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
62 LAURA MULVEY YISUAL PLEASURE AND NARRATIVE CINEMA 63 90-called natural conditions of human p ogy(as exer nce said he would welcome his films being projected upside-down so that combined with invisible editing (demanded by realism), all tend that his films do of flms with her. as the ultim e)should be identifiable; but revealing in that it emphasises the fact that for him and Claire Johnston's study of The Revolt of Mamie Stover in Phil Hardy(ed ) Ruoul Walsh burgh,1974),show Hitchcock goes into the investigative side of voyeurism, Sternberg produces apparent than real. striking case how the stre rength of this female protagonist is more taking it to characteristic of traditional narrative film)is broken in favour of the image in Cl e set out a tension betwe port with the spectator. The bear the woman and the screen film and conventions surrounding the diegesis. Each is associated with a look spectator in direct scopophilic contact with the female form displayed for his by close longer the bearer of guilt but a perfect product depth; his ithin the die ining control as light and shade, lace, steam, foliage, net, streamers and so on reduce the visual field. There This tension and the shift from no mediation of the look through the eyes of the main ma in To Hare and Have Not, the fil, man as object of the combined gaze of spectator and all the male ached as they are from audience identification. Despite Stermberg's insistence that his stories significant that they are concerned with falls in love with the main male protagonist and becomes his property, losing her outwar that of the controlling male gaze within the screen otations; her eroticism the spectator can indirectly possess her too.) ion with him, through participation in the absence of the man she loves in the There are other wi mething that the look terms, the fema y circles around but disavows: her lack of a penis, implying a threat of castration and hence unpleasure. ultimately difference, the visually ascertainable absence of the penis, the material evidence on which is end of Dishonoured, Kranau is indifferent to the fate of Magda. In both cases, the erotic based the castration complex essential for the organisation of entrance to the symbolic order sanctified by death, is disp a spectacle for the audience. The male hero and the law of the father. Thus the wo ontrollers of the look. alw at tl signified. The male unconscious has two avenues of escape from this castratio originally preoccupation with the re-enactment of the or estimating the woman, c substitution of fetish object becomes reassuring rather than dangerous valuation, the cult of the the rder and tht heir erotic drives lead them into compromised situations. The power to subject transforming it into something satisfying in itself. The first avenu nother person to the will sadistically or to the gaze voyeuristically is turned onto the woman (evoking castrator is backe d the nder a shallow mask of ideological correctmess-the man is on the right side of the law, the omething happen, forcing a change in another person, a battle of will and strength, victor Hitchcock,s skil cesses and liberal use of whicle spectator is absorbed int ply from the point of view of the male protagonist draw the spectators deeply the other hand, can exist outside linear time as the erotic instinct is focused on the look into his posit These contradictions and ambiguities can be illustrated more simply by using work by Hitchcock voyeurs nema. Jeffries of their films. Hitchcock is the more complex oth mechanisms. Stermberg's work, on the other hand, provides many pure examples of fetishistic scopophilia Lisa had been of little sexual interest to him, more or less a drag, so long as she remained on
64 LAURA MULVEY ISUAL PLEASURE AND NARRATEVE CINEMA 65 he spectator side. When she crosses the barrier between his room and the block opposite significance demanded by the patriarchal order in its fawourite cinematic form- -illusionistic ative film. The argume mtst return again ing her with punishment, and thus fin ally signify castration, and activate voyeuristic or fetishistic mechanisms to raumvent this threat. Although none of these interacting layers is intrinsic to film, it is on through his work as a photo-journalist, a maker of stories and captor of images. However, his in the of the look define enforced inactivity, binding him to his scat as a spectator, puts him squarely in the fant rying it and exposing it. This is what makes c on. Ge camera predominates. Apart from one flashback from Judy's point of view, the narrative is woven around what Scottie sees or fails to see. The audience follows he growth of cottie's voyeurism is blatant: he falls in love with reby producing an illusion cut to the measure of speaking to. Its sadistic side is equally blatant: he has chosen(and freely chosen, for he had ceman, with all the attendant possibilities of pursuit and estigation. As a result, he follows, watches and falls in love with a perfect image of female beauty an orce her to tell stery. Once he actually confronts her, his erotic drive is to break her down and watches the final product, and that t with the ions of narrative film deny the first two and subordinate them to the third, th 如m地mmm wareness achieve reality, obvious interest. But in the repetition he does break her down and succeeds in exposing her guilt.His nd truth. Nevertheless, as this article has arg the structure of looking in narrative fiction film contains a contradicts its own premises: the female image as a castration threat igo, erotic involvement with the look boomerangs: the spectator's own nstantly endangers the unity of the diegesis and bursts through the world of illusion as an fascination is revealed as illicit voyeurism as the narrative trusive,static, one-dimensional fetish. Thus the two looks materially present in time and pleasures that he is himself exercising and enjoyin pace are obsessively subordinated to the neurotic needs of the male ego. The camera becot ithin the symbolic order, in narrative terms. He has all the attributes of the patriarchal he mechanism for producing an illusion of Renaissance space, Hor ith the human eye, an ideology of represe tion of the apparent legality of look is disavowed in order to rform with verisimilitude. Simt is denied an intrinsic force: as soon as fetishistic representation e difference and the power of the male symbolic for Mark Rutland,s gaze and masquerades as the perfect to-belooked the la the look, fixates the spectator and prevents him from achieving any distance from the image the act of committing a crime, make her confess and thus save her. So he, too, This complex interaction of looks is specific to film. The first blow against the monolithic have his cake and eat it out the implications of his power. He controls money and words; he can accumulation of traditional film conventions(already undertaken by radical film-makers)is to iality in time and space and the look of the audience into dialectics and passio of the he sin ment. There is no doubt that this destroys the satisfaction, The tic background that has been discussed in this article is relevant to the pleasure voyeuristic active/passive mechanisms, Women, whose image has continually been stolen and and unpleasure offered by traditional narrative film. The scopophilic instinct( sed for this end, cannot view the decline of the traditional film form with person as more than sentimental regret (passive)raw material for the(active)gaze of man takes t step further into the content and structure of representation, adding a further layer
