Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975)

Laura Mulvey

Fascination and film

Film fascinates us (engages our emotions), through images and spectacle Mulvey uses psychoanalysis to discover where and how the fascination of film is reinforced by pre-existing patterns of fascination already at work within the individual subject (= spectator) She says she is using psychoanalytic theory as a political weapon

Cinema and pleasure

Hollywood/mainstream/narrative cinema manipulates visual pleasure. It codes the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order.

Scopophilia

scopophilia = pleasure in looking (Sigmund Freud 1905, in Three Essays) examples of the private and curious gaze: childrens voyeurism, cinematic looking the most pleasurable looking = looking at the human form and the human face, figural looking (corresponds to psychic patterns)

Woman as image, man as bearer of the look I

pleasure in looking split between active/male and passive/female women connote to-be-looked-at-ness the visual presence of women works against the development of a story-line, freezes the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation

Woman as image, man as bearer of the look II

the woman functions as both erotic object for the characters within the screen story and erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium (object of fantasy) the spectator is led to identify with the main male protagonist the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look

Fetishistic scopophilia

the image of the woman also carries a threat there are two avenues of escape from fear of femininity for the male spectator

investigate the woman, demystify her mystery disavow (deny) castration by turning the woman into a reassuring fetish. The image of the woman > overvalued: this is the cult of the (beautiful) female star, e.g. Jeanne Moreau for nouvelle vague

The male gaze and fetishistic scopophilia in Jules et Jim

scopophilia is the force driving the movements and positioning of the camera the gaze is male, and the spectator is led to identify with this male gaze the cinematic apparatus is not genderneutral (in later readings, camera can also register differences of sexuality)