In sigh The Feminism and Series Editor: Nicholas Mirzoeff This series intends to promote the cons Visual Culture Reader citing interdisciplinary field of visual hematic questions of ethnicity, gender, and sexuality to examinations of particular geographical locations and historical periods. As visual media converge on digital technology, a key them and what that implie Second edition the critical engagement with global capital. The books are intended as resource researchers, and general readers R. Schwartz Amelia Jones Multicultural Art in America The object Reader Edited by Fiona Candlin and Raiford Guins R Routledge
Contents List of illustrations First edition published 2003 by Routledge an Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN imRtnedusly publihed In the USA and Canada Permissions Madison Ave, New York, NY 100 ntroduction 9 2003, 2010 editorial selection and material, Amelia Jones: individual CONCEIVING THE INTERSECTION OF FEMINISM AND VISUAL CULTURE, AGAIN hapters, the contrbutors lorence: Prod/ucti and Bell Gothic PART ONE Provocations CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, wiltshire 1 Jennifer Doy FEAR AND LOATHING IN NEW YORK .. REVISITING AN IMPOLIT dan storage or retrieval system, without permision i E ABOUT THE INTERFACE OF HOMOPHCBIA AND-MISQGYNY 11 writing from the publishers 2 Lisa e. Bloom A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library NEGOTIATING FEMINISMS IN CONTEMPORARY ASIAN WOMEN'S ART 3 Judith wilson A catalog reoord for this book has been requested OR ANOTHER: BLACK FEI saN10:0415-54369X(hbk) ISRN10:4415-54370-3(phky 4 Faith Wilding NEXT BDDIES-WITH A DIFFERENCE ISBN13:978-0415-543699(hbk) 5 Del Lagrace volcano (in dialogue) EM] NIST CURAT1 NG AND THE“ RETURN“ F FEMIN
LAURA MULVEY VISUAL PLEASURE AND NARRATIVE ource: Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, " Screen (1975); reprinted in Visual and Other Pleasures(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 14-26. A of psychon HIS PAPER INTENDS TO USE PSYCHOANALYSIS to discover where nd specta It is helpful to understand what the cinema has been, how its magic has worked in the of the pas eapon,demonstrating the way that it de pin to the sys desire to make good the lack that the phallus signifies. Recent writing psychoanalysis and the cinema has not sufficiently brought out the importance of th tation of the female form spea patriarchal unconscious is twofold: she firstly symbolises the castration threat by her real a penis and secondly thereby raises her child into the symbolic. Once this has been achieved an end. It do orld of law and ccept as a memory, which oscillates between memory of the bl her child into the ne of the father and the law, or else struggle to ke r child gmifier for the male othe bolic order in whie fantasies and obsessions through lingu mmand by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer, not maker, of meanin
58 LAURA MULVEY VISUAL PLEASURE AND NARRATIVE CINEMA 59 There is an obvious interest in this analysis fo experienced under the phallocentric order. It sts, a beauty in its exact rendering Ple in looking/fascination with the human form to the roots of ur oppression, it brings closer an articulation of the problem, it faces us with the ultimate hallenge: how to fight the unconscious structure四 A The cinema offers a number of res. One is scopophilia(pleasure in looking) but we can begin patriarchy with the tools it provides, of which psyche dependently of the erotogenic zones. At this point he associated scopophilia with taking other e female infant and her relationship to the symbolic, the sexually mature we and forbidden(curiosity about other people' s genital and bodily functions, about the present maternity outside the signification of the phallus, the vagina. But, at this point, halytic theory as it now stands can at least advance our understanding of the status quo, patriarchal order in which we are caugh B Destruction of pleasure as a radical weapon ct and its further development in a narcissistic form. )Although th As Dvanced representation system, the cinema poses questions about the ways the unconscious(formed by the dominant order)structures ways of seeing and pleasure in looking can become fixated into a perversion, producing obsessive voyeurs and whose only sexual satisfaction can come from watching, in an active controlling sense, an 9305,1940s prod cal advances(16mm and so on) have changed the economic conditions glance, ow be artisanal as well possible for an armeptitious observation of an unknowing and unwilling victim. What is seen or alternative cinema to develop. However self-conscious and ironic Hollywood managed to be, it aly portray a hermetically of the cinema. The alternative cinem scene reflecting th space for the birth of a cinema which i different to the presence of the au dical in both a political and an aesthetic sense and challenges the basic assumptions of the laying on their tic fantasy. Moreover the extreme contrast between the darkness in mainstream film. This is not to reject the latter moralistically, but to highlight the ways in stators from one another)and the brilliance of the hich its formal preoccupations reflect th it and, further, to stress that the alternative cinema must start specifically by reacting against ough the film 15 nd narrative conventions give the spectator an illusion of looking in on a private world.Among ther things, the position of the spectators in the cinema is blatantly one of repression of their phere a magic of the Hollywood style at its best(and of all the cinema which fell within its exhibitionism and projection of the repressed desire onto the performer. here of influence)arose, not exclusively, but in one important aspect, from its skilled and tisfying manipulation of visual pleasu B The cinema satisfies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking, but it also goes further, lage of the dominant h the highly devel. an form. Scale, space, stories are all anthropomor a sense of loss, by the terror of potential lack in fantasy, came near to finding a glimpse central place of rotic pleasure in filn ing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it hen a child recognises in the mirror is crucial for the constitution of the That is the intention of this article, The satisfaction an a time when theto must be attacked. Not in favour ego hat represent of themselves is joyous in that they imagine their mirror image to be mor ion the narrative fiction film. The alternativ the thrill that comes from leaving the past behind without simply rejecting it, transcending or oppressive forms, and daring to break with normal pleasurable expectations in superior projects this body outside itself as an ideal ego, the alienated subject which, reintrojected desi eal, prepares the way for identification with others in the future. This mirror moment pre-dates language for the child
60 LAURA MULVEY VISUAL PLEASURE AND NARRATIVE CINEMA 61 Important for this article is the fact that it is an image that constitutes the matrix of the to work against the development of a story-line of subjectivity. This is a moment when an the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation. This esence then has mother's face, for an obvious example) collides with the initial inklings of self-awareness ted into cohesion with the narrative. As Budd Boetticher has put it: found such intensity of expression in film and such joyous recognition in the cinema audience is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the uman furt from the extran ad mirror(the framing of the the cinema has structures of fasc for her, who makes him act the way he does, In herself the woman has not the slightest wh to perceive it( forget who I am and where I has distinguished itself in the pro ge recognition. While at the same eroticism of the central male fig carry the story without distraction. a complex process of likeness and difference(the glamorous impersonates the ordinary) c Sections A and b have set out two contradictory aspects of the pleasurable structures of ith a shifting Iside of the scr st, scopophilic, arises from pleasure in of the show-girl allows the two looks gh sight. The second, developed egesta. hrough narcissism and the constitution of the ego, comes from ale characters in the film are neatly combined without breaking narrative verisimilitude. For of the inside its own time and space. Thus Marilyn Monroe's first appearance in The River f Ne The first is a function of the sexual instincts, the second of ego libido. This dichotomy w Re between instinctual drives and self- preservation polarises in terms of pleasure. But both are demanded by the narrative; it gives flatness, the quality of a cut-out or icon, rather than verisimilitude, to the screen nification, unless attached to an idealisation. Both pursue aims in indifference to perceptual agoria that affect the subject's perception of the world 体p中如m地h如时mm B An active/passive heterosex figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification. Man is reluctant to gaze ing the als birth: &nary, but its with language, allows the possibility of transcending the insti desire. De the look of the emerges as the representative of ings happen. The man controls the film tor, transferring it behind the screen to neutralise the extra-diegroioo astration complex. Hence the look, pleasurable in form, can be threatening in ntent,and it is woman as representation/image that crystallises this paradox agate,so that the po protagonist as In Woman as image, man as bearer of the look coincides with the active power of the erot omnipotence ordered by sexu has been split between active/ ale an simultaneousl the story can make things happen and control events better than the subject/spectato to-be-loaked-at-nes. Woman man as icon, the active male figure(the ego ideal of the i Busby Berkeley, holds the look, and plays to and signifies male desire. Mainstream film neatly combines spectacle which the alienated subject internalised his own representation of his imagina and narrative. (Note, however, how in the musical, song-and-dance numbers interrupt the He is a figure in a landscape. Here the function of film is to reproduce as accurately as possible