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)