The Lone Spectator Phenomena: Video on Demand Versus Baudry’s Apparatus Theory

In his 1974 work, Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematic Apparatus, Jean Louis Baudry argues that conditions under which cinematic effects are produced influence the spectator more than the individual film itself. Baudry formulates his theories on the cinematic apparatus of the 1970s, theatrical projection, conceptualizing the cinematic experience as continuous and uninterrupted from start to finish. However, the rise of new technologies mean that the vast majority of film experiences today take place on small, personal devices such as laptops, smartphones and tablets. Now, rather than committing to a collective, uninterrupted movie experience a theatre, the spectator is often alone, mobile and distracted. This means that the film experience becomes fragmented, and changes not only the way films are understood, but it also the way they are made. Cinema isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, but we might expect a splintering in the industry. If filmmakers expect that audiences will be watching films on their personal smaller screens, we could see films tailored specifically for either the cinema or smaller personal devices.

As an art form, cinema has been dominated by the idea of a large, public screen from the start. The multiplex is nearly as old as film itself, but with each year, stats suggest American moviegoers are favoring online viewing to the box office as streaming continues to grow in popularity. Increasingly, more and more spectators are willing to watch a movie on a personal device with their headphones plugged as an alternative to the silver screen.

In the face of new technologies and new online exhibition platforms such as Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime, there has been pushback from directors like Spike Lee and David Lynch, who are angered by the idea that their films are being viewed from personal devices. Many claim personal devices limit the visual effects of a film. For example, action and epic genre movies translate to the small screen particularly poorly. Some recent examples include The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014,) Noah (2014) and Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), but their spectacular visual style goes all the way back to early action dramas like DW Griffith’s Intolerance (1916).

No doubt, the dazzling scale of these movies can only be appreciated in the cinema, where their makers intended them to be viewed. Baudry describes this traditional cinematic experience best when he famously compares the spectator’s position in the multiplex to Plato’s cave allegory, where prisoners are bound in a position and forced to watch shadows on a cave wall. According to Baudry, the moviegoer is ‘chained’ projection surface.

From this stance, the relationship between spectator and film is interdependent on the spectator’s inability to break free from it. When viewing a film on a personal device, however, the ability to break free from the screen is an accepted part of the viewing experience. Where Baudry conceptualizes the screen as an expansion of the image into the auditorium space, personal devices present a screen that serves primarily as a visual container to frame the image. Some spectators may even stream films in one window on their device and multitask in another.

Because films are now being watched on multiple mediums, the message is likely to vary between each one. When a film is mediated through a personal device over which the spectator has total control, the spectator assumes control over the narrative. We can now “time-jump” with ease and fast-forward, rewind, or pause the film without ridicule from other audience members. This means that the pace of a film can be tailored to the our own individual desires. A film with a running time of three hours may be viewed and reviewed in fragments over the course of several days.

The fact that the cinematic apparatus is moving away from theatrical projection as described by Baudry doesn’t mean that cinemas will die out, but it may mean that the multiplex will host wholly different kinds of films than laptops and phones in the near future. Some kinds of films are suitable to be watched on a laptop or tablet, and the video on demand market continues to grow—it’s expected to be worth $61.40 billion by 2019.

As video on demand market continues to expand, online services like Netflix are producing more and more original films. At the same time, these companies acknowledge that their platforms do not match traditional cinema experiences. Netflix’s chief content officer Ted Sarandos is open about this. In one interview he even compared watching a film online to watching a sports game on TV rather than at the stadium. Sarandos’ view is reflected in Netflix self-produced content. Netflix original tend to be entertaining or informative, rather than cinematic. Many of these films are comedies such as The Fundamentals of Caring (2016), and The Ridiculous 6 (2015), or documentaries like Fearless (2016) or I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead (2016).

One could argue that these films are television films, as they tend to use lighting and framing are more akin to what you would usually find on television. A 2015 article in Filmmaker Magazine distinguishes between the two styles production. Even with the emergence of high budget, “cinematic” programs like Game of Thrones, The Wire, and Breaking Bad, there are still traditional qualities of the feature film format that that make it distinctive from television. The television image is primarily a medium tight-shot format, as wide shots tend to lose their power on a small screen, and they tend to release tension. For this reason, television narratives are mainly driven by dialogue rather than the image. Furthermore, where cinema narratives demand active participation on the part of the spectator in the creation of meaning, television narratives tend to compensate for the fact that the viewer is passive and even distracted. It’s likely that television style films will find a natural home on video on demand platforms, which are now competing to capture cable television audiences.

In this way, the phenomenon of the lone spectator using a personal device is changing the way we conceptualize film. The cinematic experience is no longer akin to Plato’s cave as described by Baudry, and filmmakers are adapting. Different mediums favor different kinds of filmmaking, and, furthermore, watching a film alone means the very idea of a film takes on new meaning. As an audience, our understanding of film seems to be headed in two directions: on the one hand, the cinema is understood as a traditional sequence of events and spectacle that follow in order to form a narrative; on the other, the cinema is becoming another window on the screens of our personal devices, left to compete with the other tabs of our virtual lives, its meaning free to be shaped, bent and warped to our individual preferences.