John berger ways of seeing camera series#

In narrative cinema, the male gaze usually displays the female character (woman, girl, child) on two levels of eroticism: (i) as an erotic object of desire for the characters in the filmed story and (ii) as an erotic object of desire for the male viewer (spectator) of the filmed story.

In a narrative film, the visual perspective of the male gaze is the sight-line of the camera as the spectator's perspective - that of a heterosexual man whose sight lingers upon the features of a woman's body. Fetishistic scopophilia involves reducing the threat of castration fear associated with the female presence by fragmenting and hypersexualizing parts of the female body. In MulveyРІР‚в„ўs analysis, voyeurism-sadism references that РІР‚Сљpleasure lies in ascertaining guilt (immediately associated with castration), asserting control and subjecting the guilty person through punishment or forgiveness,РІР‚Сњ which is noted by Mulvey to align more with a narrative cinematic structure than does scopophilia fetishization. For Mulvey, there are two ways in which women, as the passive recipients of the male gaze, can be sexualized to avert castration fear: voyeurism-sadism and fetishization. The mere presence of a female body on screen, 'her lack of penis, a threat of castration and hence unpleasure,' which is subverted through the oversexualization of her femininity. In order to mitigate this unpleasantness, Mulvey theorizes that women are transformed into passive recipients of male objectification in media representations. In the fields of media studies and feminist film theory, the male gaze is conceptually related to the behaviours of voyeurism (looking as sexual pleasure), scopophilia (pleasure from looking), and narcissism (pleasure from contemplating one's self).Р”Р„nother important part of MulveyРІР‚в„ўs theory built upon a Freudian psychoanalytic concept of male castration anxiety, where because the woman is phallus lacking, her presence evokes unpleasantness in the male unconsciousness.

The cinematic concept of the male gaze is presented, explained, and developed in the essay 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' (1975), in which Laura Mulvey proposes that sexual inequality - the asymmetry of social and political power between men and women - is a controlling social force in the cinematic representations of women and men and that the male gaze (the aesthetic pleasure of the male viewer) is a social construct derived from the ideologies and discourses of patriarchy. The existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre introduced the concept of le regard, the gaze, in Being and Nothingness (1943), wherein the act of gazing at another human being creates a subjective power difference, which is felt by the gazer and by the gazed, because the person being gazed at is perceived as an object, not as a human being. The male gaze is conceptually contrasted with the female gaze. The terms scopophilia and scoptophilia identify both the aesthetic pleasures and the sexual pleasures derived from looking at someone or something. :РІР‚Р‰807 As a way of seeing women and the world, psychoanalytic theorizations of the male gaze involve Freudian and Lacanian concepts such as scopophilia, or the pleasure of looking. The psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan are foundational in MulveyРІР‚в„ўs development of a male gaze theory, as they provide a lens through which Mulvey was able to interpret the 'primordial wish for pleasurable looking' satisfied through the cinematic experience. It soon became popular among feminists, including the British film critic Laura Mulvey, who used it to critique traditional media representations of the female character in cinema, and coined the phrase.

John berger ways of seeing camera series#

The gaze was a concept developed in 20th-century French philosophy, and the term 'male gaze' was first used by the English art critic John Berger in Ways of Seeing, a series of films for the BBC aired in January 1972, and later a book, as part of his analysis of the treatment of women as objects in advertising and nudes in European painting. In the visual and aesthetic presentations of narrative cinema, the male gaze has three perspectives: (i) that of the man behind the camera, (ii) that of the male characters within the film's cinematic representations and (iii) that of the spectator gazing at the image. In feminist theory, the male gaze is the act of depicting women and the world, in the visual arts and in literature, from a masculine, heterosexual perspective that presents and represents women as sexual objects for the pleasure of the heterosexual male viewer.