Analysis Of E. Ann Kaplan's Is The Gaze Men

Today’s filmmakers have three areas to focus on: the event or theme of the film, the audience who will be watching the film, and lastly, the individual characters and the roles they play and how they are portrayed and interpreted. Many of these films bottom line objectives are to focus on the “erotic needs of the male ego.” The focus on fetishistic scopophilia tend to slant the view such that we see the world as being dominated by men and that woman are

In Hollywood film women 's roles have varied quiet considerably between genres, geographical placement, and period settings. These factors contribute to the different representations of women 's roles in the film they are present in. The roles are diverse going from the traditional maternal role to that of manipulative murderer. Women 's roles in movies can be almost equal to the male roles, and the co-stars are not given the majority of the acclaims just because they are male. Society has set certain standards that women are supposed to follow. The most common image of women is that they are very passive and try to avoid conflict in any situation. More and more in society women are breaking down the social barriers that confine them to their specific roles. The films Rear Window and Resident Evil show women in roles that are untraditional for our society. These two movies help to show how women are rebelling against social norms and that they are taking more active and aggressive roles. In film noir’s we can see women represented as the femme fatale, a woman whose mysterious and seductive charms leads men into compromising or dangerous situations. In action movies we see the heroine who is strong both physically and mentally, and has the ability to use weapons. Women seem to be more trapped than men because they are supposed to live up to society’s standards dealing with beauty and size, which are more physical characteristics. These specific guidelines have been set by

In the early 1990s Laura Mulvey’s thesis concerning the patriarchal structure of an active male gaze has influenced feminist film critiques and Hollywood. Mulvey’s project is to use psychoanalysis to uncover the power of patriarchy in Hollywood cinema. Patriarchal influence upon cinema is found primarily in pleasure (pleasure in looking) or as Freud’s has put it, scopophilia. Mulvey suggests that it may be possible to create a new for of cinema due to the fact that patriarchy power to control cinematic pleasure has revealed.

“The male gaze,” is a powerful tool used in Hollywood films. This gaze is the way the camera or character, mainly the males, objectifies and gazes their eyes toward women in a sexualized way. It’s the difference between looking, and being looked at. Two dynamics are commonly seen which are, women as a spectacle, and the spectator position produced by filmmakers. This is shown in Clueless, a movie about a rich girl and her growing mindset on the world, where she starts by taking a new girl under her wing, making this girl like them, rich, and pretty looking.

Several film theorists have used a variety of tactics and view points to analyze feature films since their inception. One of the most prominent theorists of those that analyze films from a feminist perspective is Laura Mulvey. Mulvey is famous for her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” which presents an array of theories involving the treatment of women in films. Arguably the most notable idea presented in Mulvey’s work is the existence of the “male gaze” in films. This essay will examine Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze in relation to Alfred Hitchcock’s film, Vertigo. Vertigo does not fit the criteria of a film that

Through exposure, the role of women as a visible visual icon, such as cinematic mechanisms fetishism serves to convince the position of the male audience as an absolute subject.

When one hears the terms “violence” and “horror,” one typically imagines horrible crimes and serial killers; rarely would one think of everyday suburban life. However, this is the exact landscape of violence depicted in Charles Burns’ Black Hole. In Black Hole Burns draws attention to the implicit assumptions about “normal” and “other” made in everyday life by exposing the objectification of women and through the male gaze. The male gaze is a phrase used in film and gender studies to describe the lens through which audiences view popular culture from a heterosexual male perspective. According to Laura Mulvey, the film theorist who coined the term, the male gaze is so ubiquitous that it often goes unrecognized and is considered the norm.

The video essay argued against Laura Mulvey theory on male gaze and was mainly centred on the article of visual Pleasure and narrative cinema writer by Laura Mulvey. According to Mulvey(1975,p348) “The female is displayed for his enjoyment(connoting male phantasy) and that of the spectator fascinated with the image of is like set in an illusion of natural space, and through him gaining possession and control of the woman within the diegesis”. She went further stating that “in film the women as object of the combined gaze of spectator for all the male protagonist. She is isolated, glamorous, on display, sexualised” (p3488). Examples of such films given in the video essay is the skin I live in (Pedro Almodóvar), Spain 2011. The idea of female

In the media we see today, and movies that are continually coming out all have a central idea in common. They all show and represent the idealistic perspective of male versus female in society. From cartoons to chick flicks to romances and comedies we notice identifiable differences and trends represented between the two genders. In the movie I watched, “Clueless,” there are many examples illustrating male superiority over female, ideas of what femininity should be, and female appeal towards the male figures in the film.

Consequently, in film, women do not describe the world from their point of view. Instead, women learn to “submerge or renounce” their subjectivity; they find their own identity in the desires of the men to which they are attached (654). Therefore, Devereaux concludes, the issue is not whether it is a male or female who is doing the looking. Rather, the question is whether a patriarchal way of seeing the world triumphs regardless of who is behind the camera. In this sense, the discussion of the “literal” gaze becomes a discussion of the figurative gaze (654).

Women are deemed as a “minority” yet make up 51% of the world population and in 2014 made up only 12% of protagonists in films. And that is just on-screen, the percentage decreases as you go farther and farther into behind-the-scenes positions such as directors, cinematographers, and writers. Add race and ethnicity and those characters' percentages decline even more (Lauzen, 2015.) Women in film and television are often portrayed with emphasis based on their body type and in advertisement are largely objectified. The large objectification and misrepresentation of women in the media has led to an offset psychological view of women from growing up to adulthood.

The spectator who is watching the film finds the woman as an erotic object. In accordance to what is cited above, the dominance of male directors in the Hollywood scene also gives the power of judgment to its audience, the male population. Of course, when the male characters feel that the woman being perceived is perfect for being a visual pleasure, it tends to drive the audience in the same manner, too.

The male gaze was introduced by Laura Mulvey in her 1975 essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" and is “a feature of gender power asymmetry in film”. Mulvey explained, “Women were objectified in film because heterosexual men were in control of the camera”. The male gaze is when the audience views the scene of object –in this case the woman- from the prospective of a man. This may occur if the camera lingers over a woman’s curves for a while displaying her as an erotic object rather than a human being, making her a victim of sexualisation. The woman is usually unaware of this gaze, which brings patriarchy to the situation. Her essay also explains that the ‘female gaze’ is similar except it is like women looking at themselves through a male’s eyes. This can have a negative effect on real life women because they are being told what they should look like in order to be noticed by men and what men want to see. Feminists

There are numerous intimate emotions that factor into the equation of media-fascination, Mulvey argues. Among them are eroticism, voyeurism, and imagery. These feelings would not exist, however, without a "world ordered by sexual imbalance…" (Mulvey 523) or without "pleasure in looking [that] has been split between active/male and passive/female," (Mulvey 523). She says that in media, women are presented as objects, while men "control the film fantasy and also emerge as the representative of power," (Mulvey 524).

Since the 1940’s, movies have predominately portrayed women as sex symbols. Beginning in the 1940’s and continuing though the 1980’s, women did not have major roles in movies. When they did have a leading role the women was either pretreated as unintelligent and beautiful, or as conniving and beautiful: But she was always beautiful. Before the 1990’s, men alone, wrote and directed all the movies, and the movies were written for men. In comparison, movies of the 90’s are not only written and directed by women, but leading roles are also held by older and unattractive women. In this paper I will show the variations and growth of women’s roles in movies from the 1940’s though the 1990’s.