Enunciating the spectator's I's: To the I of the cinema: Christian Metz, spectatorship, and cinematic enunciation in Jeffrey Jeturian's Tuhog

• Main Author: Cobangbang, Samuel H.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2017
• Subjects: Jeff Jeturian. Tuhog; Motion picture plays—Philippines > History and criticism; South and Southeast Asian Languages and Societies
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_bachelors/14890
• Institution: De La Salle University

An analysis of Jeffrey Jeturian's film Tuhog (2001) using Christian Metz' post-structuralist theory of cinematic enunciation to deconstruct the film-text on two fronts: first, as an exploration of cinema's non-deictic relationship with the spectator as projected and manifested via the film-text's narrative and, second, to analyze how this film-text's critique on spectatorship is supported by the film-text's filmic and metafilmic constructions as it is, using the framework of cinematic enunciation, directed towards the spectators of Tuhog. The analysis will thus be divided on these two aspects, followed by a synthesis that relates these observations to identify Tuhog's place and significance within the context of the Philippine film industry-- the industry that enabled Tuhog's creation.This study uses the semiotic film theory of enunciation advanced by Christian Metz as exemplified chiefly from his final book Impersonal enunciation or, The place of film (2016). Enunciation is used to read the film as a film-text, but in the thesis' aim being spectatorship, describing the place of the spectator in cinema will require the vocabulary of Robert Stam, Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, and Metz' book The imaginary signifier (1982) to delineate the film-text's narrative and metafilmic constructions trace the points of enunciation.This analysis studies two spectators within the film Tuhog watching another film, titled Hayok sa laman, focusing particularly on the film-experience of two subjects: Floring and her mother Perla these subjects are marked specifically to explore spectrum of the film-text's treatment of cinema's attempt at incarnating the personal i's of its subjects to the impersonal I of the cinema. From this several observances about this relationship between the spectator and the cinema are made: the spectator's split belief through the character of Perla and the spectrum of warring fantasies through the character of Floring.As synthesis, this thesis will connect these observations towards the film industry that produced it. It will also expand on the significance of Metz's theory of impersonal enunciation in film theory, and, equally important, its understanding and place in a world filled with many screens.