Lecture transcript The gaze in historical context All right, s.docx

Lecture transcript :The gaze in historical context:
All right, so we're continuing our discussion of film noir, but
we're really thinking about it in relation to Laura Mulvey's
discussion of the gaze. So I've assigned this piece, "Visual
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," because it is probably the most
influential work in critical cinema studies that's been published
in an academic context. If you look up "Visual Pleasure and
Narrative Cinema," you'll see that it was cited tens of thousands
of times since it was first published in the journal Screen in
1975. So it's an older piece, but it's very representative of the
ways that ideas in film theory that have a certain theoretical
construct around them can sort of make their way into popular
discourse. So we're going to think about whether we agree with
her take on the gaze and whether it still applies to the ways that
film form works today. And we'll also look at some examples of
feminist filmmakers from the period that she was writing in who
tried to really combat these ideas around the gaze and
experiment with what feminist film form could really look like.
So when the article had its 30th and 40th anniversaries, there
were retrospectives which you can find online if you're
interested. There were a lot of articles published in places like
The Chronicle of Higher Education, as well as the Screen
journal that it was originally published in, as well as in popular
media commemorating the impact of "Visual Pleasure and
Narrative Cinema." And even now the idea of the gaze has been
a part of popular culture and discussions of film. So you can see
here, it's been talked about in relation to Magic Mike, in
relation to tropes of television. And if you look up male gaze in
YouTube, you'll actually see hundreds and hundreds of
compilations of clips that are organized around the male gaze,
the idea of the male gaze in film. So it's had some staying
power. As I mentioned, the article came out in a journal called
Screen, which was a really influential journal in the 1970s when
film studies as a discipline was really making its way into the

Academy, and thinking about ways to unify analysis of film
form with some of the more philosophical theoretical ideas that
were coming out of critical theory, in particular in Europe. And
so Mulvey published her piece in a journal called Screen. And
she was very influenced by psychoanalytic theory, which was de
rigueur at the time. So if you're a psychoanalytic theorist, you'll
have to sort of stay with me, because I think these ideas are a
little bit controversial now. And certainly a lot of people have
published responses to this article that take issue with many
aspects of it, but I still think it's useful, so we'll just move
through it. So if you're a psychoanalytic theorist, you take as
your starting point that the world is underlined with these deep
psychological structures that were studied first by Freud and
then revised by Lacan. These structures surface in literature,
film, and in art. For example, I'm using the metaphor of the tree
here, but you might have the root structure of the tree, which is
invisible. We don't see it, but it might actually be bigger than
the part of this tree that's above the surface. It's a really
important part. And that is essentially your id, where your
instincts lie. The tree itself is your ego. That's kind of our
reality. And then somewhere in the sky, you have your super-
ego, which is morality and ethics. And so scholars who are
interested in psychoanalysis and relating it to film wanted to
think about how these ideas might impact the viewing
experience. And they were also interested, particularly feminist
scholars like Laura Mulvey were interested in the ways that
these deep structures generate and maintain gender relations and
inequities. So for psychoanalytic film theorists, with film, the
reason that viewing a movie is so pleasurable for people is that
it imitates early childhood socialization. So cinema, for this
reason, is both pleasurable and threatening. So it's organized
around three looks. You have the look of the camera, which is
why we're talking about it in relation to cinematography. You
have the audience watching the film. And you have the
characters watching each other on screen. So with classical film
form, films that are made in a kind of mainstream fashion,

essentially you disavow the audience watching the film and the
look of the camera. And instead you focus on characters
watching each other on screen. Essentially, you want people to
forget that they're watching a movie and become completely
immersed within the experience of the film, within the fictional
world. So this process essentially mirrors two socialization
processes, so the mirror phase and the castration complex.
Mulvey refers to Lacan. And there are a lot of gender
assumptions in this article. So essentially at 18 months, a child
who is always a boy child within this framework is fascinated
by his own image and realizes the difference between himself
and his caregiver, who in this framework is always his mom. So
Lacan says that this is overlaid with misrecognition. In other
words, we see ourselves in the mirror and we misrecognize our
reflection as a superior version of ourselves. So you might think
about, OK, how would this compare to film viewing? So you see
the protagonist onscreen. And you identify with them. And this
is heightened by the editing, so point of view shots, over the
shoulder shots, and so on. You want to be this protagonist, but
of course you are far inferior. So essentially, there is a
connection, according to Mulvey, between this idea of the
mirror phase, this very basic fundamental root structure sort of
socialization process and the process of watching film. That's
why we like it so much. So the second socialization process that
film mirrors is the castration complex. So again, this is a
framework that's really built around a lot of assumptions around
gender. So essentially, the idea is that movies mimic the
recognition of sexual difference. So movies are essentially
constituted by sexual difference. So men recognize that women
are phallusless, according to Freud and Lacan, and therefore the
female body is threatening. And because women are essentially
the focus of the camera within mainstream film, that presents
this idea of the castration complex that is a threat, the threat of
female sexuality. But what Mulvey argues is that films actually
offer a kind of escape route from this threat. So they do this in a
couple of ways. So one is scopophilia, which is pleasure in

looking. So you can see this in this sort of classic sequence
from the film Psycho directed by Alfred Hitchcock who is very
interested in psychoanalysis. You can see themes of
psychoanalysis throughout his films. And in this sequence, you
get a literal peephole, so pleasure in looking is very literalized
in Psycho. So the narrative brings out the threat of female
sexuality, tames it through this kind of scopophilia. And the
function of the narrative in relation to this pleasure in looking
is to control or contain that threat to absolve it. So it does this
in two ways, according to Mulvey. It does this through
fetishism. So it reduces the woman to pure spectacle. So to
fetishize is essentially to reduce a part for the whole, so
Marilyn Monroe's breasts, Marlene Dietrich's legs, J. Lo's butt.
You can probably think of other examples. And then you have
sadistic voyeurism. So here, the woman is punished through a
sadistic male gaze and sometimes gain salvation through
marriage. So fetishization and sadistic voyeurism are enabled
through scopophilia, which occurs in two ways. According to
Mulvey's piece, you have active scopophilia, where we identify
with the powerful gaze of the camera in order to objectify the
woman. And then you have narcissistic scopophilia in which we
identify with the character. Filmic form heightens this through
cinematography and editing techniques. So I'm going to preview
a couple of editing terms here, eyeline match and point of view.
So essentially, a long shot establishes the scene where the
characters are in scene in relation to one another in the space.
And then you cut. And you have a medium close up which
shows us who we should identify with. And he's looking into
off-screen space. And then the next shot is essentially an
eyeline match. It sutures the gaze of the camera to that
character. And it answers what he's looking at. So in this case,
it's a woman's legs, which Mulvey, via Freud, would call
fetishism. Point of view is a related term. So essentially, this
describes when a shot is supposed to show us what a character
is seeing from their optical point of view as if the camera were
their eye. And you can think about this too kind of in a

metaphorical sense with the idea of the private eye in film noir.
So for example, here we know that the medium shot at the end
is from the optical point of view of the person seen looking, as
if the camera were essentially his eye. So we saw this working
in a slightly different way when we were watching Insecure. So
if you'll think back to Insecure, you have this shot. Essentially
the camera is over Issa's shoulder. It's not very obvious, but we
can see her on the left-hand side of the screen. And then it cuts
to a shot of the person whose perspective the gaze is from. In
this case, it's from Issa's perspective. And then we see what
she's looking at, Eddie lounging by the pool in a long shot. And
then we get another medium close up of Issa sort of thinking
about how she's going to pursue him. So in that case, gender is
switched. So we'll think about that a little bit more in a second.
So one of the examples that Mulvey uses is The Blue Angel by
von Sternberg. So she's very interested in the tropes of classical
Hollywood cinema. So in this clip, think about the way that film
form, such as eyeline match and point of view, encourages the
viewer to identify with the man who's watching the performance
by Marlene Dietrich. You can also think about how lighting and
other aspects of mise en scene encourage us to maybe objectify
the performer in a particular way. [VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[MUSIC PLAYING] - (SINGING) I often stop and wonder why
I appease you men, how many times I blunder in love and off
again. They offer me devotion. I like it, I confess. When I
respect emotion there is no need to guess Falling in love again,
never wanted to. What's a girl to do-- can't help it. Love's
always been my game, play it how I may. I was made that way--
- [INAUDIBLE] - --can't help-- - [INAUDIBLE] [MUSIC
STOPS] - Ladies and gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure to
present to you our guest of honor, Dr. [INAUDIBLE],, professor
of the local high school. - Pleased to meet you, professor.
[APPLAUSE] - [INAUDIBLE] [MUSIC RESUMES] -
(SINGING) Falling in love again, never wanted to. What's a girl
to do-- can't help it. Love's always been my game, play it how I
may. I was made that way, can't help it. Men cluster to me like

moths around the flame. and if their wings burn, I know I'm not
to Blame. Falling in love again, never wanted to. What's a girl
to do? I just can't help it. [APPLAUSE] Falling in love again,
never wanted to. What's a girl to do-- can't help it. Love's
always been my game, play it how I may. I was made that way,
can't help it. Men cluster to me like moths around the flame.
And if they're wings burn, I know I'm not to blame. Falling in
love again, never wanted to. What's a girl to do-- can't help it.
[END PLAYBACK] So this is another example from a film noir.
So this is from Gilda, a classic 1946 noir directed by Charles
Vidor. So as you watch the clip, think about how film form,
such as eyeline match and point of view, encourages the viewer
to identify with Johnny, played by Glenn Ford. So pay attention
to camera movement, especially when the camera dollies into
the medium close up of his face. You can think about how
lighting and other aspects of mise en scene encourage us to
objectify Gilda within this context. [VIDEO PLAYBACK] -
Johnny? - Matthew? Hello, Ballin. - Come on up here. - Well,
what are you crying about? - I feel great, Johnny. - You look
foolish. - I'll show you why. - Where is the canary? - How did
you know? - How did I know what? - So you don't know-- come.
This is where the canary is, John. [WOMAN SINGING] What a
surprise to hear a woman singing in my house, eh, Johnny? -
It's quite a surprise. - Gilda, are you decent? - Me? Sure, I'm
decent. - Gilda, This is Johnny Farrell. Johnny, this is Gilda.
[MUSIC STOPS] - So this is Johnny Farrell. I've heard a lot
about you, Johnny Farrell. - Really? Now, I haven't heard a
word about you. [TUTTING] Why, Ballin. - I wanted to keep it
as a surprise. - Was it a surprise, Mr. Farrell? - It certainly was.
You should've seen his face. - Did you tell him what I'm doing
here, Ballin? - No, I wanted to save that as a surprise too. -
Hang on to your hat, Mr. Farrell. - Gilda is my wife, Johnny.
Mrs. Ballin Mundson, Mr. Farrell. Is that all right? -
Congratulations. - Oh, you don't congratulate the bride, Johnny.
You congratulate the husband. - Really? Well, what are you
supposed to say to the bride? - You wish her good luck. - Good

luck - Thank you, Mr. Farrell. My husband tells me you're a
great believer in luck. - We make our own luck, Johnny and I. -
I'll have to try that sometime. I'll try it right now. Tell him to
come to dinner with us tonight, Ballin. - It's an order. Come
along, Johnny. We'll let Gilda get dressed. Look your best, my
beautiful. This will be the casino's first glimpse of you. - I'll
look my very best, Ballin. I want all of the hired help to
approve of me. Glad to you that you, Mr. Farrel. - His name is
Johnny, Gilda. - Oh, I'm sorry. Johnny is such a hard name to
remember and so easy to forget. Johnny, there-- see you later,
Mr. Farrel. - That's right, Mrs. Mundson. - I'll see Johnny
downstairs. - I'll see him at the casino. [END PLAYBACK] So
in this sequence from Out of the Past, which is a film we've
seen clips from before, we can think about how the film
encourages identification with the protagonist, played by Robert
Mitchum, and also the fact that it's taking place across the
border. So besides gender, what other dynamics are in play
within this scene? [VIDEO PLAYBACK] - You don't get
vaccinated for Florida, but you do for Mexico. So I just
followed that 90 pounds of excess baggage to Mexico City. She
had been at the Reforma and then gone. I took the bus south like
she did. It was hot in Tasca. And you say to yourself, how hot
can it get? And then in Acapulco, you find out. I knew she had
to wind up here, because if you want to go south, here is where
you get the boat. All I had to do was wait. Near the plaza was a
little cafe called La Mar Azul, next to a movie house. I sat there
in the afternoons and drank beer. I used to sit there half asleep
with a beer and the darkness. Only that music from the movie
next door kept jarring me awake. And then I saw coming out of
the sun, and I knew why Whit didn't care about that 40 grand. -
[INAUDIBLE] - Si, señorita. - Señorita, señor, may I speak
some words? You will be seated, señor, yes? - With pleasure,
señor. - I am [INAUDIBLE],, a guide, a most excellent guide. -
Indeed. - You ask them. They can tell you that [INAUDIBLE]
knows Acapulco as no one else. Each little street, each-- - I
don't want to go. - Very difficult girl. - Is there one not so,

señor? Perhaps a lottery ticket. - No, thank you. - I have here,
wrought by skilled hands, a ring and earrings of jade and pure
silver. - These? - Gracias señor, gracias. [END PLAYBACK]
OK, so as I mentioned before, Alfred Hitchcock is a director
who is actually interested in psychoanalysis. And a lot of his
films mediate these ideas around psychoanalytic concepts of
gender and sexuality. So this is a clip from Rear Window. So in
this narrative, a photojournalist who is played by Jimmy
Stewart, has actually been in an accident. So he essentially
spends the entire film really in a wheelchair with a giant cast on
his leg with a telescope in his lap which he uses-- a telescope
and a pair of binoculars which he uses to spy on his neighbors.
And so you can think about some of the key terms from
Mulvey's arguments around castration anxiety, scopophilia or
pleasure in looking, fetishism, seeing a part for a whole,
sadistic voyeurism, how that might come into play in this clip
from Rear Window. [VIDEO PLAYBACK] [MUSIC PLAYING]
- (RADIO) Men are you over 40? When you wake up in the
morning, do you feel tired and run down? Do you have that
listless feeling-- [RADIO TUNING] [MUSIC PLAYING]
[ALARM CLOCK RINGS] - [INAUDIBLE] [CHILDREN
SHOUTING] [PHONE RINGS] - Jeffries? - (PHONE)
Congratulations, Jeff. - For what? - (PHONE) For getting rid of
that cast. - Who said I was getting rid of it? - (PHONE) This is
Wednesday, seven weeks from the day you broke your leg-- yes
or no? - Gottison, how did you ever get to be such a big editor
with such a small memory? [END PLAYBACK] So I also
wanted to think about what Mulvey offers in the way of
alternatives. So she herself was a filmmaker. And so here in this
image, she's actually with director of photography Diane
Tammes and Peter Wollen who was a filmmaker and film
theorist, who was based in our department at UCLA for a really
long time. So she made a film with Peter Wollen called Riddles
of the Sphinx, which was a deliberate sort of attempt to create a
feminist film language that would subvert conventional ideas
around film form, objectification of women, ideas around the

gaze, and so on. And so you can think of, as we watch this clip,
the way that film form here subverts cinematic language and
ideas around visual pleasure. [VIDEO PLAYBACK] - He should
be here by now, a little boy with fair hair. - I think he's going to
come across the foot bridge. - What were you asking about
your little girl? - Oh, well, at the moment, she's in a community
nursery where Maxine works, but I was wondering whether it
wouldn't be better to have a nursery at work. Have the unionists
thought about that? - Not much, really, you're lucky to get any
sort of daycare let alone getting the one that suits you best. -
Hello. - Hello. - [INAUDIBLE] - Give this to your mother and
say thanks for waiting. - Yeah, bye. - All right, Bye. - Local
authorities are cutting back on nursery education anyway, aren't
they? - Yes, that's right. It may stimulate the women to demand
more for themselves, though. Have the unions ever done
anything at all about daycare? - No, they haven't done very
much. The TUC is in favor of free state nursery care for any
parent who wants it, but we're a long way from that. - I was
wondering whether-- - There are some nurseries in the textile
industry. And the unions do negotiate about child care there, but
that's an industry that really depends on women's labor. Unless
there is organized action around it, the union wouldn't have any
reason to take it up. It's like most things. - We have to do
something first if we want the union to take it up. - How can
you make people see the connection between better wages and
providing day care? - Well, trades unionism isn't just a question
of wages struggles. It's about work conditions too. It has to be. -
Well, in that case, might the unions get involved in running
nurseries? - They might. All sorts of questions come up with
workplace nurseries. Should the mothers be allowed to visit
during the day? Should the [INAUDIBLE] stay open to let
women shop before they collect their children? Some unions
want the employers to pay for company nurseries but to have
the nurseries run by unions and parents together. [END
PLAYBACK] So you can see with Riddles of the Sphinx, she's
not using conventional form at all. You have essentially a

voiceover from a woman who is talking about child care, so
social issues are integrated in this experimental way. You have
the camera that is moving around 360 degrees, so not something
that is following the conventions of film form, film editing,
cinematography, anything like that. Another interesting example
from this time period is by filmmaker Chantal Akerman. So her
film, Jeanne Dielman, was made in 1975. And it was-- came out
of France and Belgium. And you can think in this clip how the
film seeks to create a different visual language. So this clip is
only a few minutes long, but the actual feature film is three
hours and 45 minutes. And most of it consists of sequences like
this. So you're going to see her making veal cutlets. Most of
Jeanne Dielman consists of sequences of the main character
doing housework. So you can think about what the impact of
that would be if you were watching it for almost four hours and
what she's trying to do in terms of thinking around gender and
film form in this sequence. [VIDEO PLAYBACK] [BABY
VOCALIZES] [PHONE RINGS] [END PLAYBACK] So as you
can see, this kind of filmmaking elicits a different kind of
response to its-- from its viewer. So in your textbook, Corgan
and White are interested in these different kinds of audience
responses. So we'll return to this a couple of times throughout
the class, but I thought I would point to them here. So one of
the ways that they configure the image is to think about image
as presence versus image as text. So essentially, image as
presence is mainstream film form. So we allow ourselves to
become immersed in the film. We allow ourselves to sort of
experience the physical experience that the characters are going
through. So film form essentially emphasizes the
phenomenological experience of the characters. And then we
also have images that show the state of mind or emotions of the
characters. So you have a kind of emphasis on spectators
becoming really immersed in what they're watching. As a kind
of counterpoint to that, what they point to is this idea of image
as text. So this is an image that demands distance, that's full of
signs and codes that need to be sort of deciphered and thought

about. And they can be integrated with other more immersive
approaches to film, so they don't always stand on their own. But
you can think about these two clips from Jeanne Dielman and
from Riddles of the Sphinx and think about how they're offering
a code to their viewer, how they're offering symbols or aesthetic
experiments that the viewer is supposed to decipher or think
about. So when you read journal articles and material for class
that's making an argument about an approach to film form or an
approach to gender in media, one of the things I want you to do
is to think about whether you buy their argument. So you don't
have to necessarily take everything that the authors are saying
at face value. You can also think critically about the kind of
argument that they're making. With the Mulvey piece, visual
pleasure and narrative cinema, it's a little easy to do that
because we're at a great historical distance now. It's been
decades since it was published. And it's a piece that's really
immersed within the context of 1970s feminist filmmaking in
the UK. So there are lots of ways that we could critique it. And
there have been lots of authors who have published critiques of
that piece as well. So I want you to think about what you think
of Mulvey's model, whether you completely agree that this is
the way it works now, that this is something that you think is a
model for all time, whether you think maybe parts of it are right
but parts of it don't seem to fit contemporary filmmaking
practices, or whether you think it's just all garbage, this is not
the way that film form works today. So I thought I'd provide
some examples from other films. So this is one from Suicide
Squad, a more recent movie. And this is Harley Quinn getting
suited up. And as you can see, you have pretty much the same
dynamic working here. So you can think about how Mulvey's
model might apply to a more contemporary sequence like this.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK] [MUSIC - EMINEM, "WITHOUT ME"]
[MUSIC STOPS] - What? Won't fit anymore, too much junk in
the trunk? - Nah, every time I put this on, somebody dies. -
And? - I like putting it on. - Goodie, something tells me a whole
lot of people are about to die. [END PLAYBACK] But you also

get these more ambivalent examples. So this is a sequence from
the first season of Game of Thrones, where we're not
necessarily supposed to think that Daenerys' objectification is a
good thing. I mean, the character who is objectifying her is her
brother. And eventually, her character will be empowered and
see to it that he is tortured and killed. So he is the one who will
eventually get punished, but we still get close ups of Emilia
Clarke's body. And after she became a known actress, through
the show, she had it written into her contract that she wouldn't
do nudity. So you can also think about questions around labor
and women performers labors. So that's something that's going
to come up in Kristy Guevara-Flanagan's film, what happened to
her. [VIDEO PLAYBACK] [MUSIC PLAYING] - Daenerys?
Daenerys? There is our bride to be. Look, a gift from Illyrio.
Touch it. Go on, feel the fabric. Isn't he a gracious host? -
We've been his guests for over a year and he's never asked us
for anything. - Well, Illyrio is no fool. He knows I won't forget
my friends when I come into my throne. You still slouch. Let
them see. You have a woman's body now. I need you to be
perfect today. Can you do that for me? You don't want to
awake the dragon, do you? - No. - When they write the history
of my reign, sweet sister, they will say it began today. - It's too
hot, my lady. [END PLAYBACK] So you have also the way--
you can think about the ways that these dynamics around the
gaze and sexuality occur in same-sex relationships. So this is
Bound from 1996. And I'm showing a clip from Bound, because
it is a revision of the film noir. So it's by the Wachowkis. And
at the time, it was considered a kind of edgy film noir. I think
now it's a little dated. But you can think about the ways that it's
appropriating this idea of the femme fatale for a same-sex
relationship and the ways that the gaze works here in relation to
both the characters on screen as well as the characters watching.
So this is a movie that was released in mainstream cinemas. So
you can think about whether this is being made for a
mainstream audience, whether it's being made for a lesbian or
queer audience. So those questions are also questions that I

think more recent updates around ideas of film form and the
gaze are interested in. [VIDEO PLAYBACK] - Hold the
elevator. Thanks. - Oh no, shit, I didn't know he would call
you. You must think I'm a total nuisance. - Not exactly. - I'm
sorry. I would usually call Rashid. But I didn't know what to do,
so I called Mr. Benkeeni. - He said you lost something? - Yeah,
come on in. - I was doing the dishes. And just as I pulled the
stopper, my earring fell in. That's why I got upset. It's one of
my favorites. - You got a pot or a bucket? - Did you find it?
Oh my god, I can't believe it. I can't thank you enough. You
have to let me pay something. - No. - No? - Toby and
[INAUDIBLE] do it, I did it. - Well, if you won't take money,
how about a drink? You can't work all night. - All right, one
drink. - What would you like? - Beer. - Beer, of course. Sit
down. - Thanks. - You seem uncomfortable. Do I make you
nervous, Corky? - No. - Thirsty, maybe. - Curious, maybe. -
That's funny. Feeling a little bit curious, myself. That's a great
tattoo. Beautiful labrys. Are you surprised I know what it is? -
Maybe. - I have a tattoo. Would you like to see it? A woman in
Upstate New York did it for me. Do you like it? It took her all
day to do it. She promised it wouldn't hurt, but it was sore for a
long time after. I couldn't even touch it. But now I love the way
it feels. Here, touch it. - What are you doing? - Isn't it
obvious? I'm trying to seduce you. - Why? - Because I want to.
I've wanted to ever since I saw you that day in the elevator. I
know you don't believe me, but I can prove it to you. You can't
believe what you see, but you can believe what you feel.
[GASPING] I've been thinking about you all day. [GASPING
INTENSIFIES] [MOANING] - You planned this whole thing.
You got that hearing down the sink on purpose, didn't you? - If
I say yes, will you take your hand away? - No. - Yes. Please,
Corky, please kiss me. [DOOR OPENS] Fuck. - Violet, Vi, are
you home? - Yeah, yeah, I'm right here, Steve. [END
PLAYBACK] So this is a clip from Crazy Stupid Love. So here
we have the gaze aimed in a different direction. So you have
Emma Stone's character looking at Ryan Gosling's character,

but you could also think about differences in tone here, because
it's essentially an emphasis on the comedic aspect of the gaze.
As well as his physical strength is really emphasized here with
the Dirty Dancing reference. - You're adorable. - No, I am sexy.
I am R-rated sexy. - Mhm. - OK, I know what happens in the
PG-13 version of tonight, all right? I know. It's that I get-- I get
really drunk and then I pass out. And you cover me with a
blanket and you kiss me on the cheek and nothing happens, but
that's why I'm here. I am here to bang the hot guy that hit on me
at the bar. - Jacob? - Jacob. - Are people still saying bang? -
Oh, I do. We are going to bang, hmm? This is happening. Take
off your shirt. - Why? - Please, please take off your shirt. -
Really? - Because I can't stop thinking. I need you to do this.
OK, OK, OK, OK. - All right, OK, OK, OK. - OK, OK. - Fuck,
seriously? It's like your photoshopped. Can I-- - Ah, you have
cold hands. Now you take off your dress. - No. - Yes. - No way,
not with all that going on, no thank you. Is there dim lighting
somewhere? Oh, god. OK, so then what do we do? What
happens now? Like logistically, what's your move? - What do
you mean what's my move? - What's your move? Like, what's
your big move? - I got lots of moves. - What's your big move? -
I'm not telling you my big move. - Tell me your move. - You're
not ready for the big move. - Yes, I am. I want your big move. -
You can't handle the big move, trust me. - Tell me your big
move! - I work Dirty Dancing into the conversation. - Dirty
Dancing? - Can I sit down, please? - Yeah. - Can I put back on
my shirt? - No. Why Dirty Dancing? What do we do? Do we
watch it? - You know the big move at the end of Dirty Dancing
where Patrick Swayze picks up Jennifer Grey? - Yeah. - I can
do that. - OK. - So I tell girls I can do the move. I put on the
song "Time Of Your Life." I do the big move. And they always
want to have sex with me. - Oh my god, that's the most
ridiculous thing I've ever heard. - I agree, but it works every
time. - That would not work on me. [MUSIC - BILL MEDLEY,
"TIME OF MY LIFE"] - (SINGING) Now I-- - Oh god, this is
ridiculous. I don't want to do it. - Come on. - This is beyond

ridiculous. - Run and jump. - No. - Yeah. - No thank you. -
Come on. - Thank god I'm drunk. Here we go. So do you prefer
to do it here or in the bedroom? - The bedroom is preferred. -
Mhm, yeah, OK. Let's go there. [END PLAYBACK] So one of
the genres where the gaze has really persisted is a kind of
subgenre of maybe detective or thriller work. So you could kind
of see this in True Detective Season One as a kind of exemplary
case of this. [VIDEO PLAYBACK] - This is going to happen
again. And it's happened before. Both. - Girl, it's fantasy
enactment, ritual, fetishization, iconography. This is his vision.
Her body is a paraphilic love map. - How's that? - An
attachment of physical lust to fantasies and practices forbidden
by society. - Did you get that from one your books? - I did.
Her knees are abraded, rug burns on her back, cold sores, gum
line recession, bad teeth. There's decent odds she was a prost.
And he may not have known her, but this idea goes way back
with him. - You got a chapter in one of those books on jumping
to conclusions? You attach an assumption to a piece of
evidence, you start to bend the narrative to support it, prejudice
yourself. - Wait and see on the ID. - All right. - This kind of
thing does not happen in a vacuum. I guarantee you this wasn't
his first. It's too specific. [END PLAYBACK] What you saw in
that clip around True Detective Season One is essentially a part
of this resurgence within especially television around what's
been called the dead girl in media. So you have a lot of cultural
commentary on this kind of televisual obsession with the dead
girl, maybe starting from Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks all the
way up to maybe something like Sharp Objects in HBO, which
got a lot of credit for being a kind of commentary on the tropes
of the dead girl mystery thriller because it was told from a more
female-centric perspective. So there was even an IFC panel on
"TV Talk, colon, Dead Girls, a TV Obsession." So we can think
about the ideas that Mulvey is presenting in the gaze which you
know may be emblematic of a certain time period and film
criticism, but people are still interested in the ways that gender
and film form relate and the ways that the camera is still being

used to objectify women's bodies in certain ways. So we can
think about that in relation to one of the films that you watched,
Kristy Guevara-Flanagan's What Happened To Her. So you can
think about how the film subverts the idea of the dead girl as a
trope, what the film suggests about how film labor works, which
roles are valued, which aren't, how it plays with the idea of the
image's presence and the image as textuality, which is
something that Corgan and White are interested in. And we're
also going to have and a session with her, so we'll talk to her a
bit more about the film.
Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975) - Laura Mulvey
Originally Published - Screen 16.3 Autumn 1975 pp. 6-18
http://www.jahsonic.com/VPNC.html
I. Introduction A. A Political Use of Psychoanalysis
This paper intends to use psychoanalysis to discover where and
how the fascination
of film is reinforced by pre-existing patterns of fascination
already at work within the
individual subject and the social formations that have moulded
him. It takes as
starting point the way film reflects, reveals and even plays on
the straight, socially
established interpretation of sexual difference which controls
images, erotic ways of
looking and spectacle. It is helpful to understand what the
cinema has been, how its
magic has worked in the past, while attempting a theory and a
practice which will
challenge this cinema of the past. Psychoanalytic theory is thus
appropriated here as

a political weapon, demonstrating the way the unconscious of
patriarchal society has
structured film form.
The paradox of phallocentrism in aIl its manifestations is that
it depends on the
image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to its
world. An idea of
woman stands as lynch pin to the system: it is her lack that
produces the phallus as
a symbolic presence, it is her desire to make good the lack that
the phallus signifies.
Recent writing in Screen about psychoanalysis and the cinema
has not sufficiently
brought out the importance of the representation of the female
form in a symbolic
order in which, in the last resort, it speaks castration and
nothing else. To
summarise briefly: the function of woman in forming the
patriarchal unconscious is
two-fold. She first symbolises the castration threat by her real
absence of a penis,
and second thereby raises her child into the symbolic. Once this
has been achieved,
her meaning in the process is at an end, it does not last into the
world of law and
language except as a memory which oscillates between memory
of maternal
plenitude and memory of lack. Both are posited on nature (or on
anatomy in Freud's
famous phrase). Woman's desire is subjected to her image as
bearer of the bleeding
wound, she can exist only in relation to castration and cannot
transcend it. She turns
her child into the signifier of her own desire to possess a penis
(the condition, she

imagines, of entry into the symbolic). Either she must
gracefully give way to the
word, the Name of the Father and the Law, or else struggle to
keep her child down
with her in the half-light of the imaginary. Woman then stands
in patriarchal culture
as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in
which man can live out
his phantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by
imposing them on the
silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of
meaning, not maker of
meaning.
There is an obvious interest in this analysis for feminists, a
beauty in its exact
rendering of the frustration experienced under the phallocentric
order. It gets us
nearer to the roots of our oppression, it brings an articulation of
the problem closer,
it faces us with the ultimate challenge: how to fight the
unconscious structured like a
language (formed critically at the moment of arrival of
language) while still caught
within the language of the patriarchy. There is no way in which
we can produce an
alternative out of the blue, but we can begin to make a break by
examining
patriarchy with the tools it provides, of which psychoanalysis is
not the only but an
important one. We are still separated by a great gap from
important issues for the
female unconscious which are scarcely relevant to
psychoanalytic theory: the sexing
of the female infant and her relationship to the symbolic, the
sexuaIly mature

woman as non-mother, maternity outside the signification of the
phallus, the
vagina.... But, at this point, psychoanalytic theory as it now
stands can at least
advance our understanding of the status quo, of the patriarchal
order in which we
are caught.
B. Destruction of Pleasure as a Radical Weapon
As an advanced representation system, the cinema poses
questions of the ways the
unconscious (formed by the dominant order) structures ways of
seeing and pleasure
in looking. Cinema has changed over the last few decades. It is
no longer the
monolithic system based on large capital investment
exemplified at its best by
Hollywood in the 1930's, 1940's and 1950's. Technological
advances (16mm, etc)
have changed the economic conditions of cinematic production,
which can now be
artisanal as well as capitalist. Thus it has been possible for an
alternative cinema to
develop. However self-conscious and ironic Hollywood
managed to be, it always
restricted itself to a formal mise-en-scene reflecting the
dominant ideological concept
of the cinema. The alternative cinema provides a space for a
cinema to be born
which is radical in both a political and an aesthetic sense and
challenges the basic

assumptions of the mainstream film. This is not to reject the
latter moralistically, but
to highlight the ways in which its formal preoccupations reflect
the psychical
obsessions of the society which produced it, and, further, to
stress that the
alternative cinema must start specifically by reacting against
these obsessions and
assumptions. A politically and aesthetically avant-garde cinema
is now possible, but
it can still only exist as a counterpoint.
The magic of the Hollywood style at its best (and of all the
cinema which fell within
its sphere of influence) arose, not exclusively, but in one
important aspect, from its
skilled and satisfying manipulation of visual pleasure.
Unchallenged, mainstream film
coded the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal
order. In the highly
developed Hollywood cinema it was only through these codes
that the alienated
subject, torn in his imaginary memory by a sense of loss, by the
terror of potential
lack in phantasy, came near to finding a glimpse of satisfaction:
through its formal
beauty and its play on his own formative obsessions.
This article will discuss the interweaving of that erotic pleasure
in film, its meaning,
and in particular the central place of the image of woman. It is
said that analysing
pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this
article. The satisfaction
and reinforcement of the ego that represent the high point of
film history hitherto

must be attacked. Not in favour of a reconstructed new pleasure,
which cannot exist
in the abstract, nor of intellectualised unpleasure, but to make
way for a total
negation of the ease and plenitude of the narrative fiction film.
The alternative is the
thrill that comes from leaving the past behind without rejecting
it, transcending
outworn or oppressive forms, or daring to break with normal
pleasurable
expectations in order to conceive a new language of desire.
II. Pleasure in Looking/Fascination with the Human Form
A. 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. Originally. in
his Three Essays on
Sexuality, Freud isolated scopophilia as one of the component
instincts of sexuality
which exist as drives quite independently of the erotogenic
zones. At this point he
associated scopophilia with taking other people as objects,
subjecting them to a
controlling and curious gaze. His particular examples center
around the voyeuristic
activities of children, their desire to see and make sure of the
private and the
forbidden (curiosity about other people's genital and bodily
functions, about the
presence or absence of the penis and, retrospectively, about the

primal scene). In
this analysis scopophilia is essentially active. (Later, in
Instincts and their
Vicissitudes, Freud developed his theory of scopophilia further,
attaching it initially to
pre-genital auto-eroticism, after which the pleasure of the look
is transferred to
others by analogy. There is a close working here of the
relationship between the
active instinct and its further development in a narcissistic
form.) Although the
instinct is modified by other factors, in particular the
constitution of the ego, it
continues to exist as the erotic basis for pleasure in looking at
another person as
object. At the extreme, it can become fixated into a perversion,
producing obsessive
voyeurs and Peeping Toms, whose only sexual satisfaction can
come from watching,
in an active controlling sense, an objectified other.
At first glance, the cinema would seem to be remote from the
undercover world of
the surreptitious observation of an unknowing and unwilling
victim. What is seen of
the screen is so manifestly shown. But the mass of mainstream
film, and the
conventions within which it has consciously evolved, portray a
hermetically sealed
world which unwinds magically, indifferent to the presence of
the audience,
producing for them a sense of separation and playing on their
voyeuristic phantasy.
Moreover, the extreme contrast between the darkness in the
auditorium (which also
isolates the spectators from one another) and the brilliance of

the shifting patterns of
light and shade on the screen helps to promote the illusion of
voyeuristic separation.
Although the fiIm is really being shown, is there to be seen,
conditions of screening
and narrative conventions give the spectator an illusion of
looking in on a private
world. Among other things, the position of the spectators in the
cinema is blatantIy
one of repression of their exhibitionism and projection of the
repressed desire on to
the performer.
B. The cinema satifies 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. Scale,
space, stories are all
anthropomorphic. Here, curiosity and the wish to look
intermingIe with a fascination
with likeness and recognition: the human face, the human body,
the relationship
between the human form and its surroundings, the visible
presence of the person in
the world. Jacques Lacan has described how the moment when a
child recognises its
own image in the mirror is crucial for rhe constitution of the
ego. Several aspects of
this analysis are relevant here. The mirror phase occurs at a
time when the child's
physical ambitions outstrip his motor capacity, with the result
that his recognition of
himself is joyous in that he imagines his mirror image to be
more complete, more
perfect than he experiences his own body. Recognition is thus

overlaid with
misrecognition: the image recognised is conceived as the
reflected body of the self,
but its misrecognition as superior projects this body outside
itself as an ideal ego,
the alienated subject. which, re-introjected as an ego ideal,
gives rise to the future
generation of identification with others. This mirror-moment
predates language for
the child.
Important for this article is the fact that it is an image that
constitutes the matrix of
the imaginary, of recognition/misrecognition and identification,
and hence of the first
articulation of the 'I' of subjectivity. This is a moment when an
older fascination with
looking (at the mother's face, for an obvious example) collides
with the initial
inklings of self-awareness. Hence it is the birth of the long love
affair/despair
between image and self-image which has found such intensity of
expression in film
and such joyous recognition in the cinema audience. Ouite apart
from the extraneous
similarities between screen and mirror (the framing of the
human form in its
surroundings, for instance), the cinema has structures of
fascination strong enough
to allow temporary loss of ego while simultaneously reinforcing
the ego. The sense of
forgetting the world as the ego has subsequently come to
perceive it (I forgot who I
am and where I was) is nostagicallyreminiscent of that pre-

subjective moment of
image recognition. At the same time the cinema has
distinguished itself in the pro-
duction of ego ideals as expressed in particular in the star
system, the stars
centering both screen presence and screen story as they act out a
complex process
of likeness and difference (the glamorous impersonates the
ordinary).
C. Sections II. A and B have set out two contradictory aspects
of the pleasurable
structures of looking in the conventional cinematic situation.
The first, scopophilic,
arises from pleasure in using another person as an object of
sexual stimulation
through sight. The second, developed through narcissism and
the constitution of the
ego, comes from identification with the image seen. Thus, in
film terms, 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 through the spectator's fascination with and recognition
of his like. The first is
a function of the sexual instincts, the second of ego libido. This
dichotomy was
crucial for Freud. AIthough he saw the two as interacting and
overIaying each other,
the tension between instinctual drives and self-preservation
continues to be a
dramatic polarisation in terms of pleasure. Both are formative
structures,
mechanisms not meaning. In themselves they have no
signification, they have to be

attached to an idealisation. Both pursue aims in indifference to
perceptual reality,
creating the imagised, eroticised concept of the world that
forms the perception of
the subject and makes a mockery of empirical objectivity.
During its history, the
cinema seems to have evolved a particularillusion of reality in
which this
contradiction between libido and ego has found a beautifully
complementary
phantasy world. In reality the phantasy world of the screen is
subject to the law
which produces it. Sexual instincts and identification processes
have a meaning
within the symbolic order which articulates desire. Desire, born
with language, allows
the possibility of transcending the instinctual and the
imaginary, but its point of
reference continually returns to the traumatic moment of irs
birth: the castration
complex. Hence the look, pleasurable in form, can be
threatening in content, and it is
woman as representation/image that crystallises this paradox.
III. Woman as Image, Man as Bearer of the Look
A. In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking
has been split
between active/male and passive/female. The determining male
gaze projects its
phantasy on to the female form which is styled accordingly. 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. Woman displayed as sexual
object is the leit-motif of
erotic spectacle: from pin-ups to striptease, from Ziegfeld to
Busby Berkeley, she
holds the look, plays to and signifies male desire. Mainstream
film neatly combined
spectacie and narrative. (Note, however, how the musical song-
and-dance numbers
break the flow of the diegesis.) The presence of woman is an
indispensable element
of spectacle in normal narrative film, , yet her visual presence
tends to work against
the development of a story line, to freeze the flow of action in
moments of erotic
contemplation. This alien presence then has to be integrated
into cohesion with the
narrative. 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."
(A recent tendency in narrative film has been to dispense with
this problem
altogether; hence the development of what Molly Haskell has
called the 'buddy
movie,' in which the active homosexual eroticism of the central
male figures can
carry the story without distraction.) Traditionally, 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,
with a shifting tension
between the looks on either side of the screen. For instance, the
device of the show-
girl allows the two looks to be unified technically without any
apparent break in the
diegesis. A woman performs within the narrative, the gaze of
the spectator and that
of the male characters in the film are neatly combined without
breaking narrative
verisimilitude. For a moment the sexual impact of the
performing woman takes the
film into a no-man's-land outside its own time and space. Thus
Marilyn Monroe's first
appearance in The River of No Return and Lauren Bacall's
songs in To Have or Have
Not. Similarly, conventional close-ups of legs (Dietrich, for
instance) or a face
(Garbo) integrate into the narrative a different mode of
eroticism. One part of a
fragmented body destroys the Renaissance space, the illusion of
depth demanded by
the narrative, it gives flatness, the quality of a cut-out or icon
rather than
verisimiIitude to the screen.
B. An active/passive heterosexual division of labor has
similarly controlled narrative
structure. According to the principles of the ruling ideology and
the psychical
structures that back it up, the male figure cannot bear the
burden of sexual
objectification. Man is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like.

Hence the split
between spectacle and narrative supports the man's role as the
active one of
forwarding the story, making things happen. The man controls
the film phantasy and
also emerges as the representative of power in a further sense:
as the bearer of the
look of the spectator, transferring it behind the screen to
neutralise the extra-
diegetic tendencies represented by woman as spectacle. This is
made possible
through the processes set in motion by structuring the film
around a main controlling
figure with whom the spectator can identify. As the spectator
identifies with the main
male protagonist, he projects his look on to that of his like, his
screen surrogate, so
that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events
coincides with the
active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of
omnipotence. A
male movie star's glamorous characteristics are thus not those
of the erotic object of
the gaze, but those of the more perfect, more complete, more
powerful ideal ego
conceived in the original moment of recognition in front of the
mirror. The character
in the story can make things happen and control events better
than the
subject/spectator, just as the image in the mirror was more in
control of motor
coordination. In contrast to woman as icon, the active male
figure (the ego ideal of

the identification process) demands a three-dimensional space
corresponding to that
of the mirror-recognition in which the alienated subject
internalised his own
representation of this imaginary existence. He is a figure in a
landscape. Here the
function of film is to reproduce as accurately as possible the so-
called natural
conditions of human perception. Camera technology (as
exempified by deep focus in
particular) and camera movements (determined by the action of
the protagonist),
combined with invisible editing (demanded by realism) all tend
to blur the limits of
screen space. The male protagonist is free to command the
stage, a stage of spatial
illusion in which he articulates the look and creates the action.
C.1 Sections III, A and B have set out a tension between a mode
of representation
of woman in film and conventions surrounding the diegesis.
Each is associated with a
look: that of the spectator in direct scopophilic contact with the
female form
displayed for his enjoyment (connoting male phantasy) and that
of the spectator
fascinated with the image of his like set in an illusion of natural
space, and through
him gaining control and possession of the woman within the
diegesis. (This tension
and the shift from one pole to the other can structure a single
text. Thus both in
Only Angels Have Wings and in To Have and Have Not, the
film opens with the
woman as object the combined gaze of spectator and all the
male protagonists in the

film. She is isolated, glamorous, on display, sexualised. But as
the narrative
progresses she falls in love with the main male protagonist and
becomes his
property, losing her outward glamorous characteristics, her
generalised sexuaIity,
her show-girl connotations; her eroticism is subjected to the
male star alone. By
means of identification with him, through participation in his
power, the spectator
can indirectly possess her too.)
But 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.
Ultimately, the
meaning of woman is sexual difference, the absence of the penis
as visually
ascertainable, the material evidence on which is based the
castration complex
essential for the organisation of entrance to the symbolic order
and the law of the
father. Thus the woman as icon, displayed for the gaze and
enjoyment of men, the
active controllers of the look, always threatens to evoke the
anxiety it originally
signified. The 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).
This second avenue, fetishistic scopophilia, builds up the
physical beauty of the
object, transforming it into something satisfying in itself. The
first avenue,
voyeurism, on the contrary, has associations with sadism:
pleasure lies in
ascertaining guilt (immediately assodated with castration),
asserting control and
subjecting the guilty person through punishment or forgiveness.
This sadistic side fits
in well with narrative. Sadism demands a story, depends on
making something
happen, forcing a change in another person, a battle of will and
strength,
victory/defeat, all occuring in a linear time with a beginning
and an end. Fetishistic
scopophilia, on the other hand, can exist outside linear time as
the erotic instinct is
focussed on the look alone. These contradictions and
ambiguities can be illustrated
more simpIy by using works by Hitchcock and Sternberg, both
of whom take the look
almost as the content or subiect matter of many of their films.
Hitchcock is the more
complex, as he uses both mechanisms. Sternberg's work, on the
other hand,
provides many pure examples of fetishistic scopophilia.

C.2 It is well known that Sternberg once said he would
welcome his films being
projected upside down so that story and character involvement
would not interfere
with the spectator's undiluted appreciation of the screen image.
This statement is
revealing but ingenuous. Ingenuous in that his films do demand
that the figure of the
woman (Dietrich, in the cycle of films with her, as the ultimate
example) should be
identifiable. But revealing in that it emphasises the fact that for
him the pictorial
space enclosed by the frame is paramount rather than narrative
or identification
processes. While Hitchcock goes into the investigative side of
voyeurism, Sternberg
produces the ultimate fetish, taking it to the point where the
powerful look of the
male protagonist (characteristic of traditional narrative film) is
broken in favour of
the image in direct erotic rapport with the spectator. The beauty
of the woman as
object and the screen space coalesce; she is no longer the bearer
of guilt but a
perfect product, whose body, stylised and fragmented by close-
ups, is the content of
the film and the direct recipient of the spectator's look.
Sternberg pIays down the
illusion of screen depth; his screen tends to be one-dimensional,
as light and shade,
lace, steam, foliage, net, streamers, etc, reduce the visual field.
There is little or no
mediation of the look through the eyes of the main male
protagonist. On the
contrary, shadowy presences like La Bessiere in Morocco act as

surrogates for the
director, detached as they are from audience identification.
Despite Sternberg's
insistence that his stories are irrelevant, it is significant that
they are concerned with
situation, not suspense, and cyclical rather than linear time,
while plot complications
revolve around misunderstanding rather than conflict. The most
important absence is
that of the controlling male gaze within the screen scene. The
high point of
emotional drama in the most typical Dietrich films, her supreme
moments of erotic
meaning, take place in the absence of the man she loves in the
fiction. There are
other witnesses, other spectators watching her on the screen, but
their gaze is one
with, not standing in for, that of the audience. At the end of
Morocco, Tom Brown
has already disappeared into the desert when Amy Jolly kicks
off her gold sandals
and walks after him. At the end of Dishonoured, Kranau is
indifferent to the fate of
Magda. In both cases, the erotic impact, sanctified by death, is
displayed as a
spectacle for the audience. The male hero misunderstands and,
above all, does not
see.
In Hitchcock, by contrast, the male hero does see precisely
what the audience sees.
However, in the films I shall discuss here, he takes fascination
with an image
through scopophilic eroticism as the subject of the film.
Moreover, in these cases the
hero portrays the contradictions and tensions experienced by the

spectator. In
Vertigo in particular, but also in Marnie and Rear Window, the
look is central to the
plot, oscillating between voyeurism and fetishistic fascination.
As a twist, a further
manipulation of the normal viewing process which in some
sense reveals it,
Hitchcock uses the process of identification normally associated
with ideological
correctness and the recognition of established morality and
shows up its perverted
side. Hitchcock has never concealed his interest in voyeurism,
cinematic and non-
cinematic. His heroes are exemplary of the symbolic order and
the law-- a policeman
(Vertigo), a dominant male possessing money and power
(Marnie)--but their erotic
drives lead them into comprimised situations. The power to
subject another person
to the will sadistically or to the gaze voyeuristically is turned
on to the woman as the
object of both. Power is backed by a certainty of legal right and
the established guilt
of the woman (evoking castration, psychoanaiytically speaking).
True perversion is
barely concealed under a shallow mask of ideological
correctness--the man is on the
right side of the law, the woman on the wrong. Hitchcock's
skilful use of identification
processes and liberal use of subjective camera from the point of
view of the male
protagonist draw the spectators deeply into his position, making
them share his

uneasy gaze. The audience is absorbed into a voyeuristic
situation within the screen
scene and diegesis which parodies his own in the cinema. In his
analysis of Rear
Window, Douchet takes the film as a metaphor for the cinema.
Jeffries is the
audience, the events in the apartment block opposite correspond
to the screen. As
he watches, an erotic dimension is added to his look, a central
image to the drama.
His girlfriend Lisa had been of little sexual interest to him,
more or less a drag, so
Iong as she remained on the spectator side. When she crosses
the barrier between
his room and the block opposite, their reationship is re-born
erotically. He does not
merely watch her through his lens, as a distant meaningful
image, he also sees her
as a guilty intruder exposed by a dangerous man threatening her
with punishment,
and thus finally saves her. Lisa's exhibitionism has already been
established by her
obsessive interest in dress and style, in being a passive image of
visual perfection;
Jeffries'voyeurism and activity have also been established
through his work as a
photo-journalist, a maker of stories and captor of images.
However, his enforced
inactivity, binding him to his seat as a spectator, puts him
squarely in the phantasy
position of the cinema audience.
In Vertigo, subjective camera predominates. Apart from flash-
back from Judy's point
of view, the narrative is woven around what Scottie sees or fails
to see. The

audience follows the growth of his erotic obsession and
subsequent despair precisely
from his point of view. Scottie's voyeurism is blatant: he falls
in love with a woman
he follows and spies on without speaking to. Its sadistic side is
equally blatant: he
has chosen (and freely chosen, for he had been a successful
lawyer) to be a
policeman, with all the attendant possibilities of pursuit and
investigation. As a
result. he follows, watches and falls in love with a perfect
image of female beauty
and mystery. Once he actually confronts her, his erotic drive is
to break her down
and force her to tell by persistent cross-questioning. Then, in
the second part of the
fiIm, he re-enacts his obsessive involvement with the image he
loved to watch
secretly. He reconstructs Judy as Madeleine, forces her to
conform in every detail to
the actual physical appearance of his fetish. Her exhibitionism,
her masochism, make
her an ideal passive counterpart to Scottie's active sadistic
voyeurism. She knows
her part is to perform, and only by playing it through and then
replaying it can she
keep Scottie's erotic interest. But in the repetition he does break
her down and
succeeds in exposing her guilt. His curiosity wins through and
she is punished. In
Vertigo, erotic involvement with the look is disorienting: the
spectator's fascination is
turned against him as the narrative carries him through and
entwines him with the
processes that he is himself exercising. The Hitchcock hero here
is firmly placed

within the symbolic order, in narrative terms. He has all the
attributes of the
patriarchal super-ego. Hence the spectator, lulled into a faIse
sense of security by
the apparent legality of his surrogate, sees through his look and
finds himself
exposed as complicit, caught in the moral ambiguity of looking.
Far from being simply an aside on the perversion of the police,
Vertigo focuses on
the implications of the active/looking, passive/looked-at split in
terms of sexual
difference and the power of the male symbolic encapsulated in
the hero. Marnie, too,
performs for Mark RutIand's gaze and masquerades as the
perfect to-be-looked-at
image. He, too, is on the side of the law until, drawn in by
obsession with her guilt,
her secret, he longs to see her in the act of committing a crime,
make her confess
and thus save her. So he, too, becomes complicit as he acts out
the implications of
his power. He controls money and words, he can have his cake
and eat it.
III. Summary
The psychoanalytic background that has been discussed in this
article is relevant to
the pleasure and unpleasure offered by traditional narrative
film. The scopophilic
instinct (pleasure jn looking at another person as an erotic
object), and, in

contradistinction, ego libido (forming identification processes)
act as formations,
mechanisms, which this cinema has played on. The image of
woman as (passive)
raw material for the (active) gaze of man takes the argument a
step further into the
structure of representation, adding a further layer demanded by
the ideology of the
patriarchal order as it is worked out in its favorite cinematic
form - illusionistic
narrative film. The argument returns again to the psychoanalytic
background in that
woman as representation signifies castration, inducing
voyeuristic or fetishistic
mechanisms to circumvent her threat. None of these interacting
Iayers is intrinsic to
film, but it is only in the film form that they can reach a perfect
and beautiful
contradiction, thanks to the possibility in the cinema of shifting
the emphasis of the
look. It is the place of the look that defines cinema, the
possibility of varying it and
exposing it. This is what makes cinema quite different in its
voyeuristic potential
from, say, strip-tease, theatre, shows, etc. Going far beyond
highlighting a woman's
to-be-looked-at-ness, cinema builds the way she is to be looked
at into the spectacle
itself. Playing on the tension between film as controlling the
dimension of time
(editing, narrative) and film as controlling the dimension of
space (changes in
distance, editing), cinematic codes create a gaze, a world, and
an object, thereby
producing an illusion cut to the measure of desire. It is these
cinematic codes and

their relationship to formative external structures that must be
broken down before
mainstream film and the pleasure it provides can be challenged.
To begin with (as an ending) the voyeuristic-scopophilic look
that is a crucial part of
traditional filmic pleasure can itself be broken down. There are
three different looks
associated with cinema: that of the camera as it records the pro-
filmic event, that of
the audience as it watches the final product, and that of the
charafters at each other
within the screen ilIusion. The conventions of narrative film
deny the first two and
subordinate them to the third, the conscious aim being alwavs to
eliminate intrusive
camera presence and prevent a distancing awareness in the
audience. Without these
two absences (the material existence of the recording process,
the critical reading of
the spectator), fictional drama cannot achieve reality,
obviousness and truth.
Nevertheless, as this article has agued, the structure of looking
in narrative fiction
film contains a contradiction in its own premises: the female
image as a castration
threat constantly endangers the unity ol the diegesis and bursts
through the world of
illusion as an intrusive, static, one-dimensional fetish. Thus the
two looks materially
present in time and space are obsessively subordinated to the
neurotic needs of the
male ego. The camera becomes the mechanism for producing an
illusion of
Renaissance space, flowing movements compatible with the
human eye, an ideology

of representation that revolves around the perception of the
subject; the camera's
look is disavowed in order to create a convincing world in
which the spectator's
surrogate can perform with verisimilitude. Simultaneously, the
look of the audience
is denied an intrinsic force: as soon as fetishistic representation
of the female image
threatens to break the spell of illusion, and erotic image on the
screen appears
directly (without mediation) to the spectator, the fact of
fetishisation, concealing as it
does castration fear, freezes the look, fixates the spectator and
prevents him from
achieving any distance from the image in front of him.
This complex interaction of looks is specific to film. The first
blow against the
monolithic accumulation of traditional film conventions
(aIready undertaken by
radical filmmakers) is to free the look of the camera into its
materiality in time and
space and the look of the audience into dialectics, passionate
detachment. There is
no doubt that this destroys the satisfaction, pleasure and
privilege of the 'invisible
guest,' and highlights how film has depended on voyeuristic
active/passive
mechanisms. Women, whose image has continually been stolen
and used for this
end, cannot view the decline of the traditional film form with
anything much more
than sentimental regret.

Question:
How relevant is Laura Mulvey’s idea of the cinematic gaze in
the contemporary historical moment? Please provide at least two
examples as evidence for your argument, either from within
class, or from your own viewing. If the example is from outside
the class, provide a link or image if possible.
250-300words
FTV 4 Handout:
“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975) – Laura Mulvey
Main concepts/claims overview:
• Using psychoanalytic theory, Mulvey attempts to illustrate
how the patriarchal
structure of our society has constructed (mainstream) cinema as
a further tool of
domination over women (and images of women), reinforcing the
dominant
patriarchal order.
• Emphasis is placed on spectatorship, identification, and the
pleasures of viewing.
• Mulvey proposes an alternative cinema, which challenges
accepted modes of
making as well as looking at film, and which provokes a kind of

resistance to
subject identification as well as voyeurism in the moving image.
Terminology:
• Psychoanalysis – (here derived from Freudian theory) a system
of psychological
theory and therapy dealing with the study of the unconscious
mind
• Phallocentrism – a doctrine or belief in the ‘phallus’ as central
or superior
• Castration fear/anxiety – fear of emasculation (again derived
from Freud’s theories)
• Scopophilia – deriving pleasure from looking; in this context,
a pleasure in
exercising a controlling gaze (through cinematic spectatorship)
over the female
image
• Recognition vs. Misrecognition (mirror-moment) – dealing
with the (male)
spectator’s own identification with the masculine image on
screen, recognition is a
“visible presence” of that image, while misrecognition is the
perception of the
spectator that his own image is reflected as superior, an “ideal
ego” (derived from
Lacan’s idea of the “mirror phase”)
• Passionate detachment – the way in which Mulvey argues
cinema should be
experienced (a detached spectatorship), promoting criticality,

and transforming the
“look of the audience” as well as that of the camera.
I. Introduction
A. A Political Use of Psychoanalysis
“Psychoanalytic theory is thus appropriated here as a political
weapon,
demonstrating the way the unconscious of patriarchal society
has structured film
form.” (6)
• Woman in patriarchal culture viewed as signifier of the male
“other”
• Phallocentrism depends on the image of castrated woman
B. Destruction of Pleasure as a Radical Weapon
• The role of mise-en-scene in mainstream Hollywood film =
reinforcing
“psychical obsessions” of society (read patriarchal dominance)
“The alternative cinema provides a space for a cinema to be
born which is
radical in both a political and an aesthetic sense and challenges
the basic

assumptions of the mainstream film.” (7)
II. Pleasure in Looking/Fascination with the Human Form
A. Scopophilia – arises from pleasure in using another person as
an object of
sexual stimulation; a controlling gaze
B. Pleasurable looking and narcissistic scopophilia
(Recognition/Misrecognition) – the ways in which identification
with the
image on screen occurs (derived from Lacan’s “mirror phase”)
C. Paradox of pleasurable and threatening viewing experience –
woman as
representation/image crystallizes this paradox
III. Woman as Image, Man as Bearer of the Look
A. Pleasure in looking – active/male vs. passive/female
“The determining male gaze projects its fantasy on to the
female form
which is styled accordingly.” (9)
• The notion of the to-be-looked-at-ness – woman displayed as
sexual
object
• Woman perceived as – 1. An erotic object for the characters
within the

diegesis; 2. An erotic object for the spectator
• The fragmented female body on screen
B. The burden of sexual objectification – the male figure
“cannot bear it”, it has
been assigned to the female figure
“Hence the split between spectacle and narrative supports the
man’s role
as the active one of forwarding the story, making things
happen.” (10)
• Woman as icon
• Man given 3-D space – “he is a figure in a landscape”
C. 1. The Different Looks
a. The look of the “spectator in direct scopophilic contact with
the
female form displayed for his enjoyment”
b. The look of the “spectator fascinated with the image of his
likeness
set in an illusion of natural space”
i. The threat of castration, as perceived in the image of
“woman as icon”, has two outlets
1. Devaluation, punishment, or saving the guilty object

(woman)
2. Fetishization of the image of woman, so as to make
it reassuring rather than dangerous
D. 2. Filmmakers who exemplify Mulvey’s theory (in different
ways)
a. Sternberg – the ultimate fetish
b. Hitchcock – voyeurism and the perversion of morality
IV. Summary
• The scopophilic instinct and ego libido as mechanisms in
cinema
• The image of woman as passive (material) and man as active
(gaze)
• How the patriarchal order figures in the structure of
representation
• The root of the argument: “woman as representation signifies
castration,
inducing voyeuristic or fetishistic mechanisms to circumvent
her threat.”(14)
• Cinema has incredible power in the way the image of woman
is
constructed, as well as the way that image is perceived/viewed
for pleasure.
• Three different looks associated with cinema:

1. That of the camera
2. That of the audience
3. That of the characters at each other within the screen
§ The first two are subordinated to the third.
• A call for freeing the look of the camera, a call for “passionate
detachment”
and an alternative cinema.

Lecture transcript The gaze in historical context All right, s.docx

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Lecture transcript The gaze in historical context All right, s.docx