The Look, gaze, Gaze
The look = perceptual mode open to all
The gaze = specific instance of looking
The Gaze =
- The process of looking (or 'technology') that constitutes a whole web of relationships, including power and violence
- gives structure and stability to illusions, fantasies of self and other
- a mode of viewing reflecting a gendered code of desire
Barbara Kruger - American collage artist famous for her layered photographs
Your Gaze Hits The Side Of My Face, 1981
Guerrilla Girls - anonymous group of feminist, female artists devoted to fighting sexism and racism within the art world
Recent demonstration in Turin, January 2016: protesting against violence against women. All wear mask, political significance of mask (veil) vs. male gaze
Jacques Lacan -
French psychoanalyst
major figure in Parisian intellectual life
teaching and writings explore the significance of Freud's discovery
of the unconscious
interested in philosophical
Sigmund Freud -
'Father of Psychoanalysis'
Revolutionised the theory of the human self
Victorian era
industrialisation has moved on - led Freud to thinking we need work
Understanding of the human self split into three, id, ego, super ego
A particular moment of our entry in to language, we learn language to communicate with people, focused on boys, boys in love with their mother, aggression towards the father, fear of castration, if you can't beat the father, join him.
Formation of subjectivity
- Lacan: rereading of Freud's basic assumptions, but claimed that subjectivity is more complex
- formation of subjectivity in the mirror phase (imaginary/symbolic)
- infantile ego, in its narcissistic phase, takes itself as the object of its own libidinal drives - the ego is both the subject and both
The Gaze and Film theory
- 1970's: in film theory, Lacan's story led to an interest in the 'unconscious' of a film text; and interest in evidence of the working of desire
- theorists associated with film journal 'screen'
emphasise the importance of the cinema as apparatus and a signifying practice of ideology (Marx, Althusser)
- Viewer-screen relationship became more important
Cinema - imaginary unity
Narcissus, looking at his own image
Comforting sense of unified self:
- does not emanate from the spectator
- is constructed by the cinematic apparatus, which brings out the artificial state of regression
- dark, cosy, rhythms, 'womb-like'
Laura Mulvey
- English filmmaker and theorist
- Professor at Birbeck
- Seminal work: visual pleasures and Narrative Cinema (1975)
- Interested in power/gender relationships of the gaze
viewers derive pleasure from films in two ways:
- scopophilia - pleasure in looking, curiosity of others' bodied and emerges in childhood - voyerism
problem in extreme cases - peeping tom - stalker
- identification - with the ideal ego, represented by the on-screen hero
The gaze is not gender-neutral
- Mulvey: Hollywood cinema reflects and reinforces the way that, in a patriarchal society, 'pleasure looking has been split between active/male and passive/female'
- women = image/figure o be looked at;man = controls the look
Key forms of the gaze
- 1 the intra-diegetic gaze: e.g., main male character looks at the female character as part of film story (this 'gaze' is often created by a subjective 'point of view shot')
- 2 the direct or extra-diegetic address to the viewer: e.g., the gaze of the person in the film looking 'out of the frame' as if it is the viewer
- 3 the look of the camera - the way that the camera itself appears to look at the characters depicted; less metaphorically, the gaze of the film-maker
- 4 the spectators gaze: the gaze of the viewer at an image or a person
FILM - Peeping Tom, 1960
- Peeping tom: a person who gets please, especially sexual pleasure from secretly watching others
- in the film: eye-camera eye-main character's 'I' = sources of male gaze
- objectified women (as 'passive' image); trying to look back but subjected to the power of the male gaze
quick plot -
man abused as a child by father, grows to be a film maker and becomes peeping tom and serial killer
dad woke him with torch - he used torch in killings
watches murder back on big screen - he films the murders
Female/Queer Gaze
- Carol; adaption of Patricia Highsmith's novel The Price of Salt (1952)
- two women from very different backgrounds find themselves in an unexpected love affair in 1950's New York
Art and the Gaze
- artist: through art and language human beings can make their desires for the lost object known
- viewer: desiring subject ready to be 'manipulated"
Art theory, the unconscious and gender/power relations
Richard Wollheim
Bal
Krauss
Pollock
How is the gaze operating in these works? Within the picture or in relation to the viewer?
Gorgoine, Sleeping Venis (c.1510)
John Berger, ways of Seeing (1972)
- highly influential book based on a BBC tv series
- 'almost all Post-renaissance European sexual imagery is frontal - either literally or metaphorically - because the sexual protagonist is the spectator owner
Edouard Manet, Dejeuner sur l'herbe (1863)
Raphael, excerpt
Gorgoine, excerpt
Edouard Manet, Olympia (1863)
Yasumasa Morimura, Futago (1990)
Carolee Schneemann 2014
No comments:
Post a Comment