Music Video Theories Part 2

Laura Mulvey

Mulvey is a British feminist film theorist.
She is currently professor of film and media studies at Birkbeck, University of London.
She worked for the British Film Institute for many years before becoming a university professor.
Mulvey is best known for her essay 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', written in 1973 and published in 1975 in the influential British film theory journal Screen.

The main features of Laura Mulvey's Male Gaze Theory are:

• The representation of women in a sexual fantasy and from a heterosexuals male point of view
• Scopophilia - the pleasure involved in looking at other peoples bodies
• Objectification of female characters
• Patriarchal society
• Active male and passive female
• Men - controlling subjects
• Women as an image
• Men do the looking and the women are there to be looked at
• Needs of the male ego

Her article, which was influenced by the theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, was one of the first major essays that helped shift the orientation of film theory towards a psychoanalytic framework.
Mulvey states that she intends to use Freud and Lacan's concepts as a "political weapon." She then used some of their concepts to argue that the cinematic apparatus of classical Hollywood cinema inevitably put the spectator in a masculine subject position, with the figure of the woman on screen as the object of desire and "the male gaze".
In the era of classical Hollywood cinema, viewers were encouraged to identify with the protagonist of the film, who were, and still are, overwhelmingly male. Meanwhile, Hollywood women characters of the 1950s and '60s were, according to Mulvey, coded with "to-be-looked-at-ness" whilst the camera positioning and the male viewer constituted the "bearer of the look." Mulvey suggests two distinct modes of the male gaze of this era: "voyeuristic" (i.e. seeing woman as image "to be looked at") and "fetishistic" (i.e. seeing woman as a substitute for "the lack," the underlying psychoanalytic fear of castration).

Mulvey argues that the only way to annihilate the patriarchal Hollywood system is to 'radically challenge and re-shape the filmic strategies of classical Hollywood with alternative feminist methods'. She calls for a 'new feminist avant-garde filmmaking' that would 'rupture the narrative pleasure of classical Hollywood filmmaking'. She writes, "It is said that analysing pleasure or beauty annihilates it. That is the intention of this article."


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After reading the comment:

Mulvey's theory has influenced my planning because I am going to focus a lot on more on the woman in my video than videos by similar bands, as they tend to focus more on the band and use the woman simply just for their looks. Also, instead of using a stereotypical 'good looking' couple, I'm not going to film their faces, which will make them 'anonymous' but it will also show that I am using the two people to represent every type of couple, and not just the conventional ones. This will be something different for my audience because they are used to seeing woman being objectified in videos, whereas I won't be doing that. But the audience will still be able to relate to it, and will hopefully connect more with my video than that of other bands.