Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975)

1. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975) Laura Mulvey

2. Fascination and film • Film fascinates us (engages our emotions), through images and spectacle • Mulvey uses psychoanalysis ‘to discover where and how the fascination of film is reinforced by pre-existing patterns of fascination already at work within the individual subject’ (= spectator) • She says she is using psychoanalytic theory ‘as a political weapon’

3. Cinema and pleasure • Hollywood/mainstream/narrative cinema manipulates visual pleasure. • It ‘codes the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order’.

4. Scopophilia • scopophilia = pleasure in looking (Sigmund Freud 1905, in ‘Three Essays’) • examples of the private and curious gaze: children’s voyeurism, cinematic looking • the most pleasurable looking = looking at the human form and the human face, figural looking (corresponds to psychic patterns)

5. ‘Woman as image, man as bearer of the look’ I • pleasure in looking split between active/male and passive/female • women connote ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ • the visual presence of women ‘works against the development of a story-line, freezes the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation’

6. ‘Woman as image, man as bearer of the look’ II • the woman functions as both erotic object for the characters within the screen story and erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium (object of fantasy) • the spectator is led to identify with the main male protagonist • ‘the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look’

7. Fetishistic scopophilia • the image of the woman also carries a threat • there are two avenues of escape from fear of femininity for the male spectator • investigate the woman, demystify her mystery • disavow (deny) castration by turning the woman into a reassuring fetish. The image of the woman > overvalued: this is the cult of the (beautiful) female star, e.g. Jeanne Moreau for nouvelle vague

8. The male gaze and fetishistic scopophilia in ‘Jules et Jim’ • scopophilia is the force driving the movements and positioning of the camera • the gaze is male, and the spectator is led to identify with this male gaze • the cinematic apparatus is not gender-neutral (in later readings, camera can also register differences of sexuality)