UWE. Visual Culture: Retrospective reflections on Laura Mulvey

 Reflections on Laura Mulvey. 

(The original notes were in the form of jottings and annotations on the hard copy of the selected text of Visual pleasure and the Narrative Cinema, scanned copies of these sheets of paper were not appropriate for the blog)

• The following points were the essential themes gathered from the reading and the seminar on Mulvey's writing.
• Mulvey used Freudian psychoanalytical theory in a political way to decode twentieth century cinema; in particular the use of the notion of the castrated women as a way of making sense of the phallocentric and the dominant patriarchal order in twentieth century cinema.
• Mulvey explored the notion of scopophilia using the ideas of Freud and Jacques Lacan to explain how male voyeuristic fantasy has infiltrated into the vast majority of facets that make up cinema. Mulvey coined the words, "the male gaze".
• The exploitative nature of using another person as an object for sexual stimulation through sight was also expanded upon. Mulvey also used Freudian psychoanalysis to explain the associations between voyeurism and sodomasochism.
• Mulvey also analysed the cinema as a focus of alienation where these activities can take place. This lead into how the camera, the audience and the characters are loaded into this phallocentric slanting of twentieth century cinema.
• She illustrated he thoughts with plenty of examples, the most notable were the films of Alfred Hitchcock.
• Discussion about the validity of Muvey's ideas revolved around more or less exclusive reliance on Freuds and associates theories which have been either discredited or not in use in other fields such as psychiatry. The other point raised was the passive and gullible nature of Mulvey's cinema audience. The relationship between the dynamics of the components of cinema with the audience was not fully explored.