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