“We have needed a book like this for decades: a new understanding of film spectatorship in light of home video. Caetlin Benson-Allott offers a smart and often unexpected reconsideration of watching movies on small screens that ingeniously brings together film theory, industrial history, and horror flicks, weaving a complex yet crystalline account. This ambitious book deserves to be a new foundational text. “ —Lucas Hilderbrand, author of Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright

"...Incredibly engaging and compelling in its grappling with an underrepresented area of study that richly deserves the kind of full-bodied treatment this author gives it. Hats off."—Barbara Klinger, author of Beyond The Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies, and the Home

Caetlin Benson-Allott is Assistant Professor of English and Film and Media Studies at Georgetown University.

Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens

Video Spectatorship from VHS to File Sharing

By Caetlin Benson-Allott

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2013 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-27512-6

Contents

List of Illustrations, ix,
Acknowledgments, xi,
Introduction: Opening Up to Home Video, 1,
1 Distributing the Dead: Video Spectatorship in the Movies of George A. Romero, 25,
2 Addressing the "New Flesh": Videodrome's Format War, 70,
3 Reprotechnophobia: Putting an End to Analog Abjection with The Ring, 102,
4 Going, Going, Grindhouse: Simulacral Cinematicity and Postcinematic Spectatorship, 132,
5 Paranormal Spectatorship: Faux Footage Horror and the P2P Spectator, 167,
Conclusion: Power Play, 203,
Notes, 209,
Bibliography, 259,
Filmography, Videography, and Gameography, 281,
Index, 289,

CHAPTER 1

Distributing the Dead

Video Spectatorship in the Movies of George A. Romero

Movies construct the video spectator differently than they do the cinematic spectator; that is the fundamental claim of this chapter, the thesis I set out to prove by examining how one filmmaker altered his presentation of the same subject for different popular distribution platforms. Critics have been quick to affirm that movies look different on video and that filmmakers reimagined many of their formal and narrative conventions during the home video era, but no one has provided the close readings that would identify what these shifts actually look like, how they alter the viewer's relationship to the motion picture and reimagine the spectator. Viewers may intuitively recognize that movies of the home video era address them differently than their cinematic predecessors do, but film theorists have not yet analyzed the nature of that change or how it happened. Therefore, this chapter systematically works through the construction of the spectator in one director's oeuvre over forty years to demonstrate how new motion picture apparatuses bring forth new spectators.

All spectatorship studies—from the 1970s apparatus theory through the 1980s and 1990s reception surveys and contemporary material culture criticism—rest on the abiding assumptions that movies try to elicit specific affects or responses in a viewer and that they do so by manipulating the apparatus through which they anticipate meeting her. Hence, Jean-Louis Baudry, Christian Metz, Laura Mulvey, and the other 1970s screen theorists all appeal to the basic architecture of the movie theater—the location of the projector, the darkness of the auditorium, the size of the screen—to explain how this space constructs its spectator. When subsequent scholars challenge the 1970s theorists' "master narratives" and argue that some audiences actively resist ideological indoctrination, they implicitly affirm the idea that motion pictures exploit their form and format to direct the spectatorial response. Platform studies and new media critics likewise focus on the unique methods digital image productions offer for exciting the viewer. This last approach inspires the methodology for this chapter, but rather than focusing on innovations in motion picture production, I examine how innovations in motion picture exhibition have changed the way filmmakers imagine and address the spectator. What one can show influences what one can say, so the effect of video platforms on filmmaking matters not only because they influence production (as Janet Wasko, Frederick Wasser, and David Bordwell have shown) but also because they shape the transmission of ideas. By examining how the movies' production design, cinematography, and editing anticipate video distribution, we begin to recognize new patterns in how they interpellate the spectator. By reading these formal innovations in conversation with the narratives they convey, we can see how filmmakers negotiate story, platform, and form to achieve a particular response in a viewer.

Such an account cannot limit itself to movies produced after the video revolution, however, at least not if it hopes to convey a sense of how the drive for "videoability" changed the spectator. To do that, its analysis needs to include movies made both before and after video profits eclipsed box-office receipts, while simultaneously controlling for as many other production variables as possible—such as director, subject, and genre. Hence my turn to George A. Romero and his zombie oeuvre. Romero made six zombie movies between 1968 and 2009, and this corpus collectively proves that each new apparatus constructs a new spectator. There are two specific reasons Romero's zombie oeuvre is ideal for this study of video spectatorship. First, the director's forty-year hexalogy follows the same subject in the same genre across no less than five dominant distribution platforms, which facilitates close readings attentive to formal changes. Second, each movie exploits the commonly perceived strengths of its contemporaneous platform to involve the spectator in critiques of the mass media, US military policy, racism, and classism. Although these polemics emerge most obviously in the movies' narratives, as David Bordwell observes, "style is not simply window-dressing draped over a script; it is the very flesh of the work." Romero's zombie movies politicize their spectators by reflecting reputed possibilities and limitations of the apparatus dominating motion picture distribution at the time of production. In 1985, for instance, Romero's Day of the Dead reinterpreted zombie attacks for VHS, a lower-resolution platform that was dominating horror distribution in the mid-1980s. By racking focus on its attacking ghouls, Day transforms the zombie from the lumbering pest of yore to a threat based on limited visibility to suit its new apparatus. They are slow, those zombies, but you have to see them coming, and on an analog video a viewer might not.

Such practical attention to distribution markets and to changes in the motion picture apparatus marks Romero's entire zombie oeuvre. Because Romero undertook his first movie, Night of the Living Dead (1968), as an entrepreneurial project to transform himself from a televisual filmmaker (of commercials, primarily) into a feature-film director, Night was shot with the drive-in market and spectator in mind. It also interrogates celluloid as a platform, challenging its capacity to record and represent violence in order to reveal the political limitations of visual media and help the spectator question her insularity from recorded traumas. Romero maintains a similar attention to exhibition and the motion picture apparatus throughout his career as an independent filmmaker (albeit one occasionally hired by the studios for individual projects) and in the rest of his zombie movies: Dawn of the Dead (1978), Day of the Dead (1985), Land of the Dead (2005), Diary of the Dead (2007), and Survival of the Dead (2009). Because of the temporal breaks between each of Romero's sequels, each had to be sold through a different exhibition platform; thus, each reflects a different motion picture apparatus and imagines a different spectator. Dawn went out to the multiplexes and midnight-movie circuit that characterized 1970s cinema going; Day premiered in independent movie theaters but found its funding and its audience through VHS; Land opened in theaters that were understood to be merely advance advertising for a DVD release; and Diary came out to a...