Laura+Mulvey+Visual+Pleasure+and+Narrative+Cinema

=The Gaze=

What is "the gaze" exactly? It describes the act of looking; began as the study of the objectification of women in visual texts.
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__ ** Questions to Consider ** __ **How does it impact women in particular?** **What are some of the issues involved in discussing "the gaze"?**
 * the objectification of women - women seen as objects
 * the commonality of female nudity - display implies subordination
 * internalization of the gaze, changes women's perceptions of themselves and makes them think of themselves as objects
 * shift to objectification as a source of pleasure (for both the looker and the looked-at)
 * men as the dominant group have been the looker (the subjects; women the objects)

Laura Mulvey Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema I. INTRODUCTION

a) A Political Use of Psychoanalysis

 * ===Film reflects the langauge of [|partriarchy] by being bound up in the same story of sexual difference that all patriarchy is founded on. In film women is seen as Other, as an object not a subject. In a way she represents the unconscious of the male because she is always the object he is looking at and never is able to speak for herself.===

The male gaze: Transformers (2007) Dir. Michael Bay media type="custom" key="24896272" align="center"


 * ===Phallocentrism - a world view which sees the penis (symbolic and otherwise) as the defining center of meaning. In other words - there is a central, stable meaning to things; that meaning is defined largely by men who associate their power to name and define and control reality with their masculinity.===
 * ===Symbolic Order - the realm of meaning controlled by the Law of the Father (in[| Lacan's theorizing]): the language of partriachy.===

b) Destruction of Pleasure as a Radical Weapon
In contrast to the transformers scene, note the female gaze giving a feminist perspective: Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce (1975) Dir. Chantal Akerman media type="custom" key="24897540" align="center"
 * ===Hollywood film reflects the dominant ideology of their culture. We get our pleasure from films from this presentation of the erotic. If we learn to make films which do not encode these ideologies, a lot of people will lose their pleasure in looking at film.===


 * ===Mise-en-scene means staging an action. It is historically to do with directing plays, and later became used in film to describe how to express the way the material in the frame is directed.===

II. PLEASURE IN LOOKING/ FASCINATION WITH THE HUMAN FORM

a) Film satisfies this primal pleasure we all get from looking at other people.
===b) Narcissistic scopophilia is looking at other people as seeing them as surrogates for yourself. We also identify with people in movies. So there is a tension here between the sense of power we get from observing others as separate from ourselves and the pleasure we get in imagining that we are the people we are looking at. This may apply to women as the enforced male gaze of cinema impacts them===
 * scopophilia - the pleasure we get from looking, in seeing other people as objects. We get a sense of power from being able to do this. Along with John Berger she believes the one who looks has the power.
 * Voyeristic scopophilia -
 * the mirror stage: The mirror stage is based on the belief that infants recognize themselves in a mirror (literal) or other symbolic contraption (i.e. cinema) which induces apperception (the turning of oneself into an object that can be viewed by the child from outside of himself)

III. WOMAN AS IMAGE, MAN AS BEARER OF THE LOOK ===a) Split between male, active gaze which looks and female passivity which is looked upon. Women are always on display in film. Seen as objects of sexual desire; this is trasnsformed into exhibitionism. Visual presence of female tends to stop the stroy line to dwell on the image.=== Here we see perhaps a critical comment as the action is halted by the ephemeral introduction of female beauty into a film consisting of troubled men: Once Upon A time In anatolia (2011) Dir. Nuri Bilge Ceylan media type="youtube" key="HeC8SweG_bQ" width="560" height="315"

b) Gender split carries over into narrative of film - men carry the story, make things happen, while woman remains icon.

 * Why are so many women in film showgirls, strippers, prostitutes, nuerotic, etc?
 * Buddy pictures tend to be about male relationships that override those with women

c) Problems with woman as icon:
Kiss Me Deadly (1955) Dir. Robert Altman media type="custom" key="24897258" align="center"
 * voyeurism - is associated with the fantasy of mastery and control and is solved by the sadistic desire to punish or forgive woman for her faults


 * fetishistic scopophilia - builds up beauty and glamour of woman in order to compensate for anxiety by reducing woman to an object of erotic satisfaction

Josef von Sternberg's films fetishize his Marlene Dietrich Alfred Hitchcock films are noted for his obssession with "the cool blonde"



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Adapted from [|source]