Project 20: Gendering the Gaze (Laura Mulvey)

Project 20: Gendering the Gaze (Laura Mulvey)

How would I explain the Gaze? The Gaze would be the practice of looking which form a system of relationships; then a gaze would a singular instance.  The gaze, the act of conscious looking, is given a gendered difference which Laura Mulvey illustrates in the conventions of the cinema.

This has to been one of the projects I have enjoyed the most and have taken very detailed notes of the set text and supplementary ones so I will only try and some up a few key areas that I focused on. I don’t want to go off on a tangent. 

Nature of this project was to consider the concept of the gaze in relation to the article Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975) by Laura Mulvey. The article critiques classical Hollywood cinema in that it is patriarchal in the structure of its form and thus centred towards male viewing pleasure; the male gaze. Ultimately, the spectator is gendered as a heterosexual male or is looking from a masculine gender perspective.  

The article is from a broadly feminist perspective and uses psychoanalysis as a discourse for classical Hollywood cinema.  This project has links to OCA project two (‘Fetishising the object of the eye’), project seventeen (‘Freud, Oedipus and castration) and project eighteen (‘the mirror phase’) because Mulvey directly addresses some of the concepts they explore.

Mulvey argues that it is through the cinema offers two types of pleasure: voyeurism and narcissism. These are both integrated into the image and narrative through structures.  Voyeuristic visual pleasure is produced by looking at another our object. This is usually through the female form and is usually done for the audience through the objectifying gaze of his male on-screen surrogate, the male protagonist; this self-identification constitutes as the narcissistic visual pleasure. 

In consideration of Freudian psychoanalysis, the lack of a penis renders the female characters as fearful; which allows for their punishment within the diegesis. Women within film, because of the gaze, become passive of objects of desire. On the other hand, the fetishisation (i.e. repeated close-ups – fragments – of a particular part of a woman) of a female character deflects attention away from the lack and this pacifies the castration anxiety; especially of the audience. 

Not only cinema that genders the gaze. It seems through the majority of art history that the gaze has been assumed to be that of male. In a patriarchal society this is not surprising but has lead to many conventional modes of representation that tend to go unremarked, for example the female nude. Does the possession of one signify ones ownership of her?

Task One: Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, USA, 1958)

This is a summary of the notes I took when watching Vertigo. 

Vertigo does stand up to Mulvey’s analysis of it. Voyeurism is embedded in the structure of Vertigo; Scottie falls in a love with a woman that is under his surveillance. When Judy is reconstructed as Madeline and becomes a fetish, she is eventually punished for her treatment of Scottie. 

The Male Gaze is rendered natural – almost invisible – through the deigesis and verisimilitude of the film. Self-identification with the ideal ego is confirmed by the use of the subjective camera; the narrative is centred on what Scottie sees, or miss-sees. The audience – through the employment of the Male Gaze – is thus implicated in Scottie’s obsession through the use of point-of-view. 

Not only is sadistic voyeurism a matter for Scottie within the diegesis, we as audience members are also implicated in it through self-identification.  

Task Two: ‘How does the portrayal of R&B music in video match up to Mulvey’s insight?’ 

From watching several R&B music videos it is clear that some of them almost celebrate the Male Gaze. Women are objectified by the males within the video and thus act as surrogates for audience self-identification. This is also the case for female acts; through exhibitionism they offer themselves as spectacle. 

It is interesting to note that in some of the Hip-Hop videos the female body is fragmented in close-ups; causing fetishisation. This then disavows the castration anxiety of the male gendered audience.

Task Three: Manet’s Olmypia

 

Manet, E. 1863. Olympia [Painting]. Musee d'Orsay, Paris, France.

Although the image is geared towards a male viewer, the male ownership of the artwork could suggest the physical possession of the female nude. The woman is defiant though, her non-passive direct stare at the spectator challenges the male gaze.

The social context of the painting is represented by the second figure within the painting. The servant’s eyes are cast down. She is denied the power of the gaze and is subservient to her mistress.

Further Reading

Bellour, R. (1979). Hitchcock the enunciator. Camera Obscura. 2 (1).

Doane, M. A. (1982). Film and the masquerade: theorizing the female spectator. In: Hollows, J., Hutchings, P. & Jancovich, M. (eds). (2000)  The Film Studies Reader. London: Arnold, pp. 147-154. 

Kaplan, A. E. (1983). The struggle for control over the female discourse and female sexuality in Welles’s Lady from Shanghai (1946). In: Women and Film. Both Sides of the Camera. London: Routledge, pp. 60-72.

Mulvey, L. (1999) Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ inspired by King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946). In:  Thornham, S. (ed). Feminist Film Theory: a Reader. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 122-130.

 

Mulvey, L. (1996) Fetishism and Curiosity. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press. 

Mulvey, L. (1989). The Oedipus myth: beyond the riddles of the Sphinx. In:  Visual and Other Pleasures. Macmillan: London, pp. 177-201.

Further Screening

Duel in the Sun (King Vidor, The Selznick Studio/Vanguard Films, USA, 1946)

The Devil is a Woman (Josef von Sternberg, Paramount Pictures, USA, 1935)

Gilda (Charles Vidor, Columbia Pictures Corporation, USA, 1946)

The Lady from Shanghai (Orson Welles, Columbia Pictures Corporation/Mercury Productions, USA 1946)  

Marnie (Alfred Hitchcock, Universal Pictures/Geoffrey Stanley, USA, 1964)

The Seven Year Itch (Billy Wilder, Charles K. Feldman Group, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, USA, 1955)

Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, Alfred J. Hitchcock Productions/Paramount Pictures, USA, 1958)

Reference List

Mulvey, L. (1975) Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. In: Evans, J. and Hall, S. (eds.) Visual culture: a reader. (1999) London: Sage Publications pp. 381-389.

Bibliography

Andrew, D. (1984)  Concepts in film theory. New York: Oxford University Press. 

D’Alleva, A. (2005) Methods & theories of art history. London: Laurence King Publishing.

Cartwright, L., Sturken, M. (2001) Practices of looking: an introduction to visual culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Cook, P. (ed.) (2007) The Cinema Book. (3^rd ed.)  London: British Film Institute.

Creed, B. (1998) Film and Psychoanalysis. In: J. Hill & P. Church Gibson eds. Oxford guide to film studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press  

Hayward, S. (1996) Cinema studies: the key concepts. Abingdon: Routledge.

Hollows, J. & Jancovich, M. (1995) Approaches to Popular Film. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Filmography

Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, Alfred J. Hitchcock Productions, Paramount Pictures, USA, 1958)