Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

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Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

• Laura Mulvey

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• Social unconscious reflected in film
• Patriarchy woman as castration, lack
• Dominant order forms unconscious, which
  structures ways of seeing
• Mainstream cinema reflects dominant ideological
  concepts
• To be politically and aesthetically avant-garde,
  alternative cinema must react against it

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• Scopophilia pleasure in looking
• Objectified other, separation of audience and
  film
• Recognition/misrecognition identification w/
  human form but seen as more ideal
• Tension between libido and ego, objectified other
  and other as self.

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• Uses psychoanalysis for film analysis political
  purposes
• Expose unconscious of patriarchy in film
• Film replicates psychoanalytic mirror phase.
• Temporary loss of ego w/ simultaneous reinforcing
  of ego by identification w/ screen hero

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• Woman passive, to be looked at
• Man active, does the looking
• She exists to represent aspects of the hero, to
  be possessed
• Body parts emphasized by camera panning
• Male viewer gains control of female onscreen by
  identification with hero.

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• Female identification either masochistic or
  sadistic
• Masochistic identify with woman, see self as
  object of gaze
• Sadistic identify with man, see woman as
  dominated object.