Spectatorship refers to the relationship between a viewer and a film — how audiences engage with, interpret, and are affected by moving images. It considers not just what we see but how and why we see it differently.
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Watching a film is not a purely intellectual experience. Your body responds to what is on screen in ways that run ahead of conscious interpretation -- flinching, holding your breath, feeling something in your chest during a close-up that reading a description of the same moment would not produce. Embodied spectatorship is the theoretical framework that accounts for this, and for why the same film means something different to different viewers.
Roland Barthes' concept of the punctum describes the detail in an image that pierces a specific viewer in a way that cannot be explained by the image's general content. It is personal, involuntary, and non-transferable -- and it has profound implications for how we think about why films affect different people in different ways.