Expérience hétérotopique du cinéma : approches théoriques et historiographiques du cinéma en salle
This thesis explores how theories of moving image reception that have or have had a significant impact on the development of film studies as a discipline are centered around the movie theater and on “movie-going” practices. The analysis of a representative set of theoretical and historiographical approaches to the cinematic experience allows for the definition of key principles that unearth various forms of mediation at play in the movie-going experience. Jean-Louis Baudry’s “apparatus theory” and Christian Metz’s notion of the “imaginary signifier” both suggest a theory of movie-going experience stressing the transparency effects on spectators of the mediation of certain architectural and technological aspects of movie theaters and focusing on the symbolic and institutional nature of this form of mediation. In contrast, Roger Odin’s semio-pragmatic approach and New Cinema History’s critical historiography (as theorized by Robert C. Allen and Richard Maltby) conceptualize the opacity of a complex set of sensory, relational, social, and economic mediations occurring in movie theaters, which last during the entire experience of the audience in these exhibition sites. By unspooling the complexity of the theoretical stances above mentioned, this thesis moves towards the definition of a heterotopic cinema experience formulated from within the context of film studies.
movie theaters spectatorship cinematic experience film reception apparatus theory imaginary signifier semio-pragmatic approach sociality of cinema film exhibition intermediality