From Reverence To Rape: Contemporary Images Of Women In Film

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FILM Film with its basic meaning a motion picture or a movie. Film is an important medium through which the cultural and social norms of our society are communicated and confirmed. As with any cultural product that is projected via the mass media (broadcast, electronic, print), films cannot be produced without some intersection between artistic and economic interests. Women in Film The emergence and growth of the women's movement in the last decade have aroused considerable interest from film critics and film historians in past and contemporary images of women in cinema. Molly Haskell's From Reverence to Rape; The Treatment of Women in the Movies and Popcorn Venus; Women, Movies and the American Dream by Marjorie Rosen document, decade …show more content…

Laura Mulvey, in her seminal work about film critique, cites that in an effort to protect the male viewer from these complexes and prolong his pleasure, the woman is either turned into a fetish or restored to her “due place in the patriarchal order by the end of the film by punishing her or by reintegrating her into a romantic relationship” There are common scenes in the modern romantic films that portrays the inability of women to focus and improve their life without the help of a man, he may portray the role of a boyfriend, husband or prince charming. Feminist theory suggests that patriarchal ideology is embedded in unequal power structures and represented in romantic, drama and romantic comedy films as efforts to sustain gender inequities and sexual subordination. …show more content…

This feminist theory was first introduced in the essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” by film theorist Laura Mulvey in 1975. Male gaze is described as “the concept of the gaze as a symptom of power asymmetry”. A defining characteristic of male gaze was how the heterosexual male lets the camera “linger on the curves of the female body”. The male gaze “denies women agency, relegating them to the status of objects.” When applied to comic books, what we see presented is through the gaze of the male. It also influence the reader’s standpoint especially the younger generation who read comics daily that women in comics should be the same to women in the real

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