Feminism and film Sue Thornham

Unit One The Male Gaze

The Male Gaze

Judith Mayne (1978): ‘One of the most basic connections between women's experience in this culture and women's experience in film is precisely the relationship of spectator and spectacle. Since women are spectacles in their everyday lives, there's something about coming to terms with film from the perspective of what it means to be an object of spectacle and what it means to be a spectator that is really a coming to terms with how that relationship exists both up on the screen and in everyday life.’

Is the gaze male?

Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure & Narrative Cinema’ (1975) 1. Forerunners and contemporaries John Berger Ways of Seeing (1972): ‘Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women, but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.’

2. Psychoanalysis and Cinema

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Freud: desire and fantasy Jacques Lacan: the imaginary and the symbolic ‘Cine-psychoanalysis’:

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Cinema and regression (Baudry ‘The apparatus’ 1976)

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Cinema and absence/lack (Metz The Imaginary Signifier 1975)

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Cinema and identification/voyeurism (Metz)

Freud (1856-1939): Desire and Fantasy

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1. Acquisition of identity Oedipus complex Sexual difference and the visible

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Voyeurism fetishism

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2. Dream theory Visual images Displacement Condensation Secondary revision

“Undies to be sold in” (1969)

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3. Fantasy theory Staging of desire Mixed nature of fantasy ‘Primal’ fantasies the present

Jacques Lacan (1901-1981): the imaginary and the symbolic

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1. The Mirror Phase Infant initially an homme-lette In mirror image it sees a whole self, a being in control (ideal ego) This self is illusory, a misrecognition Identification with this image produces splitting of the self And produces desire This process belongs to the realm of the

imaginary

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2. The Entry into Language/Culture In entering language/culture, we enter a structure which pre-exists us By saying 'I' our subjectivity is constructed We move from a world of needs in the real, to a world of desires in the symbolic Entry into the symbolic also creates: (i) gendered difference (ii) the unconscious

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‘Cine-psychoanalysis’

Cinema and regression (Baudry ‘The apparatus’ 1976) ‘First of all, ... taking into account the darkness of the movie theater, the relative passivity of the situation, the forced immobility of the cine-subject, and the effects which result from the projection of images, moving images, the cinematic apparatus brings about a state of artificial regression. It artificially leads back to an anterior phase of his development - a phase which is barely hidden, as dream and certain pathological forms of our mental life have shown.’ (1976: 119)

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Cinema and absence/lack (Metz The Imaginary Signifier 1975) Cinema and identification/voyeurism/ fetishism (Metz, The Imaginary Signifier 1975) ‘During the projection [the] camera is absent, but it has a representative consisting of another apparatus, called precisely a 'projector'. An apparatus the spectator has behind him, at the back of his head, that is, precisely where fantasy locates the 'focus' of all vision.’ (1975: 52)

4. Feminist Film Theory

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The centrality of sexual difference Using psychoanalysis to explain patriarchal culture

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Laura Mulvey

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Laura Mulvey (1975)

Cinema’s structures are gendered Looking confers power Cinema structures ways of seeing/pleasure in looking according to sexual difference Cinema offers pleasures of voyeurism/ scopophilia to the male gaze Men in film function as ideal egos But masculinity precarious: women sites of anxiety as well as objects of desire Dominant cinema’s ‘3 looks’ Function of narrative