Tiêu đề Week 08 Module 24 Laura Mulvey.pdf ✅

Title of the Module: Laura Mulvey: “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” Feminist film theory or feminist film criticism, also called cine feminism became significant in film studies since the 1970s, focusing on gender as central to the concern of film. Important theorists of cine feminism were Britons like Claire Johnson, Pam Cook, and Laura Mulvey. Laura Mulvey’s seminal essay of 1975, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” first published in the British film journal Seminar is part of this theoretical position. The following are the learning objectives of this module: i. To get initiated to Laura Mulvey and her work on gaze theory ii. To locate the beginning of psychoanalytic feminist film theory iii. To understand “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” iv. To critically read film from a feminist point of view Laura Mulvey (b. 1941) is Professor of Film and Media Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her books include Visual and Other Pleasures (1989), Fetishism and Curiosity (1996), Citizen Kane (1993) and Death 24x a Second (2006). She has co-directed a number of avant-garde films with Peter Wollen including Penthesilea (1974), Riddles of the Sphinx (1978), Amyl (1980) and, Crystal Gazing (1981) Mulvey has a broad range of interests from contemporary art to the involvement in various aspects of cinema. Laura Mulvey’s essay now occupies an important position among theories of the gaze too. John Berger in his very influential book Ways of Seeing (1972) is considered to have laid the foundation for gaze theories. This work sets out to show how what we see is always influenced by how we look at it. This looking is made possible by a number of factors like class, gender, race, taste, form, truth, and beauty. Laura Mulvey with her essay “Visual Pleasure” brought feminist film criticism to cine-psychoanalysis using psychoanalytic terms like Oedipus complex, castration anxiety, fetishism, voyeurism, and scopophilia. Laura Mulvey in her “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” makes use of psychoanalysis for a radically feminist reading of cinema. It attacks the way film reflects, reveals and even plays on the straight socially established and stereotypical interpretation of sexual difference which controls images, erotic ways of looking, and spectacle. Mulvey here claims to use the psychoanalytic theory politically; that means it is used here to argue in favour of women who have a secondary position in traditional Hollywood narrative cinema. Mulvey identifies the paradox of phallocentrism depending on the image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to the world. Phallocentrism suggests the construction of language, particularly with binary oppositions in which phallus (male reproductive organ) represents the positive presence of a masculine entity as opposed to a castrated feminine entity. Mulvey uses psychoanalytical idea of lack as denoting primarily castration. Castration anxiety according to psychoanalytical theory is the fear of both sexes due to the lack of penis for woman. The boy fears that his own penis will be cut off by the father (castration anxiety), and the girl sees herself as already castrated (by the mother).

other words the conditions of screening and the narrative conventions give the spectator an illusion of looking into a private world. Then the position of the spectator in the cinema is that of repression of their exhibitionism and a later projection of this on to the performer. Secondly cinema offers the possibility for narcissistic pleasure. Narcissism is a kind of obsessive and indulgent self-love. The term has its origin in Greek mythology, where a young man named Narcissus fell in love with his own mirror reflection in water. Narcissism is a concept in psychoanalytical theory introduced by Sigmund Freud in his essay called “On Narcissism” (1914). Psychologically speaking, narcissism is a personality disorder. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, mirror phase is the stage of childhood development between the age of six months to the age of eighteen months, when the ego is formed. Human child unlike chimpanzees recognize their mirror image for the first time. This recognition though a misrecognition with their selves develops in them a narcissistic sense. Mulvey in a Lacanian way has identified this relation between the image and the self-image intensely expressed in film and the cinema audience. Thus, in film viewing at first there is separation of the erotic identity of the subject from the object (individual) on the screen and then the identification of the subject with the object on the screen which resembles him. Identification is the process by which the spectator emotionally becomes one with the character. The first is the function of sexual instincts and the second is the function of ego-libido. Both of these pursuits are unrelated to apparent and ordinary reality. Cinema, through its history seems to have developed a particular illusion of reality in which the contradiction between the libido and ego are nicely merged in a fantasy world. In reality, the fantasy world is the product of the living world. The point of reference of the desire continually returns to the original trauma of castration complex, and hence the look though pleasurable is threatening in content. Woman as Image, Man as Bearer of the Look In a sexually unequal world pleasure in looking is split between active/male and passive/female. According to Mulvey traditionally woman connotes, what she calls, “to-be-looked-at-ness.” Woman as sexual object is the recurring theme of erotic spectacle from pin-ups to striptease. Woman who combines spectacle and narrative is an unavoidable presence in narrative film. But her presence freezes the film rather than enables the story-line. Traditionally woman functioned in two ways; an erotic object for characters within the story and also for the spectator outside. The fragmented body then destroys the Renaissance space, the illusion of depth and supplies flatness rather than verisimilitude. Verisimilitude is the appearance of being true or real; it is the believability of the narrative. As if reflecting the gender roles in society, in cinema too the male figure will not bear the burden of objectification. Man who wields power is the bearer of the look and represents the look of the spectator as well. This is possible as the film is structured around a male figure. A spectator then identifies oneself with the male character on the screen. The technology of film here reproduces the natural conditions of human perception. The male protagonist commands the filmic stage of spatial illusion.