Emotional Responses to Film

Subject Positioning

It is men who dream of women, women dream of themselves being dreamt of. Men look at women, women watch themselves being looked at (John Berger, 1972)

Learning Outcomes
 Consider the 'male' camera debate and, more generally, the ways in which film 'language' constructs a gendered 'look'.  Consider the criticisms of Laura Mulveys psychoanalytical theory  Apply to texts!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfL09c4cw2I http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GsRK43Td0U&feature=related

Audience Positioning - techniques

What we are already aware of?

 Narrative point of view positioning the spectator in the characters point of view.  Spectator is encouraged to identify intensely with the position of the character

Spectator (NOT Audience!)

 The term is associated with a psycho-analytical approach to film which focuses upon the relationship of the individual to film.  The approach suggests that in following the narrative certain subject positions are constructed for the viewer to occupy; men, for example, might identify with the male hero.  It was brought to prominence by feminist film theory in the 1970s which saw the dominant positions offered for the viewer by classical Hollywood films as being essentially masculine.

Claire Johnston
 Concerned with how classical cinema constructs the ideological image of woman.  The sign woman can be analysed as a structure, a code or convention.  In relation to herself the woman means nothing: women are negatively represented as not-man.  The woman-as woman is absent from the text of the film.

Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975)

Laura Mulvey

Laura Mulvey
 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

Cinema and pleasure

 Hollywood/mainstream/narrative cinema manipulates visual pleasure.  It codes the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order.

Scopophilia
 Scopophilia = pleasure in looking (Sigmund Freud 1905, in Three Essays)  The most pleasurable looking = looking at the human form and the human face, figural looking (corresponds to psychic patterns)

Woman as image, man as bearer of the look

 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

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

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

The male gaze and fetishistic scopophilia

 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

Re-cap questions
Mulvey uses psychoanalytic theory to demonstrate the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form

Q 1. What are the two ways the female is presented in film? Q 2. What are the two pleasures we experience as film spectators? Q 3. Why does Mulvey criticise the way the gaze is structured in cinema?

Jackie Stacey
 Rejects much of the psychoanalytical work on female audiences  She focuses upon the audience in her research, as opposed to the spectator constructed by the text  Through her research she discovered three pleasures gained from cinemagoing:

3 Pleasures
 Escapism cinema offers solutions to social problems a utopian experience  Identification stars can generate fantasies of power, control and self-confidence  Consumption Rather than seeing the text/spectator position as being one of domination, exploitation and control -sees consumption is a site of negotiated meanings and resistance.

Carol Clover Last Girl theory

 Argues that both female and male spectators identify bisexually  Her case rests on the narrative role of the final girl the one who fights and survives the monster  Films openly play on a difference between appearance (sex) and behaviour (gender)  Males are feminized as they watch the film

Queer Theory
 According to Medhurst and Simpson, gender identities are not fixed they cannot be categorized and labelled.  There is a stress on performativity enacting a set of discontinuous (infinite) performances  Gender is fluid and as spectators we can on any number of gender positions and roles