Thaggert, Miriam. “Divided Images: Black Female Spectatorship and John Stahl’s Imitation of Life.” African American Review Vol. 32, No. 3 (Autumn 1998): pp. 481-491. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/3042248>.

 

When discussing cinema, black women turn to Imitation of Life because it provides a unique intersection between feminist film theory and black female spectatorship.  Black women occupy a space closer to the center than most other Hollywood movies, enabling black feminist discussion concerning the portrayals and reception of black women in film.  Thaggert makes reference to bell hooks, stating that the film initially caused her to stop going to the movies, yet as an adult it helped her form an “oppositional gaze” with which to question the imaging practices of Hollywood cinema.  hooks’s term suggest a distinction from the white masculinitist gaze. Unlike white men, black women can neither identify with the white male hero nor the white woman. Instead, they must look beyond what is presented to them and view films from a critical standpoint that she calls “an oppositional gaze.” Black female viewers of Imitation of Life, the author argues, can pose questions, such as “What pleasure is available for the black female viewers when the valued black maternal figure is recoded into the mammy, a woman who mothers others for economic survival?” or “How can a black viewer identify with a character who constantly rejects a black racial identity?”  Throughout the film, Delilah and People are offered as spectacles, making it hard to identify with them.  Delilah is easily recognizable as a descendant of “Aunt Jemima,” leaving  little opportunity to engage with her when she is portrayed as a pancake-flipping mammy. “The more commodified her appearance, the more distance exists between her and the spectator,” notes the author. 

 

The article goes on to discuss the role of Peola for the black female viewer.  Unlike Delilah, black women may identify with Peola, as hooks suggests, not because she looks for whiteness, but because she looks at whiteness and does not find a black self there. However, the fact that she is light-skinned may have created other dilemmas. The complexities of dark-skinned women trying to identify with the light-skinned women that Hollywood favored in its films create other levels of identification and/or resistance that have yet to be explored.  In the end, Imitation of Life offers two divergent representation of blackness, both based on stereotypes: the mammy and the mulatto.  Imitation’s  methods of imaging black women produce a complex process of identification and resistance for black female spectators.

Architectural Visions of Lyric Theater and Spectatorship in Late-Eighteenth-Century France, by Downing A. Thomas
Representations © 1995

Friedberg’s 2006 book discusses the recent emergence of new ideas on visual media perspective through the concept of the “window.” The computer plays host to the idea of presenting several distinct, unrelated displays to the viewer at once. These windows have become the marker of a multi-perceptual outlook. Friedberg traces the development of the concept of a “window” throughout time, with the word becoming a metaphor for one of an infinite number of screens now available to computer users everywhere. The metaphor, she says, implies a delimitation of a view with variable size. She goes on to examine the window in metaphoric, architectural, and virtual registers. All three views emphasize a framed look at a particular subject; spectatorship plays a major role in all three parts. Ultimately, she examines how computer windows have changed these traditional views on spectatorship, demanding a viewer who can handle multiple, adjacent, and postperspectival consumption.

    Her book is unique because it is thus far the most comprehensive view on this very specific topic of screens and windows. She lays out a history behind her theory of “windows,” incorporating the related concepts of perspective, frame, spectatorship, and identification. Though the history gets a bit heavy at times, it’s an incredibly thorough background and a great one to have when considering spectatorship and interaction in the digital age. I also appreciated the fact that she included a section discussing the physical aspects of screens as seen through the writings of Paul Virilio. This is the most thorough discussion I could find on the physical attributes of the screen itself, and the roles it plays as both a boundary for and a provider of information.

    The end sections of the book interest me the most because they discuss new media, and the future of new technologies in terms of Friedberg’s “virtual windows” theory. Sequential narratives here make way for the multiple and simultaneous, within one device as well as among many at once. This can be applied to devices like a PDA, which allows for instant messaging while e-mailing and writing reports; the new iPhone will also hold such capabilities, providing an update on the iPod (which, interestingly, doesn’t provide multiple virtual windows in the same device, but rather allows you to use that while using other small devices). These technologies still differ a great deal, at this moment, from televisions and the cinematic experience, and thus Friedberg’s theory can be directly applied to my paper topic.