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“Mulvey’s theories regarding activity and passivity are quite simple in regards to films and narritives pieces. Activity speaks in regards to male roles and passitvity speaks in regards of female roles. Male roles hold the power in relationships and are often seen as more aggressive or forward where as female roles are often seen as more passive and “on display”. “the female is always on display for not only the main character, but for the audience members viewing the film.” (Mulvey 1999)
With this being said, i do believe as i and others have mentioned in this unit as well as previous as time is progressing, society is as well and with this progression comes changes in trends. I believe televison and movies are greatly adjusting to these new found beliefs including that of strong female roles. As seen in sex and the city and gilmore girls.”
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Q: What are Mulvey’s theories regarding activity and passivity. Provide a summary.
:1
Similar to criticism and theory on literature, film theory has focused on the relationship between director/writer/film production, audience and the film text. In the study of film, the “pleasure of the spectator” has been the focus of much feminist criticism, and this criticism has employed psychoanalytical theories in particular. Semiotic theory has also been at the centre of film theory as a means of determining aesthetic codes particular to film.
Psychoanalytical film criticism rests initially on the idea that a film is a cultural text; in film, subjectivity is produced and affirmed, and ideology is disseminated through spectatorial identification with characters, narrative meaning and supporting aesthetic codes. The film positions the spectator so that “he” receives certain meanings, which are in keeping with the dominant ideology. From this point of view, the spectator is a passive receptor of meaning; the spectator is not a producer of meaning. Hence, the film is both container and disseminator of meaning or, actually, of ideology. The film functions as propaganda.
In keeping with this viewpoint, early feminist analysis of film focused on the gaze and demonstrated how most theories of film assumed that the gaze was male. E. Deidre Pribram asks, “How have we come to perceive all forms of filmic gaze as male when women have always taken up their proportionate share of seats in the cinema” (1). Not only did film critics complain about the invisibility of women as audience members but also about how women have been denied access to controlling the gaze as directors.
Mainstream feminist arguments regarding women as lack and as other in a patriarchal society found their way into feminist film criticism in terms of semiotic analysis of films and in terms of exposing the norms and practices in the film industry. Similar to the findings of literary criticism, feminist critiques of films made by men revealed that women characters were not often subjects of the film or even well-developed characters but were objects by which the patriarchal culture defined itself and its male characters. Stereotypes of women were the norm and the extreme stereotypes of whore, mother and virgin were and still are commonplace in mainstream films. Feminist analysis determined that “mainstream cinema’s contradictory/complementary representations of women as either idealized objects of desire or as threatening forces to be “tamed” are not attempts to establish female subjectivity but rather reflect the search for male self-definition” (Pribram 1).
In terms of film discourse, women are positioned as silent characters, “without language or voice” (Pribram 1). In terms of the gaze, the gaze was determined to “belong” to the male, and the female audience is positioned as having to identify with the male-as-subject or female-as-object. The Mulvey article is a good example of such arguments about the gaze, and it was seen as a groundbreaking theory when it was first published in 1975.
Read the article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” by Laura Mulvey
Q2:Summarize Doane’s theories on proximity and distance, and the specificity of the female spectator and female gaze. How does narcissism factor into this opposition between proximity and distance?
Female Spectatorship
There are three issues central to feminist study of female spectatorship:
1. the individual female spectator
2. Female spectators as historically and socially constituted groups
3. Female audiences as participants in film’s broad popular base
All of these issues begin with the acknowledgement of the presence of women and the importance of women to the “cinematic experience” (Pribham 5).
Read the article “Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator” by Mary Ann Doane.
