Film Studies - research for essay

UNMASING THE GAZE: SOME THOUGHTS ON ONEW FEMINIST FILM THEORY AND HISTORY – LAURA MULVEY

If the image of female stars are constructed as "to be looked at", the women in the audience are necessarily drawn into a complicity with the film's own inscribed "gaze".

During the 1920s, a new femininity, mass production and mass entertainment emerged side by side, deeply imbricated with each other, with images of modernity and, in the words of pioneer advertiser, Eal'l1est Etmo Calkins, "beauty as a business tool".

This time Dorothy and Lorelei are tailored, quite blatantly, for a gaze that is presumed male and an audience in which women are presumed incidental.

tars such as Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell were not promoting domesticity, or, indeed, consumer durables. They represent the power and the glamour of America

VISUAL PLEASURE AND NARRATIVE CINEMA



The cinema offers a number of possible pleasures. One is scopophilia. There are circumstances in which looking itself is a source of pleasure, just as, in the reverse formation, there is pleasure in being looked at.



The cinema satisfies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking, but it also goes further, developing scopophilia in its narcissistic aspect. The conventions of mainstream film focus attention on the human form.



Jacques Lacan has described how the moment when a child recognises its own image in the mirror is crucial for the constitution of the ego. Several aspects of this analysis are relevant here.



one implies a separation of the erotic identity of the subject from the object on the screen (active scopophilia), the other demands identification of the ego with the object on the screen



pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female.



As Budd Boetticher has put it:

'What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance.'

raditionally, the woman displayed has functioned on two levels: as erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium,



in psychoanalytic terms, the female figure poses a deeper problem. She also connotes something that the look continually circles around but disavows: her lack of a penis, implying a threat of castration and hence unpleasure



he male unconscious has two avenues of escape from this castration anxiety preoccupation with the re-enactment of the original trauma (investigating the woman, demystifying her mystery) counterbalanced by the devaluation, punishment or saving of the guilty object (an avenue typified by the concerns of the film noir); or else complete disavowal of castration by the substitution of a fetish object or turning the represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous (hence over-valuation, the cult of the female star)



THE MALE GAZE IN 2018 – MELISSA STRONG



“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” first acknowledges that movies make the camera invisible, almost unnoticeable, to create the illusion of verisimilitude.

today it is worth noting that the camera’s male gaze also is cisgender, heterosexual, and representative of conventional expectations of masculinity. Whatever for, you may ask? Well, as Mulvey points out, movies are a product of a patriarchal culture, so naturally they tend to reflect patriarchy.



WHAT IS THE MALE GAZE AND DOES FEMALE GAZE EXIIST - ANDY SIMMONS



Filmmakers often attempt to avoid presenting female characters as “mere” sexual objects by giving them complex back stories, strong motivations and an active role in the plot of their story. Yet the masculine gaze is still commonplace. Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises (2012) has significant personal motivations, yet she is still clearly there to be looked at.



Although written 40 years ago, Mulvey’s essay still provokes strong reactions. One common response is that both women and men are objectified in cinema.



Another argument is that cinema doesn’t invite women to desire men’s bodies. Rather, female viewers are positioned to identify with a heroine who is herself desired by a man. According to this logic, it is not Fitzwilliam Darcy’s wet undershirt that inflames the female viewer in Pride and Prejudice. Rather, it is Darcy’s longing for Elizabeth that truly appeals



So is there a female gaze? Certainly, beautiful men abound in cinema. But I’d argue that there is no direct female equivalent of the male gaze. The male gaze creates a power imbalance. It supports a patriarchal status quo, perpetuating women’s real-life sexual objectification.



Films like The Piano, In The Cut or Marie Antoinette show that cinema can use music, erotic scenes and visual aesthetics to express a feminine point of view. In doing so, such films counter the gaze, depicting women as subjects rather than objects “to be looked at”. Whilst not replicating the male gaze exactly, they challenge the enduring dominance of masculine worldviews in film and media.





“by orchestrating the ‘three looks’ of spectator, camera, and character, the cinematic appartatus naturalized a masculine gaze in the service of patriarchal ideology” (Maltby and Craven, The Hollywood Cinema, p. 398