Laura Mulvey – interview with Laura Mulvey – gender gaze and
technology in film culture
“Cinema is able ‘to materialize both fantasy and the fantastic’, it is ‘phantasmagoria, illusion and a symptom of the social unconscious.”
“Classic Hollywood cinema, we have learnt through Mulvey’s
polemic essay, reflects a patriarchal language: women is represented as
‘other’, as an object rather than a subject, materializing mans unconscious.
Objectifying women
making them exist only as a physical being for men to merely compare their
unconscious thoughts to, therefore deeming it okay.
Observing Hitchocks films ( rear window 1954 + vertigo 2958
)
“Mulvey showed the workings of the paradox of
phallocentrism: the TV camera’s gaze is co-extensive with the male gaze, which
depends on the image of ‘the castrated women’ in order to make sense of the
world. The spectator, both male and female, is invited to take pleasure in a
particular configuration of the gaze through which ‘the male hero act’s’ while
women are seen and showed at the same time’: their appearance is so much coded
for a strong visual and erotic impact that it can be argued that they connote
the true essence of being seen.’
Sits with the work of
Berger (1972), Goffman (1976) and Williamson (1978) – all simultaneously show
the ‘relational character of gender identities, by providing the evidence of
the roles played by the active/passive dialectic and its realization through
visible forms.
“Mulvey is acutely aware
that the moment of visual representation is crucial in the formation of
gender identities, and these truthful representations are ‘burdens for
women’.
“…Hollywood movies give us back a women-object through a
male gaze..”
which therefore
projects a personal fantasy on the female as a figure, seen in two ways..
“Voyeuristic (which sees the rebel woman as temptress and
prostitute) or fetishist (the docile and redeeming woman represented as the
virgin mary)
Mulvey indicates a possible way out in the exploration of
alternative representation strategies informed by feminism and avant-grant
cinema.
This image being
portrayed leaves nothing for men to have to imagine up by themselves as they
have it all done for them by the use of camera angles being shot from the gaze
of a male.
“Avant – grant, alternative cinema is central aspect to
Mulvey’s intellectual itinerary”
Mulvey and Wollens movie production draws on and develops
many of her key theoretical insights. In trying to deconstruct women’s pleasure
in looking at themselves as objects by proposing alternative viewpoints, in her
films Mulvey has focused attention on, among others, such strong active and
creative female figures as aviator Amy Johnson (Amy 1980) and photographer Tina
Modotti and painter Frida Kahlo (frida kahlo and tina modotti, 1982). When this
last work comes to be addressed in the interview, Mulvey dwells upon the issue
of female creativity and its role in the represention of the female body.
“Still, technology shapes our visibility regime as much as
the gendered shaping of our ways of seeing. Mulvey considers technology –
exemplified by the shift to the digital – as analogous to what she believes to
be the male gaze nowadays: “[w]hile technology never simple determines, it
cannot but affect the context in which ideas are formed” (Mulvey 2005). The
arrival of the digital has produces a new relationship between representation
and reality, which tends to underline the boundaries between what is moving and
what is motionless, between life and death, and between death and mechanical
animation of what is inanimate.
ACTUAL INTERVIEW QUOTES
LM – ‘there were three
formativr influences on me that brought that article into existence, (refereed
to in the introduction of the new edition of Visual and other pleasures)
“Hollywood cinema,
under the influence of the Cahiers du cinema..” (French)
“Feminism… and through
this
“my encounter with
feminism, made me see the cinema that I’d loved in a new light. Closely
followed by the realization that Freud’s ideas on scopophila and voyeurism
coincided quite closely with the structures of Hollywood cinema itself.
RS – “the avant –
garde film was important for yu because you could see a possibility of over
coming previous forms, and that was equated with new reading possibilities
which seemed not to be present in the other filmic forms. (questions)”
Theme that emerges
through LM essay is that of ‘the male gaze is also the female gaze – namely
that women look at themselves through the male gaze…’ So you cant escape the
male gaze as it is ‘the gaze’: there is no other position from which to look at
those films.”
VISUAL PLEASURES AND
NARRATIVE CINEMA – LM
“This paper intends to use psychoanalysis to discover where
and how fascination of film is reinforced by pre-existing patterns of
fascination that already work within the individual subject and the social
formations that have molded him.”
“It takes as its 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.
“Womens desire is subjugated to her image as bearer of the
bleeding wound; she can exist only in relation to castration and cannot
transcend it.”
Pleasure in looking /
fascination with the human form
“The cinema offers a number of possible pleasures. One is
scopophila (pleasure of looking). 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 Freud’s, …three essays on sexuality he
isolated scopophila as one of the component instincts of sexuality…”
“ Although the instinct is modified by other factors, in
particular the construction of 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."
Women as image, man
as bearer of the look
“In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking
has been split between active/male and passive/female. This determining male
gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, 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 they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness…”
“Women displayed as sexual object is the leitmotif of erotic spectacle: from pin ups to strip-tease…she holds the look, and plays to and signifies male desire.”
“Mainstream film
neatly combines narrative and spectacle. “
“Traditionally, the
woman displayed has functioned on two levels: as erotic objects for the
charactors within the screen story, as an erotic object for the spectator…with
a shifting tension between the looks on either side of the screen.”
“…the device of the show
–girl allows the two looks to be unified technically without any apparent break
in the diegesis. A woman preforms within the narrative; the gaze of the
spectator and that of the male characters in the film are neatly combined without
breaking narrative verisimilitude.”
“The man controls the
film fantasy 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 neutralize 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 onto 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."
"Camera technology (as exemplified 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 space of spatial illusion in which he articulates the look and creates the action."
"Camera technology (as exemplified 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 space of spatial illusion in which he articulates the look and creates the action."
