Lecture 3 - Film Theory 'The Gaze' and Pscychoanalysis

Ganes (Call of Duty)
-can play in 1st of 3rd person
-1st feels liek you are there - more life like
-3rd is cinematic
-pscyhoanalysis - choices/options

Lecture aims:
-theories about power of looking through a different theoretical frame
-psychoanalysis

Psychology - behaviour
Psychiatry - mental illness

Laura Mulvey
-visual pleasures and narrative cinema (1975)
-hollywood film - sexist - represents the gaze as powerful and male
-heroes - males - drive plot
-women - sex objects

Freudian
-scopophilia - the pleasure of looking at others as objects (emerges in childhood)
-(Mulvey 162) quote
-perversion/obsession
-'Freaudian Theories of Psychoanalysis 2'
-Narcisstic Identification
-mirror stage - Jacques Lacan
-'ideal image' reflected 'ideal ego's'
-child own body less perfect than reflection
-film and art prey-
-contradiction in these 2 pleasurable structures of looking
-scopophilia - sexual stimulation by sight
-objectifying actors on screen
-narcissistic identification with the image seen
-active male, passive female
-the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification
-males are the bearer of the look of the spectator

Types of Gaze:

Suture-
-when spectators look through eyes of actors in the film
-follow their gaze - with feeling guilty
-suture broken when actor speaks out to us
-when broken - audience aware of own gaze
-'Peep' show - point of view gaze - shot entirely in suture
-spectator's gaze

Intra-diagetic Gaze-
-a gaze of one depicted person at another within image
-Degas - Le viol (The Rape) - shows the power of the male gaze

-D&G ad

Extra Diagetic Gaze
-direct address to the viewer - looking out at us
-more affective than the intra-diagetic gaze (women's aid act)
-Edouard Monet - invented to be viewed as artist
-Marcel Duchamp - Etant Donres (1946-1966) means being given

 -what is being given? - the power of gaze?
-permission to look
-power of gaze - reminds us of our own role of looking

Conclusion:
-different forms of gaze evoke different structures of power
-we can objectify (scopophilia) and identify - narcissistic identification
-visual culture emplys different forms of the gaze to evoke structures of patriarchy
-psychoanalysis seeks to evaluate and ientify the architecture and symptons of the gaze

-'Peeping Tom'