Psychoanalytic Film Theory Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2250 words

psychoanalytical Film Theory - Essay ExampleUsing Lacanian and Freudian psychoanalytic terms, Mulvey examined how women are portrayed in cinema, as she analyzes the manly gaze and its prospects of pleasure and nonpleasure (309). Mulveys essay can be asserted as a historical document, due to her examinations of the pleasurable and controlling dimensions of vision that several disciplines studied before her and extended by and by her work. She argued that the unconscious of the patriarchal system has projected itself unto the submit narrative. The young-begetting(prenominal) gaze had perilously affected the communication between the dominant and dominated sectors of society, where political binaries of man/woman and active/passive are present. This idea will discuss the reasons why feminist film scholars adopted psychoanalytic film possibleness. It will in any case use feminist psychoanalytic spectatorship theory in studying Hitchcocks Rear Window (1959). womens rightist sch olars adopted the psychoanalytic film theory, because the latter aims to examine and depict gender identity using cultural, rather of biological, concepts that are present in films, so that the exclusion of women in dominant film discourses can be identified and dismantled for purposes of political empowerment by breaking the domination of the male gaze and reversing spectatorship from male to female gazing. Rear Window (1959) depicts scopophilia through sexual stimulations of visual pleasures and narcissism, and its pervasive use of the sexual objectification of women, where the film sees them as sources of both pleasure and nonpleasure. Psychoanalytic film theory Feminist film scholars, during the 1970s, were interested in analyzing the diverse forms of gender oppressions that relegated them to a secondary social and political status (Kaplan 1238). Their takeoff was the cultural, and not the biological, aspect of negative female experiences, where cultural semiotic systems presen t relationships in how women are seen and consumed in films and in societies where they stomach in. These scholars noted that the objectification of women, which limited their desires and objectives, could be the root cause of their oppressed conditions in real and reel life. Spectatorship theory asserts that the spectator generally refers to the male spectator, who wants to see and control women, because of the visual pleasures that the feminine form can stomach (Sherwin 174). Psychoanalysis broadens spectatorship theory by unlocking the unconscious impulses that drive the male gaze (Mulvey 305). Thus, it could be seen that ideological womens liberation movement has strongly driven psychoanalytic film theory (Kaplan 1238). The primary appeal of psychoanalysis is that it presented a cover framework for understanding preexisting conventions of women from the patriarchal perspective (Mulvey 305). It is a fitting theoretical framework for the bud feminist film theory, which still ne eds conceptual foundations. Freud and Lacan, in particular, provided terms and processes that can help explicate how the male unconscious embeds itself unto society through its dominating gaze (Mulvey 305). The erotic processes of seeing have a direct impact on consuming the female form, and they also have implications on how women are portrayed in narrative films (Mulvey 305). Lacanian theory argues that films present a mirror image that underlies symbolic infrastructures (McGowan 28). The gaze represents the male imaginary and this imaginary builds the illusions of pleasures and nonpleasures (McGowan 28).