Visual Pleasure And Narrative Cinema

First of all, the dark setting of the old man’s room manifests terror in the story. “His room was as black as pitch with the thick darkness (for the windows were close fastened, through fear of robbers), and so I knew that he could not see the opening of the door, ….”(56-59). The author directly portrays the dark scene of the old man’s room as black pitch, and the word “thick” emphasizes the deepness of the dark. The fact that the old man could see nothing because there’s no light makes the readers feel anxious. People depend on the light for their own protection, and they instinctively feel fear when it gets dark around

Throughout the novel one can notice a constant reference to the darkness, as symbolizing a heaviness and resignation that afflicts deeply the characters and also the atmosphere of story.

Many people fear things like darkness, especially at night, where fear spreads relentlessly in the minds of society. In the book Night, the memoir of the author Elie Wiezel and his experiences during the holocaust, he expresses his fear in several unique yet frightening situations. From his hometown of Sighet to Auschwitz, Elie struggles to survive while keeping close to his family. He may have been a young boy, but he was smart and resourceful as well, which is how he survived, even with scars not only on his frail body, but his mind and soul as well. The book shows fear with the mysterious window knocker, after Elie finds Idek with a young Polish girl and is warned that he will pay for snooping around, and when Elie’s father is getting beaten up.

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.

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

Many children fear the dark, and are convinced that something is lurking in the shadows waiting to gobble them up. The Dark is a great example of this fear. It is about a boy named Lazlo who is afraid of the dark in his basement. When the sun goes down, shadow fills the house. Lazlo fights it off with his flashlight. But when the flashlight burns out, Lazlo is forced to face the dark. One night the dark comes into Lazlo’s room and says it wants to show him something. Something in the basement, where the dark lives. There, Lazlo discovers a night light that puts his mind at ease. "The dark kept on living with Laszlo, but it never bothered him again," Snicket concludes (27). Now, instead of watching the shadows with suspicion as the sun sets, Lazlo is ignorant to the coming of the night. The idea of a young child being afraid of the dark is not unusual. All children have that certain place in their house that only becomes scary at night, like the basement, closet, or under the bed. The darkness is the unknown and therefore it's scary. This book, however, confronts that fear and as we follow Laszlo through his house and to all the areas of darkness. It teaches us that actually the dark is not as frightening as it first seems to

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

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

The cinema offers pleasure of scopophilia where ‘it can be fixated into perversion, producing obsessive voyeurs and Peeping Toms whose only sexual satisfaction can come from watching, in an active controlling sense, an objectified other.’ (Mulvey: 1988, p. 31)

Gothic literature uses the reader’s senses and emotion to spark suspense and the natural instincts of fear. In the stories A Cask of Amontillado, A Feather Pillow, The Mask of the Red Death, and the book The Night Circus, many of these senses and feelings emerge when the author uses a dark setting or a feeling of abandonment. In gothic literature darkness symbolizes the unknown and alludes to death, leaving the reader feeling uneasy.

When children think of darkness they think of lack of light which causes them to become scared. As we grow older, we begin to not only realize the lack of light, but the objects inside the dark which can be more frightening. We start understanding how darkness makes us feel. Darkness makes one think of unusual scenarios that are not real, but seems so real at that moment. Once we start believing in those scenarios, they start to overcome us and we no longer stay ourselves. There are multiple definitions of darkness and they all go with these two authentic stories, Heart of Darkness and The Dead. In the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, darkness is defined as: partial or total absence of light, wickedness or evil, unhappiness, secrecy and lack of spiritual or intellectual enlighten. Comparing, Heart of Darkness written by Joseph Conrad and The Dead written by James Joyce, each author brings out darkness and the living dead into the main character and shows how much it changes them for the worse and/or for the better.

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.