Deleuzian spectatorship RICHARD RUSHTON Deleuze’s writings have been received as important antitheses to the structuralist and psychoanalytic approaches to film studies of the 1970s and 1980s, the kind of work made famous in Anglo-American film studies by this journal. At one level, Deleuze was felt to have introduced a perspective on film studies that was at odds with Screen Theory’s insistence on the passivity of the cinema spectator, the latter being a notion indebted to theories of psychoanalysis and articulated in various ways by Christian Metz, Laura Mulvey, Stephen Heath, Peter Wollen, Colin MacCabe, Jean-Louis Baudry and others (and not just in Screen, but in also Film Quarterly, Afterimage and Camera Obscura). Rather than spectators passively deprived of their bodies and held in thrall to an ideological apparatus, Deleuze’s writings gave rise to the possibility of spectators who engaged their bodies and senses in ways that made Screen Theory seem incorrigibly shortsighted. And yet, if Deleuze seems to offer something beyond the notion of a passive spectator, what kind of spectator does he presume? Does Deleuze demonstrate some of the active capabilities of the cinema spectator? Or, more pertinently, does Deleuze even have a notion of a cinema spectator – a viewer or audience member who watches and listens to a film – at all? Does he envisage things called subjects which are engaged in a cinematic situation? These are somewhat difficult questions, and if Deleuze has answers to them they are not at all straightforward. My aim here is to put forward a number of propositions on Deleuzian spectatorship which might seem a little strange to some readers. These propositions are made against the backdrop of Screen Theory. I make them in order to foreground what is arguably essential to a Deleuzian 45 Screen 50:1 Spring 2009 & The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved. doi:10.1093/screen/hjn086 Part 1