A new historiographical tradition has emerged which looks at the shifting
relations between narrative and spectacle within different genre traditions.
I would recommend starting with any of the essays Tom Gunning has written
on early cinema as "a cinema of attractions," i.e. as a cinema which
is self-consciously about spectacle rather than narrative and contrast
that with Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson's CLASSICAL HOLLYWOOD CINEMA, which
stresses the centrality of narrative to Hollywood films starting in the early
teens. You might trace this through work on the musical, as others have
suggested, by Rick Altman or Jane Feuer or the more recent works on Busby
Berkeley. (Now there was someone who understood the power of spectacle).
There is good stuff on spectacle in pornography, starting with Linda Williams
HARD CORE. Williams had a great essay in Film Quarterly about three or four
years ago that looked at the differing functions of spectacle in horror,
melodrama, and pornography which is worth a look.
        I am most familiar with how these issues play themselves out in
comedy. The vaudeville tradiiton out of which  many of the key comic stars
of the silent and early sound period emerged was primarily focused on issues
of spectacle and performance. Comedy was as a result slow to respond to the
pressures towards classical narrative construction shaping Hollywood films in
general. However, the so-called "golden age" features of Chaplin, Keaton, etc.
involve a careful ballancing of spectcle and narrative demands, with Lloyd's
films subordinating spectacle almost totally to narrative (while offering
pretty amazing spectacle at the same time -- so the film becomes the story
of a protagonist whose goal is to climb a building -- the goals are
spectacular, but there is no point when the spectacle functions without
clear narrative motivation.) The heavy recruitment of NY entertainers in
the early sound period meant  a new shift in this ballance resulting in
the very fragmented, performance oriented films of the Marx Brothers or
Wheeler and Woolsey and so the story continues. This history is traced in
the AFI Reader, CLASSICAL HOLLYWOOD COMEDY, by a number of writers and the
book cites many many sources of information on this issue. (Truth in
advertising forces me to concede that I am one of the editors of that
collection.)
   In my opinion, the issue of spectacle has been one of the most interesting
and enlivening topics in contemporary film history/criticism because it helps
us to build a fuller aesthetic appreciation of genres and texts, which as
Lang Thompson noted, are devalued in the traditional cultural hierarchy but
which have played major roles int he commercial success of the cinema. In my
opinion, the most interesting films in the world cinema today are coming out
of Hong Kong, but we can't talk about those films and why they are important
if we restrict our vocabulary to purely narrative considerations. Woo, Chan and
the others often suggest or evoke narratives and character relations (often
quite complex ones) by appeal to generic conventions, while spectacle -- the
physical spectacle of combat and the emotional spectacle of melodramatic
excess and the flamboyant spectacle of stunts and slapstick comedy and the
spectacle of odd pop performances, all mixed into one film -- dominate
the screen time and the audience fascination. When you talk about a Chan
film, you are less likely to describe the plot thn the stunts, yet Chan's
plots, while generically structured, have very elaborate plot and character
relations. We need to know why the aesthetics of these films push us towards
more attention to spectacle than plot and at the same time, what functions
these plots play in motivating the action or justifying our interest in
the physical mayhem. I am nowhere near grasping everything that is going on
in these films, but I watch each new one with fascination and excitement. The
same issues are posed by Japanese animae, where often audiences watch the
films with no translated subtitles and only a shakey grasp of the plot and
with limited knowledge of the culture, yet the visual interest, the spectacle,
compells them. At MIT, the Animae society shows things regularly -- marathon
sessions which can last all night -- and the attendance is quite strong. I
don't think we can explain that interest by reference to plot; it is the
spectacle that hooks you.
--Henry Jenkins
 
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