Transcript Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975)

Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema (1975)
Laura Mulvey
Fascination and film
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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’.
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Scopophilia
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scopophilia = pleasure in looking (Sigmund
Freud 1905, in ‘Three Essays’)
examples of the private and curious gaze:
children’s 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’
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‘Woman as image, man as
bearer of the look’ II
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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
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the image of the woman also carries a threat
there are two avenues of escape from fear of
femininity for the male spectator
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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)
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