From the Bird's eye view to the Mole's sensory perception: the process of expansion of subjective territories in the spectatorship experience

The psychoanalytic film theory, influenced by Cartesian paradigm, emphasizing on the fixed distance between the observer and the cinematic space, describes the experience of cinematic spectatorship as an essentially Scopophilic act of a secluded, interiorized and immobile subject. Even though in the psychoanalytic theory, the "dark room" has been used as the main paradigm for defining cinematic spectatorship, genealogically it is possible to consider the emergence of cinema in relationship with the emergence of modern urban environments at the end of the nineteenth century, and to attribute it to the changes that have arisen within the visual and spatial culture of this period.Modern urban life has created a new kind of perceptual experience: the experience of being within the urban mass. by rereading of ideas of the thinkers such as Gustave Le Bon, Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin about the perceptual characteristics of "the man of the crowd" and The experience of participation in the mass, the present research attempts to employ these discussions in order to analyze the experience of cinematic spectatorship. These thinkers believe that the mass have a unifying power that single members could not escape from its magnetic attraction. The paper seeks to make it clear that the cinematic experience, in contrast to the experience of isolation and separation in psychoanalytic theory, essentially is a collective and communal experience, and the cinema audience can be regarded as a collective mass that percepts and feels as a mass body. The paper suggests that the difference between this kind of collective perception with the individual watching experience can be the subject of a variety of studies in the field of "audience studies" and "reception studies" that has so far been less relevant in Iran.In this model observer is not a distanced contemplating subject anymore. His sensing is not a personal matter, but it is a collective and mass experience. In this condition, observer in the form of a collective attraction could form a sensory affinity with the cinematic mass atmosphere, and thus associate with it, and experience the sense of co-ordination and synchronization. In a cinematic mass experience, we are faced with a kind of experiencing emotional contagion. In this exchange of influences and feelings, the concept of "self" as a enclosed entity, with distinct borders distinct from others, is meaningless. While Cartesian's view on subjectivity emphasizes "interiority" and "secludeness", it emphasizes the cinematic subjectivity in terms of connecting and communicating with the crowd. Here, what is important is the flow of energy that energizes the members of the masses and creates an experience of "muscular coonection" (like the experience of a military parade). In the cinematic spectatoship experience, a sense of completeness, a strange sense of development and expansion of "self" in the bond and contact with another (s), embrace the spectator. The devastating force of collective energy does not allow a space for subjectivity within its own self; it eliminates the boundaries between subject / object, self / other (s), and this interpenetration Leads to extends to subjective realms.