IT LOOKS AT YOU
The Returned Gaze of Cinema
Wheeler Winston Dixon
This is a study of the "returned gaze" from the
cinema screen, demonstrating that the films that we watch
watch us, guide us, control our gaze, and enforce societal
codes.
"I think this is a work of both brilliant synthesis and
stunning originality." -- David Desser, University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
This book is a study of one of the most insidious and
pervasive phenomena in the study and reception of cinema: the
"returned gaze" from the screen, in which the audience is
actually surveilled by the film being projected on the
screen. Rather than the usual process of watching a film, in
those films which return the gaze of the viewer, the film
looks at us, confronting our voyeur's embrace of the
spectacle it presents. The book cites examples as diverse as
Andy Warhol's Vinyl, Laurel and Hardy two-reel comedies, the
films of Jean-Marie Straub, Jean-Luc Godard, Roberto
Rossellini, and Wesley E. Barry's Creation of the Humanoids.
It also discusses the history of the returned gaze in video,
pornography, surveillance systems, and the related plastic
arts.
192 pages March 1995
Paperback ISBN 0-7914-2340-9
Hardcover ISBN 0-7914-2339-5
About the Author: Wheeler Winston Dixon is the James Ryan Endowed Professor of Film Studies, Professor of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Coordinator of the Film Studies Program at UNL, and with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Editor-in-Chief of the Quarterly Review of Film and Video. His newest books include A History of Horror (Rutgers University Press, 2010), Film Noir and The Cinema of Paranoia (Rutgers University Press and Edinburgh University Press, 2009), and A Short History of Film, written with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster (Rutgers University Press and I.B. Tauris, 2008). As a filmmaker, his complete works are in the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art, following a career retrospective at MoMA in 2003.