Monday 10 October 2016

STUDY TASK ONE - Triangulating Texts - Visual Pleasures

Laura Mulvey's essay on Visual pleasure and cinema narrative is a paper which focuses on the males gaze and perception of eroticism in cinema. Mulvey, British Feminist, film theorist is currently professor of film and media studies at Birkbeck university.

Richard Dyer's essay looking at Mulvey's original 1975 paper on cinema narrative. Dyer is a British Academic and published author.



One of the main points Mulvey puts across is that women are traditionally portrayed in cinema as being relative to the spectacle rather than narrative, they are there for the purpose of the males gaze and heterosexual look. She refers to the presence of a heroine in cinema as alien, to show the uncommon aspect of female leads in classic cinema, it is a male dominated business and women are used more as sexual objects to be there for the male gaze. To support this point she refers to Molly Haskell's theory of 'Buddy Movies' she eludes to both roles of a spectacle and narrative can be filled without a need for a feminine character. Mulvey explains that women's roles in cinema rarely break the boundaries of being an object of attraction to the male in the film and/or the male watching.

Laura Mulvey discusses the generalisation and sexualisation of females roles in classic cinema, she believes women are displayed on two levels, firstly as erotic objects for the characters within the story and as an erotic object for the person watching the movie, within her writing she says that the concept of a lead women, who holds more narrative within a film, is alien within classic cinema. John Storeys 'cine-psychoanalysis' talks about Mulvey's essay and he picks up and adds his own opinion to her thoughts, in comparison to Richard Dyers essay discussing Mulvey's work, this is a lot less balanced, where Storeys writing agrees with Mulvey, it does not expand much on what is being said in the original paper, whereas Dyers builds and contradicts Mulvey's, it offers more opinion and argues that men are also objectified in cinema as their objectification has a context to it, it has purpose to the narrative rather than just being objective.

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