NOTES

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."

1. Psychoanalytic theory is the theory of personality organization and the dynamics of personality development that guides psychoanalysis, a clinical method for treating psychopathology. First laid out by Sigmund Freud in the late 19th century, psychoanalytic theory has undergone many refinements since his work.
   
   
   JACQUES LACAN - Psychoanalysis and scandal
   "Since its inception, psychoanalysis has exerted a fascination for many women. It has relied on women's desire and willingness to articulate their fantasies, wishes, and hopes."
   "It is formed out of the 'raw materials' of women's desire to talk and Freud's desire to listen."
   "Relations between psychoanalysis and women have always been, and remain today, highly ambivalent and fraught with difficulties."
   "Psychoanalysis exerts an appeal for women...especially for those who want to challenge the social functions and values attributed to women and femininity in our culture."
   "'Fascination' being appropriate term to use in context of relations between psychoanalysis and feminism, for its etymology involves two antithetical meanings: 'to attract, irresistibly enchant, charm'; or 'to deprive victim of the powers of escape or resistance by look or presence' (OED). 
   "To fantisate is to entice and trap, seduce and contain, a relation similar to that between the snake and the snake charmer.."
   "Psychoanalysis is an effect of women's narcissistic identifications with its promise of wholeness and self knowledge."