Visual pleasure and narrative cinema
Visual pleasure and narrative cinema (English original title: Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema ) is an essay written in 1975 by Laura Mulvey . To this day it is one of the most cited articles in feminist film theory .
theses
According to Mulvey, the fascination of certain Hollywood films from the 1930s to 1950s goes back to existing patterns and gender-specific forms of patriarchal social structures that are already deeply anchored in the unconscious . In this society the woman is trapped in a symbolic order , while the man can express his fantasies through the rule of language . Stereotypical images of women who show projections or desires of women, i.e. an ideologically distorted image of femininity, are criticized . The visual pleasure is manipulated and thus transfer the eroticism into the language of the patriarchal order.
Mulvey approaches the " pleasure in looking" and "to-be-looked-at" through Freud's psychoanalysis . For Freud, scopophilia ( curiosity ), i.e. voyeuristic tendencies, is an innate instinct and part of our sexuality. According to Freud, child observation results in penis envy in women and castration anxiety in men .
According to Mulvey, the desire to look in the cinema is enhanced by the contrast between the darkness in the auditorium and the brightness on the screen. The viewer is thus placed in a voyeuristic detachment and can look unabashedly. The pleasure of looking, like the system in which we live, is determined by sexual inequality. Mulvey divides the gaze into active = male and passive = female and thus draws attention to the object position of the woman. The man is the bearer of the look, the woman the "bearer of the look" .
Mulvey's second thesis is based on the ideas of the Parisian psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and deals with the narcissistic view or the construction of an ideal ego. Lacan's conception of the mirror stage forms the basis for this, i.e. the moment in which the child recognizes himself in the mirror for the first time. The cinema makes use of this identification and offers the (male) hero as a projection surface and yardstick for the (male) viewer; this naturally excludes a female viewer. According to Mulvey, the subjective gaze of the camera, the protagonist and the viewer exert power on women.
In psychoanalysis, in addition to sexual fascination, the woman also represents a threat of castration for the man, which the man tries to compensate by assigning blame or fetishizing . Mulvey demonstrates her theses on the basis of the film Vertigo - From the Realm of the Dead (1958) by Alfred Hitchcock , since in his films the male gaze is particularly forced through the subjective camera work and the viewer is put into the role of the male protagonist. She criticizes that this film does not allow a female perspective.
Mulvey uses "psychoanalysis as a political weapon" against the manipulation strategies of Hollywood cinema. Its aim is to draw attention to the fact that the view of the cinema is not neutral, as well as the "destruction" of this voyeuristic view.
criticism
Mulvey essay also offers points of attack. It was criticized that, through her theses, she also did not give the female viewer a place in the cinema. The dualism criticized by her (separation according to biological sex, thus only two sexes possible) is not canceled by her statements, but is further codified. The audience could not be examined due to the lack of empirical research on reception, so factors such as ethnicity or class could not be included.
In addition, she lacked a media-theoretical and ideology-critical understanding of the "production of consens" . Mulvey criticizes the current situation, but offers no possible alternatives to change other than the "destruction" of the male gaze.
See also
Sources and further reading
- Laura Mulvey : Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema , in: Bill Nichols (ed.): Movies and Methods. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985. Ger .: Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. In: Liliane Weissberg (ed.): Femininity as a masquerade. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1994, pp. 48-65
- das .: A look from the present into the past: A re-vision of the feminist film theory of the 1970s. Translated by Katja Widerspahn and Susanne Lummerding. In: Monika Bernhold, Andrea Braidt, Claudia Preschl (eds.): Screenwise. Movie-television feminism. Marburg: Schüren Vlg. 2004, pp. 17-27
- This: afterthoughts on "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" inspired by King Vidor's "Duel in the Sun". In: Framework , 15-16-17, 1981, pp. 12-15.
- Sigmund Freud : Three essays on the theory of sex . Frankfurt am Main: Fischer 1983.