Alison Griffiths,
Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-231-12988-6
US$45.00 (hb)
392pp
(Review copy supplied by Columbia University Press)

Alison Griffiths’ very handsome new book Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View aims to “explore an expanded paradigm of spectatorship, beyond the seated spectator in the darkened auditorium” (p. 1). Moving away from the immobile film spectator, Griffiths is interested in participatory and mobile modes of spectatorship, and spine tingling sites of immersion and interactivity. The book continues Griffiths’ exploration of visuality and spectatorship in early cinema and pre-cinematic spaces, which she investigated a few years earlier in Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn of the Century Visual Culture (Columbia University Press, 2002). Like Wondrous Difference before it, Shivers Down Your Spine explores territory that Griffiths knows well, the slippery discursive divide between science and spectacle, pedagogy and entertainment, but this time around Griffiths has expanded her view beyond the turn of the last century to include exhibition sites from the middle ages through to the very contemporary.

Shivers Down Your Spine is structured around a series of in-depth case studies. In the first part of the book Griffiths considers a variety of examples of immersive spectacle: medieval cathedrals, nineteenth-century panorama paintings, IMAX theatres and planetariums. In the second half of the book she focuses exclusively on museums. Her intention is to demonstrate the similarities between these diverse sites. “I am interested here,” she writes, “in how space, illusion, and presence privilege a mode of spectatorship that is remarkably similar in all these sites” (p. 5). “Are there ways of seeing that are determined by the period eye,” Griffiths wonders, “or might more fluid models of visuality across time and place be imagined?” (p. 17) In answer to her question, Griffiths argues that there is a form of transhistorical spectatorship which can be found equally in thirteenth-century gothic cathedrals and twenty-first-century IMAX cinemas. Griffiths is quick to acknowledge that the case studies discussed in Shivers Down Your Spine are teleologically distinct entities with “historically unique ways of representing the world” but nonetheless, she believes, they share important phenomenological aspects (p. 17).

In chapter one, Griffiths defines the viewing experience of the medieval cathedral – “the upward gaze, large numbers of spectacular art objects (especially stained glass), and sense of being in closer communion with a diverse being” (p. 16). These viewing conditions privilege what Griffiths terms a ‘revered gaze’, a response to spectacular images in “spaces where the senses are heightened through an embodied mode of spectatorship” (p. 285). Griffith believes the revered gaze is a transhistorical gaze; the viewing conditions that produce it can also be found in more modern sites of immersion, such as museum exhibitions or, as she describes in chapter two, panorama paintings from the nineteenth-century. The size and scale of the panorama buildings, Griffiths argues, together with the atmosphere of hushed awe, the sense of the uncanny, and the sense of transportation to another time and place, echo many of the qualities of the medieval cathedral, and also cinema. Chapter three considers the relationship between the extremely large, curved, and wrap around screens of panoramas, IMAX cinemas and more recently 360 degree viewing technologies. Here Griffiths suggests that all three are shaped, in actuality and in discourse, by the idea of virtual travel. In marketing material and popular press they have all been described as ‘the next best thing to being there’. IMAX cinema in particular emphasises its experiential qualities; it’s a cinematic ‘experience’ where you are meant to ‘feel’ like you’re really there. In the fourth chapter Griffiths discusses the planetarium as yet another example of (intergalactic) armchair travel and embodied spectatorship.

In the second half of Shivers Down Your Spine Griffiths turns to museums, looking in particular at the London Science Museum, the Smithsonian Institution and the American Museum of Natural History. She charts the evolution of these museums and their exhibition strategies and approaches, paying particular attention to the role of electronic and digital media in the museum exhibition, and concepts of immersion and interactivity as they relate to museum spectatorship. Griffiths argues that while discourses around interactivity and new media have been ramped up in the last couple of decades, there is a long (pre)history of hands-on exhibits, which she discusses in detail: “To a large extent, there is nothing new about the idea of interactivity in museums; if the concept (and its overuse as a 1990s buzzword) smacks of high-tech, digitised galleries where every exhibit features cool-looking LCD or plasma screens with interactive touch pads, the reality suggests that museums have taken the idea of visitor interaction seriously for quite some time” (p. 178-9). Another recurring theme in the last half of the book is the ongoing discursive squabble about the museum’s role as an institution for sober eduction versus popular spectacle – debates which have also plagued the reception of panoramas, cinema, planetariums and IMAX cinemas. Pointing to examples of sensational museum exhibitions from the turn of last century through to the turn of this one, Griffiths suggests that the common criticisms which continue to be levelled at museums – that they are variously ‘elitist enclaves’ or ‘Disneyified entertainment’ – are at least a hundred years old.

Shivers Down Your Spine attempts to analyse the continuities and transitions that occur across different visual media and their associated institutions and exhibition spaces. Griffiths is well aware of the difficulties posed by this kind of analysis, namely the negotiation of problematic terms like ‘pre-cinema’ and ‘post-cinema’ where one media is understood not on its own terms, but according to its relationship with another (usually dominant) media. Griffiths regularly reminds us that there is no neat linearity between the emergence of museums, planetariums, panoramas, cinema and IMAX cinemas, instead she points out how they overlapped each other in chronological terms (such as panoramas and cinema) and in spatial terms (the location of IMAX cinemas within museums). Each of the case studies is firmly located in terms of their historical and cultural contexts. Griffiths provides a richly detailed history and analysis of their conditions of production and their reception, drawing on an exhaustive amount of archival material, some great examples of which have been reproduced in pages of this book.

However, this in itself poses one important problem. Griffiths is so caught up in the historical specificities of each media and exhibition site that it is impossible for her to talk about what she initially intends to discuss, that is, big picture theories about the nature of immersive and interactive modes of spectatorship. The book offers a great introduction to the history and contexts of these different media and institutions, and an excellent reading of cathedrals, planetariums, museums, IMAX cinemas and panoramas as exhibition spaces which have historically privileged and encouraged a drop-jawed, awe-struck style of spectating. Unfortunately what Shivers Down Your Spine doesn’t do is talk about what this means for spectator theory, or our understanding of audiences more generally.

Maura Edmond,
University of Melbourne, Australia.

Created on: Sunday, 22 March 2009