The influential theorist, David Bordwell, talks about various modes of watching film: the
intellectual, the casual, or the obsessive interaction with cinema practiced by the film-buff.
This thesis is an attempt to come to terms with film and film culture in a number of ways. It
is first an attempt at reinscribing a notion of aesthetics into film studies. This is not an easy
task. I argue that film theory is not adequately equipped to discuss film in affective terms, and
that instead, it emphasises ways of thinking about film and culture quite removed from the act
of film ‘spectating’ – individually, or perhaps even more crucially, collectively. To my mind,
film theory increasingly needs to ask: are theorists and the various subjectivities about whom
they theorise watching the same films, and in the same way?