Mulvey, Lutz, Collins

This week's articles address the subject of the gaze and how it affects people's perceptions of what they are viewing. In Mulvey's chapter Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, she focuses on the area of film and the ways in which it is viewed. She also looks at how women are portrayed in films which refer directly to how men perceive women. According to Mulvey there are two ways to derive pleasure from films. The first is scopophilia, meaning the pleasure that is taken from viewing people as objects and subjecting them to a controlled and curious gaze (Mulvey 835). The second way allows the viewer to identify with what they are seeing, to in some way relate to the character on screen (Mulvey 836). Mulvey then goes on to discuss how women are portrayed in cinema. She notes that primarily men are active viewers, the ones doing the looking and women are passive, the ones being looked at (Mulvey 837). On a psychoanalytical basis, taken from Freud, women are shown in films in a certain way due to 'castration complex' (Mulvey 840). Because women are sexually different, it causes men to become anxious. In film this is addressed in two different ways; either by investigating and demystifying the woman, followed by the punishment, devaluation or saving of her or turning the woman into an object, a fetish (Mulvey 840). Mulvey brings to light the inherent sexuality and desire seen in films, one that is often directed at the male gaze. I find her work to be interesting and relevant to today's media, especially in advertising, which is often created specifically for the male gaze and constantly objectifies women.

In the Lutz and Collin's article, photographs and the gaze afforded to them is addressed. This article explores “the significance of "gaze" for intercultural relations in the photograph” (Collins Lutz 134) as well as the seven kinds of gaze – photographer's, magazine's, reader's, non-Western subject's, explicit looking done by Westerner's framed in photo, gaze in mirror's or camera's shown in photo and finally the academic gaze (134). All of these gazes have different perspectives towards a photograph and shape how it is perceived. Like Mulvey, Lutz and Collins also address the male gaze. Since they are speaking about photos in a widely read magazine, National Geographic, they can rule out a separate category of male or female gaze since the audience is a large demographic containing both. While each author is addressing different media and slightly different subject matter, Mulvey, Lutz and Collins make the point that the gaze of the viewer and who that viewer is has an effect of how the film or photograph is perceived by that person.