Essay on Psychoanalysis, Cinema, and Symbolism

Surrealism is a movement that built off of the burgeoning look into art, psychology, and the workings of the mind. Popularly associated with the works of Salvador Dali, Surrealist art takes imagery and ideology and creates correlation where there is none, creating new forms of art. In this essay I will look to explore the inception of the surrealist movement, including the Surrealist Manifesto, to stress the importance of these artists and their work in the 20th century and beyond. I also will look to films from our European Cinema course to express how films incorporate the influence of surrealism both intentionally and unintentionally.

Article Three – Author: David Bordwell / Title of Article: The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film

When considering Mulvey’s theory of the “male gaze” and patriarchal domination, this film clearly demonstrates this notion. While the film opens with the main protagonist, Nola Darling, defending her actions to what seems to be a documentary camera crew. As the film progresses, the male counterparts are afforded more instances of “gaze” than Nola Darling is. Viewers are often subjected to watching the men watch Nola. When the audience does watch Nola’s “gaze” it is when she is discussing things with the camera crew. In a reading of the film, viewers are looking through male subjects “gaze” more often than that of Nola, proving Mulvey’s theory in this

In Chapter 3 of his book, “Ways of Seeing”, John Berger argues that in western nude art and present day media, that women are largely shown and treated as objects upon whom power is asserted by men either as figures in the canvas or as spectators. Berger’s purpose is to make readers aware of how the perception of women in the art so that they will recognize the evolution of western cultured art.

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.

It must be said that men of power create the structure of life--which is not necessarily profitable or fitting to women, nor to the human race in its entirety. Women do not live in this structure:“They lead beautiful lives--women. Lives not only divorced from, but irrevocably excommunicated from, all reality” (156).

Creed, B. 1999. Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection. Feminist Film Theory, a Reader, edited by. Sue Thornham. New York: New York U P.

Since the 1940’s, movies have predominately portrayed women as sex symbols. Beginning in the 1940’s and continuing though the 1980’s, women did not have major roles in movies. When they did have a leading role the women was either pretreated as unintelligent and beautiful, or as conniving and beautiful: But she was always beautiful. Before the 1990’s, men alone, wrote and directed all the movies, and the movies were written for men. In comparison, movies of the 90’s are not only written and directed by women, but leading roles are also held by older and unattractive women. In this paper I will show the variations and growth of women’s roles in movies from the 1940’s though the 1990’s.

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 film I chose to watch is the original Psycho, filmed in 1960 and directed by Alfred Hitchcock. The stars of the cast included Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, Vera Miles, John Gavin, and Martin Balsam. (IMDB.com, 2006) The story begins about a young woman named Marion Crane from Arizona who is fed up with her life and longs to marry her boyfriend, Sam. Unfortunately, the couple has little money and cannot marry. One Friday afternoon, she is asked to deposit forty-thousand dollars for her boss. Seeing the money as an opportunity to start a new life with her lover, she takes off for California with the money. She ends up becoming tired from the drive and pulls into the Bates Motel. Unfortunately for Marion, the owner of the motel, Norman

American Psycho has been recognized as a brilliant thriller of its time and can legitimately be labeled a scandalous novel. The novel was published in 1991 by the daring author Bret Easton Ellis and was later adapted into a movie production in 2000 by the director Mary Harron. The novel endured nasty criticism to the point of rousing riots and the boycott of the publishing company, Simon & Schuster; who later dropped the publication of the book, due to the negative publicity. Bret Easton Ellis’ novel was convicted of national censorship, and remains censored in select countries. The disapproval of Ellis’ novel was based on the graphic sequences of sexual violence and the

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

One of the reasons that this film made the top ten films of all time

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).