Nick Browne's "The Spectator in the Text" Bridges Cinema and Theatre, but Fails to Describe Blended Media

Professor Nick Browne proposes a reevaluation of the “center” through “reading” the film and assessing rational for camera motivation through an implied narrator placed by the spectator combined with the “implied position of the spectator”. Interpretation of the figurative placement or “center” of the spectator is complicated because the viewer can disagree with the opinions of the character represented through the geographic position and angle of the camera. This act of defiance with the physical perspective places the narrative authority in the possession of the spectator (132-133).
The switching of modes, alternating contrasting elements, is read as a as a coherent statement to the spectator, conveying a sense of meaning over time. Key to the process of reading is forgetting the elements that composed the dramatic impact, brought about by the placement of a new occluding significant event for the spectator to read, an effect Browne calls “fading” (135). A spectator reads emphasis implied through temporal variation in cycles of retrospection, fading, delay, and anticipation, an act that further involves the spectator (136).
Identification with a character on screen, without a sense of displacement as the shots change, relieves the spectator’s point of view from a “given spatial location” (134 and 137). The text the spectator inhabits is, as Browne puts it, “the product of the narrator’s disposition toward the tale” (136). Within the presentation of this structure the author transfers the appearance of authority onto the characters. To the reader, the “center”, in the context of the specular text, is a function that is adopted as the one who makes the form intelligible, and for the spectator the center is the impression of being able to occupy the space of the narrative (137).
Conclusion:
Nick Browne's text counters theories of camera placement based on theatrical spectatorship with a theory of an implied narrator and a placing the spectator in a suspended position, neither in the fictional space of the story, nor the perspective a purely passive viewer, similar to the perspective of the reader of a book. His theory has the ability to bridge cinematography and literature, but it certainly does not apply to several newer platforms. The Vive, for example, has narratives wherein the spectator can alternate between the fictional space of the story with an have an active or passive role.