Lecture Notes: Gender and Spectatorship
Introduction
- Focus of the unit: The film Vertigo and Laura Mulvey's text.
- Key term: Male Gaze
- Significant in popular culture.
- Mulvey's text uses psychoanalysis to explore fascination with film.
Psychoanalysis in Film
- Objective: Use psychoanalysis to understand fascination in film.
- Psychoanalytic Theory: A political weapon against patriarchal society.
- Film Form: Analyzed in terms of ideological structures.
- Includes classical Hollywood techniques like continuity editing, shot/reverse shot, etc.
Character and Agency in Film
- Classical narrative cinema often centers on a male protagonist.
- Principal causal agency often a man, typically a heterosexual white man.
- Women frequently lack agency, are acted upon.
Psychoanalytic Theory Overview
- Not Psychology: Though it shares some history.
- Focuses on the unconscious mind.
- Key Figures: Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan.
Main Tenets of Psychoanalysis
- Unconscious vs. conscious mind.
- Development influenced by forgotten childhood events, family dynamics.
- Behaviors influenced by repressed desires.
- Liberation through bringing repressed material into conscious awareness.
Psychoanalytic Feminism
- Intersection with Feminism: Examines patriarchy using psychoanalysis.
- Mulvey's stance: Psychoanalysis helps understand roots of female oppression.
Key Concepts from Mulvey
- Castration Anxiety: Male fear of emasculation linked to discovery of sexual difference.
- Image of Woman: Represents threat of castration.
The Male Gaze
- First Part: Objectification of women.
- Women as exhibitionist objects in film.
- Pervasive in media beyond 1930s-40s cinema.
- Encourages spectator to objectify women.
- Example in films: Man looks at a woman who doesn't look back.
Narrative Progress and the Look
- Mulvey's Argument: The look halts narrative progress.
- Classical films pause narrative for visual pleasure.
- Examples from Hitchcock's films, such as Vertigo and Rear Window.
- Visual Pleasure: Spectators engage in the act of looking, influencing narrative flow.
Conclusion
- Introduction to the second part of the male gaze: Identifying with a male protagonist.
- Further analysis of how films portray gender roles through psychoanalytic lens.
This lecture provided an introduction to key concepts in gender and spectatorship, focusing on Mulvey's psychoanalytic approach to film analysis. The discussion demonstrated how patriarchal structures influence film form and narrative, particularly through the male gaze and its effect on narrative progression.