A genealogy of the constitution of the cinema spectator citizen (1888-1930)

Abstract

This postdoctoral project presented here seeks to carry out, in the wake of Foucault's theories, an analytical look at the ethical and political constitution of film spectator in Brazil, through a genealogical analysis of the relationship between the police and the contention of vagrancy, in the temporal arc that goes from 1888 to 1930. More specifically, it is about to put into perspective the emergence of cinema as a non-formal education strategy through which the citizen/spectator was forged as a consequence of the safety devices manufactured and disseminated aiming to regulate the conduct of population segments seen as deviant. This means that the film spectator will not be pictured as a matrix of meaning of the experience that one can and should enjoy in face of film objects. Quite the contrary. What is at stake is the effort to carry out an approach to the constitution of the spectator from a historical perspective of the governance mechanisms of self and others involved there. From this analytical gesture, one gains distance from the internal history of cinema, highlighting the eccentric force vectors from the self-understanding of film watching in contemporary times, hoping that the spectator may be, to that extent, understood as an intricate object resulting from extra cinematographic processes.