Visual Pleasure And Narrative Cinema

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.

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

Through this directorial concept I intend to expose the unjust double standards that men have regarding women. Through clear emphasis on this theme I want to capture the raw human emotion of women,

When one hears the terms “violence” and “horror,” one typically imagines horrible crimes and serial killers; rarely would one think of everyday suburban life. However, this is the exact landscape of violence depicted in Charles Burns’ Black Hole. In Black Hole Burns draws attention to the implicit assumptions about “normal” and “other” made in everyday life by exposing the objectification of women and through the male gaze. The male gaze is a phrase used in film and gender studies to describe the lens through which audiences view popular culture from a heterosexual male perspective. According to Laura Mulvey, the film theorist who coined the term, the male gaze is so ubiquitous that it often goes unrecognized and is considered the norm.

Alfred Hitchcock’s, ‘Rear Window’ (1954), is ultimately a film presenting the ideas of a natural voyeuristic nature within society and how the concepts of the traditional gender roles for males of ‘participating’ were challenged during this time. ‘Rear Window’ is a film about a magazine photographer who’s active and adventurous life gets turned around when he is confined to a wheelchair in his small apartment for six weeks. During these weeks he’s found himself occupied by watching out his window and sneakily looking into his surrounding neighbours lives, gathering suspicions that one of them, Lars Thorwald has murdered his wife in cold blood, under the neighbours noses. The typical male gender roles in the 1950’s were challenged as Jeff was

This shows how the film industries use sexuality to gain audience, since it is fairly common in our society nowadays. For this paper, I will be focusing on how gender,

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 gaze deals with how the audience views the people presented in visual culture, in this case, adverts, magazines and Cinema. The ‘male gaze’ is the male ability to exercise control over women by representing them in visual means as passive, sexual objects of male desire. The power of men over women has always existed. They are seen as the more powerful and clever species. This control over women has been seen predominately in linguistics senses in past times. It is clear that there are more derogatory terms for women than there are for men. Men can also wolf whistle or cat-call in order to harass a woman but

In both Rear Window and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul give a contrasting view of gender roles in relationships to the social norm and give different forms of women in society. With the readings of Hillary Neroni’s The Feminist Theory Julio Garcia Espinosa’s For an Imperfect Cinema and Sergei Eisenstein's Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, I’ll be examining the gender roles within the films of Rear Window and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul.

Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, is the story of a photographer named L.B. Jeffries who is currently confined to a wheelchair because of a leg injury and therefore unable to leave his apartment. Out of boredom, he begins watching his neighbors, going as far as to name them and come up with scenarios for them. He seeming has all control and all from the comfort of his apartment. His girlfriend, Lisa, whom he deems “too perfect” and is unable to commit to her fully, is not as interesting as the lives of his neighbors; that is until she herself becomes interested in them as well. Laura Mulvey and Tania Modleski have both written about Rear Window and the way it either follows the normal gender roles or contradicts them. Despite being interested in similar subject matter, the two women have differing opinions on the approach of the film; is Lisa the passive object or the active agent? (Modleski, 723). The arguments presented by both women cause the viewer to not only see this film as a critique on movie viewing but on the male gaze and whether or not the man is truly in control of the world he sees around him.

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

The video essay argued against Laura Mulvey theory on male gaze and was mainly centred on the article of visual Pleasure and narrative cinema writer by Laura Mulvey. According to Mulvey(1975,p348) “The female is displayed for his enjoyment(connoting male phantasy) and that of the spectator fascinated with the image of is like set in an illusion of natural space, and through him gaining possession and control of the woman within the diegesis”. She went further stating that “in film the women as object of the combined gaze of spectator for all the male protagonist. She is isolated, glamorous, on display, sexualised” (p3488). Examples of such films given in the video essay is the skin I live in (Pedro Almodóvar), Spain 2011. The idea of female

For definition of the male gaze, this area of the exhibit will focus on Laura Mulvey’s “Woman as Image, Man as Bearer of the Look.” In this piece, Mulvey discusses two theories: voyeurism and fetishistic scopophilia. To briefly explain, voyeurism involves deriving pleasure from the assertion of control, usually done by a male. On the other hand, fetishistic scopophilia transforms the female entity into an object whose sole purpose is to pleasure. An area of this exhibit include an arcade machine of the game “Mortal Kombat” to depict the difference in the way males and females are drawn and portrayed in video games. Male characters within this game are provided armor, or clothing at the least, that covers their vital organs and suits their fighting style. It is obvious the intention of the male characters’ clothing is functionality. However, the same can not be said about their female counterparts. Not only is their clothing minimal, their fighting style is also hypersexualized. This video game is almost the epitome of Mulvey’s fetishistic scopophilia. Next to this will be side-by-side showcasing of famous superhero costumes such as Wonder Woman vs. Superman and Catwoman vs. the Joker. Again, these costumes reinforce fetishistic scopophilia as female characters are purposely clothed with minimal armor that accentuates a female’s breasts and butt. Music videos are another reliable source for elaborating on fetishistic scopophilia. For instance, the popular rock band Van Halen’s “Hot for Teacher” reduces the band’s teacher to nothing but a sexual object to whom they sexually fantasize about instead of respect and learn from. Moreover, the famous “Stacy’s Mom” by Fountains of Wayne reduces the band’s friend’s mom to a sexual object for visual pleasure. The novel “Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov will be used to further detail how males view women, even young teens, as subjects for their pleasure,

Theorist, E. Ann Kaplan in her work, “Is the Gaze Male?”, analyses the portrayal of women in film using Laura Mulvey’s “Gaze’ theory and psychoanalysis. In addition, Kaplan states that historically, females have been the central focus on only the melodrama genre, and while melodrama exposes the constraints and limitations that the family places on women, at the same time, gets women to accept those constraints as inevitable and normal. Kaplan argues that our culture is deeply rooted in “masculine” and “feminine, and dominance-submission patterns. In the end, she concludes that the exclusion from male culture provides an avenue to affect change in film and society. I partially agree with Kaplan that some women take pleasure from being the object of the male gaze as I think that is not entirely true, and specifically, this generalization does not apply to lesbians.

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.