Assignment: Expanded Participation Activity: Explore a new theorist and theory:

Theorist: Laura Mulvey – Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

Mulvey’s theory uses psychoanalysis to understand how the fascination of film is reinforced by pre-existing patterns of fascination within the human and social ideas. Building off the social formations from Freud’s theory on psychoanalysis and fetishism but with a more political stance and a feminist emphasis. Mulvey emphasizes and defines the gaze

Mulvey emphasizes the destruction of pleasure is the radical weapon within technological advances that push cinema to a radical way in both political as well as aesthetic changes within the mainstream cinema. Through this, Mulvey asserts an analysis of pleasure and beauty to destroy it. Further emphasis of the pleasure of the spectator losing themselves within film and experiencing the protagonist’s experiences synchronously enhances the ontological experience. Mulvey further emphasizes that cinema offers a number of possible pleasures including the experience of looking itself is a pleasure, but also the notion of being looked at. Because of the camera’s ability to manipulate conditions of filmic production, the viewer themselves have their gaze too intentionally architecturally created. This reflexive exploration through cinema back onto the spectacle itself, cinema is able to build and grow further.

The importance of this theory is that Mulvey develops a theory of cinema being reflexive but simultaneously exploratory on the notions of human pleasure through the experience of not only viewing but also on the notion of how to push cinema to a new level through the gendered lens – not just any gendered lens but a pleasure filled fetishization of the ontological experience. In the class, we have once covered the fetishization of faces within film – this builds it further and theorizes how this fetishization is pushed a step further and manipulated to create a pleasure and almost addictive experience.