Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

by Laura Mulvey

Genres: Nonfiction, Feminism, Film, Essays, Art, Theory, Philosophy

15 pages, Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

Laura Mulvey is an English feminist film theorist. She was educated at St Hilda's College, Oxford. She is currently professor of film and media studies at Birkbeck, University of London. She worked at the British Film Institute for many years before taking up her current position.

Mulvey is best known for her essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", written in 1973 and published in 1975 in the influential British film theory journal Screen. It later appeared in a collection of her essays entitled Visual and Other Pleasures, as well as in numerous other anthologies. Her article, which was influenced by the theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, is one of the first major essays that helped shift the orientation of film theory towards a psychoanalytic framework. Prior to Mulvey, film theorists such as Jean-Louis Baudry and Christian Metz used psychoanalytic ideas in their theoretical accounts of the cinema. Mulvey's contribution, however, inaugurated the intersection of film theory, psychoanalysis and feminism.

(via wiki)

Reviews

[anistyn]

unrelated, but i will never take another film class again

[No' · Rating 5 out of 5]

This article exposes the construction of a male gaze that hypersexualises the women in movies. It takes its roots in Freud's theory and works with three main ideas : phallocentrism and the fear of castration, scopophilia and women as an erotic object to be looked at.
It's written in 1975, so it takes "old movies" as examples (e.g Hitchcock) but I think it's interesting to find our own examples in today's cinema, and think of the rise of transformative works and the construction of a female/feminine gaze that offer an alternative to the misogynistic way women are represented in movies.

[Wera · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 stars

Incredible essay and very easy to understand thanks to the structure! I'm sure I am not quite grasping some concepts (had to look up some vocab as it was being used in the context of the article) and I wasn't familiar with the examples Mulvey used, but I am encouraged to watch the films she mentioned and come back to this essay.

[Fullmetalfisting · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wrote a dissertation on "gazes," so thanks, Mulvey, for coining the term. This is the foundation upon which Western, feminist film theory is built. If you take a feminist film class in college, they'll make you read this for sure. Within this school of thought, female characters are highly sexualized and male characters are vehicles for which the spectator can live out their fantasies. That's the long and short of it. bell hooks discusses this theory much better in her book, Black Looks: Race and Representation, specifically the chapter entitled Oppositional Gaze.

[Oleksii Dolhuliov · Rating 4 out of 5]

Тепер я теж крутий

[maria ⋆˙♡ · Rating 5 out of 5]

can you believe I went through film school and not once was this essay recommended to us? literally tragic. although I feel lucky to have only read it now when I am much more knowledgeable and attentive. it's a shame that this text has been so misunderstood and twisted in recent years given that it is still so relevant and can contribute so much to audiovisual studies as a whole

[Lucija0_ · Rating 4 out of 5]

this is one of the articles that the male/female gaze trend is based upon but the article is so much more nuanced and interesting than the modern usage, and I enjoyed reading it
I'll admit the writing can be difficult to understand at times, but I would still recommend it for anyone interested in movies :)

[cait · Rating 3 out of 5]

i don't understand the concept of femaleness as a threat to maleness and the potentiality of castration....idk maybe i am just forgetting some or just wholly lacking some gender/feminist theory. but other than that, a classic!

[Daniela · Rating 4 out of 5]

an angel loses its wings every time the terms "male gaze" and female gaze" are misused online btw

[vicky]

not sure how much i agree with castration anxiety as a root of objectification of women but the essay is otherwise completely on the nose on cinema’s ability to turn the “looked-at-ness” of women into the spectacle itself. pairs very nicely with berger’s “ways of seeing”.

[romi ☆]

laura mulvey is my Idol at this point

[eve · Rating 4 out of 5]

juste trop intéressant

[sophie esther · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this for a class and again for an essay, and was prompted to rate it not only for its importance in theory & criticism but also because of other more contemporary criticisms of it for being "reductive" (as Viv Burr and Tim Edwards suggest) and "iconophobic" (as Rey Chow called Mulvey).

I resonate with Burr & Edwards concerns about Mulvey's downplaying the female gaze as autonomously female by suggesting that female viewership of a film is masculine because the gaze is written by patriarchy (and therefore, the pleasure that a woman viewer gets from films would be through female objectification and male heroism) or that a vulnerable male character in a film is victimised to prove his heroism, or else to feminise, and therefore degrade him. I also appreciate Chow's efforts to look at sentimental (characteristically conservative/traditionalist and therefore patriarchal, I suppose) cinema and try and find ways of representation that are more penetrable and effective than the more sensationalized (as she charactersises it) forms of representation produced from political discourse like Mulvey's feminist approach.

HOWEVER I also believe that it is unfair to (ironically) reduce this short essay to the questions it poses readers, questions that end up in trains of thought that may be suspicious of Mulvey's perhaps overly binary analysis of gender roles in film. Her comments on viewership, on "looking", on subject/object, and as the coiner of the term GAZE in cultural/social discourse in relation to gender, is precisely what provide these other thinkers with the tools to pose these questions, and to form these criticisms, which they express in their own essays and books. For these reasons, I think Mulvey deserves more credit than this recent trend of reducing her transformative ideas to being "reductive"...

[L000.000.000aura · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Suele decirse que al analizar el placer o la belleza se les destruye. Esta es la intención de este ensayo” 😧😧😧😧🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️

[ally douglas? · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have always had an issue with the depiction of women in film but have never had the words to express why. These are those words.

[Mache]

once you read [laura mulvey] you'll never stop wanting to beat [tiktkok armchair theorists] to death with your bare hands -anthony bourdain

[Alejandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mulvey is rooted in psychoanalysis to explain the phallocentrism construction and structure in mainstream cinema. She talks about “woman”, in a homogenized way, and does not take into account the socio-cultural context of the word. There are so many gaps in this essay… and her position is to pessimistic, she even says that the only solution to phallocentrism cinema is avant-garde film.
However, the essay is interesting and she knows how to link psychoanalysis to explain the male gaze as an active and opposite to passive female gaze. It is also a very influential essay and piece to feminism cinema, so we should also consider that.

[Marie · Rating 4 out of 5]

She gets it.

[Minnie · Rating 3 out of 5]

3*

A timeless classic, but you definitely need a solid grounding in Freudian and especially Lacanian psychoanalytical cultural analysis to understand what Mulvey's talking about.

[R. M. · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting summary of the male gaze in films with some classic examples, but the fascination with women 'representing the threat of castration' is a strange one that isn't explained or backed up.

[Emma Vissers]

girlie girl ik heb nu wat kritieken op jou gelezen en je bent wel een beetje een essentialist nietwaar?
(ik vind psychoanalyse ook gewoon echt niet leuk)

[Şenay · Rating 4 out of 5]

“It is said that analysing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this article.” Eheh 🤭

[Ana Parejo · Rating 3 out of 5]

extracto de reflexiones varias que he sacado del artículo para un trabajo de Estudios de Género sobre el desnudo en la pintura:

"[...]pone énfasis en cómo este tipo de representaciones refuerzan constantemente los modelos patriarcales a nivel social e individual, creándose un bucle de referencias que nunca sale del estatus quo. En el caso del cine, se producen unos protagonistas masculinos que satisfacen el ego ideal en el que el espectador busca sentirse reflejado, al mismo tiempo que crea un ideal que el espectador espera ver en sí mismo cuando se mira en un espejo. Estos protagonista ideales toman acción y suelen estar orbitados por mujeres pasivas que son exhibidas, como un objeto, por el impacto erótico-visual. A su vez, estas mujeres representan para el hombre (protagonista-espectador), un premio. Por lo tanto, la mujer no tiene importancia más allá de su rol supeditado al del protagonista masculino. "

[gaba · Rating 5 out of 5]

Filled with relief and hope, I can confidently recommend this very short read. You won’t finish it with a sense of dissatisfaction, unless you’ve chosen a method of tenacity. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” is an essay on scopophila, male gaze, voyeurism and psychoanalysis (for those little boys idolising Hitchcock, Sternberg, Tarantino etc.). Interesting dive into the presence of a woman on the screen as the embodiment of both the most shallow desires and the deepest shadows of male characters. Theories about sadism being a form of ascertaining guilt associated with castration (thus with women - as women are males suffering from a lack of penis). Very much enjoyed the analysis of the separation from the objectified character on the screen - in order to achieve sexual stimulation - but also identification of the ego with the object - to complete the fantasy through images.

[Johnnie · Rating 5 out of 5]

a literal must read essay wow… so many thoughts i’ve had myself separate from this reading and how often it feels like a woman’s narrative is uprooted and interrupted for a man to be voyeuristic about her!!! i find a lot of joy in stopping the unconscious “performing” we do for men and i think there’s so much to take away from this 👍
“Woman then stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.”

[Sofia Singer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Så så så interessant

[Matthew Emmons · Rating 5 out of 5]

Now when we talk about blueprints…

[Jamie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Would have enjoyed this a lot more and given it much more credit if the author didn’t use Freud’s cocaine-fueled fever dreams as major theoretical background every other paragraph ESPECIALLY the ones pertaining to castration threat. The voyeurism part was interesting.

[mafi]

enjoyed this essay a lot, very accessible in terms of reading. im never escaping freud's clutches so at this point im just conforming to it honestly

[Ester Baroni]

“It is said that analysing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this article.”