OUGD501 - Study Task 2 - Notes from the texts

Visual Pleasure and Narrative Pleasure - Laura Mulvey
The article focuses on the objectification of women on screen in the cinema.

Structure:

1. Her use of psychoanalysis as a feminist critical tool.
2. The opportunity in contemporary cinema for more radical forms that break away from patriarchal influence - Emerging from classic Hollywood cinema.
3. Explanation of scopophilia (the pleasure of looking) - how it relates to cinema.
4. Explanation of narcissistic pleasure - how it relates to cinema.
5. Summary of the two forms of visual pleasure - and a discussion of castration threat.
6. The roles that men and women play in cinema and spectatorship - active/male, passive/female.
7. The constant treat of castration and how the male unconscious relinquishes it.
8. 2 x case studies - Sternberg and Hitchcock.
9. Summary.

1. Psycho analytical theory - used as political weapon. Castration, the woman is always the symbol of threat unintentionally. 

2. The modern cinema can react against the obsessions and assumptions so that the visual pleasure can be manipulated to move away from the normal pleasure and expectations of the patriarchal influence which will allow a new language of desire to be built. 

3. Scopophilia is the pleasure of looking which Freud associated scopophilia is one of the components of sexuality. Associated with taking other people as objects. In the cinema there is an extreme contract between the darkness and the film which allows for an isolation from the person on screen.