Key Text - Visual Pleasure & Narrative Cinema, Laura Mulvey

Notes from Text

• 'Demonstrating the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form' - The patriarchy is the basis of how film is made.
• 'the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer, not maker of meaning' - Women are there to support the role of the man.
• 'associated scopophilia with taking other people as objects, subjecting them to controlling and curious gaze' - Freud.
• 'conditions of screening and narrative conventions give the spectator an illusion of looking in on a private world' - Male fantasies, safe.
• 'In reality the fantasy world of the screen is subject to the law which produces it'.
• 'Woman as Icon'.
• 'She is isolated, glamorous, on display, sexualised'.
• 'But as the narrative progresses she falls in love with the main male protagonist and becomes his property, losing her outward glamorous characteristics, her generalised sexuality, her show-girl connotations... subjected to the male star alone' - Association through the male.

Further Notes

• 'Stars provide a focus or centre both to screen space and screen story where they act out a complex process of likeness and difference (the glamorous impersonates the ordinary' - Examples of identifying, role models.
• 'plays to an signifies male desire' - Pin ups and strip tease.
• 'Mainstream film neatly combines spectacle and narrative'.
• on Hollywood film... 'it always restricted itself to a formal mise en scène, reflecting the dominant ideological concept of cinema' - follows the trends of the time.
• 'the alternative cinema provides a space for the birth of a cinema which is radical in both a political and an aesthetic sense and challenges the basic assumptions of the mainstream film'.
• 'A politically and aesthetically avant-garde cinema is now possible'.
• 'Unchallenged, mainstream film coded the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order' - Mainstream film.
• 'the central place of the image is the woman... analysing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it'.
• 'The conventions of mainstream film focus attention on the human form'.
• 'She is one, or rather the love or fear she inspires the hero... In herself the woman has not the slightest importance'.
• On showing one part of the female body (camera angles)... 'it gives flatness, the quality of a cut-out or icon, rather than verisimilitude, to the screen'.
• 'physical structures... the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification'.
• 'structuring the film around a main controlling figure with whom the spectator can identify'.
• 'In contrast to a woman as icon the active male figure (the ego ideal of the identification process) demands a three-dimensional space corresponding to that of the mirror recognition'.
• 'The male protagonist is free to command the stage'.