Lecture 3 - The gaze

- Call of duty allowes you to chose 1st person or 3rd person perspectives.
Control how much we engage with death and violence.
- Psycocoanalysis is the analysis of the options and controls that we chose.

Laura Mulvey, 'visual pleasures and narrative cinema' (1975)
-Hollywood films is sexist in that it represents 'the gaze' as powerful and male.

-Scopophilia - The pleasure of looking at others bodies as objects.
- Instinctual desire to look
(Freudian theories)

-Narcissistic identification - (for Mulvey, spectators identify with the male hero in narrative films)
- Jacques Lacan - The mirror stage
- projected notion of 'ideal ego' in image reflected.
- Childs own body is less perfect than its reflection

-scopophilia = sexual stimulation by sight
- narcissistic = identification with the image seen.
Cinema thrives on this contradiction

- The male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification.

Extending Mulvey's theory:

Suture
-spctators look through eyes of the actors in the film.
-we are able to follow 'their' gaze without feeling guilty.
-suture can be broken eg. when an actor speaks out to us.
-this form of 'gaze' invites is to be part of the scene.

The spectators gaze
gaze of a viewer at an image.

Intra diagetic gaze
A gaze of one depicted person at another within an image.

Extra diagetic gaze
This is the direct address to the viewer.

Intra diagetic gazes defer our guilt - someone else is hurting that person.
-visual culture employs different forms of the gaze to evoke structures of patriarchy.
-Different forms of the gaze evoke different structure of power.
-we can objectify and identify.