narrative film, traits that remind a spectator of herself, or of other people she knows (in real life, from other films, etc.), and based on this well of background knowledge the spectator fills in the character (ibid, 165; 172). What a spectator ascribes to a character is often not stated, not inside the film: it is a gap she fills in with her own experience. In this sense, the film really is a mirror that reflects the spectator. Of course, by means of defamiliarisation this might be turned back to the viewer: when one has already filled in a character, believed to know what the character is like, a character might do something unexpected, thereby disturbing the spectators anticipation. She then needs to decide whether to adjust her view on that particular character, or to ignore this alien element (Iser 1972, 289).

III. After These images that take up residency in your thoughts are not radically different from the ones that are summoned in interaction before and during the viewing of a film, though due to the passing of time they are altered. Recalling some memories of a film he has seen as a child, Victor Burgin speaks of a sequence image, a sequence of such brevity that I am almost describing a still image. Although [it] is in itself sharply particular, it is in all other aspects vague: uniting someone, somewhere and something [...]. I can recall nothing else of the film (Burgin 2004, 16). Bereft of their original context, these mental images become almost self-contained objects. While describing two sequence images, originated from two separate films, that he associated with, even blends into each other, Burgin writes the peculiarity of

Thinking of something sad can upset the homeostatic settings as much as experiencing something sad, if of course the episodic memory of the subject has stocked situation-emotion pairings of which the situation resembles the one which is imagined.

24

my relation to the sequences has nothing to do with the stories in which they were originally embedded. The narratives have dropped away [and] I experience a kind of fascinated incomprehension before the hybrid object they have become (ibid, 59). The remembered images are thus not straight-forwardly taken from the film, but transformed by the spectator into something quite different. In turn these images are stocked in memory, to interact with newly encountered images of whichever kind and may help explain or rather: signify them. It is still peculiar though that some sequences are forgotten, others maintained, or that yet others haunt the thoughts of spectators, and that this seems to differ amongst individuals. It is therefore interesting to further delve into the interaction that takes place within the spectator.

B. Beyond a strictly cinematic notion of image interaction In his reflection upon photography and the way the (primarily) Western culture engages with it, Roland Barthes unveiled two possible readings of a picture. One can either appreciate it for its studium, or several studia, which he describes as a point, an element within the photograph which evokes a kind of general commitment from the viewer, but which ultimately remains but a half-desire (Barthes 1981, 26-27): it is a conventional, culturally agreed up topic of interest, but it does not personally engage the reader. The eruption of a volcano, a crowd being beaten down by police forces, etc., all are attractions of the eye, for a particular reason (exoticism, shock, etc.) and people like them because of what they are about, yet remain unmoved. Some pictures however, Barthes notes, contain something that goes beyond mere studia, an element that disturbs the studium, that rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me (ibid, 26). This he called the punctum, a tear in the picture that allows the reader to insert her own story, narrative. It has three important features: its unintentional nature, unlike the studium the punctum is to be placed entirely on the side of the reader, and was not intended by the author; its power of expansion, the reader adds to the picture; and its temporality (Ortega 2008, 237-38), which signifies that the punctum is often more clearly revealed after time, in memory, when the more obvious studium has faded away. The experience of a photograph is marked by a defeat of time [: ...] that is dead and that is going to die (Barthes, 96), a second punctum that goes beyond the detail of the first, which encompasses the intensity, the sheer madness with which the picture confronts the present (the reader) with the past and future (that is dead and this is going to die). A filmic image shows the passage of time, a photographic that time has passed, in its stillness it has
25

allegedly abstracted from time: the [photographs] power is in reflecting that moment from the real past rather than drawing us into the different present of a diegesis, of the unfolding narrative flow of events that we find in any kind of performance and film (Dant & Gilloch 2002, 6). Not taking into account that not every film is narrative, and not every photograph documentary, is this really so? Does a filmic image, firstly, not confront us with a real past? Perhaps a recent film does not to the same extent, but try watching Grand Hotel (Goulding, 1932) and not think about Greta Garbo, the actress alive on-screen, dead in our present day. It is possible that a picture evokes this more thoroughly, more intensely, but in any case it is a matter of gradual, not absolute difference. And, secondly and more importantly, does the stillness of a photograph prevent the reader from being drawn into the presence of a diegesis? What, then, is this punctum if not a gap to be filled in by readers, inserting their own narratives? It is further tribute to positivism that the photographic image is so often identified with
its material support [...] however, it is perhaps now easier to conceive the photographic image as, precisely, an image. As Georges Didi-Huberman reminds us: The image can be, at one and the same time, material and psychical, external and internal, spatial and linguistic morphological and formless, plastic and discontinuous... (Burgin 2009, 86-87) [...],

Some have tried to transpose Barthes distinction, rather technically and hence unsuccessfully, to the cinematic image (Fuery 2000, 20), but I would say far less elaborate mechanisms are required to make an analogy between film and photography. If one takes both as precisely that, images. Both studium and punctum can be applied to the experience of film, and precisely by equating them with the notion of the gap. Studium gaps, then, are those that are highly conventionalized and intended by the author (director, writer, etc.) not only the technical aspects, the language of film comes to mind here (we know what a close-up is supposed to mean, or shot-reverse shot, etc.), but as well the social conventions inherent in a certain culture. These gaps are so familiar to us that we almost do not notice that we are doing more than merely perceiving: our semantic memory (cf. Jullier) fills these gaps, they are common knowledge, though in fact taught. Of course, if one is not familiar with the conventions one is for example a child, has never seen a film, or is from a different culture it will make for peculiar filling-ins of the gap, peculiar in the sense that it cannot be foreseen by the creator, mainly because one does then not belong to the intended audience. Time however, becomes human to the extent that is articulated through a narrative mode (Burgin 2009, 87) if all there were to photography and film was contained by the
26

studium, neither of them would come to life. If into the filmic image no narratives are inserted by the spectator, it is just as much as the photograph a still, abstracted from time: the perceiver is unmoved, unconcerned with the images before her. Most filmic images are by default inserted into an external, conventional narrative structure, but a second, more personal narrative needs to be added for the film to take up any meaning, which comes into being in the interaction with the spectator. This is why, what I call punctum gaps are crucial to the experience. Ford notes that [c]ulturally we need to look back and tell stories about the past[8]. This includes our personal past as well as shared communal recollections (ibid, 67) that is why drama series on the recent past of a particular society are so satisfying: they make the past, and thus time, graspable. The series Cuntame cmo pas, for example, about a family living during Francos last years of dictatorship and presently La Movida Madrilea9 that rose in its wake, helped the present generations in Spain some of whom still have lived memories of Franco, others who have not get acquainted with some its recent past and more importantly, it made possible an emotional tie with this past. Dramas depicting the past [...] embody a sense of afterwardness in order to establish an emotional impact and a social context with which to engage the audience (ibid, 69) this afterwardness is a kind of secondariness of knowledge, you learn something second-hand, from a different perspective than the original happening. The past of the event and the presence of the viewing position enter in a dialogue. This dialogue is possible precisely because of the gap between past and present. Ford focuses on a different series, the British television drama Life on Mars, which is set in the seventies. The many pop references to the decade already makes experiences of the series differ Has one personally experiences the seventies or not? Does one get the references or not? but the behaviour of some of the characters is also severally dated, in the sense that one character in particular, Gene Hunt, a hard-boiled cop, urged for a harder treatment of criminality and did not shy away from a little violence himself. In the knowing position of the present-day, a spectator might signify Hunts behaviour as unacceptable, or conversely, our present method as too easy-going: Life on Mars has created the possibility of making links to a reconstructed past for viewers who draw on their own personal memories and intertwine these with the show (ibid, 74), adding things from outside the text, to
8

See also Harrisons Dominion of the Dead, in which the author claims that funeral rituals present in all cultures around the world - are a cultures connection to the past, allowing for cultural heritage, and thus a bare necessity for any given society. 9 This is a countercultural movement after Francos death, when Spain, or a section of its youth, tried to catch up with the capitalist course of the rest of Europe and the US.

27

personalize it. Such judgement of behaviour also takes place between different cultures. The reception of Dallas amongst a number of differing ethnical groups showed that the evaluation here is not only of the behavior in the story, but of analogous (or opposite) behavior in our group (Katz & Liebes 1990, 54). Obviously it is impossible to exhaust the well of possible gaps within a text, what matters is that a text, in this way, functions as a mirror precisely because it contains indeterminacies, tears that are open to the spectator to fill up. Interpretations, to a large extent, unveil the spectator rather than the spectacle. Because these punctum gaps allow for individualisation, they are not conventional, yet they seem to lack something to be able to completely blend with Barthes notion of the punctum. Even though the creator of a film cannot foresee how a spectator will personalize the text, the structure of the text does almost necessitate this personalisation: we are meant to judge the behaviour of characters, compare it with our own behaviour, the act by which we write ourselves into the text and hence are caught inside its narrative, by enhancing it with our own. A true punctum, however, is completely unintended by the author, a punctum possible to find in film as well. For example, location, the physical objects and settings, or material culture, within the drama can also provide emotional resonance for the viewer (Ford 2011, 75). Indeed, a chance encounter with an image may give rise to an inexplicable feeling, yet it can be explained by retracing the path taken by the affect, [leading] back to its origin in a suppressed or repressed idea (Burgin 2004, 62). By means of mental association, this time on my part, it is reminiscent of the Lacanian objet a, an object that is the source of absolute desire, it is the surplus of the Real (the unnameable, the inexpressible) that pierces through, fills up a hole in the Symbolic (the world we can express, full of conventions but which, in psychoanalytic terms does not leave much freedom to the individual desire). It is subjective, in the sense that everyone has a different objet a, but once spotted an individual is insanely attracted to it, since it is what will complete her but it is similarly unreachable and only leads to death (Anderson 2009, 13; Manlove 2007, 95-98). We are not concerned with death here and will leave psychoanalysis aside, but the effect of a punctum seems similar: it pierces through our everyday experience, it appears oddly outside the conventional world and, to the fan, it awakens a kind of excess, a spirited eager to be able to grasp it.

28

The above still is from El espritu de la colmena (Spirit of the Beehive; Erice, 1973) ,

in

which Ana, both the character as the actual actress, watches a film for the very first time, the film being Frankenstein (Whale, 1931). The moment in the film when a girl hands over a flower to the monster, Ana catches something in her experience that the others do not: [Ana] foregrounds cinemas residual capacity [...] to produce an excess which escapes narrative in undisciplined sparks of significance (Darke 2010, 156). Not only does she experience something entirely independent of Frankensteins narrative, this spark sets off the narrative of El espritu, it motions Ana to action, change and transformation. This transformative power is a fourth attribute Ortega accredits the punctum, or spark, with. Citing Anzalda10, she asserts that some readers can be sparked, transformed by taking in the experience of the Chicana: Perhaps it is the nature of a powerful work, whether in words, images, or sound [...], their differences notwithstanding, that it opens itself up for us to inhabit it and that it opens up our own selves for further analysis and understanding (Ortega 2008, 245). Although I believe she does not see the punctum broadly enough why would it only be women identifying with Anzalda that are sparked? she raises another interesting question: is this punctum, this spark purely individual or can it be shared? When I first saw Suspiria (Argento, 1977) it transformed me, it absolutely shook me. And it did not take particularly long: it might have something to do with me building up anticipation, but just from its opening titles I felt this rush, this eager, this utter excitement that was confirmed when seconds later I saw Suzy leave the airport, with the bizarrely eerie
10

Anzalda, being a Chicana, falling in between American and Mexican culture, had to struggle with her ambiguous, fragmented identity, though was able to transform, creating the consciousness of the New Mestiza And once again I recognize that the internal tension of oppositions can propel (if it doesnt tear apart) the mestiza writer out of the metate [...] eject her out as nahual, an angel of transformation [...] able to transform herself and others into turkey, coyote, tree or human (Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 1987, 74-75). 29

close-up of the door mechanism. It is the film that started off my obsessing over film, an obsession I will likely drag along my whole life. More importantly, after the viewing I had an impossible urge to look up information, to talk to people about it, to search for people who share a love for the film, etc. At this point I even want to visit Freiburg, simply to experience the Haus zum Walfisch, the setting for most of the film, myself. It instantly reminds me of an anecdote of Burgin, in which he visits the location of a film, A Canterbury Tale (Powell & Pressburger, 1944), of which a particular image haunts him. He went to make my own images of the site. [...] I hoped thereby to exorcize them (Burgin 2004, 20-21). This exemplifies the temporality that often marks a punctum: it becomes clearer after time, when the narrative has dropped away the image resurfaced from time to time in his mind. But did he visit the site to exorcize the image, or to try to broaden his understanding of what attracts him to this particular image? As we will see in the following chapter it is not unusual for fans of a film to visit its shooting location and, as a fan of Suspiria, I come to ask: is the way a fan is sparked by a given text singular and highly individual, or are fans, at least to a degree, sparked in similar ways and is that a kind of condition to be a fan of a particular text?

1.3 The communal spectator 1.3.1 Interpretative communities I have already said that after viewing Suspiria (Argento, 1977), an experience that shook me to the core, dare I say: that sparked me, I simply had to talk about it with people. Going along my notion of the spark as a kind of objet a, I had picked up, unveiled something that is not already there in its narrative and I felt as if I had learned something about myself, and the way I perceive the world, yet I could not and still do not entirely grasp what it is. In order to understand better, and to take in others experiences of the film, I launched onto the AtEase movie section since I knew there were a couple of fans of Suspiria frequenting the place and talked about my experience. A number of posters immediately leaped onto my scribbles, literally congratulating me and expressing relief, since a lot of people do not see the fuzz about the film. I wondered, though, whether they, too, found the ending extremely underwhelming and apparently that, too, was a common opinion. I learned that Argento and some of his films in particular (Suspiria; Profondo Rosso, 1976) have spawn a wealth of cult following and that there were films in horror and other genres that had similar atmospheres. I instantly delved into some of Argentos other films, as well as other horror films of about the same time period, in some way to recapture or even enhance and expand the feelings evoked by Suspiria, and to better understand them. I learned that I love vivid colours, but that
30

gothic black-and-white also had a specific charm to me, that I love brash, flamboyant stylishness. In fact that I get a kick out of sheer artificiality, which puts reality distinctly at a distance Argento is often credited for making murder an act of beauty, precisely because it is so detached from reality: it was like a new, exciting way of perceiving, of experiencing the world. Yet, all this cannot exhaustively explain the strong and lasting! effect the film has on me, which will never become completely reachable for me. Stanley Fish would agree that, by starting to discuss the film online, I entered an interpretative community, or at the very least I had a first taste of this community, of which I am a part at this moment. I learned, and now agree with, a number of basic assumptions about certain texts, that are not inside the text but that I perceive nevertheless because they determine the kind of text I make, write, that is: I actively produce meaning (Fish 1980, 11). Upon watching Suspiria, for instance, one can encounter a numbers of things that can be labelled bad: the acting is at times really poor, as is the script, the already-mentioned underwhelming ending, the rough dubbing11, etc. But they are often reversed into good aspects, or at least elements of joy, rather than annoyance. One could call it camp enjoyment, though I personally believe it is a more loving reading of these flaws, they are genuinely fun rather than knowingly, ironically as is the case with camp. These basic assumptions, a kind of shared expectations (cf. Jauss), are a set of interpretive strategies, producing interpretations that are community property. It is precisely these strategies that determine what, for a certain community, is an acceptable interpretation and what is not: All participants in an interpretative community dont necessarily agree about what a
film means; interpretive communities dont impose rigid conformity, only set ground rules for discussion. [...] One way to understand what we mean by an interpretive community would be to think about a net discussion group as a place where people exchange their views on a interpretive claims may

common topic [...]. Initially, as a new discussion group appears, diverge wildly, yet certain consensuses emerge through

discussion;

members

coalesce

around points of mutual interest and avoid areas of dispute. Over time, the group agrees upon what kinds of posts are appropriate. (Jenkins 2000, online)

In a discussion on Suspiria, the following came up: Argentos only good/great movie, mostly thanks to Goblins effective soundtrack and the talents of DP Luciano Tovoli. The acting is pretty bad though. Dude is so overrated... (or something, AtEase, 14/08/10). It is, of course,

11

As was the custom for Italian horror films of the time, there was no original language of recording and it was dubbed in several languages after principal photography ended: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076786/trivia

31

a valid opinion, however not appropriate within the interpretive community whose strategy, precisely, it is to value the bad acting, or at least take it for granted. The acting is not seen as an appropriate reason to discredit the film, to which it is nigh irrelevant. Within a community, there seems to be some agreement about what kind of disagreements can be tolerated and which ones throw you beyond the parameters of a particular group12. Taking the acting as an issue, and stating that Suspiria is the mans only good movie, necessarily propels you outside the community, into a different one (one can, for example, still be a horror fan, without being an Argento aficionado). Due to different goals and purposes for engaging with texts, disagreements between different interpretive communities arise, which are necessary to mark each groups own boundaries, however fuzzy they may be13, and to create a (stronger) sense of group identity in the process. A means to do this is turning an element that belongs to another community into quite something different, shifting its meaning (Jullier 2002, 66-67): a particular dramatic scene may by some community be taken as tragic, while another group may laugh at it, ascribing camp value to it the laughing being a sign that they get it, that is: knowingly they distance themselves from those who take it seriously and align with those who do not. The difference between groups need not even be that extensive: in investigating the feminist reception of Personal Best (Towne, 1982), a sports film with a lesbian theme, it was noted that [l]esbian feminists, academic feminists, liberal feminists, radical feminists, feminists of color, all formed competing interpretive strategies (Ellsworth 1986, 186). Not only in-between, also within one group boundaries, strategies, opinions, etc. are relentlessly in motion: [a]s individuals encounter texts, situations and each other, they engage in the active process of discerning, displaying and perpetuating how legitimate members of a specific type of community would or should treat a given text (Aden et al. 1995, 369). People are, after all, not a member of just one community: everyone is part of several communities at the same time, which makes change within a community possible, since people bring knowledge across. I do not, like Fish (1980, 173), believe that the reader is a product of the interpretive communities she belongs to, as if she is only unique because of the idiosyncratic combination of communities she is constituted of. Let us not forget that certain parts of memory are highly individual and can therefore not be shared while they do have an influence on our experience. I would also add that communities are not made out of equal members: certain members are more prototypical, others more peripheral. Some members are, for some reason (more authorative, popular, etc.), in this sense more influential,
12 13

Jenkins, an overview, not an article: http://web.mit.edu/cms/People/henry3/consume.html I am, after all, a staunch believer of the prototype theory; see Eleanor Rosch & others.

32

and it is easier for them to bring change within a certain community, potentially even making until-then unacceptable things acceptable to the community, something which is harder for peripheral members.

1.3.2 Creative communities Members of interpretive communities are not mere readers, they are writers: a misunderstanding [exists that] assumes that assimilating necessarily means becoming similar to what one absorbs, and not making something similar to what one is, making it ones own, appropriating and reappropriating it (de Certeau 1984, 166). Due to opposing goals the interpretive communities lesbian viewers of Personal Best, for example, actively engaged with and transformed the film: Most lesbian feminist reviewers ignored large sections of narrative material focusing on heterosexual romance [...]. Some redefined main characters and supporting character in order to elevate [...] Donnelly as the films star despite the publicitys promotion [...] and the relative length screen time (Ellsworth 1986, 193), though they did not tinker with, say, the chronology of the event since that is not relevant to their issues, their opposition to the dominant discourse. Interpretive communities can, however, be more than producers of meaning, they can be cultural producers, who transform the act of consumption into various forms of creative expression11 fan communities, in particular. More than ever before audiences of media texts participate, engage with each other, with the text, its producers, etc., which Jenkins calls our modern-day convergence culture, a cultural shift as consumers are encouraged to seek out new information and make connections among dispersed media content, it occurs within the brains of individual consumers and through their social interactions with others (Jenkins 2006, 3). Texts are at times even directly influenced by their fanbase: after Firefly (2002), made by Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, got cancelled from television due to disappointing viewing figures, its fans calling themselves Browncoats tried to raise money for an ad to save the series, held campaigns to ship it to navy soldiers to watch for recreation, and even persuaded Universal to produce a film, Serenity (Whedon, 2005), based on the series later fans themselves created a documentary as well as a sequel to the film, Browncoats: Redemption (Dougherty, 2010)14. Browncoats distinguish themselves from regular fans, who like the show but without the perseverance of their activism: A fan can be passive; a Browncoat never is15.
14 15

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefly_(TV_series)#Fandom http://www.browncoats.com/index.php?ContentID=42e7e88e69ab5

33

Fans relate to favorite texts with a mixture of fascination and frustration, attracted to them because they offer the best resources for exploring certain issues, frustrated because these fictions never fully confirm to audience desire, they need to be reworked so that they more fully satisfy our needs (Jenkins 2000, online). These texts provide sparks, an objet a, but it is not completely reachable, hence causing frustration. In order to get closer to just what draws one to a particular text, one starts collecting information, visiting the locations, looking for other people who can provide new pieces of information, thereby forming communities that enrich ones original experience. Though I wonder, does this bring one closer to satisfaction, to completion? Sparks are sudden, unexpected tears that propel one outside of the narrative, outside the normative, conventional Symbolic into the evermysterious Real, yet by aligning oneself with a fan community one, again, is inscribed in a conventionalized system, to an extent taught how to look at the text. It creates a sense of identity and belonging, and knowing others perspectives certainly enhances the experience, but it simultaneously seems to draw one further away from the original experience. This is why the suggestions of Aden et al. may provide a refreshing alternative. In investigating the reasons of fans for visiting the location (sounds familiar!) of Field of Dreams (Robinson, 1989), they individually, rather than collectively interrogated the people slumbering around the place. Their research of the interpretations revealed three sets of paired themes (real/unreal, amusement/purpose and community/isolation) that were commonly expressed, yet they are not collectively agreed upon on beforehand: the people present there, often families, did not know the other people before, and they did not necessarily discuss it on the spot. Everyone, for example, said to have come to amuse themselves (it is, after all, a trip), but, as one interviewee believes, everybody has some idea in their minds of something theyre searching for and hoping that theyll find it out here (ibid, 373). This seems to imply that these people were sparked in a similar fashion, that it was something inside the spark, specific to it, that made people experience the field in a common way, almost naturally, opposed to the conventionality of interpretive strategies. Of course, each one filled in these themes differently, each one is searching for something else, each based on personal experience, yet the act of searching is shared. Perhaps then, shared wounds, sparks that are not just individual, but shared (Ortega 2008, 242) are not such a radical thought after all. Similarly experienced sparks across a group of people must point in the direction of shared experience, for example circling within a certain culture.

34

1.3.3 Cultural communities So far I have mostly singled out fan communities, because of their more direct link with sparks, although they constitute only one specific kind of interpretive community: the family, co-workers, the chess club, etc. all are potential communities. When discussing film, I believe fans to be the strongest sort of community, since they directly revolve around said film text(s). A culture, as well, is another kind of community one belongs to, or not, and a rather determining one, it appears. Living in a culture, one is daily confronted with signs specific to that culture: Certain codes may [...] be so widely distributed in a specific [...] culture, and be learned at such an early age, that they appear not to be constructed [...] but to be naturally given (Hall 1973, 95) an example, to tie in with the beginning of our journey, would be how in Western society realism (in photographs, films, etc.) is seen as natural, common sense, the way things are, even though it is ruled by conventions, we simply do not notice. Moreover, television dramas, mass news reports, etc. help shape a cultures sense of the self and its past, since memory, however individualized in its articulation, is always a social and cultural process [...]. The cultural nature of such memories implies a shared constituency, even if we are not sharing the sharing of exactly the same memories (Ford 2011, 71). The viewer experiences a representation of events, but these memories, acquired second-hand, mix with their personal memories. Cultural identity, past, etc. become graspable in this way, and through these popular texts shared wounds seem, indeed, possible. To an extent, people embedded in the same culture share the same experience, and may be sparked similarly. This may also be the case for Field of Dreams: these individuals take a trip to a baseball field, in American culture both recreationally connotated, though it is a peculiar spot to visit, lending it a mysterious sphere in which people hope to find something. It is this aspect of communities that I wonder about, not the actual formation of strategies through discussion within and between groups which is obviously interesting material as well but rather, the way belonging to interpretive communities influences the experience. In other words, how strategies already at work potentially shape the viewing, without modifying ones stance by discussing afterwards. This is why I will decide to lodge into already-existing communities for my case study, to see how previous discussions within the group have created possibly shared or common interpretations, and where they converge and (are allowed to) diverge.

35

PART 2: PRACTICAL STUDY

2.1 Case study: My Own Private Idaho 2.1.1 Methodology My research will focus on the film My Own Private Idaho (1991), an early film of Gus Van Sant (Drugstore Cowboy, Elephant, Milk, etc.) starring River Phoenix, Keanu Reeves as the two protagonists, as well as roles for both professional and non-actors, some of whom allegedly were real hustlers Van Sant picked up from the streets in Portland. It is loosely based on Shakespeares Henry IV, especially the character of Scott (Reeves), explaining the Shakespearian language used in certain scenes and the fortune Scott is about to inherit. Mike (Phoenix), meanwhile, is of poor descent, from a troubled family and is narcoleptic, making him fall asleep in moments of stress. More details on its narrative will gradually surface throughout the study, but do not matter as of yet. What I set out do here is to analyse the text by means of readers and their interpretations. The main section of the research is centred around a viewing of the film organised on the 3rd of May 2011, in front of a mixed group of people (some of my high school friends, some actual or aspiring Cultural Studies students, a few homosexuals of the local Holebi house in Leuven), though I also added the individual experiences of an internet community. Firstly, however, I analyzed three in-depth essays on My Own Private Idaho, providing a very detailed account of the experience of the film to the writer. I will try to apply the insight gained in the theoretical part to the actual experiences of the film, present before me. I will focus mostly on the kinds of gaps that come to the foreground because of converging or conflicting interpretations, how these different gaps are concretely filled in, and how these filling-ins may be clarified in the light of a particular interpretive community one belongs to. To summarize the various gaps, I use, and abuse, Ruthrofs three-way distinction of fuzziness in meaning in a text: (a) propositional opacity, which is likened to the constitutive elements of the text (camera angles, etc.), in this study the conventional significations of these techniques; (b) modal opacity which is formulated in the meeting in the everyday life with the gaze we adopt to watch a film, which will include both Sobchacks six modes of spectatorial engagement and the distinction of images, whose more or less striking plastic signs alter spectators interpretation specifically; and (c) semiotic opacity, which is due to differing cultural and other contexts of

36

encountering the text (Fuery 2000, 139). I, of course, add a fourth distinction, that of the spark, with its transformative power and its position to an extent outside and unrelated to the texts narrative. I jotted down abuse, since these distinction merely function as a way to structure my own theoretical body and do not necessarily coincide with the meanings Ruthrof assigns to them. Furthermore, the three possibilities of spectator engagement (regardless of the two film positions) in Sobchacks theory coincide with the notions of referential and critical statements and involvement: Referential statements treat the [text] as applicable to real life, whether social or psychological. Critical statements treat the [text] as constructions consisting of messages and narrative formulae (Katz & Liebes 1990, 53). The former is the spectator looking at what the film depicts, the latter that the film depicts and constructs and may even take the own spectatorial position into account (what is the message the producers want to bring across, how does the film try to affect me?). As results indicate, a spectator can make both referential as critical statements of the same text; it is the relative degree among interpretive communities that may differ. Likewise, critical does not necessarily mean more detached: Critical statements that betray a fascination for the construction of the story, or with its primordial and intertextual allusions, seem no less involved (ibid, 56). All these different ways of filling in the gaps overlap: making referential statements often indicates the spectator comparing elements on-screen with the own situation and behaviour, the negotiation between two different contexts, thereby personalising the text and hence, getting involved with the text. 2.1.2 Notes on My Own Private Idaho: a selected reception To start off I would like to put three different receptions, essays in form, taken from the internet, because I believe they add to the actual research I carried out myself. Questionnaires will only reflect a rather small part of the experience a spectator went through while watching, in a sense because participants are reluctant to write down own interpretations, or feel they do not want to bother me with it, sticking instead to more objective textual and narrative cues. These three essays, while inevitably failing to bring to the surface all that marks the experience, will pursue more deeply what one has gone through while watching and will more freely express elaborate interpretations, based in part on the text, in part on their own beliefs, etc. These writers more openly connect the film with their own lives, their own body. The three articles I will take under a loop are respectively Adnums My Own Private New Queer Cinema, Martins Mystic River and Mackenzie Hoovers Leaving Normal.
37

My Own Private New Queer Cinema Unlike any of the informers in [2.1.3], this article, as well as the next two, openly put My Own Private Idaho in its context upon its release in the early nineties, that is: the active gay movement of the time, that spurred the rather short-lived but nevertheless highly productive New Queer Cinema, putting Van Sant next to other directors such as Gregg Araki. The other two articles more thoroughly discuss the film as being identity-creating for many homosexual youngsters, and while this is the case here too, Adnum also brings it into relation with the decades AIDS Crisis. He definitely likes My Own Private Idaho16, yet similarly thinks it a bit of a false idol among gays, picked up in the community as a brave, progressive film, while, according to Adnum it is precisely the opposite: expressions of tentative, ambiguous practices of post-AIDS gay male spectatorship, contrived and protected practices that simultaneously acknowledge and deny HIV/AIDS (Adnum 2005, online). Rather than combating their current situation, which would be, again according to Adnum, the subject of a transformative gay film, it is a private movie, trying to console, comfort its gay audience, as cheer-up gifts brought to the beds of the sick (ibid, online). To make his point, he addresses both the iconography of the film, as well as its use of the genre of the road film. My Own Private Idaho, and the other film at stake The Living End (Araki, 1992), are conservative, obedient objects that utilise a wide selection of gay male stereotypes mined from the iconography of several previous decades. The character Mike Waters is basically a one-man gay Hall of Fame [...], hes the meeting place of every piece of gay iconography from Tennessee Williams and James Dean to Pierre et Gilles and Calvin Klein and back again (ibid, online). More on Phoenix and Dean in the following article, but there are indeed many intertextual references to be noticed, for example the Pierre et Gilles photograph and Mike in a similar pose on the cover of a gay magazine (see below), or Mike scrubbing the place for a client, in the outfit of a Dutch sailor, reminiscent of those in Querelle (Fassbinder, 1982), an iconic gay film. The sheer alleged familiarity to homosexual viewers of these icons, this reveling in the past, in tokens that helped shape the concept, identity of gayness in the previous decades that are being updated in the film, they offer the audience threatened in real life by the HIV virus a safe haven, by reutilizing icons from a period when gays were still defined as free spirits, limitless and boundless. It does not offer new representations of gays, on the contrary: it recycles! Of course, in order to perceive these references to the past,
16

He gave it a 84% score: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/critic/markadnum/?cats=&genreid=&letter=&switches=&sortby=&limit=50&page=2

38

one first needs to be familiar with them: a large number of the informants were, apparently, not they did not make mention of any of these gay icons (with the exception of James Dean, which occurred occasionally). This can be explained by the differing contexts: twenty years later, gays and non-gays, etc.

Pierre et Gilles

My Own Private Idaho

My Own Private Idaho has often been credited with refreshing the genre of the road movie17, precisely by inserting homosexual travellers in Hollywood genres that, in the past, regularly depicted if at all! homosexuality negatively. Adnum, again, sees it rather in the light of conservativeness, driving in reverse: The maniacally mobile characters [...] are in search of domesticity and closure, not adventure and aperture[.] [...] [T]hey flee in search of comfort and acceptance continual movement is neither their goal nor their passion (ibid, online). In this case, it is his own definition of road movie that shapes his perception of how the film fits, in his view badly since it is not so much an adventure, as a fleeing away from problems, in search of, well, something. Their set-out goal is looking for Mikes mother (though they say brother at first, before they leave, after which they end up at his dads place, which leads Adnum to writing that Mike is the result of incest; something no other interpreter believed; [2.1.3]). It is obvious then that adventure is a key element to speak of a road movie for Adnum: The road trips of [these films] arent adventures that go awry, as in
17

Adnum discusses a few in the article.

39

the traditional narrative of the road movie (ibid, online) and goes on to complain about the lack of action, plot, etc. A large number of my informants, however, seem to employ different notions of the genre: Theres also the overreaching, classic road-movie theme of soulsearching (The Coma-man, AtEase). Indeed, road movies such as Two-Lane Blacktop (Hellman, 1971) or Y tu mam tambin (Cuarn, 2001) seem to be less about the actions, the physical journey than about the metaphorical, mental one. In this light the search for identity many see in My Own Private Idaho does fit into the genre. The different interpretation of Adnum seems to be, to some extent, due to his vantage point from which he approaches the film: gay culture itself moulded to a new shape around the epidemic, with AIDS-oriented organisations like ACT-UP and Queer Nation providing a politically active and self-aware infrastructure for gay culture that still exists today (ibid, online). He pushes for a combative gay movement that actively assaults the HIV/AIDS issue that many homosexuals were, in fact, looking for an identity in a moment of crisis and did so, for example, by means of past icons provided mere comfort but was inevitably a regression. Nevertheless, ACT-UP protesters championed the film (ibid, online), the very same ACT-UP apparently used the allegedly passive film for their active endeavour, meaning that the film did have a kind of transformative power (even if it is simply because it was a very popular film), that these protesters reappropriated the film to fit their goals. In which way is it then, in fact, a false idol? Mystic River Marianne Martin in the first places focuses on the films principal actors, River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves, and their careers as influencing the way we perceive their performance here: Phoenix would die of an overdose two years later at Johnny Depps club in Los Angeles while Reeves would become one of Hollywoods biggest actors, starring in such film as Speed (de Bont, 1994) and The Matrix (the Wachowskis, 1999). She also places them in context: The official story, as propagated by those involved in the production, was that Reeves and Phoenix were such good, professionals that they were able to artistically transcend the nature of these characters so alien to their true selves (Martin, online), that is: asserting that the actors themselves were definitely not gay, despite their popularity in gay communities, who spread the countering rumour of their bisexuality (ibid, online).

40

When one is familiar with films featuring James Dean, especially Rebel Without a Cause (Ray, 1955) and East of Eden (Kazan, 1955), it is easy to perceive Dean in Phoenixs performance: some of the somewhat awkward mannerisms and the intensely broody aura hanging about remind me of Dean. When one is familiar with Phoenixs death, it is impossible not to read Phoenixs imminent demise retroactively into the film [...]. Phoenix and Dean both died young, their personal lives mostly remain unknown, and their screen histories were left to be subjectively rewritten in our eyes (ibid, online). Keanu Reeves, on the other hand, reflects no one and nothingness: while many informants in [2.1.3] also believe that Reeves acting skills are, at best, controversial, which leads many to negative connotations, Martin perceives in them the quality he brings to the screen most consistently, [being] a blankness in which almost anything can be projected. [...] Van Sant makes use of it to terrifying effect in Idaho. Scott is an empty canvas, a surface on which he imposes different identities at whim (ibid, online). Ergo: whether on purpose or not, the film benefits from them. Reeves inhuman acting makes it more appropriate for his character to change his identity at will, whether it be a hustler to spite his rich father, a companion on the trip, or a successful business man who, as soon as he meets a girl, ditches Mike on his quest to his mother. Scott is all surface [... he] is what he pleases to play today, and no more (ibid, online). I approach Idaho in this seemingly sideways manner, because this perspective on images and performances offered me the first glimmer of hope for any real penetration through the surfaces of the film, which is impressively aggressive in keeping the spectator at a distance (ibid, online). Everything from the acting mannerisms, the Shakespearian dialogue, the lightning and angles that make the film look like tableaux to the films pacing, which has this a sort of limping quality, moving unexpectedly, neither entirely slow nor entirely fast, and leaving the spectator off-balance (ibid, online) explain the difficulty some have and
41

had (including me) to entirely relate, get inside the film. It is as if the plastic signs (the lightning intensity, etc.) as well as the sheer construction are alien to a large number of viewers, continually breaking previous expectations, defamiliarising us from our own hypothesizing. It is a persistent removal of the viewer from any sense of comfortable intimacy with the frame or the characters for more than a fleeting moment (ibid, online). One of such fleeting moments is the campfire scene, by many noted as one of their favourite scenes of the film [2.1.3], in which Mike awkwardly confesses his love for Scott. It might have something to do with Phoenix himself insisting that the dialogue should be extended and writing it himself, but it feels oddly direct compared to much of the rest of the film. In it, authenticity is evoked by means of subject matter, differing lightning between Mike and Scott as well as Mike looking away from both Scott and the audience, a moment only to be broken off by Reeves cold, emotionless response, a return to the mannerisms. Leaving Normal By far the most personal of the three is Mackenzie Hoovers article on his identification with the film. He confesses, his first online coming out, that he has Aspergers Syndrome, which was well into the nineties not properly defined. People did not really know what was the matter, and neither did he himself: for most of my life, I have had an invisible force field separating me from what I until recently thought of as normal humanity (Mackenzie Hoover, online). He was, and still is or feels like a complete outsider, coping with a constant, unfounded fear that something would go wrong, a sense of shame that I couldnt succeed at life, and an overwhelming sense of loneliness that nobody would ever understand my plight (ibid, online). In his search for an identity he sympathised with the gay and lesbian movement of the 1990s, no matter that their far more threatening and moralistic quagmire was different than his own, and by extension, with My Own Private Idaho. With all the commotion about the gayness and its star actors, the writer has always had an interest in the film (let us say in a more casual, stadium fashion), but it eluded him the first time he watched it: My Own Private Idaho was a more meandering affaire, full of awkward stops, episodic bits, Shakespearian interludes, and the occasional intertitle to situate us (ibid, online), echoing Martins distance argument. It was not until his second viewing with friends that it smacked [him] in the face. Having had time to absorb the films peculiar dream logic, it became a favorite for reasons I didnt entirely understand (ibid, online). He could pinpoint some elements he liked in the film, but there was something else. Trying to figure out just why it left such an impression why the film had sparked something within
42

him he ended up drawing parallels between Mikes and his own situation. Mike, like himself, was an outsider, even an outsider among outsiders, since he also clearly did not fit in with the gang of hustlers. Mike is a social misfit with an embarrassing medical condition who searches desperately for normality and never finds it while being entertained, then dropped, by a friend who ultimately knows what side hes on. It was the story of my life metaphorically, but definitely (ibid, online). He consciously inserted himself into the film, which aided him in further forming an identity, but he simultaneously seem to see it as violating the film and its subject: I emerge amazed, when looking back on my love for this film, at the immense leaps I was
prepared to take just to give myself an identity. [...] One doesnt look at the film and see the nightmare of an unprotected life: one sees young people enjoying themselves being irresponsible and living without parental authority (ibid, online).

He accuses Van Sant of romanticising street life, though that does not matter here. Mackenzie Hoover here makes a distinction between perception, what one sees, and apperception, what one does not actually perceive but projects onto the screen. He shifted what was according to him the actual matter of the film, namely the irresponsible shenanigans of a group of street kids, to more personal, more intimate grounds: a search for identity and a sense of belonging. Again it begs the question what is given to us in perception and what is projected triggered off by recognition. On the one hand a large number of people saw this quest for identity in the film, on the other hand seeing My Own Private Idaho as young people enjoying themselves and nothing more seems, to me, just as much a projection that is not given, and perhaps the result of the new context from which he gazes at his adolescent love for the film. It is an example of how all us [...] can find ourselves in slippages between images, the spaces between words, and how hard and fast definitions of ourselves may never actually add up to what we actually are (ibid, online). It also showcases the transformative power of such sparkling movies with time, we may create a culture as vibrant and beautiful as the one from which I stole my moves (ibid, online): he inserted elements that struck him into his behaviour, as a trace within his reality leading back to the films culture, as a means to little by little change his surroundings, and to strengthen his own sense of identity.

Conclusions Despite their specific, differing stances, all three authors discussed share some ground: all three are fairly literate about their subject, bringing in elements of context and knowledge to relate to the film. All three place My Own Private Idaho in the context of the gay movement,
43

relate Phoenix with Dean, etc. All three, also, make critical as well as referential statements, though the degree does differ slightly: Martin settles more often for critical statements (precisely because she approaches the film as a construction, the characters as players, to be able to penetrate), while Adnum makes relatively more referential ones. He sees the actions and non-actions of Mike and Scott as an example of sorts for the gay audience dealing with the HIV/AIDS crisis, as offering a possible way of handling their lives. Not only the younger but also the older gay men, such as the character Hans, represent a certain kind of gay, namely the weird, decadent, European one, affected by the virus. Mackenzie Hoover, in turn, mostly reverts to his own experience, though also reflecting on what the film, that is: its director, tries to achieve. He compares the street kids in the film with the experience of people he knows that really have lived a while on the street. The career or pop myths surrounding a certain actor may also influence ones experience of a certain film, depending on what one is and is not familiar, in the know of. Some fans of Thelma & Louise (Scott, 1991) rewrote, restructured the film in a vampire tale, possibly because one of its stars, Susan Sarandon, also plays a role in The Hunger (Scott, 1983), a famous 1980s gothic film (Jenkins 2000, online). Same goes for the director: Mackenzie Hoover and his friends were in total accord [about] the dreaminess of the whole enterprise, the heroin-chic-with-a-human-face that has always been the directors trump card (ibid, online). This dreaminess, typical of Van Sant, is not necessarily perceived by everyone, though it is in their own little friends community. It would be interesting to observe whether the personas of Phoenix, Reeves or Van Sant influenced interpretations in [2.1.3], by inserting this into the films meaning. We have also seen how formal features are able to create different experiences, for example finding the film hard to penetrate. Most importantly, Mackenzie Hoover gave a very detailed account of how one can write oneself into a text, how one can experience a spark that one cannot completely grasp and how this can transform people.

2.1.3 Audience research On the third of May 2011 I held a viewing of My Own Private Idaho at my faculty building in Leuven, inviting three different groups: fellow students, and future students of the Cultural Studies degree, a number of high school friends of mine and lastly, gay people from the local Holebihuis, a social centre for homosexuals, lesbians and bisexuals. Unfortunately, of the last group only two people were present at the screening, not enough to be able to speak of a group, and so I will not deduct any real results from them, at least not in terms of communal
44

interpretation. Of the other groups, respectively ten and five people came. Afterwards I contacted the forum I frequent and which I have already mentioned, AtEase, and asked some of its users to, individually, hold a screening and return the questions the same as the ones I gave to the Belgian group, only translated in English: these questionnaires are included at the end, annexed. Six posters handed in their responses. These separate groups were necessary to investigate the influence of belonging to a particular group on the experience, compared to people belonging to a different group. Of course, each member of a group also belongs to countless of other groups. However, what I wanted to see was whether the group all members had in common produced certain interpretations or assumptions that were shared. From the start I suspected the internet community group to have a stronger influence on its members, since it revolves around the discussion of film, so their goals are directly related to the viewing of the film. Nevertheless, my high school friends and Cultural Studies students have shared grounds as well. The former have shared a large amount of time together in the same school, for a period of about six years and were educated in a similar fashion, while the latter may not be as cohesive in terms of education (Cultural Studies does not teach in a determining way and each student is more or less free to delve into the domains he or she is interested in most), but they are, generally, by default interested in culture, be it film, music, theatre, etc. Firstly, personal information and background of the informants will shed light on certain interpretations and assumptions that occurred. With this in mind, I will search for the different kinds of gaps to be filled in. Taking into account what interpreters considered central themes and conflicts, and their favourite scenes, a selection of the most popular, the ones that were mentioned significantly more frequently, will be made. I will examine why they prove more striking to the informants and how they are concretely filled in. Based on different positions the spectator occupies, and different contexts, I will look at and try to explain the diversity of interpretations, as a way of personalising the text. The possibility of a spark, and its transformative power will also be touched upon. Lastly, the groups in themselves will be singled out to see in which aspect or domain some of its interpretations systematically differ from the other groups, and which aspects can be filled in differently within one particular group. A. Personal backgrounds Age: In the group of my friends, three were 21 years old, one 22 years and another 23 years. Similarly, of the Cultural Studies three people were 21, five 22 and two 23. The internet community differs most: one 21, two 25, one 26, one 28 and one 32.
45

Gender: This is more straight-forward: both my friends and the internet community are allmale clubs, while the Cultural Studies group was all-female. Nationality: All of my friends and Cultural Studies fellows are Belgian. The forum posters, however, diverge quite a bit: three are American, one is Australian, one is British and one is German. In a way, however, they all share an (often Anglo-) Germanic culture. Profession: All of my friends are still students, though in different subjects: law, political science, physiotherapy, natural science. Of Cultural Studies everyone was, of course, a student, yet with different backgrounds: journalism, photography, tourism, linguistics and literature, history, etc. In the internet forum group, three were students (one active film student, one who has just finished a master in cinema studies and one with a bachelor in sociology), one a musician without profession, one a filmmaker and music journalist and one working in the IT/AV sector. Interests: Predictably, the Cultural Studies students were all interested in a wide array of culture, art and even sports, though only four specifically mentioned film. Similarly, of the five friends only one mentioned film. However, they generally did not pinpoint their interests within the artistic field: three mentioned music, but also football, basic camping and bike travels. The internet forum stood out in that most explicitly expressed their infinite love for film, though usually embedded in other interests such as other forms of culture and art, sports, travel, science and groovy nights with friends. Familiarity with the film: In accordance with the above, my friends generally did not know who Van Sant was, one had already heard of him, another had already seen other films by him (Milk, Last Days), but none had already seen the film. In the Cultural Studies group statistically more people had already seen other films of the director, by no one had seen this film before. Of the internet community, however, only two had not seen the film before, though all were familiar with some of Van Sants work, and put the film in that and other contexts. Two of the interpreters consider the film as one of their favourites, while two others disliked the film. Every one of the other groups to varying degrees liked the film.

B. Gaps It is a bit intimidating to delve into the heaps of information gathered in front of me, precisely because it bounces in various directions, deviating into corners of personal anecdotes and believes so that it is far from easy to fit everything into a particular structure. There are numerous ways of approaching this material, with numerous outcomes perhaps, but since I am interesting in gaps I will approach it as existing out of various layers, from surface to the
46

deepest core. I feel a bit like a miner, having to heave and scratch at the surface of coals to unveil shafts deeper down the mine. As a starting point on this surface, I want to delve into the answers to two particular topics of the questionnaire: (a) the central themes and conflicts, and (b) the favourite scene(s), according to each interpreter. While the answers were diverse, it was still possible to underpin certain preferences for certain scenes, certain themes a large number of people perceived in the film. Conflicts and themes that occurred most frequently were (unrequited) love [Cultural Studies 5, friends 1, forum 3], relation Mike-Scott [CS 4, friends 1, forum 2], relation with parents [CS 5, friends 1, forum 3], street life [CS 6, friends 2, forum 1] and one peculiar one: search for identity [forum 3], which did not occur in the other groups. In the Cultural Studies group 3 people mentioned choices and somewhat similar terms, but no one outside the forum group used the word identity. Favourite scenes were even clearer: the campfire scene [CS 4, forum 3] and the funeral [CS 4, friends 1, forum 1]. One odd one out again: the dance of Hans [forum 2], which some people of the other groups even called unnecessary or annoying. What, I wonder, do these elements stand out more systematically?

I. Conventional gaps I believe formal features in the text to an extent indicate what an audience at large is supposed to perceive as more or less significant: the way a film is structured hints at the importance of certain passages, such as climaxes, etc. Of course, these formal features are not in the text, as much as we acquired them, within our film-viewing culture: we have watched numerous films, know its rules and conventions to such a degree that they almost seem natural. They have become interpretive strategies we use when watching film (image someone that is not familiar with the medium film: he or she will interpret it radically differently). We sense that the scenes of the funeral and at the campfire are crucial, because of its position in the film (campfire in the middle of the film, its stark darkness contrasting with the general brightness of the film; the funeral at the end, as a climax and its juxtaposing of two points of view). This is largely a set of techniques, all together the language of a film, that we are familiar with, in varying degrees. It is, however, not only this technical aspect that I would call conventional. Other rules are shared within a certain culture, though they depend less on the specific film language than on our everyday, social interpretations that are, as well, shared within a certain culture. Of course, having grown up in Belgium, I do not completely coincide perhaps with the cultural set of values, behaviour, etc. depicted in the film but our cultures intermingle enough, and we have become so familiarized with American culture through
47

popular media, that I understand these rules. I know, for example, that funerals in our culture are supposed to be sober and solemn. The contrast between this norm of funerals with one in which people scream, jump and kick around actions I conventionally relate to passion, agitation and spontaneity is bound to strike me. This knowledge, as previously seen stocked in our semantic memory, is so obvious, so common sense within our culture that we almost do not notice the gaps that are being filled in. In terms of satisfaction it resembles the stadium: a half-desire, something that is generally deemed interesting, without necessarily reaching one on a more personal level. The conflicts and themes most often mentioned are ones that reoccur in a great number of film texts. As Baetens & Hesling (2008) have already noted, some of these topics are specific to the text (for example, the relation between Scott and Mike), while others are more abstract, and could be applied to a large amount of films. These latter are so familiar that they are often written succinctly, often in just one word: love. Some of these themes are by default a topic of interest, precisely because they are issues within a certain society: prostitution and homelessness, regardless of whether one personally connects with them or not, are selfevidently, common sense interesting subjects. They are the kind of terms that get thrown around to create a buzz in order to promote a film; see also the initial promotion of My Own Private Idaho back in the early nineties as a gay film, which is much less a hot topic nowadays.

II. Referential and critical involvement These conventions are in fact mere indicators of where the film, in its structure, lays stresses: the spectator is open to embrace or reject them, she observes the frame, the implicit reader positions that are forged within the film and she decides whether to follow such a frame or to craft another position for herself outside this implicit reader of the film. This is where the spectator more or less for the first time actively takes to the foreground, which is reflected in the informants referential and critical statements. Seeing as the forum members have the strongest background in film, it can be expected that they make more critical statements than the others, and indeed this is the case. The vocabulary of all six forum members indicated that they approached film as a conscious construction, talking about the depiction of a certain abstract issues, the characters Mike and Scott, the persistent use of the actual names of the actors instead of their characters names, asserting that Mikes part was well written and that Phoenix gave a very good performance. Similar descriptions (even such common Dutch words as personage) were rarely, if at all, encountered in the reception of the other
48

groups. When asked for their favourite and least favourite aspects of the film, some forum members verbalized these aspects almost completely in technical terms: I liked the naturalism of most of the players, the outdoor cinematography and sense of space, and the vulnerability of the Phoenix character. I hated the performance of the guy playing the Bob character (Lester Burnham, AtEase); The sense of humor and minor deranged / surreal aspects was very appealing! Certain characters could at times become just too annoying / extreme like the fatherly bum king! (Ash, AtEase). These are, of course, interpretive strategies at work. By interacting with fellow cinephiles, taking courses on cinema, etc. they formed a particular set of default assumptions that are activated whenever they start watching a film. This does, however, not mean that they are any more critically distanced from its narrative, more referential content, on the contrary: they, too, make a large number of referential statements, and in some cases even the critical and the referential seem peculiarly intertwined. Take for example this take on the street life theme: Another theme the film has [...] is portraying the supposed scum, the miscreants of our
society, in a positive, humane light. [...] The Shakespearian lines and some of the absurd behavior of the characters [...] only help in taking us out of our current reality so we can view these people we might consider scum, simply as characters, without our usual moral instincts coming in to take over. Again, it could just be Van Sant playing around with conventions, and purposely trying to be 'arty' (the style of the various sex scenes comes to mind), but I think his real intent in doing this is to allow us to let go as the movie plays. And in the process we gain a little perspective, simply that...human beings are human beings. (shadowpla7, AtEase)

This is coming dangerously close to a description of Isers defamiliarisation. More importantly, he is able to deepen the surface studium layer of the street life theme, in which critical statements about the portrayal of this theme and the use of defamiliarising stylistic decisions (the old-fashioned language, absurd behaviour and plastic signs that differ from reality as we know it) give way to more referential significations: that human beings are human beings, no matter how entirely different they may appear at first. It is a social insight gained through critical analysis: both critical and referential involvement. While statistically making more referential statements, the other groups resort to the critical at times as well, though this happens more often in the Cultural Studies group: de film speelde zich af op diverse locaties, dat was een aangename afwisseling. Er zaten ook minder geladen momenten in, met o.a. de capriolen van de Duitser Hans. Dat maakt de film

49

minder zwaar18 (CS 2), both commenting on the construction of the film and the effect this has on her own experience. It is rarer in the group of friends, though some commented on the use of symbolic imagery, as well as some roles such as Hans being minder interessant voor het verhaal (friend 2), less relevant for the story. A logical next step then is to look into these involvements in more depth than I have done so far: what actually happens when one is (or is not) involved into a certain passage, and how does this involvement come into existence, concretely?

III. Personalising the text As I have previously argued, film engagement, like social interaction, depends on empathy, and hence on our mirror neurons, to be able to come to some kind of understanding and interpretation. In encountering the other, in this case the film, the spectator is always confronted with a gap between the own position (incorporating ones own believes, assumptions, expectations, knowledge, etc.) and that of the other, which is necessarily different. Since one cannot directly know the other, one needs to empathize, that is potentially recognize certain elements, which makes it possible for us to fill in a film, a person with our experience. Following recognition, one aligns with one of the characters and finally is engaged (emotionally and judgementally) into the narrative, though it has been noted that these three phases probably intertwine, rather than occurring in order (Jullier 2002, 172): at the stage of recognition, the things one attributes to a certain character are already in a particular way connoted, hence judgement already takes place in the very beginning. One builds up expectations, certain hypothesises about what a character is like, but can at any time be surprised, in the sense that a character does something unexpected, which might change ones interpretation of this character. It is precisely in these kinds of gaps that interpretations diverge greatly. The film structure and interpretive strategies at work make certain scenes, certain elements stand out, almost by default (explaining the frequency with which they were being referenced in the questionnaire), but the reasons and motivations people cite for liking or disliking these scenes are incredibly diverse (others have also noted this: Shively 1992; Baetens & Hesling 2008). Indeed, a large number of the audience asserted that the relation between Mike and Scott, as well as both mens relation with their parents, are mayor themes in the film, but it soon becomes apparent that there are many, sometimes even conflicting interpretations of these
18

My translation: The various shooting locations sneaked a pleasant variety into the film. There were also more frivolous moments, such as the happenings of German Hans, which made the film less heavy.

50

themes. It may seem obvious to ourselves that our preferences, emotional responses and judgements about characters are the only possible ones one reaction springs to mind: by the end I dont know who wouldnt greatly dislike Scott (Ash, AtEase) but the wealth of different interpretations indicate that spectators are much less bound to the film, or the authors intention, in their actual engagement with the film. I am aware that what is focused upon here is referential involvement (character-based). Later on I will delve deeper into critical involvement as well. Firstly, however, I want to concentrate on Scott and Mikes relation, and the numerous ways in which it was signified.

Relation Scott-Mike The results to one particular question (What did you think of the two main characters? Which of the two did you sympathize with most and why?) indicate a number of things. First of all, I did not mention who the two protagonists were supposed to be, but none of the participants picked as their main characters someone other than Mike and Scott. Secondly, it turned out that most of the viewers sympathized with Mike and a majority preferred him to Scott. He was generally liked, not only because of the subtle, sensitive performance by Phoenix, but because many recognized someone in the Mike character, most often other people they knew, other characters in movies such as Midnight Cowboy (Schlesinger, 1969), Mysterious Skin (Araki, 2004), Brokeback Mountain (Lee, 2005), etc. or themselves, as a few people in the homosexual and the internet group have written: de hoofdpersonages deden me heel lichtjes aan mezelf denken: fascinatie voor onderkant, maar vooral nergens echt bijhoren19 (gay 1); I was nowhere near the taboo lifestyle of River and Keanu in the film, but still, living as a self-proclaimed misfit, this appealed to me greatly (shadowpla7, AtEase). Through recognition people link Mike with other domains of knowledge they are reminded of, in the process filling in personal traits of Mike that were definitely not entirely given. This was common in all groups; an example: Mike was een vreemde jongen. En dan zeg ik opzettelijk jongen omdat hij zo getekend is
door zijn bestaan, dat hij precies niet volwassen geworden is. Je merkt duidelijk dat zijn emoties zo in de knoop liggen dat hij geen reel besef meer heeft. Soms dacht ik zelfs aan autisme.20 (CS 10)

19

My translation: The protagonists reminded me a little of myself: a fascination for the bottom of society, but especially the feeling of not really belonging anywhere. 20 My translation: Mike was a strange boy. I intentionally say boy because he is marked by his existence to that extent that it seems he never grew into an adult. You can clearly see that he is emotionally that unstable that he has lost any grip on reality. At times I even thought of autism.

51

Other factors for liking Mike, apart from his oft-quoted vulnerability, were his concrete physicality: being fascinated by his good looks and his peculiarly fashionable clothing and hair-style. And it is even possible to not like Mike: one person, though at first asserting both main characters are interesting, wrote that his narcolepsie wekt geen sympathie op21 (CS 4). Some people, likewise, thought his disease was random and not relevant to the film, though others pointed out that his disease, which affects him when under stress, is probably a consequence of his traumatic past. Scott is, indeed, much more controversial a character. Opinions on him are strongly divided. While most did prefer Mike, not all participants thought of Scott as awful. In fact, about half in each group were sympathetic towards him, except in the group of friends: four out of five disliked Scott, the last one by contrast actually preferred Scott to Mike. It is also noteworthy that only three people of Cultural Studies were openly hostile towards him, the others sympathetic towards him, with four of them even preferring him to Mike. One forum member had more of a knack for Scott. Most of the critique mentions his opportunism, his leaving Mike in the middle of his search for egoistic reasons, his shape-shifting character, or his general coldness. Some addressed Reeves, the actor, for their strong dislike: I dont like Keanu Reeves. At all. (CS 7); It also doesn't help when you have such an awful actor delivering these Shakespearian lines.
Considering the fact that the Scott character is revealed to be somewhat cold and ruthless with regards to his eventual casting off of Mike, the dead-eyed performance could be seen as kinda appropriate. Unfortunately, I've seen Reeves' special brand of acting in plenty of other films, and it's obvious that this is solely due to a lack of range. (infrared, AtEase)

This kind of reflects Martins argument in the previous section, with the difference that infrared does not believe Van Sant to have used Reeves special brand of acting on purpose, though he does think it might be appropriate for the film (he did not like the film, mostly because of everything surrounding the Scott character). I suspect, however, that Reeves might also be the reason why some of the participants preferred Scott to Mike. Unlike Phoenix, who most viewers apart from the internet forum seem unfamiliar with, Reeves is still incredibly famous, especially in our generation that grew up on The Matrix. How one feels about the actor may influence, however slightly, ones evaluation of and engagement with Scott. Here, too, physical beauty seems to have played a part as well, for some of the spectators. Whereas some changed their opinion of the character as the movie rolled along, others seem settled on a certain sentiment towards him, despite
21

Narcolepsy does not evoke sympathy.

52

possible evidence of the contrary: Scott is wat dubbel: hij heeft een goed hart, maar weet zeer goed wat hij wil (erfenis) en zodra hij dat heeft, laat hij de rest vallen. Al denk ik dat het meer van moetens was en hij nog steeds om zijn vrienden heeft22 (CS 10). She seems to hold on to that first judgement; he has a good heart, and all the things that happen that seem to contradict this are out of his control. Others, who prefer Scott, do not necessarily think he is a better person, but perhaps a more interesting one, one easier to relate to. Some are flat-out positive or think his actions are smart: eerst slecht worden vooraleer goed = meer appreciatie van vader: goed idee 23 (CS 4), or omdat hij het steeds opneemt voor zijn vriend en recht in zijn schoenen staat ongeacht wat er verwacht werd als zoon van24 (CS 5), seemingly not taking into account that he drops his friend later on. Nevertheless, this relationship towards his father is often cited by people who take up a liking for, or at least an interest in Scott. Take this account of one of my friends, for example: ondanks zijn afkomst koos hij toch een tijd voor die armoede, wat toch wel een toegevoegde waarde aan zijn levenservaring geeft. Anderzijds is het toch een beetje laf en oneerlijk t.o.v. de anderen dat hij telkens de keuze heeft om dat leven te verlaten25 (friend 2). Something that he perceived in Scottie must have struck a chord with my friend as he returns time and again to this issue, hardly ever mentioning Mike. Scotts endeavours remind him of meerdere mensen in het echte leven [... die] niet kiezen voor een normaal leven maar het leven dag per dag nemen ook al is het niet nodig omdat ze van thuis uit rijk genoeg zijn om een zorgeloos leven te leiden26 (friend 2). Remarkable as well is how all the major themes of the film, to him, revolve around Scott, especially his conflict with himself, asking himself what is right and what is wrong. This search for identity on the side of Scott is rarely noted in the responses I gathered, though it reoccurs twice, both of these in the reception of the two forum members. One of them, sympathizing most with Scott, writes that

22

Scott is a little ambivalent: he has a good heart but he also knows very well what he wants (the heritage) and as soon as he has that he drops all the rest. Even though I think that he has no other choice and that he still cares about his friends. 23 first becoming bad before turning good again = more appreciation from father: good idea. 24 [...] because he always defends his friend and is determined, no matter what people expect of him as the son of. 25 despite his ancestry he chooses for that poverty for a while, which enhances his life experience. The fact that he at any time has to option to opt out of this life, on the other hand, is rather cowardly and dishonest towards the others. 26 several people in real life [are a bit like Scott] and do not choose for a normal life but instead take life day per day, even though they do not necessarily need to do so since they are rich enough, by virtue of their ancestry, to have a carefree life.

53

he is a young man who is searching for his own soul and tries to leave his past behind (in
contrast for River's character, as that guy is looking for what his friend tries to get rid of). He also finds himself over the course of this search - just to lose his identity to social norms by the end. This tragedy of the character always struck me. (The Coma-man, AtEase)

The opportunism and determinism that others have attributed to him backfire and are reverted into causes that bring about his downfall. It is not only Mike who (perhaps more visibly) suffers, Scott as well. In analysing both characters, shadowpla7 tries to uncover what their goals are: For River, it's love and acceptance, idealized in the unobtainable image of his mother. [...] [His hustling is] a twisted, misguided attempt to be loved, but I believe this is the reason hes chosen this profession, while Scott is clearly in a position where anything money can buy is within his grasp, but that is also not enough. What he desires I don't think is exactly clear, but it's not something that can be purchased. It probably relates to his father, whether it's rebellion for attention, or eventually acceptance (shadowpla7, AtEase). Having deepened the surface level theme of the relation with the parents, he concludes: So the two go on this journey together, yes, upon first glance simply because they are friends.
But since they are in this relationship for two completely different things, it is only inevitable that it will break apart. Knowing that the chances of finding his mother are slimming, River turns to Keanu for love, which can only end in disappointment. And the idea of searching for a mother cannot benefit the image of rebellion Keanu is trying to convey, so there is little left for him at the end of their journey, relating to River. (shadowpla7, AtEase)

By now it is clear that in interpreting, pieces of oneself are revealed and reflected in the mirror of the text. In bridging the gap, ones own position, ones own vantage point becomes apparent. The position of the self is influenced by various contexts that form us, make us interpret in a particular way. Since it is impossible to exhaust all these contexts, I will focus on some of the most striking ones that came to the foreground in the questionnaires. Contexts National culture | Even though I believed American, German, Australian, British and Belgian culture to be too close to each other to be able to really see a large gap in this aspect, at some points it did come to the foreground. Most visibly this happened with the interpretation of an American:
I do think the idea of America is crucial to the struggle both of these characters go through [...], the idea of capitalism gives us the blind ambition that anything is obtainable, and somewhere down the road that ambition coincides with money. [...] When our desires can be so easily obtained it creates a natural sense of entitlement, which delays reality and forces it to 54

hit you even harder when it comes swinging with actual impossibility. (shadowpla7,

AtEase) No one else saw the film in this cultural light, nor mention America beyond noting the beauty of Idahos landscapes. In another case, a German forum member said of Udo Kier, who plays the character Hans: he's one of unsere besten Schauspieler. Thus, this was more of "another brilliant
Kier"-role for me. But I found him quite interesting, as he matches the theme of "slightly whacky but highly intellectual German" that pops up in art films now and then (The Coma-man, AtEase).

Cinephelia | Kier is not only a famous actor in Germany, one could say he has a certain international cult following, seeing as he played a large number of peculiar roles in horror movies (Flesh of Frankenstein, Suspiria, Andy Warhols Dracula) as well as in many Von Trier films (Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, Dogville, etc.). While many people in the other groups found him funny but often unnecessary, most film forum members thought of him positively: while there is no doubt a bit of the sinister creepy vibe [him being German doesn't help!] as time went on he just became more charming and even amusing! (Ash, AtEase); Simply as comic relief, but that may also be due to the fact that Udo Kier always manages to make me laugh (in a good way!) during any scene in a movie he's in. Pretty much every film character he plays are variations of a vaguely sinister pervert (infrared, AtEase). Two members even cited Hans dance as their favourite scene. It may also explain the striking search for identity theme that was only mentioned among the forum members. It may lead to an interpretation of identity and the construction or lack thereof online, hence why a theme of identity could be particularly striking for them, it may also simply be that they more thoroughly know the conventions of the road movie, as an existential film. Many people, also in the other groups, described the film as characters on the lookout, searching for alternative ways (roads), making choices, though it remains odd nobody apart from the forum members used identity. Perhaps when they learned the road movie, its description and its conventions, a search for identity was often said to be part of the genre. Using the word identity, then, might be a way of reflecting ones knowledge. Forum members also far more frequently mentioned the film being a road movie. Critical statements then, for example based on the construction of the film, the stylistic characteristics, etc. may have in part also something to do with recognition and preference: one can recognize something in the construction when one is already familiar with it by means of other films, stories, and so on. When one has a larger knowledge of film, one is bound to recognize more than others and hence, will be more inclined to make critical
55

statements. Of course by, for example, having obtained interpretive strategies which make one pay more attention to certain stylistic characteristics, it is also easier to perceive them. Nevertheless, since a large number of people in our culture are moderately to very familiar to the medium of film it is possible, also in groups that are not actively engaged with film, to make critical statements.

Current state of mind | Rather abstract and difficult to prove perhaps, but it does seem that whenever something is on your mind, this issue is bound to influence the experience of a film. I have sensed this with myself many times, but I believe I can also perceive it in the questionnaire of one of my friends. At the time, he was going through a troublesome period in terms of love, and the way he responded to the questions shows this in my opinion: Liefde dwingt tot (onmogelijke) keuzes; de keuze voor verlatenheid brengt rust maar ook contingent verdriet27 (friend 1). It is, of course, like all of this, my own reading, and I will not elaborate on this further, but the oft-heard notion that one goes to the cinema to forget ones troubles may turn out not quite right: one brings them along and injects them into the film. The more recent and the more thoroughly these thoughts, memories, etc. at a certain time occupy a person, the stronger their influence on film experience. Similarly as in dreams, the days residues (Burgin 2004, 65), objects, encounters but also emotions, thoughts and so on that one experiences in a day, are inserted into or mix with the narrative and images of a film.

Details To conclude and exemplify this section, I would like to turn to two detail questions posed to the receiving audiences. These were (a) How do you relate the reoccurring roads to the general meaning of the film? and (b) There's a scene in which Carmella is crying and looks for comfort with Mike. Why is Carmella crying and why does she want Mike to stay at that moment?. The former was peculiarly univocal: nearly everyone thought of the roads in existential terms, as signifying various possible ways, choices. "Life is a highway..." [...]. I think cinema loves an open road - it's picturesque and it relates to the theme of homelessness (and wandering) or rootlessness. Maybe it's a nice symbol for an unrooted generation with various vague identity issues (EyesintheCupboard, AtEase). Indeed, life as a road has become such a common, almost dead metaphor in our culture, that is has become, as one friend noted, almost trivial. Of course, minor deviations did occur (linking the road to
27

Love forces us to make (impossible) decisions; opting for solitude brings about tranquillity, but also contingent sadness.

56

the street life, noting Mikes loneliness on the road or stating that Mike belongs to this road: it is his own private Idaho), but none of the interpretations were too far off from the general metaphor. By contrast, the second question had entirely different, sometimes even conflicting interpretations. Carmella, by the end of the film Scotts new girlfriend, starts crying in one scene in the presence of Mike, handing him la castagna, a chestnut. It is an odd scene, since as a friend noted, one at first may think Scott to have broken up with her, only to find out that she and Scott leave Mike in Italy in the very next scene. This breaking of ones expectations, leads to a revision of this particular scene and frankly, very few shared interpretations occurred: some thought she was in love and afraid that he was going to leave (CS 3, forum 1) or that she was afraid to leave Italy behind for America (friends 1, holebi 1, forum 1). Most interpretations were not shared at all. To name a few: afraid to hurt Mike, feeling used by Scott (evidence: I know how you feel Mike), remembering a past love affair, suspicious about his sexual orientation, even that she was crying because she knew Mikes mother was dead! Two people suggested that she might be happy, not sad, though one person explicitly started rejecting his own interpretation as unlikely. The chestnut, interestingly, had many significations as well: the fruit represents pregnancy, is a symbol for protection she offers Mike or as symbolizing her doubts about Scott: she loves his inside, but is uncertain about his outside, his image, appearance. I must say it was a joy to read the numerous creative answers people had to this very clear gap.

IV. The spark It is difficult to point at a spark in the midst of the jotted down experiences at my disposal, especially since so many people were new to the film, and as Barthes told us, it often takes a while before the punctum becomes visible when the studium has washed away. None of the first-time viewers had an indescribable, overwhelming experience and many of the other viewers, who had seen the film already and who might even consider it one of their favourites, did neither or abstracted away from it in their writing and rationalisation of the story. One person though did seem to have an experience I would perhaps associate with being sparked. He tried to put it into words, tried to explain it in length and hence, it is rather difficult to represent it all. He started off with a bit of personal information: I had a strong Christian upbringing. It taught me morals that to this day I still value, but one
aspect of the human experience that was usually demonized more than others was sexuality. I was sheltered from it for as long as I could be, which in turn led to a prudishness that carried 57

on for some time, relating to the films I watched especially. [...] When it came to films dealing with homosexuality, I was even stricter. This was to some degree the result of growing up in the conservative suburbs of America, where homophobia subtly sneaks up on you before you have time to realize it's a bad thing. But it was a far more personal issue with me, since in my early teenage years I had found out that my parents had divorced a few years earlier because my dad was gay. [...] I wanted nothing to do with it. (shadowpla7, AtEase)

In this context, it was very difficult to watch a film promoted as narrating about a group of gay hustlers, but one thing pulled him through: But here lies the power of film in full swing. I couldn't turn myself away from those pictures
of Idaho I had in my book. I think they were of Keanu and River on the motorbike, and that surreal image of River walking along that lone highway with a flower in his hand. Before I could even put into words why, I had a thing for a particular brand of imagery, which was confirmed when I instantly fell in love with David Lynch's work. This fit that bill, just from glancing at them you get the impression of an artist who wished to portray a very real story amidst absurdity. Of course I read about the plot, and the idea of a story about a friendship between young male hustlers still scared me, but with time [...] my mind was opening up. Just knowing that a story like this existed, where the protagonists weren't demonized and their reality was not harsh and grim, despite their backgrounds, gave me the idea that Mr. Van Sant was on the side of those among the youth that society cannot understand. (shadowpla7)

It is in this case very interesting that it were the stills, the selected set of photographs taken from the film that ignited his fascination and imagination. Just by glancing over these pictures he saw what the artist wanted to put forth. It was a strong feeling these pictures must have evoked, and it sparked off something that was perhaps not necessarily in the pictures, nor in the narrative of the film that he eventually saw, but that he perhaps inserted into them. It had such force, such spellbinding attraction that he overcame his fear of homosexuality, to see a film he would otherwise shun: I bit the bullet, and finally saw Idaho, and to this day I must give it
props for contributing to a change in me, and how I perceive the world. Or at least making me so 'open-minded' that I spent the rest of high school passive-aggressively despising every bigot who passed my way (shadowpla7). It might be in combination with the fascination for the stills, but the film did have a transformative power for him: it changed himself and his view upon the world.

58

C. Interpretive communities In conclusion, then, it does seem that in terms of watching a film the forum group is, indeed, the community that has the stronger influence on the experience. Unlike the other groups, the members have film as a goal, it is their primary subject within the group and they frequently discuss it. The Cultural Studies students cohere a little bit more than my friends do, mainly because in terms of films and culture my friends are rather scattershot: some rarely watch films, others different kinds of films, etc. With a section of them I often do discuss film and after seeing My Own Private Idaho we did evaporate into town to discuss the film a little more thoroughly, after which I am sure we formed a stronger interpretive community vis-vis the film than before: one of my friends, for example, mentioned the library scene (the one in which three different hustlers meet, and in which Scott and Mike encounter each other for the first time in the film) as one of his favourites, for the nice dialogues and a couple of friends agreed and said to have completely forgotten about it until then. Due to a more or less shared interest in culture, to the point that the films they said they loved were quite similar (many love recent alternative films from such directors as Nolan, Aronofsky, Jeunet, the Coen brothers, Almodvar, etc.) the Cultural Studies group seemed to have more interpretations in common.

De weg kiest de man

De man valt in slaap Dat is geen probleem: laat maar gebeuren28 (friend 1)

28

I could not hope to approach our own private Pessoa, but for those of you who do not speak our Dutch tongue: The road picks the man -, The man falls asleep-, Thats no problem: let it happen.

59

PART 3: CONCLUSIONS
3.1 The end of the road As mentioned earlier, it was not the purpose of this thesis to come to hard facts about film experience. At points I was not afraid to veer away from the absolutely certain to more unstable grounds, grounds that depended perhaps on associative linking (though, quite appropriate for the subject at hand) on my part. To connect, for example, the punctum, gap, spark and objet a, going from Barthes and Iser, to Burgin and Lacan, is not set in stone in any way. I wanted to describe the effect of this film experience and whatever struck me as recognizable in this endeavour, drawing to a large extent on my own experience. It is, then, not a relation of clear-cut deduction that leads through the various steps of my theoretical body (B does not necessarily follow from A), but of association, suggestion and above all, possible enhancement. Bringing together all these several, separate ideas may not entirely cover how things really are (a rather dubious notion to begin with), but I hope my body of research contains many gaps, many openings that may lead others to perceive something in a new light, and which moves them to correct, reject and construct different theories, different views on this (film) experience. It coincides with the notion of dialogue that is the focal point of the thesis: exchanging views, empathizing with the other and constructing ones own interpretation by means of the gap between the two positions (in this case: my text and you, the reader). Certain elements I was unable to touch upon in my case study: some sections of Burgins account of memory and Sobchacks body recognition were difficult to put into practice. I have given personal accounts to help the concretization of their ideas, though a film such as My Own Private Idaho, conveniently labelled an arthouse film, did not provoke many visible body reactions in the tested audience (unlike horror films), which I have tried to explain by means of visual, aural, in short: carnal impulses that are stronger or weaker, depending on the specific text. Problematic as well was probing the notion of the spark: I was lucky enough to have encountered two accounts of experience, one in the essays, one in the audience survey that resemble to an extent what I understand to be a spark. In addition, shadowpla7, the sparked forum member, posed an interesting question by asserting that it were the still pictures, not the moving film that he was drawn towards first and that contained a punctum to him. Maybe this punctum created a set of strategies and assumptions that influenced the film viewing, and it was perhaps the pictures, not the film that changed him. Or perhaps it was a combination of both the stills and the film. Even more problematic was

60

the question whether a spark is at all times purely individual or whether it could be shared, not afterwards through discussion, but upon experiencing the spark for the first time. Not only did I not have enough participants to be able to probe this potentially shared phenomenon, but I believe the tools, the manners in which I examined all these various topics, did not suite this particular subject. A larger scope is necessary, as well as a different method of inquiry, though it remains difficult to contact many people that have only just been sparked before they have already formed common, basic assumptions by discussing the text in certain interpretive communities. As it is, it remains a suggestion, an interesting possible route for, I hope, further investigation. In the end, I think it is clear that I did not so much care about the text in itself. It has become apparent that a text does not entirely exist only in our minds, and that, like Iser suggests, there is raw material that no interpreter signifies differently (everyone thought Mike and Scott were the main characters for example, based on their screen time, regardless of how much one loves, say, Hans), but those are hardly the interesting parts of the experience. It is obvious that I wanted to see people reflected in the mirrors of the text: human beings and their differences, similarities, deviations, peculiarities are what fascinate me, and I think all people who investigate (film) experience. No matter how utterly bizarre I thought some interpretations were, it was an immense joy to read through all the questionnaires and I would like to thank everyone who participated, since every sharing of interpretations is, to varying degrees, an act of exhibitionism. Some went even very far in sharing their personal experience to help a brother out for his thesis. So, again, thank you! Have a nice day!

Bibliography
Aden, R. C., Rahoi, R .L., & Beck, C. S. (1995). Dreams Are Born on Places Like This: The Process of Interpretive Community Formation at the Field of Dreams Site. Communication Quarterly, 43, 368-380. Adnum, M. (2005). My Own Private New Queer Cinema. Senses of Cinema, 34, online: http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2005/feature-articles/new_queer_cinema/ Aitkin, I. (2001). European Film Theory and Cinema: A Critical Introduction. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press. Anderson, A. (2009). iek in tekst en beeld. Een vergelijking van Slavoj ieks Looking Awry en The Perverts Guide to Cinema. Leuven: KULeuven. Bacon, H. (2005). Synthesizing Approaches in Film Theory. The Journal of Moving Image Studies, 61

vol. 4, 1-14. Baetens, J. & Hesling W. (2008). De pluriforme filmkijker: een kwalitatief publieksonderzoek naar de receptie van 'Lumumba'. Tijdschrift voor mediageschiedenis, 11 (1), 22-66. Barthes, R. (1981). Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography [trans. by Richard Howard]. New York: Hill and Wang. Burgin, V. (2004). The Remembered Film. London: Reaktion Books. Burgin, V. (2009). The Eclipse of Time. Cinma & Cie. Internation Film Studies Journal, vol. IX, no. 12, Spring, 79-89. Dant, T. & Gilloch, G. (2002). Pictures of the Past: Benjamin and Barthes on Photography. European Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 5, no. 1, 5-25. Darke, C. (2010). Les Enfants et Les Cinphiles: the Moment of Epiphany in Spirit of the Beehive. Cinema Journal, 49, no. 9, Winter, 152-158. De Bruyn, B. (2006). The Anthropological Criticism of Wolfgang Iser and Hans Belting. Image and Narrative, vol. 7, no. 2, http://www.imageandnarrative.be/inarchive/iconoclasm/debruyn.htm de Certeau, M. (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ellsworth, E. (1986). Illicit Pleasures: Feminist Spectators and Personal Best. Issues in Feminist Film Criticism. Ed. by Patricia Erens. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990, 183-96. Fish, S. (1980). Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Ford, T. (2011). Television Dramas as Memory Screens. Image and Narrative, vol. 12, no. 2, 66-82. Fuery, P. (2000). New Developments in Film Theory. London: Macmillan Press. Hall, S. (1973). Encoding / Decoding. The Cultural Studies Reader. Ed. by Simon During. New York: Routledge, 1993, 90-103. Homer, W. I. (1998). Visual Culture: a New Paradigm. American Art, vol. 12, N. 1, 6-9 Iser, W. (1972). The Reading Process: a Phenomenological Approach. New Literary History, vol. 3, 2, On Interpretation: I, 279-299. Iser, W. (1978). The Act of Reading. A Theory of Aesthetic Response. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Jauss, H. R. (1985). The Identity of the Poetic Text in the Changing Horizon of Understanding. Reception Study. From Literary Theory to Cultural Studies. Ed. by J. L. Machor & Ph. Goldstein. New York and London: Routledge, 2001, 827. Jenkins, H. (2000). Reception Theory and Audience Research: The Mystery of the Vampire's Kiss. Reinventing Film Studies. Ed. by Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams. London: Arnold, 165-182, or online: http://web.mit.edu/cms/People/henry3/vampkiss.html Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press. Johnson, M. & G. Lakoff. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 62

Jullier, L. (2002). Cinma et Cognition. LHarmattan. Katz, E. & Liebes, T. (1990). Interacting with Dallas. Cross Cultural Reading of American TV. Canadian Journal of Communication, vol. 15, no. 1, 45-65. Keysers, C. & Gazzola, V. (2010). Social Neuroscience: Mirror Neurons Recorded in Humans. Current Biology, vol. 20, N. 8, R353-354. Mackenzie Hoover, T. (2007). Leaving Normal. Reverse Shot, 21, online: http://www.reverseshot.com/article/my_own_private_idaho_0 Manlove, C. T. (2007). Visual Drive and Cinematic Narrative: Reading Gaze Theory in Lacan, Hitchcock and Mulvey. Cinema Journal, vol. 46, no. 3, Spring, 83-108. Martin, M. (2007). Mystic River. Reverse Shot, 21, online: http://www.reverseshot.com/article/my_own_private_idaho Martinez, D. (2008). Nothing to See: The Emptiness of the Image. Unpublished paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, May 22, 2008. Mitchell, J. W. T. (1986). Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: University Chicago Press. Mitchell, J. W. T. (1994). Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: University Chicago Press. Monson, I. (2008). Hearing, Seeing and Perceptual Agency. Critical Inquiry, vol. 34, N. S2, 36-58. Murphy, G. (2002). The Big Book of Concepts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Murphy, R. (2004). The Act of Viewing: Iser, Bordwell and the Post-Theory debates in contemporary film studies. Comparative Critical Studies 1, 1-2, 119-145. Ortega, M. (2008). Wounds of Self: Experience, Word, Image and Identity. Journal of Speculative Philosophy, vol. 22, no. 4, 235-247. Shively, J. (1992). Cowboys and Indians: Perceptions of Western Films Among American Indians and Anglos. American Socialist Review, vol. 57, no. 6, 725-734. Sobchack, V. (1992). The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Sobchack, V. (2002). What My Fingers Knew: The Cinesthetic Subject, or Vision in the Flesh. Senses of Cinema 5, online: http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/00/5/fingers.html Stadler, H. & Sobchack, V. (1994). Review of The Address of the Eye [with a response by Sobchack]. Journal of Film and Video, vol. 46, N. 1, 61-66. Tomasello, M. (2000). First steps towards a usage-based theory of language acquisition. Cognitive Linguistics, vol. 11, 1-2, 61-82.

Websites
AtEase: http://board.ateaseweb.com//index.php?showforum=45

63

Supplement 1: the questionnaires A. Dutch (1) Geslacht: m/v Leeftijd: Beroep: Opleiding (ook indien nog aan de gang):

Enkele van je voornaamste interesses?

2. Hoe vond je de film ? - - - -

kk

3. Had je de film voordien al gezien ? 4. Kende je de film, of de regisseur (Gus Van Sant), al ? Zo ja, hoe? 5. Is dit een soort film die je uit jezelf zou kijken? Wat zijn een aantal van je lievelingsfilm en/of genres? 6. Zijn er centrale conflicten of belangrijke themas uit de film je bijgebleven? Welke? 7. Welke aspecten van de film vond je interessant? En welke minder interessant? 8. Heb een (minder?) favoriete scne? 9. Wat vond je van de 2 hoofdpersonages? Voor wie had je meer sympathie, en waarom? 10. Wat vond je van het personage Hans Kline, de Duitser? 11. Deden n of meerdere personages je aan iets of iemands anders denken (uit bv. een andere film, uit echte leven, etc.)?

[Detailvragen] 12. Wegen duiken herhaaldelijk in de film op. Op welke manier zijn ze volgens jou belangrijk voor de film? 13. Wanneer en waarom besluiten Scott en Mike erop uit te trekken, naar Idaho? 14. Bij het kampvuur biecht Mike zijn liefde voor Scott op. Had jij voordien al een voorgevoel van die gevoelens en zo ja, waaruit maakte je dat dan op? 15. Hoe interpreteer jij beelden die af en toe terugkomen zoals die van de vissen of het plattelandshuis? 16. In een scene op het platteland zie je Carmella even wenen. Hoe komt het dat ze weent, volgens jou? 17. Hoe interpreteer jij het einde van de film?

64

B. English 1. Age? Gender? Profession? Which educational degree have you taken/are you currently taking? Nationality? A number of your personal interests? 2. How did you like the film? [1 to 5, 1 being horrible, 5 being amazing] 3. Did you see the film before? 4. Were you familiar with the film, and/or the director, before? 5. Name a number of your favourite films and/or genres 6. Which are, to you, the film's central conflicts and thema's? 7. Which aspects of the film did you like most? And which did you like least? 8. Is there a particular scene you love the most and if so, which one? 9. What did you think of the two main characters? Which of the two did you sympathize with most and why? 10. What did you think of the character of Hans Kline? 11. Did someone or something in the film remind you of something or someone else (in, for example, another movie, or in real life, or ...)?

Detail questions 12. How do you relate the reoccuring roads to the general meaning of the film? 13. When and why did Scott and Mike decide to take off to Idaho? 14. What did you think of the campfire scene and did you see this revelation coming on beforehand? 15. What is your interpretation, if you interpret it at all, of the reoccuring images of the fishes? 16. There's a scene in which Carmella is crying and looks for comfort with Mike. Why is Carmella crying and why does she want Mike to stay at that moment? 17. How do you interpret the ending of the film?

65