觀看城市：桃樂絲‧理察森及其電影評論

Observing the City: Dorothy Richardson and Her Film Criticism

自1927 年至1933 年間，英國女性小說家桃樂絲‧理察森（Dorothy Richardson 1873-1957）曾於專業電影期刊Close Up 中開闢長期專欄，撰寫評論性文章。在其專欄裡，理察森以批判視角從文化與社會層面剖析觀看電影的行為以及新興（特別是女性）的娛樂消費大眾。她曾多次論及電影作為藝術形式在美學與技術上的創新。此外，她也曾特別指出「看電影」（film-watching）是一項別具意涵的文化與都會活動，其功能除了娛樂大眾之外，還能夠教化觀眾並提供世界觀。概括而言，理察森認為新興的娛樂大眾、日新月異的電影視覺效果以及電影院作為興起的大眾消費空間等要素皆在相當程度上型塑了特殊的觀影經驗，而理察森的電影評論則充分反應出其所持的美學、文化及社會視角。職是之故，此篇論文擬探討理察森在其長期受忽視的電影評論裡對於「電影觀看」的觀察並聚焦於其對於「電影觀看」（filmic spectatorship）所採取的美學、文化與社會視角以及對於二○、三○年代女性「電影觀看」所牽涉的性別、文化、空間、視覺與大眾消費等議題所作之觀察。

The coincidental development of the film industry and women’s streetwalking in the early twentieth century cities had endowed “the female spectator” with a double meaning. On the one hand, these earlier female cinema-goers are the very antecedents of “the female spectator” haunting feminist film theories over recent decades. On the other hand, female ramblers consuming urban spectacles in the street of the early twentieth century are no less capable spectators of a volatile and multiply represented urban space. One of the first British female practitioners of stream-of-consciousness novel-writing, Dorothy Richardson is also a rambler and spectator in London of the 1920s and 1930s. For six years Richardson contributes regularly to Close Up, a film journal published between 1927 and 1933. In her column “Continuous Performance,” a title suggesting the rapid flow and untiring display of the film’s images, Richardson, a critical spectator, comments on the socio-cultural aspects of film-watching and the aesthetical, technical innovations of film as an art form. That film-watching is an important cultural, metropolitan activity providing entertainment, civilization and cosmopolitan vision, and that filmic spectatorship is a complex interaction of the viewer, diegetic effects and the cinema as an alternative public space, are both persuasively argued by Richardson throughout her film criticism. Thus said, examining Richardson’s comments on cinematic spectatorship in her long-ignored film criticism, this paper explores Richardson as a pioneering film critic to address cinema-viewing as a significant cultural, metropolitan, and perceptual activity, and women’s cinematic spectatorship as involving particularly gender, urban space, and female pleasure in the 1920s and 1930s.