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VISUAL PLEASURE AND NARRATIVE CINEMA

Laura Mulvey

• Screen Autumn 1975

• Intention:

Analyze-Destroy

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three looks associated with cinema:the camera as it records the pro-filmic eventthe audience as it watches the final productthe characters at each other within the screen illusion

The conventions of narrative film deny the first two and subordinate them to the third, the conscious aim being always to eliminate intrusive camera presence and prevent a distancing awareness in the audience.

Without these two absences (the material existence of the recording process, the critical reading of the spectator), fictional drama cannot achieve reality, obviousness and truth.

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The Quote of Psychoanalysis: Freud & J. Lacan

• Freud: the anxiety of castration① ② Oedipus complex

③ Psychological complement

• J. Lacan: Mirror Stage

The order of

｛ the Imaginary, the Symbolic, the Real ｝

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Cases Analysis: Sternberg & Hitchcock

• Sternberg: 许多有关纯粹的恋物窥视癖的例证 pure examples of fetishistic [ 'fi:tiʃistik ]

Scopophilia [ ,skəupə'filiə ]

• Hitchcock: 同时用两种机制，窥淫癖 / 恋物窥视癖 both mechanisms of voyeurism[ vwɑ:'jə:rizəm ]

and fetishistic scopophilia

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Goal It is said that analysing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it.

That is the intention of this article. • To break down--

the relationship between the Cinematic codes and the formative external structures

• To challenged—

The pleasure provided by the mainstream film.

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• Psychoanalysis is not the only but an important tool,

by examining patriarchy [ ‘peitriɑ:ki ] （男权 / 父权） . with the tools it provides.

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A. A Political Use of Psychoanalysis

• fascination of film/ pre-existing patterns of fascination

• starting point• the way film reflects, reveals and even

plays on the straight, socially established interpretation of sexual difference which controls images, erotic ways of looking and spectacle.

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a political weapon Psychoanalysis

• Psychoanalytic theory is thus appropriated here as a political weapon,

demonstrating the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form.

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phallocentrism

• it depends on the image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to its world.

• it is her lack that produces the phallus as a symbolic presence, it is her desire to make good the lack that the phallus signifies.

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summaries briefly • the function of woman in forming the patriarchal

unconscious is two-fold• ①real absence of a penis raises her child into the ②

symbolic (Real order, Symbolic order, Imaginary order)

• Freud's famous phrase the frustration experienced under the phallocentric

order

• ultimate challenge: how to fight the unconscious structured like a language

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B. Destruction of Pleasure as a Radical Weapon

• the cinemathe unconscious structures ways of seeing and pleasure

in looking.• Hollywoodreflecting the dominant ideological concept of the cinema

• not to reject the mainstream film moralistically①but to highlight the ways in which its formal

preoccupations reflect the psychical obsessions of the society which produced it

②to stress that the alternative cinema must start specifically by reacting against these obsessions and assumptions

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• A politically and aesthetically avant-garde cinema is now possible, but it can still only exist as a counterpoint.

• The magic of the Hollywood style

• Unchallenged, mainstream film coded the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order.

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This article will discuss• the interweaving of that erotic pleasure in

film• its meaning• in particular the central place of the image of

womanthe intention of this article

• analysing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it• the high point of film history hitherto must be

attacked

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• Nota reconstructed new pleasure

• nor intellectualised unpleasure

• butto make way for a total negation of the

ease and plenitude of the narrative fiction film

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• It is the place of the look that defines cinema, the possibility of varying it and exposing it.

• cinematic codes create a gaze, a world, and an object

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the voyeuristic-scopophilic look that is a crucial part of traditional filmic pleasure can itself be broken down

• three looks associated with cinema:the camera as it records the pro-filmic eventthe audience as it watches the final productthe characters at each other within the screen illusion

• free the look of the camera into its materiality in time and space

• free the look of the audience into dialectics, passionate detachment

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Further Reading• Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Hogarth,

1929 ）

• Helene Cixous, Keith Cohen, Paula Cohen, The Laugh of the Medusa (Chicago Journals, Vol. 1, No. 4, Summer, 1976), pp. 875-893 Published by: The University of Chicago Press

• Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press,1979)