This dissertation seeks to identify the purposive force that determines the form and function of commercial stereophony in capitalist society, and the ways in which this force affects the productive and consumptive activities of stereophonic practitioners and listening audiences. Employing dialectical materialism, I examine three social processes that either historically established or continue to influence the mediative potential of stereophonic sound: the invention and industrial standardization of the stereophonic apparatus, the professionalization of stereophonic practitioners, and the social construction of stereophonic listeners as a mass consuming audience. These interrelated studies reveal perceived economic necessity as the dominant causal force that governs all stereophonic processes and practices under the capitalist economic system. Informed by my chapter findings, which complicate Karl Marx’s materialist base and superstructure schema – a coarse conceptual abstraction of capitalist production, I construct a more refined and flexible schematic diagram that offers a distinctive bird’s eye view of the universal interplay between capitalists, producers and consumers. This novel conceptual schematic depicts productive forces and productive relations as coterminous expressions of the dual-purpose of capitalism: to produce surplus-value for accumulation by capitalists, and to do so in perpetuity.

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You Had to Have Been There challenges the role of fetishistic materiality throughout Film Studies using the history of New York underground film and video production from 1965 to 1985. It focuses on four situations of underground film and video production and exhibition: the relationship between Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground's Exploding Plastic Inevitable and the Film-makers' Cinematheque, the screening of Michael Snow's Rameau's Nephew by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen at Anthology Film Archives, the production of work by Ed Emshwiller, Nam June Paik, Steina and Woody Vasulka, Bill Viola, and other artists at WNET's Television Laboratory, and the exhibition of No Wave Cinema by Beth and Scott B, Lizzie Borden, Vivienne Dick, John Lurie, James Nares, and others at Max's Kansas City, the Mudd Club, and the New Cinema. This project uses the above exhibition sites to argue for the importance of liveness and presence in recording media, considering the affect of liveness not only on our definitions of cinema, but also on the relationship between cinema and historiography. While a canon of experimental film has emerged within Film Studies, determined by the alignment of experimental filmmakers and the academy, this dissertation carves out an alternate corpus of works screened in non-traditional environments. It finds an affinity between such spaces and the project of post-classical apparatus theory, both of which challenge the regimented space of traditional film spectatorship. The films and videos of this project are connected by two crucial elements: their location in New York City and their attention to sound. The personnel involved in the creation and reception of these films and videos constitute a network forum, or a group of artists who use the spaces of reception and production to reconfigure assumptions about film and video. Some of these spaces share direct links and touchstones, while others are tied together by shared concerns. One shared concern is a critical approach to the relationship between sound and image within cinema. Michael Snow and the filmmakers of the No Wave use pre-existing ideologies of sound to challenge cinematic presence and absorptive spectatorship while embracing the limits of subcultural spectatorship. The Exploding Plastic Inevitable and the Television Laboratory embrace sound's power as present, reorienting our perspective on the relationship between technology and the body. Taken together, these exhibition sites argue for the importance of sound and liveness in understanding experimental film history. They also suggest alternative modes of spectatorship that might hold productive power in our current media environment of hyper-reproduction and communicative capitalism.

Nous exposons dans ce mémoire les principes qui fondent, au sein de la discipline des études cinématographiques, une conception théorique de la réception d’images animées reposant sur la modalité de consommation spécifique du cinéma en salle. Notre analyse d’un ensemble représentatif d’approches théoriques et historiographiques de l’expérience cinématographique permet de relever les principes qui orientent la conception de différentes formes de médialité conférées à l’expérience du cinéma en salle. Les théories du dispositif et du signifiant imaginaire de Jean-Louis Baudry et Christian Metz proposent une conception de l’expérience du cinéma en salle qui met l’accent sur les effets de transparence médiatique de certaines composantes des salles de cinéma sur les spectateurs ainsi que sur le caractère imaginaire, symbolique et institutionnel de ces médiations. La sémio-pragmatique de Roger Odin et l’approche historiographique de la New Cinema History telle que présentée par Robert C. Allen et Richard Maltby proposent une conception de l’opacité médiatique de l’ensemble complexe des effets de médiation sensorielle, relationnelle, sociale et économique de l’expérience du cinéma en salle et dont les spectateurs font l’épreuve sur toute l’étendue de ce type de site d’exploitation et sur toute la durée de son occupation spectatorielle. Au terme de notre analyse, les différents principes relevés permettent de formuler la notion d’expérience hétérotopique du cinéma pour désigner la conception de l’expérience du cinéma en salle qui caractérise la compréhension de la réception d’images animées dans le cadre des études cinématographiques. / This thesis explores how theories of moving image reception that have or have had a significant impact on the development of film studies as a discipline are centered around the movie theater and on “movie-going” practices. The analysis of a representative set of theoretical and historiographical approaches to the cinematic experience allows for the definition of key principles that unearth various forms of mediation at play in the movie-going experience. Jean-Louis Baudry’s “apparatus theory” and Christian Metz’s notion of the “imaginary signifier” both suggest a theory of movie-going experience stressing the transparency effects on spectators of the mediation of certain architectural and technological aspects of movie theaters and focusing on the symbolic and institutional nature of this form of mediation. In contrast, Roger Odin’s semio-pragmatic approach and New Cinema History’s critical historiography (as theorized by Robert C. Allen and Richard Maltby) conceptualize the opacity of a complex set of sensory, relational, social, and economic mediations occurring in movie theaters, which last during the entire experience of the audience in these exhibition sites. By unspooling the complexity of the theoretical stances above mentioned, this thesis moves towards the definition of a heterotopic cinema experience formulated from within the context of film studies.