'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' an essay by Laura Mulvey that analyses cinema from a psychoanalytic lens leading to the groundbreaking concept of the Male Gaze in cinema.
“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”- Laura Mulvey (1975)
She analyses the manipulation of visual pleasure through psychoanalysis (Lacan, Freud)
Heroine is made as a passive object of erotic spectacle through the controlling gaze of the male hero: the spectators are encouraged to identify with this male position/look.
Male/Active and Female/passive
Laura Mulvey was part of the 1970’s Women’s Liberation movement that protested against the Miss World competition.
Miss World represented a “public celebration of the traditional female road to success” and where physical attributes are what define a woman.
The protest was against the enforced passivity on the women (making them a passive spectacle) and the passivity within them as spectators.
The film form has been shaped by the unconscious of the patriarchal society.
Scopophilia: the pleasure in looking. It occurs in two ways: active scopophilia and narcissistic aspect.
Active Scopophilia:
Spectators in a cinema hall are manipulated by placing them in a scopophilic position where they almost become like Peeping Toms(peeping into a private world in darkness separate from the other)- where voyeurism and fetishism is encouraged.
Using another person as an erotic object and where the subjects identity is distanced and different from the object.
Narcissistic:
Spectators desire to identify with the human form they see on the screen and recognise as similar to themselves.
Lacan’s mirror stage is applied here to understand the workings of this gaze. The mirror represents the “ideal ego” and in this context the screen = mirror (Christian Metz in 1975 article ‘The Imaginary Signifier’).
With cinema, time and space get blurred and temporarily the spectator identifies with the world created on screen but at the same time there is a re-evocation of the “ideal ego”.
Woman plays the “passive exhibitionist” role and the men on screen are the agents of the look and thus possess her or control her.
Placing all spectators irrespective of their gender in a masculinized position of looking at her.
3 sets of looks in Cinema:
Camera’s look
Audience looking at the film
Characters looking at each other
Film Noir: voyeuristic strategy- femme fatale- the hero is on the right side of the Law and she is in the wrong and it concludes with her possession or punishment etc. Unconsciously representing “the problem of her sexuality being resolved”.
The Maltese Falcon, Hitchcock’s films- Rear Window
Joseph Sternberg- fetishism is exemplified.
Fetishism:
overvaluing something particular over the whole
Camera fragments her breasts, face, legs etc to fetishize it and thus make it an erotic spectacle/object.
Freud: castration anxiety- by overvaluing another part of her body he deals with the “dangerous wound” (vagina)
The look of the camera needs to be freed in order to break this kind of narrative pleasure.
The Female Spectator:
Questions came up about what happens to female viewers? Are they too forced to masculinize their gaze?
She may enjoy the fantasy of control by positioning herself in the male gaze. (Mulvey)
Proximity to image structures the gaze (Mary Ann Doane)
Transvestite between the two gaze- as she is a woman seeing from a male gaze
She can see it in two ways (but she loses herself in the image):
a) over identifying with the heroine
b) take the heroine as her own narcissistic object of desire
6. Flaunting femininity in an exaggerated way: is a mask/masquerade adopted by women to hide their masculinity. It is punished within films eg. femme fatale
7.Jane Gaines (book- Black Looks): race as a factor in gaze- the privilege of sexual looking is for white men and not black men. (Film analysis-Mahogany).
8.The oppression of all women isn’t just through gender but also race.
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