Laura Mulvey Analysis
In feminist theory, the male gaze is the act of depicting women and the world, in the visual arts and in literature, from a masculine, heterosexual perspective that presents and represents women as sexual objects for the pleasure of the male viewer. In the visual and aesthetic presentations of narrative cinema, the male gaze has three perspectives: (i) that of the man behind the camera, (ii) that of the male characters within the film's cinematic representations; and (iii) that of the spectator gazing at the image.
The film critic Laura Mulvey coined the term male gaze, which is conceptually contrasted with and opposed by the female gaze. As a way of seeing women and the world, the psychology of the male gaze is comparable to the psychology of scopophilia, the pleasure of looking; thus, the terms scopophilia and scoptophilia identify both the aesthetic pleasures and the sexual pleasures derived from looking at someone or something.
Fascination and film
- Film fascinates us (engages our emotions), through images and spectacle.- Mulvey uses psychoanalysis to discover where and how the fascination of film is reinforced by pre-existing patterns of fascination already at work within the individual subject (= a spectator)
- She says she is using psychoanalytic theory 'as a political weapon'.
Cinema and pleasure
- HOLLYWOOD/MAINSTREAM/NARRATIVE CINEMA MANIPULATES VISUAL PLEASURE.
- IT CODES THE EROTIC INTO THE LANGUAGE OF THE DOMINANT PATRIARCHAL ORDER.
Scopophilia
- Scopophilia = pleasure in looking (Sigmund Freud 1905, in 'Three Essays')
- Examples of the private and curious gaze: children's voyeurism, cinematic looking.
- The most pleasurable looking = looking at the human form and the human face, figural looking (corresponds to psychic patterns).
'Woman as image, man as bearer of the look'
- Pleasure in looking split between active/male and passive female.
- Women connote 'to-be-looking-at-ness'
- The visual presence of women -works against the development of a storyline, freezes the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation.
- The woman functions as both erotic object for the characters within the screen story and erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium (object of fantasy).
- The spectator is led to identify with the main male protagonist.
- The power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look.
Fetishistic Scopophilia
- The image of the woman also carries a threat
- There are two avenues of escape from fear of femininity for the male spectator.
-investigate the woman, demystify her mystery
-disavow(deny) castration by turning the woman into a reassuring fetish. The image of the woman > overvalued: this is the cult of the (beautiful) female star, e.g. Bridgitte Bardot or Anna Karina for nouvelle vague.
- The gaze is male, and the spectator is led to identify with this male gaze.
- The cinematic apparatus is not gender-neutral (in later readings, camera can also register differences of sexuality).
- The Male Gaze
- The female voice
- Technologies of gender
- Queering desire
- The monstrous-feminine
- Masculinity in crisis
Shohini Chaudhuri shows how these four thinkers construct their theories through their reading of films as well as testing their ideas with a number of other examples from contemporary cinema and television. She concludes that the concepts have not remained static over the past thirty years but have continually evolved with the influence of new critical debates and developments in film production, signalling their continuing impact and relevance in an era that is often unthinkingly branded as 'post-feminist'.
Summary
In her celebrated essay 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema'. Mulvey proposes that narrative cinema produces the male as agent of the look and the female as the object of spectacle through mechanisms of voyeurism and fetishism. In this way, narrative cinema imposes 'masculine' viewing strategies on all of its spectators, irrespective of their actual sex. Her argument gave rise to a number of debates, particularly as to whether narrative cinema systematically excludes women and the 'female gaze'. To answer these questions, feminist theorists investigated films targeted at female viewers as well as studying the actual reception of films by female audiences. Mulvey herelf modified her arguments in her 'Afterthoughts' to her essay, where she considers the role of the female spectator. She argues that, in accepting the 'masculinised' subject position offered to her by narrative film, the female spectator can engage in a form of 'transvestite' identification, which involves altering between genders. However, the universalising tendencies of Mulvey's psychoanalytic framework also came under scrutiny, including from black feminist theorists, who stressed the importance of integrating the role of history into the analysis of filmic representation, as well as recognising that women's oppression is not exclusively determined by gender.
The male gaze and fetishistic scopophilia in 'Le Mepris/Vivre, Sa Vie'
- Scopophilia is the force driving the movements and positioning of the camera.- The gaze is male, and the spectator is led to identify with this male gaze.
- The cinematic apparatus is not gender-neutral (in later readings, camera can also register differences of sexuality).
Feminist Film Theorists by Shohini Chaudhuri
- Since it began in the 1970's, feminist film theory has revolutionized the way that films and their spectators can be understood. This book focuses on the groundbreaking work of Laura Mulvey, Kaja Silverman, Teresa de Lauretis, and Barbara Creed. Each of these thinkers has opened up a new and distinctive approach to the study of film and this book provides the most detailed account so far of their ideals. it illuminates the following six key concepts and demonstrates their value as tools for film analysis:- The Male Gaze
- The female voice
- Technologies of gender
- Queering desire
- The monstrous-feminine
- Masculinity in crisis
Shohini Chaudhuri shows how these four thinkers construct their theories through their reading of films as well as testing their ideas with a number of other examples from contemporary cinema and television. She concludes that the concepts have not remained static over the past thirty years but have continually evolved with the influence of new critical debates and developments in film production, signalling their continuing impact and relevance in an era that is often unthinkingly branded as 'post-feminist'.
Summary
In her celebrated essay 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema'. Mulvey proposes that narrative cinema produces the male as agent of the look and the female as the object of spectacle through mechanisms of voyeurism and fetishism. In this way, narrative cinema imposes 'masculine' viewing strategies on all of its spectators, irrespective of their actual sex. Her argument gave rise to a number of debates, particularly as to whether narrative cinema systematically excludes women and the 'female gaze'. To answer these questions, feminist theorists investigated films targeted at female viewers as well as studying the actual reception of films by female audiences. Mulvey herelf modified her arguments in her 'Afterthoughts' to her essay, where she considers the role of the female spectator. She argues that, in accepting the 'masculinised' subject position offered to her by narrative film, the female spectator can engage in a form of 'transvestite' identification, which involves altering between genders. However, the universalising tendencies of Mulvey's psychoanalytic framework also came under scrutiny, including from black feminist theorists, who stressed the importance of integrating the role of history into the analysis of filmic representation, as well as recognising that women's oppression is not exclusively determined by gender.
Youtube video's explaining theory
REFERENCES
-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male_gaze (Neville, Lucy July 2015)
-) https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-psychology/chapter/psychodynamic-perspectives-on-personality/
-) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MpDbbvM3qo
-) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLJsHaLLcwk
-) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yl2Eh8swrEs
-)
-) Feminist Film Theorists book by Shohini Chaudhuri
-) King Edward one drive powerpoints
-) https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-psychology/chapter/psychodynamic-perspectives-on-personality/
-) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MpDbbvM3qo
-) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLJsHaLLcwk
-) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yl2Eh8swrEs
-)
-) Feminist Film Theorists book by Shohini Chaudhuri
-) King Edward one drive powerpoints
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