Death 24x A Second Stillness And The Moving Image Analysis

Today, Film and Television are among the most internationally supported commodities. Financially, their contributions are enormous: both industries are responsible for the circulation of billions of dollars each year. Since their respective explosions into the new media markets during the mid-twentieth century, film and television have produced consistently growing numbers of viewers and critics alike. Sparking debate over the nature of their viewing, film and television are now being questioned in social, political, and moral arenas for their potential impact on an audience. Critics claim that watching films or television is a passive activity in which the viewer becomes subconsciously

In “A Century of Cinema”, Susan Sontag explains how cinema was cherished by those who enjoyed what cinema offered. Cinema was unlike anything else, it was entertainment that had the audience feeling apart of the film. However, as the years went by, the special feeling regarding cinema went away as those who admired cinema wanted to help expand the experience.

Mulvey, Laura. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975) - Laura Mulvey. Thesis. N.d. N.p.: Laura Mulvey, 1975. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975) - Laura Mulvey. NG Communications, 2006. Web. 20 Feb. 2014. .

Both Laura Mulvey and bell hooks describe the idea of the “gaze” in film. In both of the theories presented by Mulvey and hooks, the “gaze” is the way in which viewers are subjected to a particular perspective because of their social standing. In Mulvey’s case, she argues that the “gaze” in which the audience is forced into is that of the “male gaze” while hooks argues a more nuanced “gaze” including the “oppositional gaze”. While some of Mulvey’s argument is accurate, hooks argues that it leaves out important other factors, in particular, race. Both arguments have many similarities and differences, and can be seen exemplified in many films, such as Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It.

Although the best reasons for “going to the movies” are to be entertained and eat popcorn, understanding a film is actually quite complex. Movies are not only a reflection of life, they also have the capability of shaping our norms, values, attitudes, and perception of life. Through the media of film, one can find stories of practically anything imaginable and some things unimaginable. Movie-makers use their art to entertain, to promote political agendas, to educate, and to present life as it is, was, or could be. They can present truth, truth as they interpret it, or simply ignore truth altogether. A movie can be a work of fiction, non-fiction, or anything in-between. A film is an artist’s interpretation. What one takes away from a film depends upon how one interprets what has been seen and heard. Understanding film is indeed difficult.

Several film theorists have used a variety of tactics and view points to analyze feature films since their inception. One of the most prominent theorists of those that analyze films from a feminist perspective is Laura Mulvey. Mulvey is famous for her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” which presents an array of theories involving the treatment of women in films. Arguably the most notable idea presented in Mulvey’s work is the existence of the “male gaze” in films. This essay will examine Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze in relation to Alfred Hitchcock’s film, Vertigo. Vertigo does not fit the criteria of a film that

The characters Sherman portrays, lighting, clothing and expressions are cliché of what is present in cinema, so much that viewers of her work have told Sherman that they ‘remember the movie’ that the image is derived from, yet Sherman having no film in mind at all.[iv] Thus showing that her word has a pastiche of past cinematic genres, and how women are portrayed in cinema and photography and how Sherman has manipulated the ‘male gaze’ around her images so they become ironic and cliché.

The theories of Laura Mulvey and Bell Hooks share their views on how individuals who attend the cinema have the opportunity to gaze and interrupt the messages that are being portrayed. Based upon their views, spectators can have their own beliefs and views of life and not have to focus on societal practices of racism and sexism. The article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” critiqued by Mulvey, focused on how sexism and voyeurism were the main theme in terms of how males dominated society and how woman were subservient to males due to castration. In the article “In Black Looks: Race and Representation” Chapter 7, The Oppositional Gaze, Hooks mainly focused on black woman’s identity and touches on both sexism and male/white female dominance over them. Both Mulvey and Hooks help to focus ones attention on how the white male sexist and black racial domination is portrayed by Hollywood in cinema. An example of this portrayal is represented by the movie “The Help”, produced in 2011 and directed by Tate Taylor.

Darrin Brown, Sharon Lauricella, Aziz Douai and Arshia Zaidi composed a study focusing on the uses and grats of the aforementioned genre as a means of better understanding the relationship between television and its audiences (Brown, Lauricella, Douai, Zaidi, 2000). Blumber and Katz’s theory on uses and gratifications suggest that audience’s choose to watch certain programs as it satisfies a particular need; in other words, people use a program to gratify or please themselves (Who Watches Crime Dramas and Why?, 2012). They identified four main uses and grats: entertainment and diversion, where there is an idea of escapism; surveillance and information, where people have an urge to become more knowledgeable in a particular area; personal identity, where there is a comparison between the characters and audience members; and finally, personal companionship, where audience’s become involved with characters as if they were real (Who Watches Crime Dramas and Why?, 2012). The uses and Gratification theory assumes that audiences use mass media as an outlet for satisfying certain needs and desires (Brown, et. al, 2000). According to another group of scholars, the gratification individuals get when using such media are both social and psychological in nature (Brown, et. al, 2000). In

Nagib, Lucia and Anne Jerslev. Impure Cinema: Intermedial and Intercultural Approaches to Film. London, U.K.: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2014. Print.

According to Stephen King, America’s best-known writer of horror fiction, horror movies can serve a valuable purpose. In King’s Playboy-published essay, “Why We Crave Horror Movies,” he examines the popular trend of attending horror films, and he provides several explanations for this craving behavior. King claims that attending these gory films is not just a trend; he believes that it is a necessity. In the essay, King claims that we need/crave horror movies for two basic reasons. First, we need to view such films to fulfill our basic need for entertainment and excitement. Also, we need to view these horror films to fulfill a certain psychological need. King states that we need to subject ourselves to such irrationality periodically in order to exercise our dark side and release certain evil fantasies, so we do not act on them.

The following essay examines the characteristics of the aestheticisation of abjection by analysing Jonathan Demme’s, The Silence of The Lambs (1991) to better understand what pleasure we, as a culture, find in consuming horror films. The Silence of the Lambs shows women being tortured, sexually assaulted and murdered yet is still a widely popular film that serves to entertain a seemingly sane society.

Many critics have noticed that Mulvey’s application of psychoanalysis and filmmaking appears in an ironic return to Freud and Jacques Lacan. Mulvey uses the gaze to examine male pleasure in narrative cinema, but Lacan

The notion that film functions rhetorically is hardly novel, and, indeed, there is a long tradition of film criticism within rhetorical studies.5 Historically, the rhetorical criticism of film has tended to focus on the representational aspects of cinema, attending to how films compel audiences at a cognitive rather than corporeal level. But more recently, scholars in an array of fields (Kennedy, 2000; MacDougall, 2006; Massumi, 2002; Shaviro, 1993; Sobchack, 1995, 2004) have begun to consider how cinema appeals directly to the senses, how it sways viewers somatically as well as symbolically. Attention to the body corresponds closely to the affective (re)turn in rhetorical studies,6 for conceptualizing rhetoric as embodied necessarily “reflects a merger of reason and emotion” (McKerrow, 1998, p. 322; see also Johnson, 2007). Rhetorical

Since its humble beginnings in the later years of the nineteenth century, film has undergone many changes. One thing that has never changed is the filmmaker’s interest in representing society in the present day. For better or worse, film has a habit of showing the world just what it values the most. In recent years, scholars have begun to pay attention to what kinds of ideas films are portraying (Stern, Steven E. and Handel, 284). Alarmingly, viewers, especially young women, are increasingly influenced by the lifestyle choices and attitudes that they learn from watching these films (Steele, 331). An example of this can be seen in a popular trope of the “romantic comedy” genre in this day and age: the powerful man doing something to help, or “save” the less powerful woman, representing a troubling “sexual double standard” (Smith, Stacy L, Pieper, Granados, Choueiti, 783).