tailieunhanh - Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975) - Laura Mulvey

Traditionally, the woman displayed has functioned on two levels: as erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium, with a shifting tension between the looks on either side of the screen. For instance, the device of the show- girl allows the two looks to be unified technically without any apparent break in the diegesis. A woman performs within the narrative, the gaze of the spectator and that of the male characters in the film are neatly combined without breaking narrative verisimilitude. For a moment the sexual impact of the. | Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema 1975 - Laura Mulvey Originally Published - Screen Autumn 1975 pp. 6-18 http I. Introduction A. A Political Use of Psychoanalysis This paper intends to use psychoanalysis to discover where and how the fascination of film is reinforced by pre-existing patterns of fascination already at work within the individual subject and the social formations that have moulded him. It takes as 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. It is helpful to understand what the cinema has been how its magic has worked in the past while attempting a theory and a practice which will challenge this cinema of the past. Psychoanalytic theory is thus appropriated here as a political weapon demonstrating the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form. The paradox of phallocentrism in aIl its manifestations is that it depends on the image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to its world. An idea of woman stands as lynch pin to the system 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. Recent writing in Screen about psychoanalysis and the cinema has not sufficiently brought out the importance of the representation of the female form in a symbolic order in which in the last resort it speaks castration and nothing else. To summarise briefly the function of woman in forming the patriarchal unconscious is two-fold. She first symbolises the castration threat by her real absence of a penis and second thereby raises her child into the symbolic. Once this has been achieved her meaning in the process is at an end it does not last into the world of law and language except as a memory which oscillates between memory of maternal plenitude and memory of lack. Both are .