by morganwolf » Wed Dec 07, 2005 3:41 pm
Except for the parts in quotations, all of this is my own explication.<br><br>In our discussion of EWS, it is useful to consider the importance of what John Berger ( Ways of Seeing 1972) calls 'the gaze.' I had to read Berger for a film studies class years ago, and read Susan Sontag's On Photography for my visual anthropology class. I have to say that these works were, if you'll forgive the pun, eye opening.<br><br>Berger has a lot to say about how women view films that depict female nudity. The female spectator is 'conflicted' because she must 1) identify with the object of the gaze 2) must position herself as a male spectator in order to appreciate the traditional frontal nude representations inherent to post-Renaissance art.<br><br>Think about yourselves as spectators and how you reacted to this film. It's likely that the males had different reactions that the females. Think about the subjective experience of film viewing. Did you identify with Alice or Bill? Or both? Just interesting questions that encourage self-reflection. There are many ways to read this film. Kubrick probably thought about most of them, but each of sees what we want to see in this film. This is true of all visual representations. By virtue of the gaze's subjectivity, viewers 'see' with their eyes wide shut. We are doomed to make meaning according to what anthropologist Clifford Geertz termed our personal, albeit intricately woven, 'webs of significance.' That's a fwiw statement. Fwiw. <!--EZCODE EMOTICON START ;) --><img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/wink.gif ALT=";)"><!--EZCODE EMOTICON END--> <br><br>Back to the film and the power of the gaze.<br><br>Here are some text quotes from Berger and Sontag. My comments follow.<br><br>------------------<br>Notes on 'The Gaze'<br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/gaze/gaze08.html">www.aber.ac.uk/media/Docu...aze08.html</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br>In Ways of Seeing, a highly influential book based on a BBC television series, John Berger observed that ‘according to usage and conventions which are at last being questioned but have by no means been overcome - men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at’ (Berger 1972, 45, 47). Berger argues that in European art from the Renaissance onwards women were depicted as being ‘aware of being seen by a [male] spectator’ (ibid., 49), <br><br>Berger adds that at least from the seventeenth century, paintings of female nudes reflected the woman’s submission to ‘the owner of both woman and painting’ (ibid., 52). He noted that ‘almost all post-Renaissance European sexual imagery is frontal - either literally or metaphorically - because the sexual protagonist is the spectator-owner looking at it’ (ibid., 56). He advanced the idea that the realistic, ‘highly tactile’ depiction of things in oil paintings and later in colour photography (in particular where they were portrayed as ‘within touching distance’), represented a desire to possess the things (or the lifestyle) depicted (ibid., 83ff). This also applied to women depicted in this way (ibid., 92). <br><br>Writing in 1972, Berger insisted that women were still ‘depicted in a different way to men - because the "ideal" spectator is always assumed to be male and the image of the woman is designed to flatter him’ (ibid., 64). In 1996 Jib Fowles still felt able to insist that ‘in advertising males gaze, and females are gazed at’ (Fowles 1996, 204). And Paul Messaris notes that female models in ads addressed to women ‘treat the lens as a substitute for the eye of an imaginary male onlooker,’ adding that ‘it could be argued that when women look at these ads, they are actually seeing themselves as a man might see them’ (Messaris 1997, 41). Such ads ‘appear to imply a male point of view, even though the intended viewer is often a woman. So the women who look at these ads are being invited to identify both with the person being viewed and with an implicit, opposite-sex viewer’ (ibid., 44).<br><br>We may note that within this dominant representational tradition the spectator is typically assumed not simply to be male but also to be heterosexual, over the age of puberty and often also white. <br>-------------<br>Notes on 'The Gaze' - Daniel Chandler<br>The eye of the camera<br><br>Looking at someone using a camera (or looking at images thus produced) is clearly different from looking at the same person directly. Indeed, the camera frequently enables us to look at people whom we would never otherwise see at all. In a very literal sense, the camera turns the depicted person into an object, distancing viewer and viewed. <br><br>We are all familiar with anecdotes about the fears of primal tribes that 'taking' a photograph of them may also take away their souls, but most of us have probably felt on some occasions that we don't want 'our picture' taken. In controlling the image, the photographer (albeit temporarily) has power over those in front of the lens, a power which may also be lent to viewers of the image. In this sense, the camera can represent a 'controlling gaze'. <br><br>In her classic book, On Photography Susan Sontag referred to several aspects of 'photographic seeing' which are relevant in the current context (Sontag 1979, 89): <br><br>-- 'To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed' (ibid., 4)<br><br>-- 'Photographing is essentially an act of non-intervention... The act of photographing is more than passive observing. Like sexual voyeurism, it is a way of at least tacitly, often explicitly, encouraging what is going on to keep on happening' (ibid., 11-12); <br><br>-- 'The camera doesn't rape, or even possess, though it may presume, intrude, trespass, distort, exploit, and, at the farthest reach of metaphor, assassinate - all activities that, unlike the sexual push and shove, can be conducted from a distance, and with some detachment' (ibid., 13). <br><br>The functions of photography can be seen in the context of Michel Foucault's analysis of the rise of surveillance in modern society. Photography promotes 'the normalizing gaze, a surveillance that makes it possible to qualify, to classify and to punish. It establishes over individuals a visibility through which one differentiates and judges them' (Foucault 1977, 25). Photography was used in the second half of the nineteenth century to identify prisoners, mental patients and racial types (Tagg 198<!--EZCODE EMOTICON START 8) --><img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/glasses.gif ALT="8)"><!--EZCODE EMOTICON END--> . However, looking need not necessarily be equated with controlling (Lutz & Collins 1994, 365). <br><br>Film theorists argue that in order to 'suspend one's disbelief' and to become drawn into a conventional narrative when watching a film one must first 'identify with' the camera itself as if it were one's own eyes and thus accept the viewpoint offered (this is, for instance, an assumption made by Mulvey 1975). Whilst one has little option but to accept the locational viewpoint of the film-maker, to suggest that one is obliged to accept the preferred reading involves treating viewers as uniformly passive, making no allowance for 'negotiation' on their part. There are many modes of engagement with film, as with other media. <br><br>The film theorist Christian Metz made an analogy between the cinema screen and a mirror (Metz 1975), arguing that through identifying with the gaze of the camera, the cinema spectator re-enacts what the psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan called 'the mirror stage', a stage at which looking into the mirror allows the infant to see itself for the first time as other - a significant step in ego formation. Extending this observation to still photography, Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins observe that 'mirror and camera are tools of self-reflection and surveillance. Each creates a double of the self, a second figure who can be examined more closely than the original - a double that can also be alienated from the self - taken away, as a photograph can be, to another place' (Lutz & Collins 1994, 376). <!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/gaze/gaze06.html">www.aber.ac.uk/media/Docu...aze06.html</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br>-------------------<br>Laura Mulvey did not undertake empirical studies of actual filmgoers, but declared her intention to make ‘political use’ of Freudian psychoanalytic theory (in a version influenced by Jacques Lacan) in a study of cinematic spectatorship. Such psychoanalytically-inspired studies of 'spectatorship' focus on how 'subject positions' are constructed by media texts rather than investigating the viewing practices of individuals in specific social contexts. Mulvey notes that Freud had referred to (infantile) scopophilia - the pleasure involved in looking at other people’s bodies as (particularly, erotic) objects.<br><br>In the darkness of the cinema auditorium it is notable that one may look without being seen either by those on screen by other members of the audience. Mulvey argues that various features of cinema viewing conditions facilitate for the viewer both the voyeuristic process of objectification of female characters and also the narcissistic process of identification with an ‘ideal ego’ seen on the screen. She declares that in patriarchal society ‘pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female’ (Mulvey 1992, 27). This is reflected in the dominant forms of cinema.<br><br>Conventional narrative films in the ‘classical’ Hollywood tradition not only typically focus on a male protagonist in the narrative but also assume a male spectator. ‘As the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look onto that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence’ (ibid., 2<!--EZCODE EMOTICON START 8) --><img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/glasses.gif ALT="8)"><!--EZCODE EMOTICON END--> .<br><br>Traditional films present men as active, controlling subjects and treat women as passive objects of desire for men in both the story and in the audience, and do not allow women to be desiring sexual subjects in their own right. Such films objectify women in relation to ‘the controlling male gaze’ (ibid., 33), presenting ‘woman as image’ (or ‘spectacle’) and man as ‘bearer of the look’ (ibid., 27). Men do the looking; women are there to be looked at. The cinematic codes of popular films ‘are obsessively subordinated to the neurotic needs of the male ego’ (ibid., 33). It was Mulvey who coined the term 'the male gaze'. <br><br>See Laura Mulvey (feminist film theorist) on 'The Gaze':<br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/gaze/gaze09.html">www.aber.ac.uk/media/Docu...aze09.html</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br>--------------------------<br>My comments, using Berger as a way of making meaning --<br><br>Consider the power of Kidman's gaze as she appraises herself. In so doing, she subverts the traditional (as in post-Renaissance) role of the male spectator. The shots of her rear-end also subvert the relentless frontal nudity of the other female nudes in the film. Of all the women, she is the only one that appears to be in control of her body and how it is used -- except Domino, which I'll get to in a minute.<br><br>It's worth noting that it is Alice's gaze at her husband's flirtatious behavior, while she is dancing, that provokes most of the subsequent story line. Anticipating he is nearing that point of infidelity (revisiting Beethoven's operatic theme in Fidelio), the next night's pot smoking episode provokes her pent-up frustration with her husband, the breadwinner, who 'keeps' Alice in style while she figures out whether to return to another job. (Nod to whomever made the reference to Alice as just another prostitute, but she is respectable, in comparison to them, enjoying the social-economic distinction and privilege of marriage.)<br><br>During the argument, Bill sexually objectifies her, instead of being jealous of her near-miss with infidelity, with the waltzing Hungarian. Alice punishes him by recounting the (fictional?) story of the naval officer. Would she really have 'given up everything' for his one perfect guy, who may not exist? Her refusal to have sex with the Hungarian seems like a 'quaint' or 'outmoded' mindset when juxtaposed with Bill's mindset and post-party excesses.<br><br>More thoughts on Domino/Alice:<br><br>I see Domino as Alice's alter-ego, clad in animal furs, living in a wild, unprotected environment, pursuing her animalistic urges. I mentioned in a previous post that Alice must release her Domino self/shade/alter in order to satisfy her husbands growing hunger for the forbidden while, at the same time, retaining control over him and the tight structure of their marriage.<br><br>It is interesting that Bill makes the offer of money - that is one way to diminish Domino's power. From the moment they meet, Domino seems to be unwilling to take money. Is she pursuing Bill for her own sexual satisfaction? If so, she is in control. For that, she must be punished, as all 'loose' women are: she gets AIDS. (Hitchcock has been showing moviegoers what happens to sexually active women since Psycho, which imho, began the era of the slasher films.)<br><br>Also, do we all agree that Domino at the ritual? I'd say yes, but who knows?<br><br>Last night, I thought about the bizarre street assault scene, when the gang of thugs knock Bill against a parked car and call him a fag, or Mary. It appears to be another provocation to prove his sexual potency by engaging in risky, extra-marital behavior. Interesting that Alice interrupts her husband before he can consummate his evening with Domino. Her well-timed phone call rescues Harford from contracting AIDS. But he is still restless. Here, I again have to agree with Pants Elk again.<br><br>Nick Nightingale is the "devil" who tempts Bill (why else let him see the password and then give him the address to Somerset?). <br><br>Thinking back to what I found in Bullfinch's Mythology, Nick can be seen as the nightingale making ready to sing over the grave of Orpheus (Bill) who he does expect to survive after his visit to the Underworld. He does survive, but barely. Only by returning to Alice does Bill find redemption and rebirth. (One reading of many!)<br><br>Last thing - Ziegler's Party/Somerset: think about the light/dark dichotomy and the color scheme: gold and white (heavenly colors?) vs. red/black (hell/underworld colors)?<br><br>Subtext piles on subtext. I love it. Wonderful thread, people. <p></p><i></i>
