Event

Jean Ma

Leaving the Movie Theater, Again

The title of this talk refers to a canonical text on cinema spectatorship. In “Leaving the Movie Theater,” Roland Barthes parts company from his fellow travelers in apparatus theory as he considers “another way of going to the movies.” This way is defined not by captivity to the fascinating illusion of the projected image on the screen, but rather by a process of “coming unglued” and peeling away from the image, as a dissociated, distracted, and soporific mode of attention takes over. It is such a half-awake, half-sleeping state that the contemporary filmmaker and artist Apichatpong Weerasethakul proposes as the ideal way in which to experience his moving image works. His 20-hourlong installation SLEEPCINEMAHOTEL fleshes out this stance with a material framework designed to literally put its viewers to sleep. For both Barthes and Apichatpong, to sleep is to become, in the latter’s words, “part of a different kind of cinema in the making.” This paper develops the idea of sleepy spectatorship as productive encounter with the projected image. To admit this possibility is to relinquish a definition of cinema as a permanently fixed sequence of images and sounds, while opening up the question of exactly where the viewing experience begins and ends. A discourse of narcotic spectatorship has long haunted the history of movies; to reanimate the sleepy spectator at the present juncture is to answer to the challenge of rethinking moving image spectatorship beyond the theater. 

Jean Ma is the Mr. and Mrs. Hung Hing-ying Professor in the Arts at the University of Hong Kong. Her books include Melancholy Drift: Marking Time in Chinese Cinema; Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography (with Karen Redrobe); and Sounding the Modern Woman: The Songstress in Chinese Cinema. She is the coeditor of “Music, Sound, and Media,” a book series at the University of California Press. Her recent monograph At the Edges of Sleep: Moving Images and Somnolent Spectators (available in an open-source digital edition) was a finalist for the 2023 Kraszna-Krausz Book Awards and the 2023 Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Prize.