LAURA MULVEY: VISUAL PLEASURE AND NARRATIVE CINEMA

Marilyn Munroe

Daniel Chandler writes about film spectatorship and Laura Mulvey's gaze theory:

'Film has been called an instrument of the male gaze, producing representations of women, the good life, and sexual fantasy from a male point of view' (Schroeder 1998, 208). The concept derives from a seminal article called Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema by Laura Mulvey, a feminist film theorist. It was published in 1975 and is one of the most widely cited and anthologized (though certainly not one of the most accessible) articles in the whole of contemporary film theory. Laura Mulvey did not undertake empirical studies of actual filmgoers, but declared her intention to make ‘political use’ of Freudian psychoanalytic theory (in a version influenced by Jacques Lacan) in a study of cinematic spectatorship. 

Such psychoanalytically-inspired studies of 'spectatorship' focus on how 'subject positions' are constructed by media texts rather than investigating the viewing practices of individuals in specific social contexts. Mulvey notes that Freud had referred to (infantile) scopophilia - the pleasure involved in looking at other people’s bodies as (particularly, erotic) objects.



Rita Hayworth

In the darkness of the cinema auditorium it is notable that one may look without being seen either by those on screen by other members of the audience. Mulvey argues that various features of cinema viewing conditions facilitate for the viewer both the voyeuristic process of objectification of female characters and also the narcissistic process of identification with an ‘ideal ego’ seen on the screen. She declares that in patriarchal society ‘pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female’ (Mulvey 1992, 27). 

This is reflected in the dominant forms of cinema. Conventional narrative films in the ‘classical’ Hollywood tradition not only typically focus on a male protagonist in the narrative but also assume a male spectator. ‘As the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look onto that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence’.



Halle Berry

Traditional films present men as active, controlling subjects and treat women as passive objects of desire for men in both the story and in the audience, and do not allow women to be desiring sexual subjects in their own right. Such films objectify women in relation to ‘the controlling male gaze’, presenting ‘woman as image’ (or ‘spectacle’) and man as ‘bearer of the look’. Men do the looking; women are there to be looked at. The cinematic codes of popular films ‘are obsessively subordinated to the neurotic needs of the male ego’. It was Mulvey who coined the term 'the male gaze'.

Adobe After Effects

Learning how to use After Effects: creating an ident with your production company name. You use a virtual camera to fly around the 3D image

Piers Production team collaborating on a film ident

Smart Choice Productions ident in creation

'Don't Worry About It' Production Company

Chilling Productions in development

Wright Productions ident in development

MY MEDIA WORLD

Your first blog post will answer the question: 

What media do I use? How does it affect me and the world that I live in? 

(You may use the guidelines below)
Aim to exploit the technologies available in blogging such as video, audio, images

    I have a mobile phone (model/make). I mostly use my phone for…

If I upgraded, I would choose…[mobile phone make with your reasons]

    To keep in touch with my friends, I use…[give examples of how Facebook is used]

I am concerned / not concerned by privacy issues

    If I want to see a film, I tend to….[mention platforms that you use & explain if there are different ones for different occasions]

I keep up with films by watching trailers online…I book cinema tickets online…I make use of orange Wednesdays to watch films…

    Music is important in my life and I tend to listen with…

I pay for music using iTunes / I avoid paying for music as…

    As I like video games, I…

    I use the internet for x hours on weekdays and x hours at the weekend…

I use the internet for……

My family uses the internet for…

I experience various problems with the internet, such as…

    I would / would not go online to read news…

I still buy / rarely buy newspapers or magazines…

    On TV I tend to watch…

If I want to watch something that I have missed, I..

Is there also a place for more traditional technology in your life?

    In the future, what I think would be useful technology is..

JOHN BERGER: WAYS OF SEEING

Venus (Roger Michell 2007)

Daniel Chandler in Notes on the Male Gaze writes:

In Ways of Seeing, a highly influential book based on a BBC television series, John Berger observed that ‘according to usage and conventions which are at last being questioned but have by no means been overcome - men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at’ (Berger 1972, 45, 47). 

Berger argues that in European art from the Renaissance onwards women were depicted as being ‘aware of being seen by a [male] spectator’, Berger adds that at least from the seventeenth century, paintings of female nudes reflected the woman’s submission to ‘the owner of both woman and painting’. He noted that ‘almost all post-Renaissance European sexual imagery is frontal - either literally or metaphorically - because the sexual protagonist is the spectator-owner looking at it’ . He advanced the idea that the realistic, ‘highly tactile’ depiction of things in oil paintings and later in colour photography (in particular where they were portrayed as ‘within touching distance’), represented a desire to possess the things (or the lifestyle) depicted . This also applied to women depicted in this way . 

Writing in 1972, Berger insisted that women were still ‘depicted in a different way to men - because the "ideal" spectator is always assumed to be male and the image of the woman is designed to flatter him’. In 1996 Jib Fowles still felt able to insist that ‘in advertising males gaze, and females are gazed at’ (Fowles 1996, 204). And Paul Messaris notes that female models in ads addressed to women ‘treat the lens as a substitute for the eye of an imaginary male onlooker,’ adding that ‘it could be argued that when women look at these ads, they are actually seeing themselves as a man might see them’ (Messaris 1997, 41). 

Such ads ‘appear to imply a male point of view, even though the intended viewer is often a woman. So the women who look at these ads are being invited to identify both with the person being viewed and with an implicit, opposite-sex viewer’ . We may note that within this dominant representational tradition the spectator is typically assumed not simply to be male but also to be heterosexual, over the age of puberty and often also white.

G322 TELEVISION DRAMA

In the first half of your AS examination, you will analyse representation in a five-minute unseen extract of  television drama. There will be one focus: age, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, class and status, physical ability/disability, regional identity. There will be one compulsory question, for example:

1. Discuss the ways in which the extract constructs representations age of using the following:

·      Camera shots, angles, movement and composition

·      Editing

·      Sound

·      Mise-en-scene

      Today we tackle G322 June 2009 paper with the Dr Who extract for analysis. After doing the exam, we look at the examiner's report. The exam focus is on representation of gender.

G322: INSTITUTIONS AND AUDIENCES (FILM)

Heyday Films produced Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows (David Yates, 2011)

In Section B of your examination, you answer a long essay question on aspects of the film industry and processes of production, distribution, marketing and consumption. We focus on specific studios/production companies that target British audiences. We consider contemporary film distribution practices (digital cinema, DVD, HD-DVD, downloads etc) and how these affect production, marketing and distribution. We will study:

• who makes, owns, funds and distributes specific recent films
• cross media convergence and synergy in production, distribution & marketing
• new film technologies such as digital cinema
• technological convergence
• proliferation in hardware and content for institutions & audiences
• how national and British audiences are targeted by film institutions
• how your own experience illustrates wider trends

We will look at case studies such as Working Title, DNA Films, Heyday, GK Films

DNA Films produced The History Boys, The Last King of Scotland, Notes on a Scandal (all 2006)

GK Films produced London Boulevard (William Monahan, 2010)

TED TALKS: AUGMENTED REALITY

Today we watch one of a selection of screenings from Ted Talks. 
Wireless data from every light bulb
What we learned from 5 million books
Magic and Lies on iPods 

First, a fascinating development in augmented reality, part of the revolution in the way that intuitive computer technology is changing our daily life. In this lecture, the architect of Bing maps at Microsoft demonstrates how maps can carry additional information.

Watch Blaise Aguera y Arcas on Ted Talks:  augmented reality maps

In the second example Tim Berners-Lee explains the vital importance of open source data. The example shown relates to an American lawyer correlating data about water supplies to housing with data about the ethnicity of householders: he succeeded in demonstrating that the water board had conspicuously failed  to connect black householders.

Watch Tim Berners-Lee on Ted Talks: Tim Berners Lee: The Year Open Data Went Worldwide

MAGAZINE DESIGN

PRINT BRIEF

The preliminary exercise: using DTP and an image manipulation program, produce the front page of a new school/college magazine, featuring a photograph of a student in medium close-up plus some appropriately laid-out text and a masthead. Additionally candidates must produce a DTP mock-up of the layout of the contents page to demonstrate their grasp of the program.

Main task: the front page, contents and double page spread of a new music magazine (if done as a group task, each member of the group to produce an individual edition of the magazine, following the same house style). Maximum four members to a group.

OCR exemplar music magazine brief

SCHOOL / COLLEGE MAGAZINE DESIGN
Search for 'college magazine design' images for ideas:

University of Chichester magazine

• Start by taking photos around school for inset images
• Take an original photograph that would make a striking magazine cover.

• Turn it into the magazine cover design of your choice using PhotoShop.

• Create an interactive poster using Glogster that explains your decisions.

Glog about the AS Media course as an example of how to create a Glog

ADOBE AFTER EFFECTS 
We have a tutorial on Adobe After Effects which we will use to make our film production company ident.
Venturay Productions 'Magic' Trailer

Ident Showreel

FRONT ROW: MARK LAWSON

Time to listen in to what BBC radio 4 has to offer. Media students should not neglect radio: it is easy to listen again using BBC iPlayer and there is a wealth of useful archive information in the form of interviews.

Mark Lawson talks to Michael Caine 
Last broadcast on Tue, 27 Oct 2009

Today we hear Michael Caine describing his early work in cinema, including his initial success in the States, where his accent and class didn't count against him.

We discuss the development of British cinema and television, and the films of the 1960s and 1970s, and discuss film in relation to social class and regionality.

We watch extracts from Educating Rita and analyse how the opening sequence establishes class through sound codes, mise-en-scene, accent and camera angles.

Watch 'Educating Rita'

MARK KERMODE FILM REVIEWS
Listen to Mark Kermode podcast on BBC Radio 5 LIve

 

IDEOLOGY

What is ideology? It is the ideas that lie behind a media text, the agenda that drives its producers.
Ideology is the body of ideas or set of beliefs that underpins an institution or way of behaving and creates social relations. Different sets of beliefs are held by different groups in society and the most prevalent beliefs are those held by the dominant (ruling) groups.

Look here for helpful explanations of terms such as dominant ideology (hegemony), preferred readings, oppositional reading:
Mediaknowall


Watch scenes from East Is East (Damien O"Donnell, 1999). How might different audiences respond, depending on their values?
East Is East trailer

In 1971 Salford fish-and-chip shop owner George Khan expects his family to follow his strict Pakistani Muslim ways. But his children, with an English mother and having been born and brought up in Britain, increasingly see themselves as British and start to reject their father's rules on dress, food, religion, and living in general.

CALLING ALL!

"Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence." Althusser (2001) Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays

How is identity formed? How do people become who they are? How do they form value systems?

Louis Althusser (1918-1990) the French philosopher built on work by Karl Marx and Jacques Lacan relating to people's social roles and the way in which they form a sense of identity, class and individuality. For him, it is impossible to escape ideology, to avoid being subjected to it.

Althusser's uses the term interpellation (calling or hailing, holding or detaining for questioning) to refer to the process of how people step up into existing social positions; people are constituted or constructed by pre-existing social structures (this is a structuralist stance). The power of the mass media is to position the person (called the subject) in such as way that their representations are taken to be reflections of everyday reality.

The term  interpellation is best understood through Althusser's example: a police officer shouts "Hey, you!" in public. An individual turns round and 'by this mere one-hundred-and-eight degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject.' Althusser (1972: 174)

KEY CONCEPTS: REPRESENTATION

'The media do not just offer us a transparent 'window on the world' but a mediated version of the world. They don't just present reality; they re-present it.' (Buckingham, 2003:58)

• Media representations are always constructs, that is, they are made by someone for consumption by an audience. All representations are 'mediated'.
• Studying media involves analysing how representations are made to seem natural or 'true'.
• However realistic a representation may seem - even a photograph - it is a construction not a representation of reality. Think of holiday snaps, wedding photos, celebrity shots, estate agents' photos, cover girls, film posters, advertising material.
• Meaning is made as much by what is excluded as what is included. Some things are more prominent (foregrounded), some less prominent. Composing a shot involves deliberate selection, choice of angles, lighting and so on.
• Writing can anchor (fix) meaning: captions, for example.
• The meaning of a visual media text (moving image, photo etc) is not fixed and contingent; its meaning also depends on the viewer who assigns meanings and interprets the text. Literature students encounter this post-structuralist notion in Roland Barthes's The Death of the Author (1977). 
• "To give a text an Author is to imposes a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final significance, to close the writing." (Barthes 1977)
• Viewers bring with them a set of assumptions and values with which they make judgements. For example, would different cultures think differently about some of the media that you have looked at in class, ranging from Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis to films about cultural identity (such as East Is East and perfume adverts?

The Times 12.09.2011: As New York remembers 9/11, a father mourns his lost son.

Analyse the photographs above and below taken at the 9/11 memorial at Ground Zero in the light of what you have discussed.

Former president George W. Bush, the First Lady and President Barak Obama  pay their respects at the North Pool of the National September 11 Memorial

Now is the time to start widening your media consumption and dipping into media that you might not normally use. Try online newspapers to familiarize yourself with different approaches and to see different representations. Today we used The Times newspaper at this site here.

Definition of Representation

AS MEDIA STUDIES

 Our AS Media Studies course is OCR H140. We do two modules: a portfolio of creative work and an examination.