Pleasure in looking
Cinema offers two contradictory aspects of pleasurable looking:
- scopophilia, the pleasure of looking. Cinema may at first sight appear remote from the 'undercover world' of the obsessive voyeur but the 'hermetically sealed' world of film, together with the contrast between the darkness of the auditorium and the brilliance of the screen, promotes the 'illusion of voyeuristic separation';
- a narcissistic aspect as the viewer identifies with the image seen. (Shades of the celebrity culture we identify nowadays).
These are contradictory because:
"the first implies a separation of the erotic identity of the subject from the object on the screen (active scopophilia) the other demands identification of the ego with the object on the screen through the spectator's fascination with the recognition of his like."
Woman as Image
"In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female."
Women are an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film, yet their presence works against the story line. Women act as the erotic object of the screen characters and of the spectator in the auditorium.
Men, on the other hand, are the active participants, the ones who make the story happen, and also the 'bearer of the look of the spectator', as the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, the ego identification process.
This is what Mulvey terms the 'natural conditions of human perception', with a nod to Barthes here.
So we have a tension between in the representation of women: the scopophilic contact displayed for his enjoyment, and the spectator 'fascinated with the image of his like set in an illusion of natural space, and through him gaining control and possession of the woman through diegesis'.
Deeper than that, the woman connotes also the lack of a penis invoking castration anxiety from the male audience. The male unconscious can escape either by re-enacting the drama (demystifying), or by turning the female figure into fetish so that is becomes reassuring rather than dangerous (fetishistic scopophilia).
The first avenue, voyeurism, has associations with sadism - in a film sense the narrative demands a battle of will and strength, victory/defeat all in linear fashion from beginning to end. Fetishistic scopophilia can exist outside the linear time as focussed on look alone.
Mulvey contends that Hitchcock uses both mechanisms: voyeurism and fetishistic fascination.
Howells and Negreiros (2012, p101) point out that Mulvey's thesis is not unlike that of Berger: polemical; says as much about the author as the subject; and has 'a habit of always finding just what [she is] looking for in [her] chosen texts'. Berger and Mulvey are possibly 'looking at the wrong thing, blinded to aesthetics by the bright light of ideology'.
This seems a little unfair to me. Mulvey has a point, made cogently, but within an academic framework, citing Freud and Lacan, for example. The point where objectivity stops and assertion starts is always blurred. I would add too that many of the authors that we have read in this course - Althusser, Barthes, Foucault, Freud, Lacan to name a few - are very inclined to write in a self assured way that often alludes factual certainty to a concept that is anything but.
Moreover, her argument retains relevance today. By coincidence, at the same time as reading this article, the Times ran a story entitled: Hollywood shamed as flick chicks fail to break through celluloid ceiling. A study by Stephen Follows (2014) sets out how film crews are dominated by males (74% in UK, 78% in US), particularly the key creative roles of writers, editors and directors (85% male). Morevover, the gender split has changed little over the last ten years.
The gender bias affects the viewing:
"Men overwhelmingly prefer stories told from a male perspective such as United 93, Paul Greengrass’s film about passengers rising up against September 11 terrorists, which had audiences that were 89 per cent male....Women much prefer films such as Penelope, a romance starring Christina Ricci and James McAvoy, which was written by a woman and had a 90 per cent female audience. Other films with a strong female following included Jane Eyre, Sex and the City and Bridesmaids."
Follows argues that some very successful movies - he quotes, Avatar, Titanic, and The Avengers - tell the story from both a male and a female perspective. It is interesting too to see how the Dr. Who stories are considerably more female oriented now than they used to be. We do not yet have a female (or non white) doctor but the assistant (now Carla played by Jenna Coleman) is herself an enigma: an ostensibly ordinary girl from 21st century but also the one who save the doctor on Trenzelore by reversing damage done by the 'Great Intelligence'. The point here is that Clara is more independent and the doctor relies on her as much as the reverse is true.
Moreover, her argument retains relevance today. By coincidence, at the same time as reading this article, the Times ran a story entitled: Hollywood shamed as flick chicks fail to break through celluloid ceiling. A study by Stephen Follows (2014) sets out how film crews are dominated by males (74% in UK, 78% in US), particularly the key creative roles of writers, editors and directors (85% male). Morevover, the gender split has changed little over the last ten years.
The gender bias affects the viewing:
"Men overwhelmingly prefer stories told from a male perspective such as United 93, Paul Greengrass’s film about passengers rising up against September 11 terrorists, which had audiences that were 89 per cent male....Women much prefer films such as Penelope, a romance starring Christina Ricci and James McAvoy, which was written by a woman and had a 90 per cent female audience. Other films with a strong female following included Jane Eyre, Sex and the City and Bridesmaids."
Follows argues that some very successful movies - he quotes, Avatar, Titanic, and The Avengers - tell the story from both a male and a female perspective. It is interesting too to see how the Dr. Who stories are considerably more female oriented now than they used to be. We do not yet have a female (or non white) doctor but the assistant (now Carla played by Jenna Coleman) is herself an enigma: an ostensibly ordinary girl from 21st century but also the one who save the doctor on Trenzelore by reversing damage done by the 'Great Intelligence'. The point here is that Clara is more independent and the doctor relies on her as much as the reverse is true.
References:
Follows (2014) What percentage of a UK film crew is female? Available from http://stephenfollows.com/what-percentage-of-a-british-film-crew-is-female/ Accessed on 25 August 2014.
Howells and Negreiros (2012) Visual Culture Polity Press, Cambridge
No comments:
Post a Comment