Feminist Film Theorist Laura Mulvey and Classicism

749 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: How hollywood cinema is classical

Feminist film theorist, Laura Mulvey, refuses to use classicism. She structures her film, Riddles of the Sphinx, through modernism. Mulvey believes that classicism is built for the male’s pleasure. This attraction can be explained through the term scopophilia, the pleasure of looking. Society has limits, but films can explore these desires according to Mulvey. She also expresses the desire of narcissism, being in love with yourself. Narcissistic visual pleasure can be derived from self-identification, someone’s ideal self ego. Mulvey integrates the structures of scopophilia and narcissism into the story as well as the image of her film, Riddles of The Sphinx.
Laura Mulvey used psychoanalysis to understand the fascination of Hollywood cinema. The two desires in us, scopophilia and narcissism, are suited in cinema, but both desires aren’t from the same person. Mulvey states that if scopophilia is only on film, it will trigger the fear of loss and powerlessness. Mulvey has evaluated scopophilia in classical cinema. The structure of traditional cinema establishes the male character as active and powerful. The female character is passive and powerless.
Classical film narratives can present the constructed images of a woman as natural, realistic and attractive. This is the illusionism of classic cinema. Mulvey solves the ways in which narrative and visual techniques in cinema make scopophilia into an exclusively male privilege. Within the narrative of the film, male characters direct their gaze towards female characters. The audience is made to identify with the male actor in the film. The targeting audience for this type of film are heterosexual males.
Mulvey focuses on visual pleasure in the cinema with the concept of the mirro...

... middle of paper ...

...uise’s different voices such as her friends and fellow workers, brings an uncertainty of meanings to the film in contrast to the descriptive control associated with the traditional voice-over. The slow and constant rotation of the camera is followed by a mangled voice-over which sometimes expresses Louise's thoughts. It also presents other voices, such as her new friend Maxine.
Mulvey’s psychoanalysis of cinema and feminism was interpreted through various scenes in Riddles of the Sphinx. She attempted to use these different types of modernism filming techniques to communicate her messages to the audience. Mulvey wasn’t worried about selling tickets for her film “Riddles of the Sphinx.” She wasn’t trying to please everyone when making her movie. Mulvey only cared about including what she wanted to communicate in her film and getting her point across to the audience.

Show More
Related

  • The Legend of Ed Gein and His Filmic Rebirth

    2005 Words  | 5 Pages

    Mulvey, Laura."Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality/Screen. London: Routledge, 1992.

    Read More

  • Male Failure and Genre Affirmation in New Hollywood Westerns and Noir

    2198 Words  | 5 Pages

    In the classical Western and Noir films, narrative is driven by the action of a male protagonist towards a clearly defined, relatable goal. Any lack of motivation or action on the part of the protagonist problematizes the classical association between masculinity and action. Due to inherent genre expectations, this crisis of action is equivalent to a crisis of masculinity. Because these genres are structured around male action, the crises of action and masculinity impose a crisis of genre. In the absence of traditional narrative elements and character tropes, these films can only identify as members of their genres through saturation with otherwise empty genre symbols. The equivalency between the crises of genre and masculinity frames this symbol saturation as a sort of compensatory masculine posturing.

    Read More

  • Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window

    1162 Words  | 3 Pages

    Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Narrative Apparatus Ideology. Ed. Philip Rosen, (New York: Columbia UP, 1986), 198-209.

    Read More

  • Postmodern Film

    2291 Words  | 5 Pages

    The postmodern cinema emerged in the 80s and 90s as a powerfully creative force in Hollywood film-making, helping to form the historic convergence of technology, media culture and consumerism. Departing from the modernist cultural tradition grounded in the faith in historical progress, the norms of industrial society and the Enlightenment, the postmodern film is defined by its disjointed narratives, images of chaos, random violence, a dark view of the human state, death of the hero and the emphasis on technique over content. The postmodernist film accomplishes that by acquiring forms and styles from the traditional methods and mixing them together or decorating them. Thus, the postmodern film challenges the “modern” and the modernist cinema along with its inclinations. It also attempts to transform the mainstream conventions of characterization, narrative and suppresses the audience suspension of disbelief. The postmodern cinema often rejects modernist conventions by manipulating and maneuvering with conventions such as space, time and story-telling. Furthermore, it rejects the traditional “grand-narratives” and totalizing forms such as war, history, love and utopian visions of reality. Instead, it is heavily aimed to create constructed fictions and subjective idealisms.

    Read More

  • The Truman Show vs Rear Window

    1709 Words  | 4 Pages

    Scopophilia is taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze by allowing the spectator to look into a secret diegetic world, a projection of desire onto the former. For example, Peeping Tom (1960) stimulates a direct connection with the audience between eye and phallus, through the form of a camera wielded by protagonist and serial killer Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm). He is equip...

    Read More

  • Classical and Post-Classical Hollywood Cinema

    2472 Words  | 5 Pages

    Classic narrative cinema is what Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson (The classic Hollywood Cinema, Columbia University press 1985) 1, calls “an excessively obvious cinema”1 in which cinematic style serves to explain and not to obscure the narrative. In this way it is made up of motivated events that lead the spectator to its inevitable conclusion. It causes the spectator to have an emotional investment in this conclusion coming to pass which in turn makes the predictable the most desirable outcome. The films are structured to create an atmosphere of verisimilitude, which is to give a perception of reality. On closer inspection it they are often far from realistic in a social sense but possibly portray a realism desired by the patriarchal and family value orientated society of the time. I feel that it is often the black and white representation of good and evil that creates such an atmosphere of predic...

    Read More

  • Film Bodies: Genre, Gender and Excess

    2633 Words  | 6 Pages

    Film scholar and gender theorist Linda Williams begins her article “Film Bodies: Genre, Gender and Excess,” with an anecdote about a dispute between herself and her son, regarding what is considered “gross,” (727) in films. It is this anecdote that invites her readers to understand the motivations and implications of films that fall under the category of “body” genre, namely, horror films, melodramas, (henceforth referred to as “weepies”) and pornography. Williams explains that, in regards to excess, the constant attempts at “determining where to draw the line,” (727) has inspired her and other theorists alike to question the inspirations, motivations, and implications of these “body genre” films. After her own research and consideration, Williams explains that she believes there is “value in thinking about the form, function, and system of seemingly gratuitous excesses in these three genres,” (728) and she will attempt to prove that these films are excessive on purpose, in order to inspire a collective physical effect on the audience that cannot be experienced when watching other genres.

    Read More

  • Essay On Klute By Laura Mullvey

    1316 Words  | 3 Pages

    According to Laura Mulvey, women function on two levels in Hollywood classical cinema: as an erotic object for the character in the diegesis, and as an erotic object for the spectators in the theater. Explain Mulvey’s argument and apply it to either Klute or Jeanne Dielman. (your answer should not be confined only to examples of men looking at women, but may also consider the possibility of women looking at women.) If Mulvey is correct, can women ever function as active participants in the narrative? How does the film support or negate tgis point?

    Read More

  • Miss Representation Summary

    1350 Words  | 3 Pages

    These movies allowed female characters to embody all the contradictions that could make them a woman. They were portrayed as the “femme fatale” and also “mother,” the “seductress” and at the same time the “saint,” (Newsom, 2011). Female characters were multi-faceted during this time and had much more complexity and interesting qualities than in the movies we watch today. Today, only 16% of protagonists in movies are female, and the portrayal of these women is one of sexualization and dependence rather than complexity (Newsom, 2011).

    Read More

  • The Role of Women in Screwball Comedy Films

    4993 Words  | 10 Pages

    Led by Laura Mulvey, feminist film critics have discussed the difficulty presented to female spectators by the controlling male gaze and narrative generally found in mainstream film, creating for female spectators a position that forces them into limited choices: "bisexual" identification with active male characters; identification with the passive, often victimized, female characters; or on occasion, identification with a "masculinized" active female character, who is generally punished for her unhealthy behavior. Before discussing recent improvements, it is important to note that a group of Classic Hollywood films regularly offered female spectators positive, female characters who were active in controlling narrative, gazing and desiring: the screwball comedy.

    Read More

  • Male Gaze

    1788 Words  | 4 Pages

    A challenge that faces both Canadian cinema and women’s cinema is the idea of the male gaze. The film industry is a phallocentric institution that since its inception has always faced the problem of objectifying women.

    Read More

  • Summary Of Laura Mulvey's 'Visual Pleasure And Narrative Cinema'

    1072 Words  | 3 Pages

    Kubrick’s Gaze In Laura Mulvey’s article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” she uses the concept of scopophilia, or pleasure obtained through looking at things, to discuss the portrayal of women in film as passive sexual objects, while inferring that it is the active male “gaze” that objectifies them. Mulvey’s ideas are extremely relevant to Stanley Kubrick’s final film Eyes Wide Shut, in which the themes of sexuality and voyeurism are abundant. Gender roles are very clearly defined in Eyes Wide Shut. Men control the “gaze” and obtain scopophilic pleasure by looking at women.

    Read More

  • The Persecution of Women in Alfred Hitchcock's Blackmail and Frenzy

    3307 Words  | 7 Pages

    ...are influenced by Although the uneasiness of relationships at the conclusion of Hitchcock’s films is a common theme, it is the deformation of sound and language by Hitchcock that creates the suspense and anxiety that his films are infamous for, allowing the female to become the centre of the discrimination, meaning that its only solution is the pursuit of “human communication”, an ideal that through careful analysis of both films, seems impossible for the female to ascertain.

    Read More

  • Feminism and the Movie Industry

    1785 Words  | 4 Pages

    Feminism is a movement that supports women equality within society. In relation to film, feminism is what pushes the equal representation of females in mainstream films. Laura Mulvey is a feminist theorist that is famous for touching on this particular issue of how men and women are represented in movies. Through her studies, she discovered that many films were portraying men and women very differently from reality. She came up with a theory that best described why there is such as huge misrepresentation of the social status quos of male and female characters. She believed that mainstream film is used to maintain the status quo and prevent the realization of gender equality. This is why films are continuously following the old tradition that males are dominant and females are submissive. This is the ideology that is always present when we watch a movie. This is evident in the films from the past but also currently. It is as if the film industry is still catering to the male viewers of each generation in the same way. Laura Mulvey points out that women are constantly being seen as sexual objects, whether it is the outfits they wear or do not wear or the way they behave, or secondary characters with no symbolic cause. She states that, “in traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote it-be-looked-at-ness.”(Mulvey pg. 715). Thus, women are nevertheless displayed as nothing more than passive objects for the viewing pleasure of the audience. Mulvey also points out through her research that in every mainstream movie, there is ...

    Read More

  • Feminism In Movies Essay

    1848 Words  | 4 Pages

    Feminist theory was derived from the social movement of feminism where political women fight for the right of females in general and argue in depth about the unequality we face today. In the aspect of cinema, feminists notice the fictitious representations of females and also, machismo. In 1974, a book written by Molly Haskell "From Reverence to Rape: The treatment of Women in Movies" argues about how women almost always play only passive roles while men are always awarded with active, heroic roles. Moreover, how women are portrayed in movies are very important as it plays a big role to the audience on how to look at a woman and how to treat her in real life due to the illusionism that cinema offers. These images of women created in the cinema shapes what an ideal woman is. This can be further explained through an article 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' written by a feminist named Laura Mulvey in 1975. She uses psychoanalysis theories by Sigmund Freud to analyze 'Scopophilia' which is the desire to see. This explains how the audience is hooked to the screen when a sexy woman is present. In a bigger picture, where Scopophilia derives from, 'Voyeurism' is also known as feeling visual pleasure when looking at another. Narcissism on the other hand means identifying one's self with the role played. It is not hard to notice that in classical cinema, men often play the active role while the women are always the object of desire for the male leads, displayed as a sexual object and frequently the damsels in distress. Therefore, the obvious imbalance of power in classical cinema shows how men are accountable to moving the narratives along. Subconsciously, narcissism occurs in the audience as they ...

    Read More

More about Feminist Film Theorist Laura Mulvey and Classicism

Open Document