A challenge that faces both Canadian cinema and women’s cinema is the idea of the male gaze. The film industry is a phallocentric institution that since its inception has always faced the problem of objectifying women. As well Canada has faced similar problems long before the existence of film in the form of the colonial gaze, with attempts from both Britain and France to take what Canada had to offer and make it its own. In the film Away From Her (2006) Sarah Polley recognizes this problem that the gaze has on both the identity of women and Canada in film, and tries to express these problems by foregrounding the gaze to show it in a way that is unusual. This essay looks to explore the various ways that Polley uses the gaze in order to …show more content…
In the book Women Filmmakers Refocusing E. Ann Kaplan mentions “For complex socio-political reasons… women were rarely able to direct films during the classical period, when famous male auteurs such as Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Fritz Lang, and Nicholas Ray accomplished some of their most brilliant work.” Secondly, with Polley taking control of the gaze, the objects that she points the gaze toward will act differently due to the castration behind the camera. Cinematographer Zoe Dirse mentions an account she had when filming a Sufi parade for a documentary in Cairo. She quotes “the men seem curious, staring directly into my lens (curious at the camera or my gender) and then suddenly the look changes and I feel danger as they start to push and shove...” . On the other hand when Dirse is filming women she quotes: The two women seem totally oblivious to the camera. Is it because the gender of the bearer of the look is female and the subjects feel safe and not threatened? Later, gypsies sing and perform to my hand-held camera with abandon and pleasure, their faces and gestures open to my inviting lens, allowing me to capture the sadness and joy in this ancient love song for Sarajevo.
This experience of Dirse’s proves the power of gender behind the lens to create situations that could not be replicated if a man had control of the gaze. Although Polley is not the physical operator of the camera, she is still in a
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
In Hollywood film women 's roles have varied quiet considerably between genres, geographical placement, and period settings. These factors contribute to the different representations of women 's roles in the film they are present in. The roles are diverse going from the traditional maternal role to that of manipulative murderer. Women 's roles in movies can be almost equal to the male roles, and the co-stars are not given the majority of the acclaims just because they are male. Society has set certain standards that women are supposed to follow. The most common image of women is that they are very passive and try to avoid conflict in any situation. More and more in society women are breaking down the social barriers that confine them to their specific roles. The films Rear Window and Resident Evil show women in roles that are untraditional for our society. These two movies help to show how women are rebelling against social norms and that they are taking more active and aggressive roles. In film noir’s we can see women represented as the femme fatale, a woman whose mysterious and seductive charms leads men into compromising or dangerous situations. In action movies we see the heroine who is strong both physically and mentally, and has the ability to use weapons. Women seem to be more trapped than men because they are supposed to live up to society’s standards dealing with beauty and size, which are more physical characteristics. These specific guidelines have been set by
One way camera movement is used to show gender is during the scene when the Super is telling his team that their investigation is going to be led by a woman. The camera pans around the room depicting the officer’s reactions, all of which are men. This camera movement coupled with the unhappy reactions from all the men in the room shows us that this is a man’s world and that Helen Mirren’s character will struggle to be taken seriously. Another example of gender through camera movement is after Helen Mirren’s character is told that she has got the job. The clip starts with a shot of the Commander sign on the door, that she then opens
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
Laura Mulvey understands Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills as to be rehearsing this structure of the ‘male gaze’, “The camera looks; it captures the female character in a parody of different voyeurisms. It intrudes into moments in which she is ungraded, sometimes undressed, absorbed into her own world in the privacy of her own environment. Or it witnesses a moment in which her guard drops and she is suddenly startled by the presence, unseen and off-screen watching her.”[v]
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.
Today’s filmmakers have three areas to focus on: the event or theme of the film, the audience who will be watching the film, and lastly, the individual characters and the roles they play and how they are portrayed and interpreted. Many of these films bottom line objectives are to focus on the “erotic needs of the male ego.” The focus on fetishistic scopophilia tend to slant the view such that we see the world as being dominated by men and that woman are
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
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.
Even though male gaze is still the fundamental construct in modern films, I do not think lesbians and majority of women these days enjoy objectification. Women are trying to break through gender differences and evolve as equal being to men. In trying to explain how women are positioned in films, Kaplan says “Psychoanalysis a crucial tool for explaining the needs, desires and male-female positioning that are reflected in film” p. (). Kaplan uses psychoanalysis to argue how women take
The male gaze puts his fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled, in a unique sort of way. In this traditional exhibitionist, role women are continuously being looked at and their appearance is delivered to the male gaze in such a way as a strong visual and erotic impact and provides male desire. The presence of a woman in a normal narrative film is the key of the movie. However, the key of the narrative film works against the development of the story-line and stops the action due to the erotic gaze. Butt Boetticher said: “What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance”.
within the film. The theory of the Male Gaze states that the audience is invited to watch the
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).
In society, women are often perceived as the weaker sex, both physically and mentally. In modern times women have leveled the playing field between men and women, and feminism is a highly discussed topic, but for years, women faced discrimination and prejudice both in life and in the workplace, due to their sex. This way of thinking flooded into the world of film. In their works, the authors of each of the various sources address the limitations and liberations of women both on and off the screen in nineteenth century Film and Cinema. Not every source is completely filled with information related to the research topic, but they do cover and analyze many of the same points from different perspectives. Prominent points addressed in each