Male Gaze Essay

Renowned feminist film theorist, Laura Mulvey, explores how classic Hollywood cinema is shown through a masculine perspective that fetishisizes women as objects of desire. This perspective is also known as the “male gaze”, which creates a voyeuristic and scopophilic layer to the viewing of film. According to Mulvey, “in their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.” One of the staples of classic Hollywood cinema is women consistently being put or made into a visually erotic role for both the male characters on screen, and the audience. This staple is of course found in the

Gender roles have been, and unfortunately still are, evident in our everyday lives for quite sometime. Women are often portrayed as sexual objects, or delicate individuals; a body with no brain or strength. These traits are easily found within many novels and movies- old and new. In Alfred Hitchcock’s films, Rear Window and Strangers on a Train, Hitchcock begins his films representing women with the same characteristics as stated above. They are very stylish, attractive and presented as second-class individuals to males. But after examining these two films, Hitchcock does something that many directors in his time would not have dared to do. By making the women the heroine and arguably the protagonist of the storyline, Hitchcock proves to

In her most famous photograph Untitled Film Still #21 she produced an expressionistic self-portrait by portraying as a small-town girl, supposedly lost in the “Big City”. The elements and principles, though lacking in visual colour, she makes it up by having other significant elements such as the lines of the windows and structures with the subject’s eyesight directing observers throughout the picture. There is very little negative space, in addition, the subject is placed near the lower right acting as the focal point creating an asymmetrical balance to expose the uncomfortable sense of being “misplaced”. Furthermore, the camera angle from a downwards view stresses how large the surrounding is and that she is merely lost. In consideration, the background simply highlights the atmosphere that is instilled within the audience helping viewers understand the ambience of the image. It genuinely is a narrow depth of field to clarify the expression of the subject she has chosen to represent, in which is being supported by the scenario of towering skyscrapers and not vice

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

Through exposure, the role of women as a visible visual icon, such as cinematic mechanisms fetishism serves to convince the position of the male audience as an absolute subject.

All it takes is a simple drive down the highway or a quick view of a magazine stand to see dozens of pictures of hypersexualized men and women advertising items like food or furniture or giving tips on how to be thinner, beautiful, or younger. These images have been a constant for majority of people's lives and so we as a society have become complacent to them, it is expected to only see very beautiful people on television shows, commercials, and other forms of entertainment and advertising. Even as I write this, I see a commercial for Amazon informing people that now they sell clothing, they did this through attractive women seductively delivering boxes to doors. Children toys like dolls always show beautiful women in skimpy outfits or men

No other artist has ever made as extended or complex career of presenting herself to the camera as has Cindy Sherman. Yet, while all of her photographs are taken of Cindy Sherman, it is impossible to class call her works self-portraits. She has transformed and staged herself into as unnamed actresses in undefined B movies, make-believe television characters, pretend porn stars, undifferentiated young women in ambivalent emotional states, fashion mannequins, monsters form fairly tales and those which she has created, bodies with deformities, and numbers of grotesqueries. Her work as been praised and embraced by both feminist political groups and apolitical mainstream art. Essentially, Sherman's photography is part of the culture and

She repeatedly re-examines the woman’s roles in society and history, she doesn’t believe that her works have negative or explicit messages, which is why she leaves them untitled making them open to interpretation. In the late 1980’s she expanded her range to more gross subjects. I believe her works strongly support woman’s rights, which was, is still is a very important topic. She typically photographed herself in a range of costumes. To create her photographs, often times she would shoots alone in her workspace, taking on many roles such as make-up artist, director, talent, and so

In Sturken and Cartwright’s essay Modernity: Spectatorship, Power and Knowledge they discuss the gaze and that it is to “look or stare, often with eagerness or desire”(76). Sturken and Cartwright also use Laura Mulvey’s idea of the male gaze as an example. Mulvey proposed “that the conventions of popular narrative cinema are structured by a patriarchal unconscious, positioning woman represented in films as objects as a male gaze”(76). The male gaze is closely related to the stereotype of the dumb blonde. The character of the dumb blonde is always represented as highly sexual and attractive and is, therefore, the misogynistic male viewer.

The ways in which women are meant to be observed merely as a spectacle. Hitchcock has the ability to control our “gaze” of Lisa and

Laura Mulvey, the British scholar, she puts forward the film argument combines with psychoanalytic theory and the concept of "male gaze" in her article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative”. Mulvey mentions that, “In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active / male and passive / female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female form which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are whisper At and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looking-at-ness.”(p.715) In other words, Hollywood narrative films use women in order to provide a pleasurable visual experience for men. The narrative film structures its gaze as masculine. The woman is always the object of the reifying gaze, not the bearer of it.

Cléo from 5 to 7, directed by Agnes Varda, is a film about one woman’s struggle to come to terms with the possibility of her potential illness. Not only is Cléo struggling with her physical health, but she is also dealing with her beauty and the consequences of being an attractive woman in the modern world of the 1960s. When examined through the lens of Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” theory, another aspect of the film comes to light. The film seems to objectify Cléo and thus trivialize her struggles with others’ perceptions of her throughout the film by adhering to the construct of the male gaze. Although Cléo from 5 to 7 appears to play into the construct of the male gaze through the repeated objectification of Cléo, it actually subverts this idea and instead confronts the viewer, and the notion of women as passive objects to be viewed.

The feminist touch of the film goes beyond the content and duration: the framing of the scenes is unprecedented and unique to Akerman’s vision. For the majority of the film, the camera is positioned frontally and at the height that matches director’s short stature,

Firstly there was sexual objectification of women in cinema as male film directors wanted actresses to wear revealing costumes in an imaginary scenario in a film that highlighted body parts seen as sexual in our society, due to their subconscious lust. This supports Mulvey’s belief that the sexual objectification of women in cinema by Hollywood film makers was

There is some disparity between the way critics and philosophers like Judith Butler view Cindy Sherman's work and the way that Cindy Sherman speaks of her photographs. It may be the disparity that exists between many modern artists, who often operate on an intuitive level, and the philosopher critics who comment upon them from a theoretical perspective or a pre-established framework. On one level, Cindy Sherman may only be playing "dress-up" (as she herself admits) in her famous History Portraits (1989-90) (Berne, 2003). On another level, however, her "dressing-up" may be indicative of a deeper problem in modern gender identity theory which is the problem of "becoming" woman (Butler, 1994) or, as Judith Butler sees it, the problem of performativity. In the History Portraits, Sherman may certainly be said to be "performing" and perhaps even attempting to "become" the male and female characters she represents in her work. Indeed, it is upon such a premise that philosopher critics and gender theorists find her work so engaging. This paper will examine Cindy Sherman and her History Portraits in relation to Judith Butler's gender theory, the portrayal of the self, and how gender identity has changed throughout the course of modern history. It will examine representations of womanhood from Romantic Idealism to Post-Modernism and will also