Film Analysis Essay Psychology

It was produced by A&M Films and Channel Productions and was distributed by Universal Pictures. When it was released on the fifteenth of February 1985 it quickly gained a cult following. Starting with the ratio of men to women it’s not looking like fair representation with men outnumbering women 2 to 1. In the same Guardian article as above it is states that women have “just 30% of speaking roles”. Another problematic element of the representation of the two prominent women is that they both change in order to end up desirable to two of the men. Claire has to prove that she isn’t a well behaved selfish spoilt rich daddy’s girl in order to become attractive to John. Allison is changed physically by being made over by Claire who changes her from the crazy girl who wears all black to being ‘naturally beautiful’ with subtle make up a look which is more generally considered attractive. This suggests that the film is made to appease the Male Gaze (Laura Mulvey). The film has a lot to say about putting people in boxes, it’s the moral of the story that you shouldn’t, it also points out the dangers of these boxes. It points out the real life unfair labels and representations forced upon women when the concept of virginity is brought up. A New York Times online article suggests that teenage females in film are “like their adult counterparts, defined by hypersexuality or asexuality” [Item ] . Allison describes the

Audiences of both genders are hardly immune to the commercial powers of oversexualization.”(Thompson,45). Many different genres of film have lot of sexual themes in their plot. Chick flick share this in common with other films. Hollywood know what make money in the movie industry and that is sex. In romantic comedies all the actor are some of the most beautiful people you ever seen. Looks matter so much in these films. Older films like sixteen candle touch themes like being insecure of one's body and coming it to someone else. It seems that the

“The powerful look of the male protagonist ….is broken in favor of the image in direct erotic rapport with the spectator… .[The woman] is no longer the bearer of guilt but a perfect product whose body, stylised and fragmented by close-ups, is the content of the film, and the direct recipient of the spectator’s look.” (Mulvey 1975)

Another way of keeping the audience involved with the story is by exposing physical attributes of the heroine actresses by putting them in skin tight, revealing clothes that shows off their bodies trained to perfection.. However, even though girls are shown as “sexualized females”, they own many other qualities such as martial arts, expert skills at disguise and espionage, working with wires and technology, singing in German and many more.

Virginity and sex are common themes in popular media. Whether a direct discussion of the social expectations of virginity are expressed in a movie, the norms and expectations will surface indirectly nonetheless. The French film À Ma Soeur challenges the media’s lack of direct discussion of virginity and sexuality in youth, especially young girls. The story of À Ma Soeur follows two sisters on vacation, one who is attractive and thin and the other who appears overweight and plain-looking. The attractive older sister begins a relationship with an older man, and both sisters express their perception of virginity during the film. From Catherine Breillat’s forthright discussion and presentation of society's double-standards and taboos surrounding

The result of this research shows that the sexualization of female characters is activated and well in popular motion picture content, this result fits the Freud’s views of scopophilia (Stacy 2013). Freud isolated scopophilia as one of the constituent instincts of sexuality which occur as drives very independently of the erotogenic zones, the mainstream cinema present a hermetically sealed world which unties magically neutral to the presence of the spectator, producing for them a feeling of separation and impacting on their voyeuristic phantasy (Mulvey 1975, p. 8). According to the Feminist film theory’s argument, women are inevitably reduced to the objects of a male gaze in mainstream cinema (Humm 1997, p. 39). Mulvey claimed ‘through this privileged gaze, film audiences, regardless of their actual gender, are treated as masculine subjects’, she also figures cinema as irreducibly shaped by sexual difference, the film is constructed around looks or gaze, it shapes editing and narrative, that these looks are entirely those of men looking at women (Humm 1997, p. 17). The art historian John Berger had succinctly pointed out that ‘the "ideal" spectator is always assumed to be male and the image of the woman is designed to flatter him’ (Berger, 1972).

The music video does this by; clothing the women which are associated in it not only in appropriate clothing but the way they dance is not in a sexual or erotic way. In contrast to Diced Pineapples – Rick Ross and Ne-yo – Miss Independent are very diverse compared to each other. For instance, the concept of the song ‘Miss Independent’ is different to ‘Diced Pineapples’ as the way it’s trying to portray women is in a positive way. It does this in various ways, for example, the way the women are dressed in Neyo’s video is different, their body is not only covered with clothes, but it’s covered with sophisticated a clothes which indicates that the concept of the music video was to portray women in a positive way. The locations of where the women actors are situated in also adds to this, due to these females being in an office and dressed in classy garments implies that they are elegant and exclusive, this reveals the purpose of this video unlike ‘diced pineapples’ where it is obviously clear what they are trying to presume from the video.

From a different perspective, these films could have have different conceits than the filmmakers intend. For that reason, I commend them for making the choice to allow the perspective to remain feminine, which make these films so significant. This representation demonstrates the opportunity to tell when we give the narrative back to

Because the outgrowth of the modern liberated women coocurred with the boom of cinematic productions, it was inescapable for filmmakers to make use of women’s new image in most of works. In reality, producers and directors exploited this deliberate rebellion against social norms in most of cinematic works in which women appear to be young, beautiful and strong. They moved further to overwork on women’s ostentation of their sexuality through images that bring them back to the same circle of objectification and exploitation by the male gender. In fact, this depiction was the groundwork of contemporary Hollywood popular movies which work at promoting and dissipating what was agreed upon as the easy insertion into eroticism and sexual consumption.

“Mainstream cinema (and culture) reinforces how we are to ‘look’ at women (as objects, as passive, as without agency, unworthy of our existential attention)” (Week 8 Slides). While there is nothing wrong with admiring the female form, it does raise some questions about how easily susceptible audiences are to media. When the audience has ”...come to accept the sexist tropes and codes of mainstream Hollywood cinema as natural, inevitable and beyond reproach…” (Week 8 Slides), there is a problem. “The Gaze” started early on in cinema and has continued to be practiced in films even to today, if not more so today. One film in particular that sparked controversy was Michael Powell’s 1960 film “Peeping Tom”. The film is about a serial killer who films his victims as they are murdered. This film ended up being banned in many places around the world and was seen as one of the worst films. A few years later, Martin Scorsese brought the movie back into the light and is now seen as one of the greatest cult films ever made. The reason behind why it shifted from being appaling to being amazing, relies on the audience. Nothing about the film has changed over the years, but the opinion of it has. How can this be? It has to do with the audience's reaction and perception of the content. In 1960, audiences brains weren’t trained to fetishize woman like they are in today’s modern films. The voyeuristic nature of the film

Felix Van Groeningen’s The Broken Circle Breakdown continues the long-standing tradition of showcasing graphic sexuality in European cinema. Europe has never been shy when it comes to nudity or sexual content in their films. In contrast, the United States has been much more conservative about showing sex on screen until relatively recently. A film like The Broken Circle Breakdown is a good representation of how Europe has almost always been much more advanced at handling sex on screen than the United States.

A fundamental theorist for the aforementioned is Laura Mulvey, whose psychoanalytic study of narrative cinema nurtured the notion that women onscreen play an “exhibitionist role” (Mulvey, 1975:19). Mulvey (1975) states that the visual importance allocated to the woman symbol actually goes against the development of the storyline, as it “freeze[s] the flow of action” to allow “moments of erotic contemplation” (Mulvey, 1975:29). Classical narrative cinema’s use of previously established stars in films can be said to serve the former technique, in a way that the films gain popularity through their actors hired. As a result, the female star can be said to be positioned in films merely for the voyeuristic pleasure of the spectators; as opposed to serving a role in the continuation of the

Davis questions what does women always being nude on films have to say about the role women play in the world. I can say that having this double standard, says a lot about what society has to say about the role of women and proves the point that women are nothing more than objects, and or beneath men, in many areas. Not only is that an issue but Davis mentions how an actress refusing nudity and sex scenes can take a major career setback. However, if a male decides to not partake in those scenes there’s other roles he can take on, which isn’t fair to any degree. Davis feels that having more men on screen isn’t just for the viewers it’s to help even out

Women in film are often portrayed in a manner deemed pleasurable to the male viewer. Laura Mulvey takes this concept and dissects it within her article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Mulvey references the term male gaze, “wom[en] displayed as sexual object[s] is the leitmotif of erotic spectacle: from pin-ups to strip-tease, from Ziegfeld to Busby Berkeley, she holds the look, and plays to and signifies male desire” (Mulvey 40). Because of this interpretation it is relevant to examine different forms of media, such as films, to establish if the male gaze is present. Furthermore, it is appropriate to analyze films directed by women to identify the male gaze, due to their unique interpretation of female character’s visual representation. In the essay that follows, it will consider Girlfight and Dance, Girl, Dance to analyze how two separate female filmmakers, Karyn Kusama and Dorothy Arzner respectfully, challenge the theory of the male gaze, along with comparing and contrasting the methods in which such challenges were made, and finally it will address how any filmmaker may object the male gaze.

Cinema provides anthropomorphic stories for audiences to escape from their own realities and immerse themselves in a fictional world where everything is controlled by the director, who structures the film around a main controlling figure. The way that the cinema displays the space, surroundings, and the human forms in the film allows the director of the film, like Hitchcock, to use camera techniques that create an oppressive male gaze towards female characters in the movie. Most mainstream films pay extra attention to how the human form is presented to the audience. Women in film are continuously used solely as part of the landscape in films. The gaze the director focuses on the female form turns them (females) into objects, whose appearance is used to deliver a strong visual and erotic impact that provokes the male desire. I support Mulvey’s argument that, “woman as icon, displayed for the gaze and enjoyment of men, the active controllers of the look,” (Mulvey 28). Mulvey is saying that film directors are using techniques, like camera angle or movement, to further enforce the idea of a woman’s body being a sexual object. The creation of an active male gaze in film is used to derive pleasure from being able to look at an oversexualized female form tailored to the desires of the men. Consequently, making the female no longer an actual living person, they are now just part of the landscape of a bigger work of art. Therefore, reinforcing the societal standard representation of the perfect and powerful ideal ego of the male character, and the image of the passive and powerless female character. In his article “Visual “Drive” and Cinematic Narrative: Reading Gaze Theory in Lacan, Hitchcock, and Mulvey,” Clifford Manlove reaffirms Mulvey’s claim by stating that, “Patriarchal influence upon cinema is found primarily in “pleasure”; that is to say, “the pleasure in looking…” (Manlove 84). Manlove’s point reinforces the scopophilia tendencies that Mulvey says are present in films. Additionally, it also adds evidence to the claim that the cinema is influenced by the societal norms surrounding everyday life.