Laura Mulvey!

Hello, Hello, Hello!

     Yes, yes, I am back, contain your excitement, please. I would personally like to say that I missed this place but also I'd like to dive into work as quick as possible.

     Today's lesson was rather exciting I would say. We got introduced to.........well the title says it but let me have my little introduction, please. We got introduced to Laura Mulvey and her male gaze theory. More about that later, because naturally I looked up the woman and this is what I found from my trusty companion that is the internet;

     Laura Mulvery was born on August 15 in 1941 and she is a British feminist film theorist! Exciting, I know. And currently this little lady is a professor of film and media studies in Brikbeck, University of London. Her most known essay is titled "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" and if you are interested you can read more about it here. Mulvey is influenced by Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan and states that she intends to use their theories and concepts as political weapons. And this is where the Male Gaze theory comes in. Laura Muvey used the concepts of Freud and Lacan on Classical Hollywood Cinema to argue that through the editing and shots the viewer was always put in a masculine position with females on screen displayed in appealing way to make them the objects of desire. In classical Hollywood the main characters were overwhelmingly male (they still are today) and of course the viewers were encouraged to relate to them. In the mean time, the women on screen, bared their main purpose of being pretty and being looked at. The women were mostly displayed in a voyeuristic fashion. Mulvey suggests that film and cinematography are centered on the ideas and values of a patriarchy. Within her essays she touches on several different types of spectatorship in film viewing. Viewing a film involves subconsciously relating to and understanding the male and female roles. The main idea that Mulvey brings out it that the action of 'looking' is generally seen as an active male role while the passive role of 'being looked at' is a female characteristic. Laure Mulvey argues that it's because cinematography  is usually tied to patriarchal expectations is the reason why the women in films are tied to desire and are present in their costumes to convey visual and erotic impact. With a male as a main character in a film female actresses are rarely ever meant to play characters that directly impact plot or keep the story going. They are inserted into the film to support the male character and be the sexually objectified since the male role cannot achieve that.

"It is said that analysing pleasure or beauty annihilates it. That is the intention of this article"

-Laura Mulvey

-Greta owo