Visual and Other Pleasures Essays - Film Theory, Feminist Theory

Visual and Other Pleasures Essays - Film Theory, Feminist Theory Visual and Other Pleasures Laura Mulvey (Hampshire, 1989: latest edn. Hampshire, 2009) (A)A political use of psychoanalysis 14 Psychoanalytic theory is thus appropriated here as a political weapon, demonstrating the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form. 15 Woman then stands in patriarchal culture as a signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of women still tied to her place as bearer, not maker, of meaning. ...But, at this point, psychoanalytic theory as it now stands can at least advance our understanding of the status quo, of the patriarchal order in which we are caught. (B)Destruction of pleasure as a radical weapon 16 New cinema The alternative cinema provides a space for the birth of a cinema which radical in both a political and an aesthetic sense and challenges the basic assumptions of the mainstream film. It is said that analysing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this article. The magic of the Hollywood style at its best (and of all the cinema which fell within its sphere of influence) arose, not exclusively, but in one important aspect, from its skilled and satisfying manipulation of visual pleasure. Unchallenged, mainstream film coded the erotic into the language of dominant patriarchal order. The satisfaction and reinforcement of the ego that represent the high point of film history hitherto must be attacked. The alternative is the thrill that comes from leaving the past behind without simply rejecting it, transcending outworn or oppressive forms, and daring to break with normal pleasurable expectations in order to conceive a new language of desire. 2. Pleasure in looking/fascination with the human form a. the cinema offers a number of possible pleasures. One is scopophilia (pleasure in looking). There are circumstances in which looking itself is a source of pleasure, just as, in the reverse formation, there is pleasure in being looked at. Originally, in his Three Essays on Sexuality, Freud isolated scopophilia as one of the component instinct of sexuality which exists as drives quite independently of the erotogenic zones. -19 FREUD: 19 During its history, the cinema seems to have evolved a particular illusion of reality in which this contradiction between libido and ego has found a beautifully complementary fantasy world. Ill. Woman as image, man as bearer of the look In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly. 20 Budd Boetticher: What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance. Traditionally, the woman displayed has functioned on two levels: as erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium, with a shifting tension between the looks on either side of the screen. (B)The man controls the film fantasy and also emerges as the representative power in a further sense: as the bearer of the look of the spectator, transferring it behind the screen to neutralise the extradiegetic tendencies represented by woman as spectacle. This is made possible through the processes set in motion by structuring the film around a main controlling figure with whom the spectator can identify. As the spectator identitfies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look onto that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence. 21In contrast to woman as icon, the active male figure (the ego ideal of the identification process) demands a three-dimensional space corresponding to that of the mirror recognition, in which the alienated subject internalised his own representation of his imaginary existence. Here the function of the film is to reproduce as accurately as possible the so-called natural conditions of human perception. 21-24 examples of films/directors