Interrogating the Image

Interrogating the Image argues that movies examining the role film and television plays in the lives of their audience have created changes both in the movies themselves and in their viewers, and considers fourteen films where the moving picture is central to the narratives. Three films discussed—The Purple Rose of Cairo, Pleasantville, and The Truman Show—offer frame-breaking experiences for their characters that allow spectators to appreciate the ruptures between lived reality and media-play, delivering therapeutic payoffs that can be restorative, reconstructive, or rejective. Other examples come from the worlds of cinema (The Majestic, Matinee, Cinema Paradiso), television (Bamboozled, Network, Natural Born Killers, Medium Cool), and the sociopolitical realm where media dominates (Being There, Wag the Dog, Bob Roberts, Bulworth). Meanwhile, significant interpretive stances—reflective/reflexive, critical, and ironic—are engendered and embraced by filmmakers and audiences who create and consume these works. The result is a media-saturated culture, in transformation and best understood using cinema's interrogative resources.

By observing how the audience has been depicted in movies, Del Jacobs has made an important contribution to the scholarship on how motion pictures are received…a must for students of motion picture spectatorship., Del Jacobs smartly begins Interrogating the Image by turning the camera around on us, the audience. And after the film-viewer relationship is thoroughly explored—tracked through changes in delivery media (e.g. home video) and changes in the films themselves—the work then examines films that are conscious of the audience and films that are conscious of cinema itself. This may sound roundabout, but it is, in fact, genius., This prescient, thoughtful book challenges readers to anticipate and think about the rapid change between electronic imagery and its generation.... This thoughtful book presents a future for US American media marked by the eventual total interaction of audience and image via YouTube, Twiter, Hulu, Facebook, and so on.... Recommended., Looking through the past and to the future of cinema, Del Jacobs explains why movies matter with a remarkable synthesis of analysis through key films that reflect our cultural configurations, holding up a mirror to our times in the same way a movie screen faces an audience. Essential reading for filmmakers and film lovers.

Del Jacobs is a documentary filmmaker and professor of film and media studies at State College of Florida, where his explorations in film history have focused on spectatorship and genre study. He is the author of Revisioning Film Traditions: The Pseudo-Documentary and the NeoWestern.