Visual Pleasure and Narrative cinema

Visual pleasure and narrative cinema

A theory based on Laura Mulvey (a professor of film and media studies) A Feminist.

One of the first major essays that helped shift the orientation of film theory towards a psychoanalytic framework – She based her theory on that of Freud’s, Lacan’s.

She was a feminist that argued that in Hollywood cinema, they inevitably put the spectator in a masculine subject position and the woman on screen as the object of desire.

Mulvey suggests that there were two distinct modes of the male gaze of this era: "voyeuristic" (i.e. seeing women as 'whores') and "fetishistic" (i.e. seeing women as 'madonnas').

(Links in with the Madonna whore complex)

She argued that the only way in which to be rid of the Hollywood system was to radically challenge and re-shape the strategies of film making with alternative feminist methods.