The Male Gaze in Chicago

The Male Gaze, is the idea that the female character(s) are purely in the scene as an erotic object for the male characters and male audience. They're are there to be looked at, that is their meaning in the scene/film.




The Cell Block Tango scene from Chicago is a prime example of the male gaze in film. In the scene the girls are dancing around in lingerie in Tango style, a style seen as being sensual, passionate and intimate. The male gaze is prominent throughout this scene, and this is shown by the intense focus on the female body and the way it moves during the tango style dance routine and the close ups on the dancers' legs; also the costumes used in the scene also scream male gaze as they're all dressed in lingerie and heel showing off their physique of the girls, making them an erotic object to the male viewer.

The types of shots used in this scene show the camera as a male with desires towards the women; the long shots show the whole body of the females with them dancing around in the lingerie style costumes which strongly implies the desires towards the females that, in Mulvey's theory, are only a part of the scene to be erotic objects for characters in the scene and the audience.
The close ups do a similar thing, but instead they set the focus in a particular area, for example theres a close up shot on one of the dancers crotch with while rising one foot through the instep drawing all attention to her crotch defining her as a erotic object for males either in the film or in the audience. 
The lighting also helps apply Mulvey's theory, the shot when the spotlight hits on the couple doing the spread eagle lift on the drum beat causes your eyes to be drawn to that movement, for Mulvey that would be what a heterosexual male would do in that given situation.

Freud's Theory of the 'Self' in Fight Club

The first scene, I believe, displays Tyler Durden as the id really well. While the Narrator is sat reading the article of the organ Tyler is riding round the house in a very childlike manner. The way Tyler throws himself off the bike at the end of the scene shows the lack of concern for the consequences of actions, although it is only a small consequence of a possible bruise it could be used a metaphor for the bigger decisions Tyler makes with bigger consequences, like Project Mayhem later in the film. Tyler survives solely off desires and wants, and doesn't live in reality he lives in the ideal world where living off desires doesn't end horribly.

The Second scene where the Narrator is always in shot but Tyler and Marla are coming in and out of shot but never together shows the 3 parts working at the same time. It starts with Tyler saying "Tell 'em you blew it all up" straight away shows him as the id as its a very irrational thing to suggest which is a characteristic of the id, being irrational and childish. The childish side comes through further into the clip as well when he tells the Narrator to get rid of Marla when he's done with her rather than doing it himself, much like when a child gets other people to do things for them when they'd rather be doing something else.
To counteract Tyler as the id, Marla takes the part of the superego. This is shown by her very rational and grounded way of thinking. She is the opposite to Tyler Durden and tries to get the Narrator round to her way of thinking, to make him more in touch with the world around him rather than Tyler's made up ideal world where the outcomes of situations don't matter if the action is what you want to do.

Shot Types for Psychoanalytical Film

I would like for my film to start with mirror shot of the main character, in the way her parents want to see her, put together and neat. I feel like a mirror shot is good start to my film as the idea of starting with a reflection being what is seen first gives the impression that what you first see isn't what is true; which later becomes known as the 'her' that her parents know isn't who she really wants to be. She feels trapped in the reflection of her parents ideals.

I plan to used long and extreme long shots to show the isolation the main character is feeling at the point in the film where she is still trying to fill the void although she is drinking and smoking, what she expected to fill the void and make her feel whole. 






The high angle would be used in parts of the film in which the main character is under the control of her parents. The use of the high angle would show that the main character is inferior in the situation and not in control of her own life; instead she is controlled by her authoritative parents.

I plan to use POV shots during the main characters downward spiral, when she's smoking and taking drugs. I think it'll give it more impact to give the feeling of it being the viewers point of view; maybe feel more relatable.





Close ups gives a closer look into the emotions of the character in frame which is vital to my concept. The girl who is central in my film is a very emotional teenage girl, so I feel that close ups will capture the level of emotion I need to portray the character to the extent I would like.

Psychoanalytical Film Idea

Lacan 'lack' Theory

My idea is a young girl who is living under the control of super authoritative parents with very strict rules and expectations. From watching TV and on social media the girl believes she is missing out on a regular life. She starts to act out against her parents' wishes, begins to drink and sneak out in order to live the life she thinks she's missing out on.
As the film progresses her problems get worse and goes from small issues (sneaking out and occasional drink) to excessive drinking and sleeping around to rebel against her parents; to the point of no return.


The 'lack' missing from my main character's life is the 'typical' teenage life that in reality doesn't actually exist, which is why the more she drinks and acts out she still feels the need to carry on because she's trying to live up to the expectations set by the media and the lives portrayed are unattainable in real life. Yet she continues to reach out for what she can never have.

Freud 'self' Theory

As well as Lacan's 'lack' my film will also demonstrate Freud's theory of the 3 parts of the self.

The parents act as the superego
The main character is the ego
The TV show (Skins) represents the id

Visual Mood Board

I found these images on google images as a visual mood board of the ideas I have for my film, these include screen caps from TV shows (Skins and Gossip Girl). 

Lacan's Theory in Fight Club

Lacan's theory suggests that during our early years, between 6 to 18 months old, in which our younger selves see our reflection as a perfect being and from then constantly try to achieve the perfection that is 'lacking'.



A nameless first person narrator (Edward Norton) attends support groups in attempt to subdue his emotional state and relieve his insomniac state. When he meets Marla (Helena Bonham Carter) another fake attendee of support groups, his life seems to become a little more bearable. However when he associates himself with Tyler (Brad Pitt) he is dragged into an underground fight club and soap making scheme. Together the two men spiral out of control and engage in competitive rivalry for love and power. When the narrator is exposed to the hidden agenda of Tyler's fight club, he must accept the awful truth that Tyler may not be who he says he is. 


Fight Club shows how easy it is for people to become so engrossed in ‘bettering their lives’ that it leads to destruction of some sort. The Narrator feels he is living an empty live with no personal identity or purpose where was Tyler Durden is living a full life with the soap business and a lot of personality. The Narrator feels as though something in his life is missing so tries many different things to try and fill the gap from buying all the new furniture from the Ikea catalogue so that he can feel like his life is the way it should be, but when that doesn’t help he buys something new until his condo looks like the Ikea catalogue itself. During this scene text flashes up onscreen in the font and format used in an Ikea catalogue. The text takes up the majority of the screen showing that it’s taking up the majority of the Narrator’s life because he’s trying to make his life the perfect life he sees in the catalogue.

 

As well as the catalogue lifestyle he starts to attend self-help groups for the terminally ill/dying in attempt to fill the void he’s feeling. He goes to the self-help groups to make himself feel better by being surrounded by people who really have it worse than him, like Bob, Bob has lost his testicles due to cancer and because of the hormone imbalance in his body he grew breasts, he’s lost part of what makes him a man and gained a womanly asset; his life is a lot worse than what we know of the Narrator’s. When he realises that the groups aren’t working he moves onto the next thing because they aren’t giving him what he wanted. The next thing being his condo blowing up losing his ‘perfect Ikea’ lifestyle leading him to meet Tyler and fight club beginning. The fight club is giving the Narrator the fix of adrenaline and filling the space he thinks he needs only later for not to be enough kick starting project mayhem, all with the help of Tyler and him being the front man of both fight club and project mayhem. As project mayhem unfolds it loops back to the first scene of the film which gives the audience the impression that after everything the Narrator goes through to find what he thinks to be missing none of it was enough for him and he’s going to start all over again until he finds what wants to fulfill the void. Adding the character of Tyler Durden adds depth and dimension to the situation of the Narrator trying to find what he wants as it shows him as chasing what he sees as the perfect lifestyle for him, which is Tyler’s life. Using Freud’s theory of the self and seeing Tyler as just an aspect of the Narrator’s self shows that the Narrator is chasing a life of someone he thinks to have what he wants when in reality its himself he’s trying to be, just what his mind sees as the ‘perfect’ him.

Lacan

Jacques Lacan was a major figure in twentieth century Parisian intellectual life and often referred to as "The French Freud". He is a highly significant figure in the history of psychoanalysis.

Lacan proposed that the mirror stage was part of an infant's development from 6 to 18 months.

The account of the mirror stage is feasibly Lacan's most famous theoretical contribution. Initially developed in the 1930s, it involves a number of interrelated ingredients. Lacan offers the narrative of this stage as an explanation for the functions of the Freudian psychical agency of the ego.

By early 1950s, Lacan's concept of the mirror stage had evolved: he no longer considered the mirror stage as a moment in the life of the infant, but as representing a permanent structure of subjectivity, or as the paradigm of "imaginary order".

One of the psychoanalytic and philosophical upshots of the mirror stage, a crucial one in Lacan's eyes, is that the ego is an object rather than a subject. In other words, the ego, despite conscious senses to the contrary, is not a locus of autonomous agency, the seat of a free, true “I” determining its own fate. This portrait of the ego-as-object is at the heart of Lacan's lifelong critical polemics against Anglo-American ego psychology, with the ego psychologists seeking to strengthen their patients' egos by appealing to supposed autonomous and “conflict-free” sides of these psychical agencies. Against this, Lacan views the ego as thoroughly compromised and inherently neurotic to its very core, as a passionate defence of a constitutive ignorance of the unconscious.

Related the idea of "lack" and that it caused desires to arise.

"Desire is a relation to being to lack. The lack is the lack of being properly speaking. It is not the lack of this or that, but the lack of being whereby the being exists."

Similar to the Freudian approach of id acting on the hedonistic lifestyle where was the Superego act on the moral principles and what "lack" related to is the Ego which is in between. From a Freudian approach, the "lack" of hedonistic features strive us to act on moral principles and vice versa. Can never fulfil the "lack", desires have to be unreasonable.

Mulvey

Laura Mulvey's 1975 essay "Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema", coined the term 'male gaze' which became a well known and discussed theory.

In film, the male gaze is when the audience put in the perspective of a straight man, for example, a scene may focus on a woman's body and its curves, showing the scene from a males point of view. It is only the male gaze if the curves are emphasised with specific conventions like slow motion, cut aways or deliberate camera movements.

The male gaze theory denies women of their own identity, showing them as subordinate to men and as objects of admiration of physical appearance. The male gaze is very prominent in James Bond films
The female characters in film is key; she often has little importance herself, she is there more to make the male feel more important and needed.

Mulvey states that the female character in a narrative has two functions:

As an erotic object for the characters within the narrative to view
As an erotic object for the audience within the cinema (or wherever viewing) to view.

Female objectification is related to the male gaze, that when the persons gazed at are objectified, treated as an object whose sole value is to be enjoyed by those viewing. Characters that are objectified are often devalued and their humanity and personal identity is removed.

taken from Laura Mulvey,
Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema

Mulvey posits that gender power asymmetry is a controlling force in cinema and constructed for the pleasure of the male viewer, which is deeply rooted in patriarchal ideologies and discourses. The concept has subsequently been prominent in feminist film theory, media studies, as well as communications and cultural studies. This term can also be linked to models of scopophilia, and narcissism.

The man emerges as the dominant power within the created film fantasy. The woman is passive to the active gaze from the man. This adds an element of "patriarchal" order. Mulvey argues that, in mainstream cinema, the male gaze typically takes precedence over the female gaze, reflecting an underlying power asymmetry.

This inequality can be attributed to patriarchy which has been defined as a social ideology embedded in the belief systems of Western culture and in patriarchal societies. It is either masculine individuals or institutions created by these individuals that exert the power to determine what is considered "natural".

These constructed beliefs begin to seem "normal" because they are common and carry out unchallenged, thus arguing that Western culture has a hierarchical ideology which sets masculinity in binary opposition to femininity thus creating levels of inferiority.

Mulvey describes its two central forms that are based in Freud’s concept of scopophilia, as: "pleasure that is linked to sexual attraction (voyeurism in extremis) and scopophilic pleasure that is linked to narcissistic identification (the introjection of ideal egos)", in order to show how women have historically been forced to view film through the "male gaze".

Combo of Lacan and Freud

Film fascinates us (engages our emotions), through images and spectacle

Mulvey uses psychoanalysis 'to discover where and how the fascination of film is reinforced by pre-existing patterns of fascination already at work within the individual subject' (= spectator)
She says she is using psychoanalytic theory 'as a political weapon'

Hollywood/mainstream/narrative cinema manipulates visual pleasure
It 'codes the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order'
Scopophilia = pleasure in looking (Freud)
Examples of the private and curious gaze: children's voyeurism, cinematic looking
The most pleasurable looking = looking at the human form and the human face, figural looking (corresponds to psychic patterns)

'Woman as image, man as bearer of the look'

Pleasure in looking split between active/male and passive/female
women connote "to-be-looked-at-ness'
The visual presence of women 'works against the development of a stortyline, freezes the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation.'
The woman functions as both erotic object for the characters within the screen story and erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium (object of fantasy)
The spectator is led to identify with the main male protagonist.
'The power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look.'

The male gaze and fetishistic scopophilia in 'Le Mepris/Vivre Sa Vie'

Scopophilia is the force driving the movements and positioning of the camera.

The gaze is male, and the spectator is led to identify with this male gaze.
The cinematic apparatus is not gender-neutral (in later readings, camera can also register differences of sexuality)

Health and Safety

Health and Safety of location shoots:

The health and safety of any crew and members of the public must be taken into consideration before any filming happens. If health and safety procedures weren't taken and someone was injured the filming would be delayed or cancelled altogether. If filming out in a public area the weather is a significant aspect that can affect the health and safety of cant crew or public; for instance, if it had been raining the floor would be slippery and someone could fall and injure themselves. Also any equipment used when on location could been seen as a hazard, all equipment should be watched over to ensure it is safe to those using it as well as those who may be passing by.

Health and Safety in the studio:

When working in the studio you need to ensure that all cables are tidy and not a tangled mess on the floor that someone could trip over especially if the studio is dark during a shoot. Also the movement of lights, the lights must be cool to touch before manoeuvring them to avoid burning yourself on them as they get very hot. When work in the studio is complete make sure all lights are off properly so they don't overheat or blow out. If using a tripod it needs to be set up correctly so that it is secure so that it doesn't fall and break any equipment or injure any member of the crew.

ISO

ISO measure the sensitivity of the image sensor. A lower ISO setting has smaller grain meaning the image will be a better quality, whereas a higher ISO setting has a higher grain meaning the image will be a poorer quality. 



This clips shows demonstrations of ISO 100 and 200, because of the low ISO setting the image is a clear high quality with a small amount of grain; if it was a higher ISO setting there would be a higher grain making the image quality poor and there's also a chance it may have been overexposed if I'd have left all other settings the same for a low ISO.

Biblography

tvtropes

Wikipedia

The Film Experience (book)

Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (book)

Wikipedia - Taxi Driver

SparkNotes - Taxi Driver

Filmsite - The Graduate

MTV - The Graduate

Wikipedia - Bonnie and Clyde

Girls Do Film - Bonnie and Clyde

Sense of Cinema - Bonnie and Clyde

IMDb - Bonnie and Clyde

Aperture

The space through which light passes through the lens on the camera. The change in aperture can provide more than one dimension into a photograph.
Aperture is measured in f-stops; the higher the f-stop the smaller the hole for light to be let in, and the lower the f-stop the larger the hole for the light.



This video is an example of a low f-stop (f2.8) using a 60mm lens. The focus of this shot is the wooden stump in the left of the screen, with the foreground and background not in focus. If I was to redo this I would aim to have the duck in focus rather than the wooden stump; but at the same time I think this example works well in displaying the aperture setting f2.8.

 

This video displays the aperture setting f8 using a standard lens. Using this f-stop and lens the whole shot should be in focus, however I am unsure that this is correct; so if I was to reshoot this setting I would make sure the entire shot is in focus and chose a setting that shows that the shot is in focus.

 

Shutter Speed

Shutter speed is the amount of time in which the camera is exposed to light. 



This clip is shot at 1/30 in 24fps and captures the movement in each frame, this a blurred effect to the shot as the camera catches more motion in each frame.




This video is shot at 1/50 which is best for 24fps as it is double the frame rate which gives a clearer image.




 The shutter speed of this clips is over 1/50th with 24fps, but I am unsure of the exact number, however as it over double of the frame rate it has given a crisp image and reduced the amount of motion caught by the camera unlike the first clip of 1/30th.