Visual Pleasure And Narrative Cinema

Within the action and suspense of Rear Window, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, the theme of feminism is uncovered. Throughout Rear Window, Lisa Fremont, the female protagonist, is a symbol of feminism due to her character transformation.

Scopophilia is defined as the pleasure in looking. There are three kinds of looking in film: characters looking at other characters, cameras looking at the characters, and finally, the audience looking that the screen through the camera. The only way to change how women are viewed in cinema is to disrupt the looking. Through the narrative and technical structure in Stepford Wives (1975), the traditional male gaze is questioned while at the same time the main character, Joanna, is given her own gaze.

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

This technique momentarily suspends the omniscient gaze of the camera, and evokes the spectator’s—as well as Hitchcock’s—desire to “capture” the female protagonist as she escapes off-screen. In this context, the seemingly objective tracking shot may in fact reveal itself as a violent, subjective

Both Laura Mulvey and bell hooks describe the idea of the “gaze” in film. In both of the theories presented by Mulvey and hooks, the “gaze” is the way in which viewers are subjected to a particular perspective because of their social standing. In Mulvey’s case, she argues that the “gaze” in which the audience is forced into is that of the “male gaze” while hooks argues a more nuanced “gaze” including the “oppositional gaze”. While some of Mulvey’s argument is accurate, hooks argues that it leaves out important other factors, in particular, race. Both arguments have many similarities and differences, and can be seen exemplified in many films, such as Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It.

In Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 classic thriller Rear Window, Jimmy Stewart stars as L.B. Jeffries, a world traveling magazine photographer accustomed to living a fast pace active lifestyle. When Jefferies injures himself taking a risky picture he is immobilized, confined to a wheelchair inside his apartment for two months. Bored with his uneventful life he becomes completely obsessed with the lives of his neighbors spending the majority of his waking hours watching them from his window. To obtain a better view he begins using a telescopic lens from one of his cameras. By watching his neighbors through the camera he assumes the role of both a spectator and a voyeur. This contributes to

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

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

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

Alfred Hitchcock has always been known for his suspenseful and action filled films. His 1954 production of the movie Rear Window is no contradiction to that. Throughout Rear Window, many different motifs and themes are splayed out for the audience to dwell upon. One well seen theme is voyeurism. Within the movie, the audience is challenged with this theme, and left with the uncertainty about the power of voyeurism. Some critics believe that Hitchcock even went so far as to use the film as a way to say that us as an audience has an obsession with watching, which invades the privacy of those around us: voyeurism is

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.

Cinema in of itself has always been voyeuristic in nature due to the demographics of the creative heads and audience majority. As cinema developed over the years, directors incorporated the general desire and scandal of watching, specifically voyeuristic male gazes on women, to combine the audiences desire to watch with the desire of the characters watching within the film. This essay will focus on directors Alfred Hitchcock with his movie Psycho (1960) and David Lynch with Blue Velvet (1986) on their use of different staging and filmography techniques within the films to give the audience further insight into the psyche of the male characters and blur the lines between lust and violence as result of branching from similarly composed scenes

The male gaze was introduced by Laura Mulvey in her 1975 essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" and is “a feature of gender power asymmetry in film”. Mulvey explained, “Women were objectified in film because heterosexual men were in control of the camera”. The male gaze is when the audience views the scene of object –in this case the woman- from the prospective of a man. This may occur if the camera lingers over a woman’s curves for a while displaying her as an erotic object rather than a human being, making her a victim of sexualisation. The woman is usually unaware of this gaze, which brings patriarchy to the situation. Her essay also explains that the ‘female gaze’ is similar except it is like women looking at themselves through a male’s eyes. This can have a negative effect on real life women because they are being told what they should look like in order to be noticed by men and what men want to see. Feminists

I wanted to create an intimate experience with an audience through a film. I needed to get started. I had researched on forums, websites even Youtube on advice on how where I could start. Most places said, to begin with, something you already owned. In my case, It was the iPhone 5s. I had used my phone for a year to take photos and videos when I had recently decided to upgrade to the Canon T6i. After using the camera for a couple of months now, I wanted to see the similarities and differences in functionality that the iPhone 5s had compared to the Canon T6i.

In her feminist essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” by Laura Mulvey, she adopts Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic studies of the mirrors stage and Freudian psychology to explain how Hollywood cinema has reinforced the spectator identification with a patriarchal male while using women in films to fulfill voyeuristic fantasies from male spectators. She argues that in classical Hollywood cinema that active males drive the story while passive females are there to be exhibited as something pleasurable for the male character and the audience to look at. In the movie Funny Games (1997) directed