In Conversation With Laura Mulvey (Interview)
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- Опубликовано: 13 сен 2024
- My shift in spectatorship came very specifically out of the influence of the Women's Movement. Instead of being an absorbed spectator; a voyeuristic spectator; a male spectator, as it were, I suddenly found I'd become a woman spectator, who watched the film from a distance, not with those absorbed eyes.'
Laura Mulvey is a feminist film theorist, whose seminal text 'Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema' instigated what is now known as 'male gaze' theory. Together with Peter Wollen, she also made many experimental films in the '70s and '80s. Here she talks Freud; Hollywood; her own counter-cinema; Frida Kahlo, and a shift to active spectatorship.
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Wow, Mulvey really is a personal inspiration. I think media plays a much bigger part in society than people assume. It's so cool to compare the ways cinema shifted and what tricks/tropes filmmakers still use today. Sucks so many people use her work out of context.
I've read about Mulvey's "male gaze" theory for years and years, and it's very much true. First time I've ever seen her in an interview, though.
Have never heard Laura speak! This is so cool, total punk rocker of feminist and film theory!!!
I'm sorry that people are so cruel in the comments section. You truly were a pioneer in your field.
ooooh i loved this video and i loved knowing this channel and website
Very interesting interview.
There are no Turkish videos about Mulvey. can i translate this in Turkish?
very bad automatic translation, it distracted me in a wrong way and made me misunderstand the point
Have just added subtitles that we've written ourselves
there is an english translation uploaded by us!
💕🎬💕
Her theories are very much out of date today. Freud's psychoanalytical framework that she leans heavily on have been largely debunked through evidence based studies. The popularity of movies like Fifty Shades of Grey, Magic Mike, Twilight, 365 days, Sex/Life prove that there's just as much of a market for the female gaze. There is also a tremendous amount of empowered female lead heroine characters in the cinemas. I've studied film theory for years and I believe the power play goes both ways in the sexual realm.
When we write an essay in any era, the aim would not be to emancipate it as a general truth for all times (even if, in Mulvey's case, the foundations of his theory continue to be inscribed in today's cinema) but to draw inspiration from it and complement our critical visions. Mulvey herself returns to her essay (visual pleasure and narrative cinema) in a commentary entitled ‘returns to “visual pleasure”’, which adds a new complexity while remaining on the same line of thought. As for the female gaze you're talking about, no one has said that it doesn't exist (fortunately, in fact) but that it is very poorly represented and that the few films that do feature it are mostly not highlighted.
The selective attention and specious logic on display here is astounding. 🤔
She'll never have to worry about the male gaze.
funny, you didnt hear a thing..its like as if you watched through male eyes and expected her to be pretty by your standards and be quiet; "the spectacle".
Thank you Natalie and you look hot too.
@@johnyzero2000 thank you so much omg
@@nataliewong8240 This has nothing to with expectation, it's an observation. Jon Feld didn't watch this interview with the expectation that Mulvey would be a pretty woman. The male gaze is not about judging women as pretty or not pretty in whatever situation. It's about the role of physical attractiveness in the depicition of women in cinema. And ofcourse, Mulvey's notion of female spectacle as a patriarchal commodity construction is complete nonsense, since Hollywood censorship in the films of the 50s and 60s, that she analyzed in her essay, actually repressed sexual spectacle, while nowadays feminist filmmakers are depicting their female characters often in very sexual ways to show their sexual power. Female spectacle has always been intimidating to men, precizely because an physically attractive women is both attractive but also sexually selective. In Mulvey's original essay you will see that she talks contradictions: she calls the woman passive while at the same time describes how she influences the actions that the male protagonist has to perform, in order to control the narrative tendencies the woman triggers as a spectacle. Female spectacle has always been active, while male spectacle risks losing it's spectacularity and becoming passive. Like the stoned spectator of Medusa if you will. Camille Paglia has pointed out many times how ancient female archetypes play in on this. Now, in an era with a lot of feminist filmmakers the image of the femme fatale has been exhausted, precizely because it holds so much power. Mulvey wrote her essay in a time where a lot of marxist theorists, like Althusser and Debord, speculated about the lived world as a capitalist spectacle creation in order to exploit the people economically. You could see how this was an inspiration for Mulvey, certainly after Beauvoir's book The Second Sex in which she argued that women are made in the image of men. The cinematic apparatus might function in the same way she thought, therefore, along with Metz, giving birth to Screen Theory. It however has been pointed out many times by now that the depiction of the woman as spectacle has it's roots in ancient art history and shows true female power and essentialism. However, what is female essentialism nowadays? What is a woman, what is a man? If woman is a genderperformance that shouldn't be privileged above other perfomances because there's no subject behind the performance, then feminism might as well come to an end.
the irony of that statement. the absolute and utter stupidity. you are proving her theory right you dumb loser. btw in case your brain isn't working properly (it isn't) in order to judge that you think she is not worth gazing at you have to.... GAZE. Get it, thicko?
Yep...that whole men looking at women thing is just about the worst thing to ever fall upon humanity...I mean toss them in prison.
This should be the focus of the world.
Not starving children or homelessness
Shut up, Stephen.
No one ever said it was the worst problem in the world.
Why is it that when we talk about the issues that affect women, someone always has to point out "but this isn't as bad as other issues like starving kids in developing countries!!!". You can be concerned and passionate about a diverse range of issues while you advocate for them too. No need to try to bury whatever makes YOU, as a man, uncomfortable.
@@sophiamiguez8503 Cuz they have bias and dont know how to argue. They can’t help but gaze but are too lazy at the thought of fixing it. Or even admitting that it exists at all. Instead, they choose to rationalise it away as “phft there are bigger problems”.
again, seeing the world in binaries, it’s either an issue that has to be fixed RIGHT NOW or NEVER. You can only fix THIS ISSUE or THE OTHER ISSUES. I find that a lot of the bias and bad-faith arguments spilled by anti-progressive people are just the same, just binary thinking.
Don't worry. The birth rate has fallen so far below replacement that humanity will be extinct within a few more generations, and that'll solve the male gaze problem. Extinction is pretty much the solution to all the problems that feminists have come up with, because having children just isn't a thing women should want to ever do now. Certainly not be a grandmother, that's the worst thing ever. We might think about segregation based on sex while we wait to go the way of the dodo, so women won't have to suffer men looking at them.