Afterthoughts On Visual Pleasure And Narrative Cinema Pdf
High Noon, and read Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” “Afterthoughts on Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” and Montelongo-Flores’ “Gatekeeping the West.” Write Guided Response Paper 5 engaging at least one of the films and at least one of the critical readings. Come prepared to do a scene. From the earliest silent cinema to the age of the internet and digital media. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (Laura Mulvey, L) Th 3/21 Reading: “Afterthoughts on Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (Mulvey, L) Week Eleven: Key Concept: Non-Fiction and Documentary.
› › Laura Mulvey, Male Gaze and the Feminist Film TheoryLaura Mulvey, Male Gaze and the Feminist Film TheoryBy on. ( )Laura Mulvey (b. 1941) is Professor of Film and Media Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is the author of (1989), Fetishism and Curiosity (1996), Citizen Kane (1992) and (2006).
She is the director of a number of avantgarde films made in the 1970s and 1980s, made with. Mulvey’s essay (1975) has had a major impact on the course of film scholarship.
Mulvey’s interests are broad, ranging from contemporary art to the introduction of sound in cinema, from to.It is clear that the most iconic of Mulvey’s articles is, first published in Screen in 1975 (reprinted in Visual and Other Pleasures along with “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema inspired by ‘s (1946)”). Mulvey’s work has been overshadowed by this single piece of youthful polemic (the author was in her early thirties on publication) but “Visual Pleasure” does highlight issues of concern that continue to run through her subsequent work. Most obviously these include feminism and psychoanalysis, and it is these two branches of twentieth- century thinking, alongside Marxism, that most consistently inform her philosophical approach to film and art.
A number of other broad areas are of obvious and continuing interest to Mulvey. These include photography (particularly ideas of stillness and delay) and contemporary art (with an emphasis on women artists and artists who could broadly be described as “postmodern”). Increasingly her work has reflected her interest in death and the Freudian compulsion to repeat. Her interest in cinema covers a surprisingly narrow range, with an overwhelming emphasis on popular Hollywood cinema from around 1930 to 1960, melodrama (particularly the films of Douglas Sirk and Rainer Werner Fassbinder) and, more recently, Iranian cinema.There are a small number of films to which she dedicates extended discussions – (dir.
Josef von Sternberg, 1930), (dir. Orson Welles, 1941), (Journey to Italy; dir. Roberto Rossellini, 1954), (dir. Sirk, 1959), (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), (Fear eats the soul; dir. Fassbinder, 1974), (dir. Ousmane Sembene, 1975) and Blue Velvet (dir.
David Lynch, 1986) – to some of which she returns repeatedly throughout her writing. It is in the early 1970s that Mulvey began to re-evaluate her relationship to Hollywood cinema, because of her greater involvement with feminism and, increasingly, psychoanalysis. In her introduction toshe writes:Before I became absorbed in the Women’s Movement, I had spent almost a decade during her twenties in the 1960s absorbed in Hollywood cinema. Although this great, previously unquestioned and unanalysed love was put in crisis by the impact of feminism on my thought in the early 1970s, it also had an enormous influence on the development of my critical work and ideas and the debate within film culture with which I became preoccupied over the next fifteen years or so. (1989: xiii)Her work begins to concentrate on analysing the ways in which women are represented in popular and art culture. She takes part in the demonstration against the, and this action also points to a concern that runs throughout her work: the relationship between theory and practice (Mulvey 1989: 3-5). Mulvey sees that it is necessary to understand and analyse the ideological precepts of contemporary culture, while also realizing that one should contribute to or intervene in that culture itself in order to bring about change.
From the direct action of a stage invasion, Mulvey’s analysis of films informs her own film-making practice in the 1970s and 1980s.In, Mulvey characterizes the viewer of cinema as being caught within the “patriarchal order” and, in accordance with a certain feminist identity politics, postulates an “alienated subject” (ibid,: 16) that exists prior to the establishment of such an order. It is to the possibility of this romantic individual and his or her liberation from that order that the essay is addressed. Mulvey explains that Hollywood, and crucially its visual style (which we can broadly understand as the style expounded by David Bordwell et al. THE GAZE AND CURIOSITYThe phrase “male gaze” occurs only twice in (1989:19,22) but has become the shorthand for describing the main point of the essay. The interior/exterior model explored in Fetishism and Curiosity could be explained by a term such as “false consciousness”, or even “ideology”, and in this sense it can be linked back to Mulvey’s preoccupation with the “real”. In order to be able to sustain an intellectual project based on the moral worth of interpretive activity, the critic cannot interpret blindly but must have as a goal the elucidation of the “real” and of “truth”.
This truth lies beneath the carapace created by another (presumably evil) power. Critical activity becomes a crusade against hypocrisy and oppression where the avant-garde (whether it be artistic or interpretive) is the only position from which an attack on the carapace is possible.It is the importance of interpretation that lies behind Mulvey’s other, less frequent, metaphor in Fetishism and Curiosity: that of the hieroglyph, one of the meanings of which is “a secret or enigmatical figure” (OED).
She writes of three processes that the hieroglyph evokes:a code of composition, the encapsulation, that is, of an idea in an image at a stage just prior to writing; a mode of address that asks an audience to apply their ability to decipher the poetics of the “screen script”; and, finally, the work of criticism as a means of articulating the poetics that an audience recognises but leaves implicit. (1996: 118)For Mulvey, the process of the formation of meaning is quite straightforward. There is an idea that exists, which is then translated into a form that demands to be deciphered but which can be properly understood only by a small group of critics who will come and explain to the general public the true message of any “mode of address”. This final reading of the hieroglyph would constitute the failure of the fetish and the final cracking of the carapace. Presumably, this explanation of the processes that underpin popular culture and consumer culture in general will have some sort of liberating effect on general society. Hie problem that faces the critic is difficulty itself.Mulvey returns to the problematic of difficulty again and again throughout these essays. She writes that: it may always be difficult to decipher the place of labour power as the source of value.
(Ibid.: 5) A shared sense of addressing a world written in cipher may have drawn feminist film critics, like me, to psychoanalytic theory, which has then provided a, if not the, means to cracking the codes encapsulated in the “rebus” of images of women. (Ibid.: 27) The enigmatic text Citizen Kane that then gradually materialises appeals to an active, curious, spectator who takes pleasure in identifying, deciphering and interpreting signs. (Ibid.: 99)In the introduction she writes:History is, undoubtedly, constructed out of representations.
But these representations are themselves symptoms. They provide clues, not to ultimate or fixed meanings, but to sites of social difficulty that need to be deciphered, politically and psychoanalytically even though it may be too hard, ultimately, to make complete sense of the code.
(Ibid.: 11)The difficulty of interpretation would appear to be the ultimate impossibility of combining theory and practice. Mulvey seems to come to the conclusion that reality, while always the necessary yardstick of interpretation, cannot in the end be understood through curiosity. It is in her book on Citizen Kane that Mulvey explores the pleasures of interpretation for its own sake and ends with the observation that there “are two retreats possible: death and the womb” (1992: 83).
If we can understand her work to have been concerned with “the womb” (the origins and interpretation of reality), perhaps her most recent book deals with the other retreat: death.In, Mulvey shifts her attention to the freeze-frame, or the slowed image, and to the image of death. She explores what she terms the “death drive movie” (2006: 86) epitomized by Psycho and Viaggio in Italia. Her ruminations on C.S. Peirce’s semiotic triangle of icon, index and symbol try once again to come to terms with the relationship between representation and reality and her focus on the index, which is “a sign produced by the ‘thing’ it represents” (ibid.: 9) like a footprint or shadow.
Here she concentrates on photography more than cinema and is indebted to Roland Barthes’ linking of the photograph with death in Camera Lucida (1981). She also discusses the uncanny at some length. She sums up her project in thus: “The cinema combines two human fascinations: one with the boundary between life and death and the other with mechanical animation of the inanimate, particularly the human figure” (2006: 11).Mulvey is also fascinated by the impact of digital technologies on the moving image but does not really explore this beyond the analogue possibility of freezing the image on screen. She formulates two new models of spectatorship – the pensive and the possessive spectator – but neither of these are fully articulated in any convincing manner. Rather than examining the details of her argument in this book, which are perhaps even less clearly formulated than in her other episodic works, it may be worth noting Mulvey s rather world-weary tone and her emphasis on death.The book does, however, contain an essay on the Iranian film-maker, whose work she terms as a cinema of “uncertainty” and of “delay”. For Mulvey, Kiarostamis films appear to be an elegy for cinema itself, which is now in its final death throes. This approach seems uncannily to echo Mulvey s 1970s “negative aesthetics” approach that film as it exists should be destroyed, with only a vague sense of “sentimental regret”.
It is this emotion that seems to pervade.Finally, Mulvey cannot reconcile pleasure, or even life, and reality. At this stage of her work reality equals death. In her afterword to a collection of essays on the new Iranian cinema Mulvey explicitly addresses the issue that her feminist stance in the 1970s is echoed in Islamic censorship of cinema:Islamic censorship reflects a social subordination of women and, particularly, an anxiety about female sexuality. But it then produces, as a result, a “difficulty” with the representation of women on the screen which has some – unexpected – coincidence with the problems feminists have raised about the representations of women in the cinema. (2002: 258)Mulvey is puzzled by the fact that both oppression and liberation may result in exactly the same aesthetic object and her proposed solution is that it is this puzzlement, this curiosity, this call to “the process of deciphering”, that will move us away from being transfixed by “the fascination of the spectacle” ibid.: 261). However, it is difficult not to be left with a certain sense of pessimism.Source: FILM, THEORY AND PHILOSOPHY The Key Thinkers Edited by Felicity Colman, McGill Queens University Press.
Mulvey Visual Pleasure And Narrative Cinema
.Part of thebook series (LDS) AbstractSo many times over the years since my ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ article was published in Screen, I have been asked why I only used the male third person singular to stand in for the spectator. At the time, I was interested in the relationship between the image of woman on the screen and the ‘masculinisation’ of the spectator position, regardless of the actual sex (or possible deviance) of any real live moviegoer. In-built patterns of pleasure and identification impose masculinity as ‘point of view’; a point of view which is also manifest in the general use of the masculine third person.
Visual Pleasure In Narrative Cinema
However, the persistent question ‘what about the women in the audience?’ and my own love of Hollywood melodrama (equally shelved as an issue in ‘Visual Pleasure’) combined to convince me that, however ironically it had been intended originally, the male third person closed off avenues of inquiry that should be followed up. Finally, Duel in the Sun and its heroine’s crisis of sexual identity brought both areas together.