- 1st person player clip
- 'intense, life-like'
- 'enables me to think I'm in the game'
- 3rd person player clip
'more cinematic like an interactive movie'
'it's harder to control other people in the third - that's why I like it'
(Different perspectives)
-What motivates us to hurt?
- What motivates us to watch it?
- Can control engagement with death and violence - maximum or minimum.
- Choice is down to player.
- Psychoanalysis: analysis of options and choices we make.
Aims
- Look at ideas about the power of looking through psychoanalysis.
- Consider: scopophilia, suture, intra/extra-diagetic and narcissim.
- Introduce film theory and feminist psychoanalysis.
- Key thinkers/authors: Freud, Mulvey (Women as sex objects), Jacques Lacan and Kaja Silverman.
Different perspectives
- First lecture looked at the power of the gaze through 'discourse analysis' - how knowledge is formed. And focussed on institutional structures.
- This lecture looks at the gaze through psychoanalysis. This will focus on psychical, interpersonal and sexual relations.
Misconceptions
- Mishmash of psychology (behaviour) and psychiatry (mental illness).
Linked to both that can be applied to all aspects of society, art and design.
-It's all about sex.
It does focus on the role of sexuality, particularly at infancy but is also about how we look at other objects, and our behaviour towards them.
Laura Mulvey 'Visual and Other Pleasures'
- Hollywood films - sexist - gaze is represented as male and powerful.
- Plot of film, male driven.
- Women are seen as sex objects.
-Scopophilia
- Pleasure of looking at others' bodies as objects.
- Instinctual desire to look - this emerges in childhood.
- Extreme scopophilia - can lead to voyeurism in which the person's only sexual gratification comes from being a peeping tom.
- Narcissistic identification: (Mulvey) spectators identify with male hero.
Jacques Lacan - Mirror Stage
- Projected notion of ideal ego in image reflected.
- Child's own body - less perfect.
- Films can produce a fascination in image - lead to loss of ego.
- Comic book guy's narcissistic identification with film hero and comic book only highlight loss of ego.
Contradiction in two pleasurable structures...
1. scopophilia - sexual stimulation by sight (objectifying actors on screen).
2. narcissistic identification - with image seen.
- Cinema thrives on contradiction.
- Product of patriarchal realities.
Women as image/ Men as bearer of look
- Passive female, active male.
- Male gaze projects fantasy on to female figure.
-'male figure cnanot bear the burden of sexual objectification'
- 'By means of identification with him (male actor e.g. Brad Pitt), through participation in his power the spectator can indirectly possess her (female actress e.g. Angelina Jolie) too.
Suture (extending Mulvey's theory)
- Spectators look through eyes of the actors in the film.
- Follow gaze - without guilt.
- Can be broken - actor speaks to us.
- When broken - audience aware of gaze.
- Possibility of audience feeling guilty.
- This gaze invites audience to be part of scene.
Spectator's gaze
- Gaze of viewer at an image.
- Most common form of gaze.
e.g. Us viewing Toby (lecturer).
- We are also viewing others in audience, this is...
Intra-diagetic gaze
- Gaze of one depicted person at another within an image.
e.g. Toby sees us looking at him and looking at others
Degas: Le Vial (The Rape)
Cropped image above.
Full image.
Gaze: Intra-diagetic
- It is the character that gazes at the subject (girl).
- This exhibits the power of the gaze, we don't obtain it but recognise the power.
- Defers guilt.
Dolce and Gabbana Advert
Gaze: Intra-diagetic
- No guilt, we are not perpetrators.
- Possibility of narcissistic identification.
Edouard Manet: A Bar at the Folies Bergère
Gaze: Extra Diagetic
- Invited to be viewed as the artist.
Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnés (1946-1966) Mixed media.
- Go up to door look through hole.
- Translation: being given.
- Being given what? The gaze? Permission?
- Contemporary computer games use different forms of the gaze.
- Hitman pick, intra-diagetic or suture.
- Suture forces empathy, between player and protagonist.
- This is broken when we are rmeinded that the gaze is constructed.
Conclusion
- Different forms of the gaze evoke different structures of power.
- We can objectify (scopophilia) and identify (narcissistic identification).
- Visual culture employs different gazes to evoke structures of patriarchy.
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