Rear Window And Ali 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

In the first film Rear Window, we follow a man by the name of L.B. “Jeff” Jefferies, who is currently stuck at home nursing a broken leg. In order to kill time Jeff watches his neighbors from his wheelchair with a pair of binoculars at the rear window of his place. While watching these neighbors Jeff develops several insights to his neighbors ranging from “Miss Torso” a beautiful ballet dancer who is throughout the film shown in a scantily clad, sexual manner to the lonely, depressed woman who attempts a suicide at one point in the movie. The driving point of the film comes

Auteur Alfred Hitchcock’s suspenseful, darkly comic film, Rear Window (1954) subverts the murder mystery genre to explore the suppressed anxieties and desires of American Individuals and communities. The film is an allegory of their responses to changes in gender roles and domestic life in the post-war era. Hitchcock’s panopticon set subjects the space of a Greenwich Village apartment building to set a point of view of its immobilized protagonist, confined to his small apartment, where he is predilected to spectate others as a form of escapism and an expression of control. Hitchcock challenges the idea of conservative values such as an “active male” and a “passive female” and how Jeff uses his speculations of the performances played out on the courtyard to distance himself from his own fears of

I will be taking films prior to feminism movement and films during the feminism movement and how the representation of women was altered. For this argumentation, I will be analyzing the film Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and The State of Film and Media Feminism (Kuhn, 2004), where Annette Kuhn argues that the women in cinema were crafted according to the male desires. Then I will proceed to discuss about films that were made from a woman’s point of view, rather than the way a man might perceive or see a woman. This will highlight the film: Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), which gives a portrayal of feminism through a young single

In the early 1990s Laura Mulvey’s thesis concerning the patriarchal structure of an active male gaze has influenced feminist film critiques and Hollywood. Mulvey’s project is to use psychoanalysis to uncover the power of patriarchy in Hollywood cinema. Patriarchal influence upon cinema is found primarily in pleasure (pleasure in looking) or as Freud’s has put it, scopophilia. Mulvey suggests that it may be possible to create a new for of cinema due to the fact that patriarchy power to control cinematic pleasure has revealed.

Although The To Do List does not entirely conform to the ideologies presented by Laura Mulvey in her piece, Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema, the theories argued can be utilized as a constructed lens, which is subverted by the film’s narrative. Similarly, as Mulvey states in her work: “(i)t is said that analyzing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this article” (Mulvey, 839), much in the same way is my intention for such a case study – to work at diminishing the taboo constraints placed on female sexuality. Mulvey’s definition of cinema’s scopophiliac qualities are subverted in the film and rather function to place almost a female gaze upon some of the main male characters, which is a clear deviation from common Hollywood films. Much as women are eroticized in media, writer/director

As an advanced representation system the cinema possesses questions of the ways the unconscious structure ways of seeing and pleasure in looking. Feminists have been using Freud’s psychoanalytical theory as a political weapon in order to deconstruct popular Hollywood cinema and how it stimulates the patriarchal culture. Even though we are more conscious about these structures nowadays, Hollywood cinema still uses the Male Gaze in order to control the identification processes of the spectator. A recent example is the thriller Disturbia (2007) by D.J. Caruso, seen as a modern interpretation of Hitchcock’s Rear Window. It’s a movie about a grounded teenager who starts spying on his neighbours

In Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, she presents a number of very interesting facts regarding the ways that the sexual imagery of men and women respectively are used in the world of film. One such fact is that of the man as the looker and the female as the looked upon, she argues that the woman is always the object of reifying gaze, not the bearer if it. And “[t]he determining

In her book titled Film Theory and Criticism, Laura Mulvey presents the male gaze by describing the modern culture as a “patriarchal culture” in which women represent the male’s “other” (804). This culture creates an environment where the man is the master while the woman is subject to exist as nothing more than a sexualized object whose purpose is to serve for pleasure of the male audience. The male gaze is found in films, art, and literature. It is in these cultural objects that the audience is exposed to seeing the world and, more specifically, women through the male perspective. This is especially depicted in

According to Laura Mulvey cinema is a man’s world, and we’re all just living in it. The cinematic text is organized along lines that are corresponding to the cultural subconscious with is essentially patriarchic. Pedro Almodóvar’s Talk to Her undoubtedly merits attention. The aspect of the film and its tendency to produce a cluster set of reactions pushes the need to revisit the fictional (but probable) events that it depicts. Every relational concept in this film reaffirms the male gaze and an overall attitude of dismiss on women.

Hopkins claims ‘the fact that it is a woman’s hand which ranges along the bookshelf in the trailer clearly suggests that this is a “woman’s film.”’ By referring back to Doane’s definition of the woman’s film, one can assume that Stevenson’s adaptation reinforces the “deeply entrenched identification of women suffering from hysteria and paranoia.” Although the acting style does not reflect the melodramatic style in Tolentino’s adaptation, the acting in Stevenson’s film is still vastly exaggerated, which is reflected in the film’s poster. In analysing the work of feminist film critics, Molly Haskell and Marjorie Rosen, Smelik observes ‘a direct relation between films and society,’ and ‘the objection of the dream factory to Hollywood is that it produces false consciousness, that films don’t show ‘real’ women but only stereotypical images of an ideologically laden ‘femininity’. The posters of the 1943 film frame the culturally constructed image of ‘femininity’ of the 1940’s. In

The majority of mainstream cinema today is constructed from the viewpoint of what is known as the “male gaze”; which we recognize by how it looks at women, as

The term classical Hollywood cinema has been used to describe a narrative and visual style of film-making which developed between in the early 20th century, and as far as the 1960s. The style is characterized by a number of devices that establish a linear narrative logic and a realistic cinematic space; which soon became some of the most prevalent narrative techniques in cinematic history to this day. The heyday of second-wave feminism, saw the birth of feminist film theory, which became concerned with female representations in the media. This period ignited an era of scepticism felt towards classical Hollywood that lives on; as many believe that this narrative style set a sexist tone to cinema for the years to come. Motivated by both the aspiration to adequately depict female subjectivity onscreen and the aim to achieve social equality of the sexes, scholars often turn to the experimental cinema to appreciate feminist objectives thrive (Watson & Hill, 2015). Nevertheless, others believe that the audience’s familiarity with the

The movie trailer has been chosen for analysis because it is timeless in its appeal. The movie was a highly acclaimed one, and people in the world greatly watched it. It was very famous for its epic touch and great revolution on the film industry. It would be interesting to have a semiotic analysis of gender as portrayed in this great movie. The relations between men and women are a central idea in the filming industry. Laura Mulvey added a political dimension by taking into account specific film strategies to highlight the underlying relations of power on gender models in filming industry. For a long time, the masculine gender has dominated the industry while the feminist gender has been undermined.

Rear Window is a film about L.B. “Jeff” Jeffries directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Jeff is a photographer while on bed rest he takes an interest in his neighbor by peeping through his window, hence the name Rear Window. He begins to suspect Lars Thorwald, one of his neighbors, of murdering his wife and hiding her body. The film centers around this murder to explain the voyeurism and invasion of privacy Jeff and the audience is guilty of. It is clear the film focuses on romantic relationships and marriage in the eyes of Jeff as well. The neighbors all represent a stage in a romantic relationship through Jeff’s eyes and the audience also get to see the development of Jeff’s own relationship. It is safe to assume that this film is a love story and a suspenseful film.