This paper intends to use 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 and the social formations that have molded him. It takes as a starting point the way film reflects, reveals, and even plays on the straight, socially established interpretation of sexual difference which controls images, erotic ways of looking, and spectacle. It is helpful to understand what the cinema has been, how its magic has worked in the past, while attempting a theory and a practice which will challenge this cinema of the past. Psychoanalytic theory is thus appropriated here as a political weapon, demonstrating the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form.
The paradox of phallocentrism in all its manifestations is that it depends on the image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to its world. An idea of woman stands as linchpin to the system: it is her lack that produces the phallus as a symbolic presence, it is her desire to make good the lack that the phallus signifies. Recent writing in Screen about psychoanalysis and the cinema has not sufficiently brought out the importance of the representation of the female form in a symbolic order in which, in the last resort, it speaks castration and nothing else.
To summarize briefly: the function of woman in forming the patriarchal unconscious is twofold, she first symbolizes the castration threat by her real absence of a penis and second thereby raises her child into the symbolic. Once this has been achieved, her meaning in the process is at an end, it does not last into the world of law and language except as a memory, which oscillates between memory of maternal plenitude and memory of lack. Both are posited on nature (or on anatomy in Freud's famous phrase). Woman's desire is subjected to her image as bearer of the bleeding wound. She can exist only in relation to castration and cannot transcend it. She turns her child into the signifier of her own desire to possess a penis (the condition, she imagines, of entry into the symbolic). Either she must gracefully give way to the word, the Name of the Father and the Law, or else struggle to keep her child down with her in the half-light of the imaginary. Woman then stands in patriarchal culture as signifier of the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.
There is an obvious interest in this analysis for feminists; a beauty in its exact rendering of the frustration experienced under the phallocentric order. It gets us nearer to the roots of our oppression, it brings an articulation of the problem closer, it faces us with the ultimate challenge: how to fight the unconscious structured like a language (formed critically at the moment of arrival of language) while still caught within the language of the patriarchy. There is no way we can produce an alternative out of the blue, but we can begin to make a break by examining patriarchy with the tools it provides, of which psychoanalysis is not the only but an important one. We are still separated by a great gap from important issues for the female unconscious which are scarcely relevant to phallocentric theory: the sexing of the female infant and her relationship to the symbolic, the sexually mature woman as non-mother, maternity outside the signification of the phallus, the vagina. But at this point, psychoanalytic theory as it now stands can at least advance our understanding of the status quo, of the patriarchal order in which we are caught.
Destruction of Pleasure as a Radical Weapon
As an advanced representation system, the cinema poses questions
of ways the unconscious (formed by the dominant order) structures
ways of seeing and pleasure in looking. Cinema has changed over
the last few decades. It is no longer the monolithic system based
on large capital investment exemplified at its best by Hollywood
in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Technological advances (16mm,
etc.) have changed the economic conditions of cinematic production,
which can now be artisanal as well as capitalist. Thus it has
been possible for an alternative cinema to develop. However self-conscious
and ironic Hollywood managed to be, it always restricted itself
to a formal mise-en-scene reflecting the dominant ideological
concept of the cinema. The alternative cinema provides a space
for a cinema to be born which is radical in both a political and
an aesthetic sense and challenges the basic assumptions of the
mainstream film. This is not to reject the latter moralistically,
but to highlight the ways in which its formal preoccupations reflect
the psychical obsessions of the society which produced it,
and, further, to stress that the alternative cinema must start
specifically by reacting against these obsessions and assumptions.
A politically and aesthetically avant-garde cinema is now possible,
but it can still only exist as a counterpoint.
The magic of the Hollywood style at its best (and of all the cinema which fell within its sphere of influence) arose, not exclusively, but in one important aspect, from its skilled and satisfying manipulation of visual pleasure. Unchallenged, mainstream film coded the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order. In the highly developed Hollywood cinema it was only through these codes that the alienated subject, torn in his imaginary memory by a sense of loss, by the terror of potential lack in fantasy, came near to finding a glimpse of satisfaction: through its formal beauty and its play on his own formative obsessions. This essay will discuss the interweaving of that erotic pleasure in film, its meaning, and in particular the central place of the image of woman. It is said that analyzing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this essay. The satisfaction and reinforcement of the ego that represent the high point of film history hitherto must be attacked. Not in favor of a reconstructed new pleasure, which cannot exist in the abstract, nor of intellectualized unpleasure, but to make way for a total negation of the ease and plenitude of the narrative fiction film. The alternative is the thrill that comes from leaving the past behind without rejecting it, transcending outworn or oppressive forms, or daring to break with normal pleasurable expectations in order to conceive a new language of desire.
Pleasure in Looking/Fascination with the Human Form
A. The cinema offers a number of possible pleasures. One is
scopophilia. There are circumstances in which looking itself is
a source of pleasure, just as, in the reverse formation, there
is pleasure in being looked at. Originally, in his Three Essays
on Sexuality, Freud isolated scopophilia as one of the component
instincts of sexuality which exist as drives quite independently
of the erotogenic zones. At this point he associated scopophilia
with taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling
and curious gaze. His particular examples center around the voyeuristic
activities of children, their desire to see and make sure of the
private and the forbidden (curiosity about other people's genital
and bodily functions, about the presence or absence of the penis
and, retrospectively, about the primal scene). In this analysis
scopophilia is essentially active. (Later, in Instincts and
Their Vicissitudes, Freud developed his theory of scopophilia
further, attaching it initially to pre-genital antoeroticism,
after which the pleasure of the look is transferred to others
by analogy. There is a close working here of the relationship
between the active instinct and its further development in
a narcissistic form.) Although the instinct is modified by other
factors, in particular the constitution of the ego, it continues
to exist as the erotic basis for pleasure in looking at another
person as object. At the extreme, it can become fixated into a
perversion, producing obsessive voyeurs and Peeping Toms whose
only sexual satisfaction can come from watching, in an active
controlling sense, an objectified other.
At first glance, the cinema would seem to be remote from the undercover world of the surreptitious observation of an unknowing and unwilling victim. What is seen on the screen is so manifestly shown. But the mass of mainstream film, and the conventions within which it has consciously evolved, portray a hermetically sealed world which unwinds magically, indifferent to the presence of the audience, producing for them a sense of separation and playing on their voyeuristic fantasy. Moreover, the extreme contrast between the darkness in the auditorium (which also isolates the spectators from one another) and the brilliance of the shifting patterns of light and shade on the screen helps to promote the illusion of voyeuristic separation. Although the film is really being shown, is there to be seen, conditions of screening and narrative conventions give the spectator an illusion of looking in on a private world. Among other things, the position of the spectators in the cinema is blatantly one of repression of their exhibitionism and projection of the repressed desire onto the performer.
B. The cinema satisfies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking, but it also goes further, developing scopophilia in its narcissistic aspect. The conventions of mainstream film focus attention on the human form. Scale, space, stories are all anthropomorphic. Here, curiosity and the wish to look intermingle with a fascination with likeness and recognition: the human face, the human body, the relationship between the human form and its surroundings, the visible presence of the person in the world. Jacques Lacan has described how the moment when a child recognizes its own image in the mirror is crucial for the constitution of the ego. Several aspects of this analysis are relevant here. The mirror phase occurs at a time when the child's physical ambitions outstrip his motor capacity, with the result that his recognition of himself is joyous in that he imagines his mirror image to be more complete, more perfect than he experiences his own body. Recognition is thus overlaid with misrecognition; the image recognized is conceived as the reflected body of the self, but its misrecognition as superior projects this body outside itself as an ego ideal, gives rise to the future generation of identification with others. This mirror moment pre-dates language for the child.
Important for this article is the fact that it is an image that constitutes the matrix of the imaginary, of recognition/misrecognition and identification, and hence of the first articulation of the I, of subjectivity. This is a moment when an older fascination with looking (at the mother's face, [32] for an obvious example) collides with the initial inklings of self-awareness. Hence it is the birth of the long love affair/despair between image and self-image which has found such intensity of expression in film and such joyous recognition in the cinema audience. Quite apart from the extraneous similarities between screen and mirror (the framing of the human form in its surroundings, for instance), the cinema has structures of fascination strong enough to allow temporary loss of ego while simultaneously reinforcing the ego. The sense of forgetting the world as the ego has subsequently come to perceive it (I forgot who I am and where I was) is nostalgically reminiscent of the presubjective moment of image recognition. At the same time the cinema has distinguished itself in the production of ego ideals as expressed in particular in the star system, the stars centering both screen presence and screen story as they act out a complex process of likeness and difference (the glamorous impersonates the ordinary).
C. Section II. A and B have set out two contradictory aspects of the pleasurable structures of looking in the conventional cinematic situation. The first, scopophilia, arises from pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight. The second, developed through narcissism and the constitution of the ego, comes from identification with the image seen. Thus, in film terms, one implies a separation of the erotic identity of the subject from the object on the screen (active scopophilia), the other demands identification of the ego with the object on the screen through the spectator's fascination with and recognition of his like. The first is a function of the sexual instincts, the second of ego libido. This dichotomy was crucial for Freud. Although he saw the two as interacting and overlaying each other, the tension between instinctual drives and self-preservation continues to be a dramatic polarization in terms of pleasure. Both are formative structures, mechanisms not meaning. In themselves they have no signification, they have to be attached to an idealization. Both pursue aims in indifference to perceptual reality, creating the imagized, eroticized concept of the world that forms the perception of the subject and makes a mockery of empirical objectivity.
During its history, the cinema seems to have evolved a particular illusion of reality in which this contradition between libido and ego has found a beautifully complementary fantasy world. In reality the fantasy world of the screen is subject to the law which produces it. Sexual instincts and identification processes have a meaning within the symbolic order which articulates desire. Desire, born with language, allows the possibility of transcending the instinctual and the imaginary, but its point of reference continually returns to the traumatic moment of its birth: the castration complex. Hence the look, pleasurable in form, can be threatening in content, and it is woman as representation/image that crystallizes this paradox.
Woman as Image, Man as Bearer of the Look
A. In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking
has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining
male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is
styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women
are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance
coded for strong visual and erotic impact so they can be
said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. Woman displayed as
sexual object is the leitmotif of erotic spectacle: from pin-ups
to strip-tease, from Ziegfeld to Busby Berkeley, she holds the
look, plays to and signifies male desire. Mainstream film neatly
combined spectacle and narrative. (Note, however, how in the musical
song-and-dance numbers break the flow of the diegesis.) The presence
of woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative
film, yet her visual presence tends to work against the development
of the story line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of
erotic contemplation. This alien presence then has to be integrated
into cohesion with the narrative. As director Budd Boetticher has put it:
What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance.
(There has been a tendency in narrative film to dispense with this problem altogether; hence the development of what Molly Haskell has called the "buddy movie," in which the active homosexual eroticism of the central male figures can carry the story without distraction.)
Traditionally, the woman displayed has functioned
on two levels: (1) as erotic object for the characters within the
screen story, and (2) as erotic object for the spectator within the
auditorium, with a shifting tension between the looks on either
side of the screen. For instance, the device of the showgirl allows
the two looks to be unified technically without any apparent break
in the diegesis. A woman performs within the narrative, the gaze
of the spectator and that of the male characters in the film are
neatly combined without breaking narrative verisimilitude. For
a moment the sexual impact of the performing woman takes the film
into a no-man's-land outside its own time and space. Thus conventional close-ups of legs (Dietrich, for instance) or a face
(Garbo) integrate into the narrative a different mode of eroticism.
One part of a fragmented body destroys the Renaissance space,
the illusion of depth demanded by the narrative; it gives
flatness, the quality of a cut-out or icon rather than verisimilitude
to the screen.
B. An active/passive heterosexual division of labor has similarly controlled narrative structure. According to the principles of the ruling ideology and the psychical structures that back it up, the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification. Man is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like. Hence the split between spectacle and narrative supports the man's role as the active one of forwarding the story, making things happen. The man controls the film fantasy and also emerges as the representative of power in a further sense: as the bearer of the look of the spectator, transferring it behind the screen to neutralize the extra-diegetic tendencies represented by woman as spectacle. This is made possible through the processes set in motion by structuring the film around a main controlling figure with whom the spectator can identify. As the spectator identifies with the main male{1} protagonist, he projects his look onto that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of onmipotence. A male movie star's glamorous characteristics are thus not those of the erotic object of the gaze, but those of the more perfect, more completely, more powerful ideal ego conceived in the original moment of recognition in front of the mirror. The character in the story can make things happen and control events better than the subject/spectator, just as the image in the mirror was more in control of motor coordination. In contrast to woman as icon, the active male figure (the ego ideal of the identification process) demands a three-dimensional space corresponding to that of the mirror recognition, in which the alienated subject internalized his own representation of this imaginary existence. He is a figure in a landscape. Here the function of film is to reproduce as accurately as possible the so-called natural conditions of human perception. Camera technology (as exemplified by deep focus in particular) and camera movements (determined by the action of the protagonist), combined with invisibile editing (demanded by realism), all tend to blur the limits of screen space. The male protagonist is free to command the stage, a stage of spatial illusion in which he articulates the look and creates the action.
C.1 Sections III. A and B have set out a tension between a mode of representation of woman in film and conventions surrounding the diegesis (narrative). Each is associated with a look: that of the spectator in direct scopophilic fantasy) and that of the spectator fascinated with the image of his like set in an illusion of natural space, and through him gaining control and possession of the woman within the diegesis. (This tension and the shift from one pole to the other can structure a single text. Thus both in Only Angels Have Wings and in To Have and Have Not, the film opens with the woman [35] as object of the combined gaze of spectator and all the male protagonists in the film. She is isolated, glamorous, on display, sexualized. But as the narrative progresses she falls in love with the main male protagonist and becomes his property, losing her outward glamorous characteristics, her generalized sexuality, her showgirl connotations; her eroticism is subjected to the male star alone. By means of identification with him, through participation in his power, the spectator can indirectly possess her too.)
But in psychoanalytic terms, the female figure poses a deeper problem. She also connotes something that the look continually circles around but disavows: her lack of a penis, implying a threat of castration and hence unpleasure. Ultimately, the meaning of woman is sexual difference, the absence of the penis as visually ascertainable, the material evidence on which is based the castration complex essential for the organization of entrance to the symbolic order and the law of the father. Thus the woman, as icon, displayed for the gaze and enjoyment of men, the active controllers of the look, always threatens to evoke the anxiety it originally signified. The male unconscious has two avenues of escape from this castration anxiety: (1) preoccupation with the re-enactment of the original trauma (investigating the woman, demystifying her mystery), counterbalanced by the devaluation, punishment, or saving of the guilty object (an avenue typified by the concerns of the film noir); or else (2) complete disavowal of castration by the substitution of a fetish object or turning the represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous (hence over-valuation, the cult of the female star). This second avenue, fetishistic scopophilia, builds up the physical beauty of the object, transforming it into something satisfying in itself. The first avenue, voyeurism, on the contrary, has associations with sadism: pleasure lies in ascertaining guilt (immediately associated with castration), asserting control, and subjecting the guilty person through punishment or forgiveness. This sadistic side fits in well with narrative. Sadism demands a story, depends on making something happen, forcing a change in another person, a battle of will and strength, victory/defeat, all occurring ina linear time with a beginning and an end. Fetishistic scopophilia, on the other hand, can exist outside linear time as the erotic instinct is focused on the look alone. These contradictions and ambiguities can be illustrated more simply by using works by Hitchcock and Sternberg, both of whom take the look almost as the content or subject matter of many of their films. Hitchcock is the more complex, as he uses both mechanisms. Sternberg's work, on the other hand, provides many pure examples of fetishistic scopophilia.
C.2 It is well known that Sternberg once said he would welcome his films being proejcted upside down so that story and character involvement would not interfere with the spectator's undiluted appreciation of the screen image. This statement is revealing but ingenuous. Ingenuous in that his films do demand that the figure of the woman (Dietrich, in the cycle [36] of films with her, as the ultimate example) should be identifiable. But revealing in that it emphasizes the fact that for him the pictorial space enclosed by the frame is paramount rather than the narrative or identification processes. While Hitchcock goes into the investigative side of voyeurism, Sternberg produces the ultimate fetish, taking it to the point where the powerful look of the male protagonist (characteristic of traditional narrative film) is broken in favor of the image in direct erotic rapport with the spectator. The beauty of the woman as object and the screen space coalesce; she is no longer the bearer of guilt but a perfect product, whose body, stylized and fragmented by close-ups, is the content of the film and the direct recipient of the spectator's look. Sternberg plays down the illusion of screen depth; his screen tends to be one-dimensional, as light and shade, lace, steam, foliage, net, streamers, etc., reduce the visual field. There is little or no mediation of the look through the eyes of the main male protagonist. On the contrary, shadowy presences like the male character La Besiere in Morocco act as surrogates for the director, detached as they are from audience identification. Despite Sternberg's insistence that his stories are irrelevant, it is significant that they are concerned with situation, not suspense, and cyclical rather than linear time, while plot complications revolve around misunderstanding rather than conflict. The most important absence is that of the controlling male gaze within the screen scene. The high point of emotional drama in the most typical Dietrich films, her supreme moments of erotic meaning, take place in the absence of the man she loves in the fiction. There are other witnesses, other spectators, watching her on the screen; their gaze is one with, not standing in for, that of the audience. At the end of Dishonoured, Kranau is indifferent to the fate of Magda. In both cases, the erotic impact, sanctified by death, is displayed as a spectacle for the audience. The male hero misunderstands and, above all, does not see.
In Hitchcock, by contrast, the male hero does see precisely
what the audience sees; however, in the films I shall discuss
here, he takes fascination with an image through scopophilic eroticism
as the subject of the film. Moreover, in these cases the hero
portrays the contradictions and tensions experienced by the spectator.
In Vertigo in particular, but also in Marnie and
Rear Window, the look is central to the plot, oscillating
between voyeurism and fetishistic fascination. As a twist, in
further manipulation of the normal viewing process, which in some
sense reveals it, Hitchcock uses the process of identification
normally associated with ideological correctness and the recognition
of established morality and shows up its perverted side. Hitchcock
has never concealed his interest in voyeurism, cinematic and non-cinematic.
His heroes are exemplary of the symbolic order and the law--a
policeman (Vertigo), a dominant male [37] possessing money
and power (Marnie)--but their erotic drives lead them into
compromised situations. The power to subject another person to
the will sadistically or to the gaze voyeuristically is turned
onto the woman as the object of both. Power is backed by a certainty
of legal right and the established guilt of the woman (evoking
castration, psychoanalytically speaking). True perversion is barely
concealed under a shallow mask of ideological correctness--the
man is on the right side of the law, the woman on the wrong. Hitchcock's
skillful use of identification processes and liberal use of subjective
camera from the point of view of the male protagonist draw the
spectators deeply into his position, making them share his uneasy
gaze. The audience is absorbed into a voyeuristic situation within
the screen scene and diegesis which parodies his own in the cinema.
In his analysis of Rear Window, Douchet takes the film
as a metaphor for the cinema. Jeffries is the audience, the events
in the apartment block opposite correspond to the screen. As he
watches, an erotic dimension is added to his look, a central image
to the drama. His girlfriend Lisa had been of little sexual interest
to him, more or less a drag, so long as she remained on the spectator
side. When she crosses the barrier between his room and the block
opposite, their relationship is reborn erotically. He does not
merely watch her through his lens, as a distant meaningful image,
he also sees her as a guilty intruder exposed by a dangerous man
threatening her with punishment, and thus finally saves her. Lisa's
exhibitionism has already been established by her obsessive interest
in dress and style, in being a passive image of visual perfection;
Jeffries's voyeurism and activity have also been established through
his work as a photojournalist, a maker of stories and captor of
images. However, his enforced inactivity, binding him to his seat
as a spectator, puts him squarely in the fantasy position of the
cinema audience.
In Vertigo, subjective camera predominates. Apart from one flashback from Judy's point of view, the narrative is woven around what Scottie sees or fails to see. The audience follows the growth of his erotic obsession and subsequent despair precisely from his point of view. Scottie's voyeurism is blatant: he falls in love with a woman he follows and spies on without speaking to. Its sadistic side is equally blatant: he has chosen (and freely chosen, for he had been a successful lawyer) to be a policeman, with all the attendant possibilities of pursuit and investigation. As a result, he follows, watches, and falls in love with a perfect image of female beauty and mystery. Once he actually confronts her, his erotic drive is to break her down and force her to tell by persistent cross-questioning. Then, in the second part of the film, he re-enacts his obsessive involvement with the image he loved to watch secretly. He reconstructs Judy as Madeleine, forces her to conform in every detail to the actual physical appearance of his fetish. Her exhibitionism, her masochism, make her an ideal passive counterpart to Scottie's active sadistic voyeurism. She knows her part is to perform, and only by playing it through and then replaying it can she keep Scottie's erotic interest. But in the repetition he does break her down and succeeds in exposing her guilt. His curiosity wins through and she is punished. In Vertigo, erotic involvement with the look is disorientating: the spectator's fascination is turned against him as the narrative carries him through and entwines him with the processes that he is himself exercising. The Hitchcock hero here is firmly placed within the symbolic order, in narrative terms. He has all the attributes of the patriarchal superego. Hence the spectator, lulled into a false sense of security by the apparent legality of his surrogate, sees through his look and finds himself complicit, caught in the moral ambiguity of looking. Far from being simply an aside on the perversion of the police, Vertigo focuses on the implications of the active/looking, passive/looked-at split in terms of sexual difference and the power of the male symbolic encapsulated in the hero. Marnie, too, performs for Mark Rutland's gaze and masquerades as the perfect to-be-looked-at image. He, too, is on the side of the law until, drawn in by obsession with her guilt, her secret, he longs to see her in the act of committing a crime, make her confess, and thus save her. So he, too, becomes complicit as he acts out the implications of his power. He controls money and words, he can have his cake and eat it.
To begin with (as an ending), the voyeuristic-scopophilic look
that is a crucial part of traditional filmic pleasure can itself
be broken down. There are three different looks associated with
cinema:
the camera as it records the pro-filmic
event
the audience as it watches the final product,
the characters gazing at each other within the screen
illusion
The
conventions of narrative film deny the first two and subordinate
them to the third, the conscious aim being always to eliminate
intrusive camera presence and prevent a distancing awareness in
the audience. Without these two absences (the material existence
of the recording process, the critical reading of the spectator), fictional drama cannot achieve reality, obviousness, and truth.
Nevertheless, as this article has argued, the structure of looking
in narrative fiction film contains a contradiction in its own
premises: the female image as a castration threat constantly endangers
the unity of the diegesis and bursts through the world of illusion
as a intrusive, static, one-dimensional fetish. Thus the two looks
materially present in time and space are obsessively subordinated
to the neurotic needs of the male ego. The camera becomes the
mechanism for producing an illusion of Renaissance space, flowing
movements compatible with the human eye, an ideology of representation
that revolves around the perception of the subject; the camera's
look is disavowed in order to create a convincing world in which
the spectator's surrogate can perform with verisimilitude. Simultaneously,
the look of the audience is denied an intrinsic force: as soon
as fetishistic representation of the female image threatens to
break the spell of illusion, and the erotic image on the screen
appears directly (without mediation) to the spectator, the fact
of fetishization, concealing as it does castration fear, freezes
the look, fixates the spectator, and prevents him from achieving
any distance from the image in front of him.
This complex interaction of looks is specific to film. The
first blow against the monolithic accumulation of traditional
film conventions (already undertaken by radical filmmakers) is
to free the look of the camera into its materiality in time and
space and the look of the audience into dialectics, passionate
attachment. There is no doubt that this destroys the satisfaction,
pleasure and privilege of the "invisible guest," and
highlights how film has depended on voyeuristic active/passive
mechanisms. Women, whose image has continually been stolen and
used for this end, cannot view the decline of the traditional
film form with anything much more than sentimental regret.
The above is, admittedly, a highly scholarly article, which some even find "impenetrable." Try consulting the articles below for enlightenment:
PLEASE NOTE : This handout is a copy of an article that, at the time I put it up on my web site, could be found on line at several sites including: http://philosophy.okstate.edu/blazek/mulvey.htm http://www.bbk.ac.uk/hafvm/staff_research/visual1.html and http://www.richmond.edu/~lmcwhort/restricted/Mulvey.html