Laura mulveys article visual pleasure and narrative cinema

Essay by nadiyaqub March 2004

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Laura Mulvey's article "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" argues that in classical hollywood cinema there exists a different viewing expierience for male and female spectators. explain the basis of the theory. Do you agree?

Since 1970's Laura Mulvey has been regarded as one of the most famous and well known feminist in film critic. through out histry, women's body has been used as a vision of pleasure by men. women's bodies have been used to make profit for the males sexual desire. the women's body itself becomes an object of desire for a man, and the amount it signifies, is mostly sex. in my essay today, i will be talking about Laura Mulveys article "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema". Mulvey builds her critic on mainstream cinema on Freud's and Lucan's psychoanalytic theory, in which the key component of her arguement is that there is a difference between viewing of male and female spectatorship in hollywood cinema, where the male is always in the position of dominant viewer and the female viewer is always viewed as an object on the screen by the males.

the unconcious of the patriachal society that we live in constructs film forms. women can only exist in relation to castration and her body and her image that she posseses are tied to her place as a bearer. i will first talk about Laura Mulvey's theory and than will move on and take a stand on my opinion on her theory. the way i look at Mulveys theory, its divided into two parts. first is pleasure in looking/ facination with the human form and second is women as image, man as bearer of the look.

When Mulvey talks about Patriachy and film forms in her article, we can view that her form is...