18/11/10
FILM THEORY, 'THE GAZE' & PSYCHOANALYSIS
-Psychoanalysis - way of thinking linke
d to psychology + psychiatry
-Laura Mulvey- (Film writer informed by both feninism and psychoanalysis. Most famous work 'Visual pleasures and narrative cinema' (1975) later turned into a longer book of the same name. Some key points developed by Mulvey:
- Hollywood film is sexist in that it represents the gaze as powerful and male/ heros typically male and drive the plot/ women in film exist as 'sexual' objects to be 'looked at'.
-Scopophilia- pleasure of looking at others' bodies as objects '...at the extreme [scopophilia] can become fixated into a perversion, producing obsessive voyeurs and Peeping Toms whose only sexual satisfaction can come from watching, in an active controlling sense, an objectified other.'
-Narcissistic Identification- Identify with male character. 'The cinema satisfies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking, but it also goes fu
rther, developing scopophilia in its narcissistic aspect.'
-Mirror Stage- 'The moment when a child recognises their own mirror-image as a project perfected model of 'ego'. Film (like its similarity with the mirror) produces a fascinationin the image that can itself, induce a loss of ego. In our increasing identification with a projected 'ego', our own sense of ego becomes lost..' Projection of 'ideal ego' comic book guy in the simpsons thinks he's radioactive man.
-Suture- spectators look through eyes of the actors in the film
-We are able to follow 'their' gaze without feeling guilty
-Suture can be broken e.g., when an actor speaks out to us
-When broken, the audience are aware of their own gaze
-Possibility then, to make the spectator feel guilty
-Jacques Lacan- Famous french psychoanalyst, particularly influential on art history and theory.
-Different types of the 'gaze'- spectator's gaze, intra diagetic gaze, extra diagetic gaze, suture
-Le Viol - Degas
-A bar at folies-bergere- Manet
-Duchamp- Etant Donnes (1946-1966) being given power of the gaze
-Peeping Tom
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