' For a director -- and most directors just like most voyeurs, clinically speaking, are male -- can render even a heterosexual woman's gaze into a desiring male gaze, simply by focusing on such sensual aspects of feminine behavior, such as Marylyn Monroe's bejeweled cleavage in "Gentlemen prefer Blondes." The female viewer might prefer to gaze at the male faces of the suited individuals who fawn about the lovely Ms. Monroe's amply evident charms. But by virtue of Howard Hawk's production, the men of this song and dance routine who wave black ropes of diamonds at the conventionally attractive and voluptuously presented actress are virtually faceless -- there is no camera focus on any individual, so the men appear to be a sea of white faces in black suits in a sea of pink. The pink costume of the actress makes all eyes draw to her, as well as the fact that she is the singer. Even a scene where Monroe and her compatriot, the even more generously endowed Jane Russell, sing at a cafe in a French street, the broadness...
All eyes are on the actresses and their most feminine assets of legs, breasts, and highly roughed lips and cheeks. "Don't you know that a man being rich is like a woman being pretty?" asks Monroe's character Lori lee, of her desired object of marriage. However, unlike wealth, which can be concealed, beauty is in evidence, in the camera's visually present lens, unlike money that is concealed, visually. In the film, we know a man is rich because we are told by the women he is wealthy, but we know as voyeurs that they are sexually desirable because the camera tells us, by virtue of its focus, even if 'we' as viewers are heterosexual female who would not see them as such, in ordinary life.
Nino, like Amelie, is a kind of professional voyeur. During the day, he sells sexual pictures of people, and during the evening he creates photographic collages of stranger's faces in the name of his art. Nino's creation of art is only through snips of life, rather than through actually experiencing life. Like the title character, Nino gazes at others and manipulates their lives from his hidden position. Amelie cannot allow
Gradually, the viewer's pleasure of being the knowing doctor shifts to the pleasure of socially-sanctioned unwilling penetration: "But the worst of it was that I too had got beyond reason. I could have torn the child apart in my own fury and enjoyed it. It was a pleasure to attack her. My face was burning with it," says the doctor as he grows angry with the girl's intransigence. Mulvey might
Gaze Seeing, Looking, Regarding When Mulvey (1975) wrote about the psychological importance of the male gaze, most women would have recognized in her description of the dynamics of phallocentrism and the male observation of women their own experiences. Mulvey argued that men use their ability an authority to look at women as a means of maintaining their power in a patriarchal society, and this use of the gaze is something that women
A perfect example of this is located in Chapter three. Chapter three opens with the camera zooming steadily in on a window. The shot then cuts to a shot of streetlights, establishing the time of day as early morning. Even though simply not enough of the room is exhibited to demonstrate what exactly exists within it, the shot following the streetlight is of a woman in bed, strongly suggesting it
Bazin, Mulvey, the "Male Gaze," and Taxi Driver The claim that Taxi Driver refutes Bazin's photographic/realist notion of cinema and affirms Mulvey's idea of the "male gaze" is valid when one considers the film in light of the "lens" of director Scorsese and his journey for the hero Travis Bickle. On the surface, it is a film about the "real" streets of New York City and the "real life" of an
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
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