Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975)

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Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975)

• Laura Mulvey

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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

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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

• 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)

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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

• 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

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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
  gt overvalued this is the cult of the (beautiful)
  female star, e.g. Jeanne Moreau for nouvelle vague

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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 gender-neutral (in
  later readings, camera can also register
  differences of sexuality)