Sign Up Now
Get instant access to over 1 million+ study documents
OR
Already registered? click here to login
By creating your account, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and student honor code.
Sexuality and Cinema
Laura Mulvey's arguments in "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" are readily illustrated with reference to the 1991 Jonathan Demme film "The Silence of the Lambs."
Mulvey's starting point is psychoanalytic, and suggests that the image of the female is the way in which filmic meaning is constructed. This begins with Mulvey's critique of the "phallocentric" mode of thinking, in which a woman is understood to be nothing more than a castrated male, and is therefore the focus of horrified, and desirous, observation. Here, she views film itself as a technological construction designed to increase the activity of "pleasurable looking," even pushing it into the sexualized realm of voyeurism or scopophila: "The cinema satifies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking, but it also goes further, developing scopophilia in its narcissistic aspect." This means that the narcissism of the viewer, understood to be male, is gratified by the way in which psychology, and its social construction, is represented within the film. Mulvey's conclusion identifies the way in which an audience's narcissistically-based sexual instinct (ego libido) is invited to identify with, and...
The image of woman as (passive) raw material for the (active) gaze of man takes the argument a step further into the structure of representation, adding a further layer demanded by the ideology of the patriarchal order as it is worked out in its favorite cinematic form - illusionistic narrative film.
Mulvey's conclusions here are particularly fascinating when we consider "Silence of the Lambs." The film was released 16 years after the initial publication of Mulvey's essay, and in some ways it almost seems as though Jonathan Demme were responding to, or grappling with, some of Mulvey's main points. The dynamic of observation within the film itself is one which works both ways -- the clue that Hannibal Lecter gives to Clarice Starling as to how she will find Jame Gumb involves the notion of "what he covets," or desires in a transgressive way, and "we begin by coveting what we see every day." In this sense, it is Buffalo Bill's proximity to his first victim Fredrika Bimmell -- and his chance to observe her and, crucially as we learn, to take eroticized Polaroid photos of her which Starling will discover -- that leads to the construction of desire as "coveting."…
Film Analysis: American Beauty Women's Sexuality Film Analysis: American Beauty Film Analysis: American Beauty American Beauty (1999) was written by Alan Ball, creator of the HBO series 6 Feet Under, and directed by Sam Mendes. American Beauty centers around the Burnham family, who, on the surface seems like a picture-perfect, white, upper-middle class, suburban family. The protagonist of the film is the father and husband of the Burnham family, Lester, who, fed up with
Sexuality is defined, expressed, and experienced as a personal but also as a social and political phenomenon (Siedman, 2010, p. 11). The film 40-year-old Virgin presents a strikingly unique twist on Western norms and values related to sexuality. Specifically, 40-year-old Virgin focuses on male heteronormativity, and the notion of the male as being expected to be sexually virile and sexually ravenous from puberty onwards. When the title character is forced
Sexuality & PC-TV Facts About Human Sexuality This section will consist of facts about human sexuality, such as what are the dominant ideas and themes felt about sexuality; what are the criticisms; and what significant changes have been happening about sexuality over time. All facts listed in this section are pulled from Our Sexuality by Robert Crooks and Karla Baur. In order to accurately speak about the changes that the media, specifically television,
Film Noir Among the various styles of producing films, it has been observed the noir style is one that has come to be recognized for its uniqueness in characterization, camera work and striking dialogue. Film Noir of the 1940s and 50s were quite well-known for their feminine characters that were the protagonists, the femme fatale. This was most common with the French, later accepted in the United States. There might have
Movie production is one of the world's most enduring, exciting, and economically prosperous industries. Whether Bollywood or Hollywood, Bonnie and Clyde or Batman Returns, the film industry continues to rake in the dough and please a wide range of audiences. Chapter 6 of the text describes the origin of the film industry and its evolution and development. The authors also discuss the potential for film to influence cultural values as
The spectator is unwittingly sutured into a colonialist perspective. But such techniques are not inevitably colonialist in their operation. One of the innovations of Pontocorvo's Battle of Algiers is to invert the imagery of encirclement and exploit the identificatory mechanisms of cinema in behalf of the colonized rather than the colonizer (Noble, 1977). It is from within the casbah that we see and hear the French troops and helicopters. This