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 ---- To signoff SCREEN-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF SCREEN-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]