Film theory

The ‘Male Gaze’ is a phrase coined by Laura Mulvey, in which she examines how through media, the portrayal of women has evolved and is seen through the eyes of the male perspective. After the 1960’s sexual revolution, films started to incorporate women as a more objectified aspect, demonstrated by the visual representation of how they provocatively use their bodies. In this essay we will be specifically examining the ‘male gaze’ in the 1999’s cult classic, “Fight Club” from both the protagonist

purpose of this essay, I will thoroughly explain and elaborate on Freud’s terms as I analyse a sequence from the point where Ellie arrives at Oscar’s house to the moment Oscar sees Ellie’s castrated genitals, through the act of ‘peeping’. Taken from the film Let the Right One in by Tomas Alfredon (Alfredon, T. 2008). My analysis of the sequence will be centred on the ideas of voyeurism and fetishism as set out by Laura

still exists. The male gaze is a concept that refers to how visual culture is designed to please a male viewer by sexually objectifying women. It was first coined by Laura Mulvey, a British feminist film critic, in her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975). She argues that Hollywood films use women as “erotic objects” in order to provide pleasurable experience for heterosexual male audiences. According to her, the male gaze can be seen as active and passive roles that satisfy the spectator

De Beauvoir provides us with two key terms produced by the “Gaze” operations. According to her, women under the male gaze are the controlled ones and appear like motionless objects whose subjectivity is totally lost. They appear as the peripherals, the minors in front of the centre. De Beauvoir comments on that “She is the inessential in front of the essential. He is the subject; he the absolute. She is the other” (6). At the Convent, the female characters empower themselves through subverting this

Depictions of Cleopatra in film and TV series, focus more on the personal aspects of her life, with little excerpts of her political life being thrown in. Each depiction having undertones, of what is happening politically, at the time the film was made. The 1917 Film starring Theda Bara, had all the themes of a contemporary vision of Egypt being, 'exotic and alluring, but also alien and threatening.' (Fear, 2008, AA100 DVD). Shown within its backdrop imagery, and in Bara's threatening portrayal

to the beach and cuts to a long shot of a mother holding her daughter in a field of sunflowers. Simone de Beauvoir found the idea of a "woman's nature" to be oppressive. She linked motherhood to slavery. Close your Eyes could conform to Beauvoir's theory that women are pressured into focusing on motherhood, marriage and femininity instead of politics, technology or other jobs/ crafts; Buble's music video has a strong emphasis on the role of the mother. The montage contains many positive shots of family

Roman Polanski’s 1965 Repulsion was a film atypical of its time in its portrayal of woman. Films in the 1950s and 1960s generally portray women as the damsel in distress and in need of rescue by the knight in shining armor (a man), as Mulvey’s puts it “ she is isolated, glamourous, on display, sexualised. But as the narrative progress she falls in love with the male protagonist and becomes his property.” Essentially, Laura Mulvey, states that women only have meaning by how she identifies with the

on the idea that a man is looking at her. The woman looks at herself with a “male gaze” to decide if the way she looks and acts is appropriate in society. This “male gaze” is shown in many different advertisements. It is also shown in Rear Window, a film by Alfred Hitchcock. In both forms of media, women are sexualized and shown under the gaze of men. One example of women being seen under the gaze of men in the tutorial is in the form of one of the

John Berger in “Ways of Seeing”, begins the first chapter by stating, “Seeing comes before the words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak” (Berger 7). An essential element in art is the being able to visualize the creation. A common term instilled within art history is ‘male gaze’ introduced by Laura Mulvey in "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", where a scene is viewed through a heterosexual male perspective and the female role is highly sexualized and focused on her body parts

Mulvey approaches the concept of psychoanalysis as the idea of a political weapon, which is then used in the way to expose patriarchal unconsciousness in both films and how certain structures in society are formed. A woman can not be the maker of meaning, but can only be the bearer of viewership within this structure, she is the object that is to be viewed in an erotic form. To be the object of pleasure for the male gaze, men take this satisfaction from watching to fulfill their own innate sexual