Notes on Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975)

LINKS

• Some Good explanatory notes | A Summary
• Notes on "The Gaze"
• The Piano and the Gaze

• the objectification of women-- seen as objects
• the commonalaity of female nudity -- display implies subordination
• internalization of the gaze, changes women's perceptions of themselves and makes them think of themselves as objects
• shift to objectification as a source of pleasure (for both the looker and the looked-at)
• men as the dominant group have been the looker (the subjects; women the objects)
• ties back to another aspect of teh feminist critique of Freud-- the degree to which Freudian theory iis based on visual dynamics

438    I. INTRODUCTION

a) A Political Use of Psychoanalysis

• Film reflects the langauge of partriarchy by being bound up in the same story of sexual difference that all patriarchy is founded on.  In film women is seen as Other, as an object not a subject.  In a way she represents the unconscious of the male because she is always the object he is looking at and never is able to speak for herself.
• Phallocentrism -- a world view which sees the penis (symbolic and otherwise) as the defining center of meaning.  In other words-- there is a central, stable meaning to things; that meaning is defined largely by men who associate their power to name and define and control reality with their masculinity.
• Symbolic Order -- the realm of meaning controlled by the Law of the Father  (in Lacan's theorizing): the language of partriachy.  As opposped  (by Kristeva) to the Imaginary -- the primal language of connectiona sscoiated with pre-Oedipal bonding with the mother.

b) Destruction of Pleasure as a Radical Weapon

• Hollywood film reflects the dominant ideology of their culture.  We get our pleasure from films from this presentation of the erotic.  If we learn to make films which do not encode these ideologies, a lot of people will lose their pleasure in looking at film.
• Mise-en-scene means staging an action. It is historically to do with directing plays, and became later to do with film to express how the material in the frame is directed.

440    II. PLEASURE IN LOOKING/ FASCINATION WITH THE HUMAN FORM

a) Film satisfies this primal pleasure we all get from looking at other people.
scopophilia - - the pleasure we get from looking, in seeing other people as objects. We get a sense of power from being able to do this.  With John Berger she believes the one who looks has the power.
Voyeristic scopophilia --
b) Narcissistic scopophilia is looking at other people as seeing them as surrogates for yourself.  We also identify with people in movies.   So there is a tension here between the sense of power we get from observing others as separate from ourselves and the pleasure we get in imagining that we are the people we are looking at.
the mirror stage:
c) tension between these impulses-- to see others as separate and to identify with them

442  III. WOMAN AS IMAGE, MAN AS BEARER OF THE LOOK

a) Split between male, active gaze which looks and female passivity which is looked upon. Women are always on display in film.  Seen as objects of sexual desire; this is trasnsformed into exhibitionism.  Visual presence of female tends to stop the stroy line to dwell on the image.
diegesis -- "In a narrative film, the world of the film's story. The diegesis includes events that are presumed to have occurred and actions and spaces not shown onscreen. " source
Buddy pictures
Why are so many women in film showgirls, strippers, etc.
b) Gender split carries over into narrative of film--men carry the story, make things happen, while woman remains icon.
c1) Problems with woman as icon:
444    c1a) voyeurism -- sadistic desire to punish woman for her lack
        c1b) fetishistic scopophilia -- builds up beauty of womanin order to compensate for anxiety
C2) Examples: Sternberg's Dietrich films show festishism.  Hitchcock's are studies in voyeurism--

447 SUMMARY 

Varieties of the gaze:

• The camera
• The audience
• The characters