Laura Mulvey and Cinema

419 Words2 Pages
Laura mulvey and cinema A society’s culture could be figured out through its administered norms, rituals, literature, film and artistic practice. Therefore the mass culture is the analytic object of feminism. Usually the way a character of a popular film or a novel portrayed and visualized set a standard in the society. In “Visual pleasure and narrative cinema” Laura Mulvey depicted how popular cinema objectify women multiple times through patriarchal unconscious what Mulvey termed as “Male Gaze”. Women as the object of male desire and identification are the two way women are presented in the narrative cinema according to Mulvey. The former one makes woman a passive spectacle on which men confers their schopophilic look, last one is identification which she describes through Lacan’s Mirror stage; it defines narcissistic men against women. She mentions in her essay that “the pleasure” is provided through the visualization of women in cinema, the analysis of this pleasure will destroyed it. Schopophilia is the pleasure in looking at another as sexual object. The audience looked at the female character of the film with their sexual desire in their imagination. Mirror Stage deals with recognition and misrecognition of a child on the mirror. Mulvey makes parallel with the audience to the child, audience of cinema recognizes themselves and misrecognizes as ideal, superior than women which reflects their ego libido. Mulvey’s defines the structure of the moments of cinema; one is the moments of narrative and second is the moments of spectacle. The first is associated with the active male and second with the passive female. She talked about “Male Gaze” through which men as the maker of the meaning and the “Spectacle” where women projected as the bearer of the meaning. Women encountered by male gaze three times which serve to sexually objectify a woman in a cinema,
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