Transcript No Slide Title

Opening remarks:
•The historical nature of the essay
•Film as it is related to cultural practice: its constitutive role
•The analysis of the film within patriarchal system of
representation
•The use of psychoanalytic theory as a mode of deconstructing
mainstream film
patriarchal system of representation
•Phallus as a symbol of power, privilege, mastery, action, vitality,
presence within our social norm
•Within this system or symbolic order, the subject is understood
as male-the one who acts or observes; while the object is female,
the one who appears or is seen
•Page 15, “Woman then stands in patriarchal culture…as bearer,
not maker of meaning.”
•She lacks agency to create meaning because all of meaning is
made in the terms of patriarchy
•Page 15: “Woman stands in patriarchal culture as a signifier
for the male other…”
•She is seen in and through the terms of the other (patriarchy)
•Do we have a word or term for the female symbolic order?
Do we define the male through these female symbolic terms?
Appropriation of Psychoanalysis
• a science that studies subject construction, especially
through studying unconscious or preconscious materials
•Used in film studies by Mulvey to understand cinematic
representation and the fascination with the screen
•Linked to the Freudian idea of scopophilia: pleasure in
looking
• Within scopophilia: voyeurism and narcissism
Scopophilia: Voyeurism
•Mastering the world visually; or turning persons into objects
•Mulvey says that watching a film is not only a narcissistic
experience, but also voyeuristic in its very form
•Page 17: “…conditions of screening and narrative conventions
give the spectator an illusion of looking in on a private world.”
Scopophilia: Narcissism
•Identification of the ego to the outside world as a one to one
relationship
•Mulvey relates the experience watching film to narcissism and
the mirror stage
•(page 18): “…it is an image that constitutes the matrix of the
imaginary…and hence of the first articulation of the I, of
subjectivity.”
•(page 17)” The conventions of mainstream film focus attention
on the human form…” through scale, space, and stories. She
see this a form of narcissistic fascination.
Suture
•The ways in which we are bound to the screen space
•(page 16) “…skilled and satisfying manipulation of visual
pleasure.” (scopophilia)
•(page 20)Suture: “The function of film is to reproduce as
accurately as possible the so-called natural conditions of human
perception.”
•Camera technology/conventions of realism
•Deep focus, camera movements determined by gaze of protagonist,
invisible editing
Cinematic representation and the Gendering
of the Gaze
•(Page 20)The film is structured around a main controlling
character, which is often male
•This becomes gendered when the camera is aligned with the
gaze of the male protagonist
•The signifying function of woman as object and the man as
observer in cinematic forms
•Page 19: “In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure
in looking has been split between active/male and
passive/female.”
Suture
•The gaze of the spectator and the male characters in the
film are aligned
•Suture occurs more frequently for the male audience.
How can the female audience experience suture? What is
their subject position within the representation?
Audience/spectator position in Rear Window
•(page 23) The male hero, Jeffries sees what the audience sees;
we see along his gaze
•Lisa is coded within the film as “to-be-looked-at”
•In as sense, Jeffries is in the audience: the events in the
apartment across the way are the screen
Alternative approaches
•Free the look of the camera into time and space
•Free the look of the audience into passionate detachment
•Destroy the pleasure in looking