Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Ranging over a rich variety of material from film and film literature, and encompassing a critical interrogation of traditional realist ethnographic and cinematic texts, this book highlights the extent to which the cinema has contributed to the rise of voyeurism throughout society.

The cinema not only turns its audience into voyeurs, eagerly following the lives of its screen characters, but casts its key players as onlookers, spying on other′s lives. The nature of the cinematic voyeur is examined in depth, as are its implications for contemporary society. Norman K Denzin analyzes Hollywood′s manipulations of gender, race and class, and, drawing on the work of Foucault, argues that the cinematic gaze must be understood as part of the machinery of surveillance and power which regulates social behaviour in the late twentieth century.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Introduction
• The Birth of the Cinematic Society
• The Voyeur's Desire
• The Comic Voyeur's Gaze
• The Asian Eye
• Charlie Chan and Mr Moto Go to the Movies
• Flawed Visions
• The Obsessive Male Gaze
• Women at the Keyhole
• Fatal Female Visions
• Paranoia and the Erotics of Power
• The Voyeur's Future

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

We live, says Denzin (sociology, communication, humanities, Univ. of Illinois, Urbana-Champagne) in a "horrible and terrifying" postmodern world where "we are all entangled in an interconnecting web of narrated video images." In other words, this has become a "cinematic society"; and the cinema itself has been symptom and cause and may itself suggest, if not a cure, at least a direction in which to search for a defense. Denzin speaks out in favor of a multivocal approach to both cinema studies and ethnographic studies, his primary academic home. He analyzes a number of films in which the voyeur is central, from Charlie Chan films to Fatal Attraction (1987) and Blue Velvet (1986). His discussions of the films are always interesting and sometimes--as in the case of Chan Is Missing (1989)--definitive. Some are less persuasive: his discussion of The Conversation (1974) fails to bring out the full depth of the film, and his treatment of Rear Window (1954) is both shallow and error-filled--faulty quotations and, inexplicably, Miss Torso referred to as "Miss Torse" throughout. Denzin's book is in the forefront of the movement that, following the pioneering work of the feminists, takes cinema studies increasingly toward the political. Upper-division undergraduate and above. W. A. Vincent; Michigan State University