"the male gaze": classic or dud?

laura m herself is a total honey, for one thing (a very funny sweet clever little old posh brit woman, and a good companion to get drunk w.after work): she is i think long past LaYMoR gender-essentialist versions of her own ideas, if she wz ever caught in them in the first place: the idea of genedered gaze is of course tremendously strong, even if you want to disprove it (and a good movie to ask douglas's Q abt is todd haynes's yes-sirkian-but-something-else-too FAR FROM HEAVEN)

Fashion pages are interesting because on the whole they are aimed at women - however one of the ideas of certain kinds of fashion is to attract men, so whilst the page will be set up for the female gaze, they are attempting to replicate a male gaze in reading it. I don't think it is as binary as saying "who is this page made for".

arnie under the cold mud = like a man fantastically panicking abt his sexuality when he go into a gay sauna and gets a hard-on

As for the male/female alien question - the Predator is hunting them because they've got big guns...

Wouldn't the Alien vs Predator thign posit Pred as male cos the Aliens are posited as female? The face-hugger things being male?

Sod Hstencil, I blame Lara Croft (and the fact that I was never any good at sodding Tomb Raider).

(Apart from Mark S who is a pokémon).

(Actually pokémon have genders too but I will leave it at that before I reveal myself as even MORE of a dork).

I'm trying to think of the viddy games my lady-friends like:

driving games
1-on-1 fighting games

The latter have a spectator's point of view and doesn't privilege one fighter over the other (though I recall some of the female fighters have jobble-tastic boobie action... hm). The former could be read as male, but I'm not sure it holds.

(NB I am possibly playing devils advocate here - I've read a Germaine Greer book you know).

I personally think I should stay away from driving games. They make me too violent => I AM TOO INFLUENCED BY THE MALE GAZE!!

It is also worth mentioning that when the male gaze tries to reconstruct a 'female gaze' in vid games we end up with Mary Kate and Ashleys shopping extravaganza or yet another Lara-clone. This is why I like Ape Escape 2. Focus on the monkeys...

seriously (well "seriously" heh), they *are* both medusa-form monsters = effie gray's pubic hair = THEE NATURE OV THEE GOTHICK

(dear god my "theory of everything" is getting very extremely mentalist)

Hey Sarah how can it be a "male-driven narrative" if YOU'RE DRIVING, eh??

Compare this with TV - esp soap operas.

Games: how important is the framing device to the way you play a game. F'rinstance in a first person shooter if you never see your character it is merely constructed my cut scenes and the box cover. how much freedom do you have? (Is playing Crazy Taxi as one of the female drivers significantly different to playing it as one of the male ones?)

i think they "subvert the gaze" mainly in the sense that they are all unwatchably awful: i assume a lot of 60s undergrd movie ideology went into their making also (snow, dwoskin, mekas yada yada)

(did I tell you that Adolfas Mekas teaches where I went to school?)

In OutRun ISTR you played as a bloke with a simpering blonde as yr escort. I have been reminded of this in the VENUS RAZOR ads which feature lots of lovely blond chixx0r all in pink driving a pink car and showing off their freakishly hairless leggies saying that their razor is so good it's scandalous - ARGHHH! At least in Outrun the woman was getting a nice drive around sunny Cali-By-Numbers...

I really do not see how such a rub advert cd be designed for a female gaze - I suppose they've missed out the 'science' bit - maybe that's more one for the blokes eh?

No no it is surely too rubbish to be human or even simian - it must have been designed by a passing carrier bag on the wind...

Pete what's difft about TV?

(there is an amusing paragraph or two on these movies in bailey-head b.watson's "art, cl4ss & cl34v4g3", and the probems w.their idea of avant-gardism... but i'll have to look that up also)

http://www.angelfire.com/ut/pinevergreen/images/MBV.jpg

I think one thing about Mulvey is her big essay ("Visual Pleasure . . .") has been misunderstood. My impression was that it was more prescriptive than hermeneutic--more advocating for a new kind of cinema, or a new kind of responsibility in cinema, than suggesting a new way of interpreting cinema (although that's been its lasting influence).

Wollen's Riddles of the Sphinx (Mark: that's his right?) is unwatchable, but I kind of like Sally Potter's Gold Diggers. Sure you can sense the points they are trying to make, but Potter at least has a good deal of basic filmmaking skill and imagination.

these days wollen is a good writer, esp. in ref (yuk term alert) "cross disciplinarity"; laura is still a bit clenched for my tastes as a stylist

Summary:

1. Yes Pete, Gena is rub in Crazy Taxi - also look at yr surroundings and the skimpily dressed gurls you pick up...

2. Although you don't see your body in an FPS, your actions and surroundings tend to be gendered just as much as a rendition of your body wd be. Lots of monsters + bloke squaddies = a v restrictive headspace, especially if you're trying to look for some chixx0r headspace.

3. There's more than a bit of contrarianism creating something where the only purpose is NOT to be male at all - and I love it! I admit I don't have a clue abt the films yr referring to but I think in the HEM HEM musical ouvre that the Slits managed to do that vvv well and they didn't half blooming make a racket eh?

4. Crossroads is the best TV show ever.

I agree with you about looking being the building block, although there are certainly films where looking isn't even the point! I mean, a lot of the Fluxus stuff is pure experiment. To bring up Tony Conrad's cooking films, the idea there was that instead of shooting anything, he actually "cooked" the films. That is, he was interested in the idea of making film without processing, and wanted to explore filmmaking as an extension of "recipe," in a sense delivering filmmaking from auteurism to amateurism.

As far as homoeroticism, I agree with you, but maybe my point would come across better if I could show you Flaming Creatures. Homoeroticism isn't exactly the word I was looking for, unless flaccid penises are erotic (and I don't think they are, at least not as erotic as erect ones!).

Also, I can think of some filmmakers that explicitly "use" the male gaze itself, bringing it to a sort of breaking point (knowingly or not). First thing that comes to mind immediately is Warhol's films (a number of which were really just his attempt to "cash in" on ideas already posited by other L.E.S. types - Jack Smith, the Fluxus people, etc.). Something like Empire stretches the gaze to the point where it's no longer tenable, and fascination turns to repulsion or indifference. Or any of the "fetish"-type films (Haircut).

I don't know if this is all coming across that well, but I think there are a lot of different strategies from underground film that, while employed, haven't really been followed through with. These strategies aren't just from a purely "film theory" perspective, either; I think there's a lot of fertile ground here for the cult stud types to ponder (if they ever get tired of talking about Madonna).

(Also it didn't help that in one book assigned in that course around film had dozens of factual errors in it.)

Can we talk about how Milla basically ripped off Meshes... for that one music video?

What, do you mean that when you gaze at the shoe, the shoe gazes back at you?

http://empty.org/empty/full/m/body.jpg

Seriously though, I often wonder whether an "average" movie going audience would derive any satisfaction from a film whose narrative trajectory was not linked to the male gaze? And that seems like the problem that Hstencil was running into. I.e. this stuff is inherently political; for instance, when I studied it at Berkeley, the film department had already been absorbed into rhetoric. And while Kaja Silverman, Judy Butler and Carol Clover would show us experimental feminist films by Valie Export, Potter and Mulvey herself to illustrate various critiques, the meat of the discussion was almost always theory's engagement with the zeitgeist and whether theory had anything practically prescriptive for Hollywood.

also Mark S, does Mulvey really distance herself from Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema? I mean it's such a great essay; a product of it's time and appropriated by everyone, but I return to it all the time.

And Michael Powell's Peeping Tom. And I'm sure theorists have gone to town applying the male gaze concept to this film.

and thanks for the clarification Mark

dare I bring up music videos? pop music in general? Whee! Yeah mass media is all about cute faces and curvy butts and nice boobs. Problem: nobody has figured out a better way to sell magazines.

But seriously, I think the male gaze is an interesting idea for analyzing the structure of films of the 1940s and 1950 but analytic formalism is much less interesting to me than the social historical context in general. I would hope formalism in general has less currency today but, then again, I laugh my azz off at beer commercials.

Has anyone else read The Women Who Knew Too Much by Tania Modeleski?

i might try read it over the next coupla days and report back

(partly this is because i have actual real writing work to do, entirely unrelated, and procrastination is mah business, but actually di's crossness has made me think a bit — cz i read and admired LM and studied this stuff b4 i met her, back when i wz still a ideological theorist and punk-rock hardnut, and then later when i wz at S&S, she wz mainly this supernice woman who worked across the corridor and came in and asked vague and daffy questions abt how to use the photocopier... i never ONCE talked serious theory with her, always just gossip and family stuff, and the whole tenor of things was anyway different => anyway i think it's suddenly time i re-unearthed THAT buried part of my journey... )

(if i start quoting stephen heath you can ALL kick me in the nuts)

"classic" probably comes up under canon-scrutiny all the time on ilx, but the word itself seems to have been appropriated via c or d.

A good example would be Carol Clover's 'Men, Women and Chainsaws' which uses psychoanalysis to explain why slasher films are(were) so popular with teenage boys.

In this context (understanding the relationship between women and the movies they watch) a "formalist" approach does seem sort of airless and perhaps beside the point. I think the problem is that the means by which critics map meanings onto different techniques is both too narrow in choosing its tools (i.e. they don't really consider the historical development of, say, crosscutting and its function in the overall Hollywood style) and too broad in applying them (so that a canted angle can be said to "mean" any number of things depending on the argument). A lot contemporary film scholarship is dazzling sophistry but totally unconvincing as an argument about films and how they made and appreciated.

Amst., I guess I am interested in being restricted.

the 7-yr-old me didn't have TV but quite enjoyed THE WONDERFUL JOURNEY and THUNDERBIRDS ARE GO!!

I'll bring the surgical tape. Wait, what were we talking about?

And these studies are not ahistorical - slasher films are a product of their time (as is 'Scream'), and Clover's book takes that into account. Kaja Silverman's 'Male Subjectivity at the Margins' dwells on what she calls a "historical trauma" for men in the immediate aftermath of WWII - returning soldiers, an uncertain future etc. which leads to things like "It's a Wonderful Life" and "The Best Years of Our Lives". The lingering fascination with castration in those and many other films of the period practically hits you over the head with the broken bannister in "It's a Wonderful Life".

I have a similar reaction to commercials, but I don't know that I consider them evil. I like that you have a clear standard against which to judge them -- do they sell the product or not (obv. if you're in advertising this is not so "clear" after all) -- and it's interesting to see when the director and writer's artistic goals are at odds with that, and when the two goals harmonize. So it's like Hollywood for Dummies, I guess.

http://www.academic.marist.edu/pennings/rw1.jpg

also, Amateurist, with regards to the hegemony of conservative gender roles, I'm not sure if you mean that in a politically conservative sense? If so, I think that while some theorist have clear political aims, many are just illuminating or describing the condition of gender and identity. It's not conservative or liberal or even a choice, necessarily. I.e. even though gender may be a construct, it's not really a construct that anyone has a choice in (though perhaps in the far off future when we all live by Harraway's 'Cyborg Manifesto'), and it's really a practicality that we must live with - even if Freud or Lacan help us to see our predicament more clearly. I feel like the Cat in 'Babe' who tells him that he's going to the slaughterhouse no matter what.

I have enjoyed this thread.

Lisa
Carol
Gabbneb

http://www.neworderonline.com/images/gallery/electronic_gettingawaywithit_front.jpg

Whether this statement is meaningful or trite depends I think on whether the male/female gaze (concepts I think we have established are useful) is a binary oppostion or a continuum.

I would say that Dick fits into Jane, but that would be undergirding the hegemony of conservative gender roles.

(What worries me about my argument is that I tried to list all the great humanist artists and they were all male.)

"our" who? What kind of desires?

the satisfaction we get from spending 2 hours watching a story develop and end, using camera shots and various cues to suspend our disbelief etc; things we take for granted and often things that are included by the creators and enjoyed by the audience on an unconscious level.

"that darn wuz preposterous. Drink your Milk!"

I haven't read the rest of the thread, but Am, this is totally OTM.

Based on some of the art and music criticism I've read, I'd say this could apply to quite a lot of other kinds of scholarship as well.

I still like reading it... even if I find writing it a major exertion.

I once had a kind-of-crush on a girl whom I, subconsciously, would always reflexively call Laura Mulvey.

lol

Classic, if sometimes drawn to absurd lengths:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrJAApAuhSg

http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/285#comment-1594

find on the page "male gaze"

that's really funny, esp. in the context of the last "scene" of Riddles of the Sphinx

My male gaze is too advanced to not be bored by the youtube video Derelict posted. If her nostrils began to dilate and someone began to sodomize them I suppose then I'd have a little something to look at.

i was referring to the thing you posted btw

I figged. I've never seen the Riddles of the Sphinx. I imdb'd it, though.

lol functional shift

(No plot synopsis.)

it ends with a long scene of one of those plastic toys with the small metal ball-bearings in a brightly-colored maze that you're supposed to shake, turn, manipulate to get into the hole at the center. It takes a very very long time showing the ball-bearings rolling around the maze and not getting in the hole. When they finally did so, the screening audience of a hundred or so freshman MCM students clapped and cheered.

primarily because they/we had spent over two hours watching this movie and it was finally over. I think Tracer Hand was there in the audience as well.