PhD Oral Exam - Samantha Wilson, Film and Moving Image Studies

When studying for a doctoral degree (PhD), candidates submit a thesis that provides a critical review of the current state of knowledge of the thesis subject as well as the student’s own contributions to the subject. The distinguishing criterion of doctoral graduate research is a significant and original contribution to knowledge.

Once accepted, the candidate presents the thesis orally. This oral exam is open to the public.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the reversal of object and image in popular and philosophical attitudes towards nature by tracing the aesthetic and epistemological role of the “view” through a series of prescriptive texts and screen technologies which became increasingly popular in Great Britain within the second half of the 19th century. These include early 18th century topographical literature, Romantic and picturesque tour guides written in the early 19th century, mid 19th century painted panoramas, and, finally, scenic filmmaking in the first two decades of the 20th century. Underlying each was a persistent anxiety over where spectator and natural phenomena should meet. The project uses this discursive lineage to analyze the role of the early scenic film in reconstructing the expectations of nature appreciation amongst working class audiences. The project proposes a shift away from the “cinema of attractions” model (Gaudreault & Gunning, 1989) which claims that the first decade of cinema marked a clear departure from traditional models of spectatorship, and, instead argues that scenic filmmaking represented a culmination and problematization of debates which had originally surfaced well over a century prior with the emergence and proliferation of the sublime and its associated state of astonishment.

The natural sublime was a product of various socioeconomic changes that occurred throughout the 17th and 18th century, like increased modes and opportunities to travel domestically and to the European continent. The aesthetic category was largely depended on a specific mode of spectatorial address. Unlike traditional forms of appreciation like beauty, which depended upon detached contemplation, the sublime was only accessible at the precarious place where immersion and detachment met. Here specific vantage points constructed an interplay between traditionally opposed spectatorial states. The aesthetic category seemed, in fact, completely counter intuitive to both the other categories valued by the period and the stability provided by the neo-classical frame, and yet this precariousness only enhanced its culture and conceptual cache. The concept eventually initiated its own cultural industry associated with nature appreciation which placed the problem of the frame at the centre of its popular discourse.