‘Casual Shopper’ is set in a suburban shopping mall. To the sound of muzak we watch a woman stroll from one store to another, fondling merchandise and pausing only to react to the inquiries of hopeful salespeople, ‘Can I help you?', 'No, I'm just looking' she replies. By focusing on the consumer, the film draws attention to the mechanics of “the look”, and comments on the growth of mass consumption culture and the creation of a “common” desire to purchase and acquire things.

Shopping is an activity that consists of predictable yet indeterminate activities where, like the cinema, what we go to experience over and over again is our own desire. 

Television commercials are viewed on TV sets in the home. Shopping takes place in a space specially designed for that purpose. Just as theatres are constructed to make possible specific spectator relations with the film through the use of frontal and fixed perspective, darkness, and the placement of the projector behind the audience, so stores are designed to produce specific effects within the consumer, through the use of endless corridors filled with objects for free libidinal access, set design and grid lighting.

Of course, there are fundamental differences between the movie spectator and the shopper. The shopper is not stationary but is constantly moving and does not identify with the objects in the store in the same way as with the characters on the screen. But, they are linked in several crucial ways through the process of looking that must be brought to both occasions to activate desire – the spectator sits and the film does its work, the shopper moves and the store comes to life. ‘Casual Shopper’ is about, but certainly does not exhaust, some of these relations. 

– Judith Barry

Description compiled in 2026 by Jess Higgins, using sources: Cinenova catalogue (1994) edited by Kate Norrish, and Circles catalogue (circa 1983) compiled by Helen MacKintosh and Margaret Gillan.