Mulvey is an important film theorist and her feminist take on cinema and its technicalities helps explains a lot of cinema’s social effects. The oedipus complex claims that women are always jealous of men because of their own lack while men are scared of women as they represent the threat of castration. This entire idea is centered on women and their “lack of”, which is then compensated by the male gaze that places the female in a way that mostly subtly objectifies and sexualises her. Though there has been many critiques of Mulvey’s view being too generalising and stereotyping, these same critiques argue for the new phenomenon of the “female gaze”, which apparently subjects the male body to the audience’s gaze now, as in movies like Magic Mike. Though it seems that movies that subjectify men instead to this so-called “female gaze” allow for greater respect of women on-screen, the truth of the matter remains that Mulvey is right in suggesting that females will still always be captured in the “male gaze”, even if there is some semblance of an attempt at a “female gaze”. Just noticing camera angles and other cinematographic elements such as lighting in frames that supposedly show the “female gaze” would expose how men are not as sexualised in the way women still are and constantly will continue to be.
rebecca quek
In this week’s readings, Adorno highlights his elitism by lamenting the massification and commodification of radio. For him, things such as the “aura” of the musician and the music is lost in the transmission of, let’s say, symphonies through the radio. For him, music loses its criticality as radio allows for the music to become mere entertainment and distraction, instead of a source of critical thought, or a platform for the education in music and a music culture.
Mulvey’s readings highlight the problematic of the male gaze in the cinema. She argues that the female body is often subjected and projected in such a way in that it becomes a mere object for the male to gaze upon. She also talks about Scopophilia, the pleasure of looking, and how this is heightened in the cinema through the way the seatings arrangements are planned allowing audiences to become immersed, vouyeuristically in the private world of the movie they feel themselves to be inhabiting.
Ong Yan Ting
Adorno argues that radio would result in commodification of music, such that it loses its ‘aura’, a term by Benjamin. Before radio, one might have to travel to certain places to hear music and the music is the ends. But radio makes it more affordable and convenient to gain access to music, and when we don’t have to work for it, the value of music drops. Radio becomes more of a means to an end. Even right now as I’m typing out the post, I have my radio playing in the background, thus music becomes just a form of distraction and entertainment.
In Mulvey’s article, she mentions a male gaze in film and how women exist only to be looked at by men in film. As that article was written in 1975, things have changed since then. In film today, men and women are both subjected to the gaze (although women are still subjected to a stronger gaze). Film has encouraged scopophilia, the idea of liking to see and be seen. Image is clearly a very important factor, as men and women put in effort to improve their image, and characters in film are expected to be pleasurable to look at, men being strong and handsome (icon of masculinity) while females are to be gorgeous and curvy/skinny (icon of femininity).
This youtube video shows the comedy group Axis of Awesome singing many popular songs using only four chords. This could perhaps relate to Adorno’s belief that popular music was consumed as a mere commodity and require little or no effort on the listeners’ part, leading to a loss in criticality. Adorno also argued that when music becomes entertainment, it loses its cultural value. It becomes solely profit oriented, leading to standardization of music. We become accustomed to certain patterns in music, as Adorno claimed that over time, popular music would repeat itself, become standardized and thus losing its “essence”. Similar to Benjamin’s aura, music loses its authenticity (originality and authenticity) when it is mechanically reproduced, how different is one song from another if it can be played with the same four chords?
Tham E-lyn
What I found interesting about the readings was how the Woman was described to be in a constant state of anxiety. Her lack of the phallus is what defines her. She is absorbed with it precisely because she doesn’t have it, presenting a unorthodox paradox. This lack of a phallus gives rise to desire, in turn attaching meaning. The readings also explores the notion of “scopophilia”, an objectification, the blatant sexual pleasure derived from the simple gesture of “looking”. This brings into play the element of voyeurism as well, how an individual is able to live through or satisfy his pleasures through visual imagery. This is what happens in a cinema – in a cinema, you are faced with a plethora of moving images, allowing you to access voyeurism just by watching what plays out on screen. Producers may be very well aware of this, choosing to present images so as to appeal to this very sensory emotion. The very commodification of women’s bodies, how women always look so good on screen – this is all part and parcel of catering to consumers. Ultimately, it all boils down to the generation of profits; everything that is manufactured is simply to earn profits.
Time is also alluded to be a linear value, while indexicality/contingency constitutes a mere representation of the event. For example, take a photograph – A photograph is just a representation. Looking at a picture of a reservoir, for instance, you are not looking at the actual reservoir; you’re just looking at a replication of it.
A photograph captures a moment, captures movement, captures time. It represents time, but is not time itself. The same can be said of the cinema. Yet, this capturing of a particular moment may in the process cause the moment to lose its meaning. The lines between what is the past and the present and what is the future are all blurred, all condensed into one representative photograph. Without any caption or description, we are unable to tell when the photograph was taken, what it represents per se. It also introduces the notion of dependency – without these accompanying descriptions, we are lost. The irony lies in how we take photographs to remember, but yet, to remember, we rely on these photographs. It’s a reliance that is encompassing. To capture a photograph also introduces the notion of chance – its the capturing of one moment. The moment is there only once, and then it’s gone. A parallel can be drawn to capitalism, how modernity and chance ties in with progression.
Lee Cheong Khi
Mulvey discusses the psychoanalytic background of mainstream films and how pleasure in viewing is separated into active (male) and passive (female). She describes patriarchal culture reproduced in the films, where females are always represented as the male other, reminding me of de Beauvoir’s idea of the ‘other’. To Mulvey, films produce two major effects; scopophilia and ‘developing scopophilia in the narcissistic aspect.’ The repressed self is further exhibited and projected when audiences chose to view these films to derive sexual pleasure. Moreover, they start to associate the project images with their bodies, imagining ‘his mirror image to be more complete’. Mulvey’s analysis can contribute to the existing literature as it provides a critical reading and digs deeper into the mainstream films that many tend to neglect.
Annabel Su
All the readings this week point out how film and radio serve to reiterate and structure the dominant hegemonic discourse within society in a way that seems to be logical and rational. And over time, when these discourses are left unquestioned, they become a taken for granted part of social life and are deeply entrenched in society.
In her writing, Mulvey uses the theory of pyschoanlysis to show how society’s patriarchal discourse impacts both the way we watch movies and the way we interact with the cinema itself. Mulvey posits that cinematic visions are aligned with the cultural subconscious that is in essence, patriarchal. Therefore, women are bearers of meaning and serve as a signifier for the male other. Hence, her central argument is that the Hollywood films utilize women to incite an enjoyable visual experience for men and this structures the gaze as a masculine one, while the women are always gazed upon as reified objects. When these films are not questioned and left unchallenged, the erotic is slipped into the language of the dominant patriarchal order and it is hard to extract it.
According to Doane, time is no longer passed but is instead, spent. It is reified and cinemas played an essential role in representing and structuring time in this manner. With the Industrial Revolution and Taylorization, time was commodified and made to adhere to a strict structure that mechanized the human body and eliminated unproductive time. Hence, the notion of leisure time was no longer a given but was earned. Time was now based on value and the monetary terms, and this rationalization produced an obsession with contingency and indexicality, which can be observed in films.
Adorno asserts that music has become a reified commodity that has completely transformed its meaning. Music was no longer an end in itself but a means to an end. It did not result as a product of human force and creativity, but instead was used a moneymaking entity. This strips away the listener’s ability to make meaning and alienates him from his human consciousness. To Adorno, music is now a type of false consciousness, as the listener believes the radio to be providing him with a sort of culture as he sells his labor power and toils away. Hence, the standardization of music and the mass dissemination through radio takes away the ability for humans to make their own choices and reduces their intellectual ability.
Frances Tan Wei Ting
“We live in a society of commodities”. According to Adorno, this “commodity character of music tends radically to alter it”, where it “becomes a means instead of an end”, and produces “commodity listening” (the absent-minded audience with suspended critical facilities), cloaking the commodity in “culture and erudition” (like Benjamin’s aura), standardizing commodity and enthusiasm. An illusion of ownership is created, such that the man in the street becomes smug and self-satisfied, and less inclined to question social realities. The antagonisms in the cultural sphere are not easily recognized. Their being hidden also draws attention away from more obvious antagonisms in other spheres. The new technique of musical reproduction, radio, does not bring about anything new. It does not fulfil its promises. Instead of progression, there is retrogression. Repetition of the standardized creates the illusion of a crowd that consumers follow and form without realising that their “free choice” is “pseudo-individualism”. The crowd does not understand itself. The crowd is entertained.
Doane talks about the (mechanical) representability of time, in records fixing life and movement, in immersive experiences of other spaces and times. “The vision of life must be paid for in life itself”. The immortality and extensions of the human body depend on the initial finite body. The representation is neither “proper” nor “normal”, but shocking and threatening. This is the shock mentioned by Benjamin that accompanies new technologies. Cinematic technology is brought up as a “time-based media” enabling the access to time and its representation(s) and the structuring of time and contingency. Time becomes felt, structuring other aspects of modernity, even being worn. Time is externalized from the human subject that is situated in it. Time becomes “uniform, homogenuous, irreversible, and divisible into verifiable units”. Time becomes a measure of value, and is thus of value, a currency that can be stored and spent. Other features are emphasized due to the change in the nature of time, such as increased linear thinking, reification, standardization, stabilization and rationalization. Memories gained as a record of time. But is the unknowable “instant” really able to be represented? Or should it be assumed that time and memory are two systems, the conscious and the unconscious? The conscious does not remember, shielding the shock from the effects of modernity on the human existence, leading to experiences which slip away, and rationalization that mimics meaning. When time becomes an instant, e.g. in film, the present becomes inseparable from the past. There is “thisness”, the promise of restoration (manipulation). Discontinuity at the same time is continuity. Other key terms include abstraction/rationalization, and an emphasis upon the contingent, chance and ephemeral, description/narration, statistics, temporal compression, historical trauma and rupture, indexicality and multiple temporalities. There is the temporality of the apparatus, the temporality of the diegesis, and the temporality of reception.
Mulvey talks about gender and its relation to the cinema via notions of psychoanalytic theory. The scopophilic instinct (pleasure in viewing another person as an erotic object, or a dangerous object) and the ego libido (narcissistic identification with main, male, character) within the cinematic codes create a gaze, a world (patriarchal) and an object. These are possible due to the three looks associated with the cinema: the subordination of the looks of the camera and the audience to that of the characters at each other within the screen illusion (the last look being the cinematic codes that reflect the patriarchal reality).
I find it difficult to see a link between the three articles.
Khrisha Chatterji
Mulvey explains how film is patriarchal as it reestablishes societal norms of gender and sexuality. She then goes on to write about scopophilia which is the pleasures of looking. It makes people objects that are being subjected to another’s gaze. In cinemas, it allows for a voyeuristic phantasy whereby spectator can feel as though they are looking in on a private world. The spectator is in a position where their exhibitionism is repressed and that they place their repressed desires onto the performer on screen. The film lets the spectator identify him/herself with the performer. It works like a mirror. In film, women are there to be looked at compared to men who are there to perform. Women are there not to help in the plot in any way, they are placed in films as eye candy and to provide pleasure viewing for the spectators.
Doane harps a lot about representation of time and how cinematic technology played an important role in establishing time representation. There’s this obsession with time in modernity. The standardization of time came with improvements in speed of transportation and communication. She wants to put across her point that contingency that was formed in the 19th century was an important factor in the development and rise of the cinema as a central representational form of the 20th century.
Adorno is critical of radio music. He believes that radio music is produced to manipulate the masses. Radio music is seen as music for the masses. The way one listens to a symphony has different effects. He mentioned something like this: is symphony on a radio still considered a symphony? And how would people listen to the symphony on the radio? He believes that music has become a commodity and that it is connected to standardization and mass production. Music is no longer a force. It has become a regular commodity. There is no longer a need to be intelligent in appreciating music. All the listener has to do is just listen. To him, that is not music. Music requires the brain to work. For him music may have been brought to the masses but it does not mean a rise in music culture as the music brought to the masses is not desirable. What role does music play? For him, music is a commodity forced onto the masses to consume instead of the masses participating in the culture of music.
Mulvey is an important film theorist and her feminist take on cinema and its technicalities helps explains a lot of cinema’s social effects. The oedipus complex claims that women are always jealous of men because of their own lack while men are scared of women as they represent the threat of castration. This entire idea is centered on women and their “lack of”, which is then compensated by the male gaze that places the female in a way that mostly subtly objectifies and sexualises her. Though there has been many critiques of Mulvey’s view being too generalising and stereotyping, these same critiques argue for the new phenomenon of the “female gaze”, which apparently subjects the male body to the audience’s gaze now, as in movies like Magic Mike. Though it seems that movies that subjectify men instead to this so-called “female gaze” allow for greater respect of women on-screen, the truth of the matter remains that Mulvey is right in suggesting that females will still always be captured in the “male gaze”, even if there is some semblance of an attempt at a “female gaze”. Just noticing camera angles and other cinematographic elements such as lighting in frames that supposedly show the “female gaze” would expose how men are not as sexualised in the way women still are and constantly will continue to be.
In this week’s readings, Adorno highlights his elitism by lamenting the massification and commodification of radio. For him, things such as the “aura” of the musician and the music is lost in the transmission of, let’s say, symphonies through the radio. For him, music loses its criticality as radio allows for the music to become mere entertainment and distraction, instead of a source of critical thought, or a platform for the education in music and a music culture.
Mulvey’s readings highlight the problematic of the male gaze in the cinema. She argues that the female body is often subjected and projected in such a way in that it becomes a mere object for the male to gaze upon. She also talks about Scopophilia, the pleasure of looking, and how this is heightened in the cinema through the way the seatings arrangements are planned allowing audiences to become immersed, vouyeuristically in the private world of the movie they feel themselves to be inhabiting.
Adorno argues that radio would result in commodification of music, such that it loses its ‘aura’, a term by Benjamin. Before radio, one might have to travel to certain places to hear music and the music is the ends. But radio makes it more affordable and convenient to gain access to music, and when we don’t have to work for it, the value of music drops. Radio becomes more of a means to an end. Even right now as I’m typing out the post, I have my radio playing in the background, thus music becomes just a form of distraction and entertainment.
In Mulvey’s article, she mentions a male gaze in film and how women exist only to be looked at by men in film. As that article was written in 1975, things have changed since then. In film today, men and women are both subjected to the gaze (although women are still subjected to a stronger gaze). Film has encouraged scopophilia, the idea of liking to see and be seen. Image is clearly a very important factor, as men and women put in effort to improve their image, and characters in film are expected to be pleasurable to look at, men being strong and handsome (icon of masculinity) while females are to be gorgeous and curvy/skinny (icon of femininity).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I
This youtube video shows the comedy group Axis of Awesome singing many popular songs using only four chords. This could perhaps relate to Adorno’s belief that popular music was consumed as a mere commodity and require little or no effort on the listeners’ part, leading to a loss in criticality. Adorno also argued that when music becomes entertainment, it loses its cultural value. It becomes solely profit oriented, leading to standardization of music. We become accustomed to certain patterns in music, as Adorno claimed that over time, popular music would repeat itself, become standardized and thus losing its “essence”. Similar to Benjamin’s aura, music loses its authenticity (originality and authenticity) when it is mechanically reproduced, how different is one song from another if it can be played with the same four chords?
What I found interesting about the readings was how the Woman was described to be in a constant state of anxiety. Her lack of the phallus is what defines her. She is absorbed with it precisely because she doesn’t have it, presenting a unorthodox paradox. This lack of a phallus gives rise to desire, in turn attaching meaning. The readings also explores the notion of “scopophilia”, an objectification, the blatant sexual pleasure derived from the simple gesture of “looking”. This brings into play the element of voyeurism as well, how an individual is able to live through or satisfy his pleasures through visual imagery. This is what happens in a cinema – in a cinema, you are faced with a plethora of moving images, allowing you to access voyeurism just by watching what plays out on screen. Producers may be very well aware of this, choosing to present images so as to appeal to this very sensory emotion. The very commodification of women’s bodies, how women always look so good on screen – this is all part and parcel of catering to consumers. Ultimately, it all boils down to the generation of profits; everything that is manufactured is simply to earn profits.
Time is also alluded to be a linear value, while indexicality/contingency constitutes a mere representation of the event. For example, take a photograph – A photograph is just a representation. Looking at a picture of a reservoir, for instance, you are not looking at the actual reservoir; you’re just looking at a replication of it.
A photograph captures a moment, captures movement, captures time. It represents time, but is not time itself. The same can be said of the cinema. Yet, this capturing of a particular moment may in the process cause the moment to lose its meaning. The lines between what is the past and the present and what is the future are all blurred, all condensed into one representative photograph. Without any caption or description, we are unable to tell when the photograph was taken, what it represents per se. It also introduces the notion of dependency – without these accompanying descriptions, we are lost. The irony lies in how we take photographs to remember, but yet, to remember, we rely on these photographs. It’s a reliance that is encompassing. To capture a photograph also introduces the notion of chance – its the capturing of one moment. The moment is there only once, and then it’s gone. A parallel can be drawn to capitalism, how modernity and chance ties in with progression.
Mulvey discusses the psychoanalytic background of mainstream films and how pleasure in viewing is separated into active (male) and passive (female). She describes patriarchal culture reproduced in the films, where females are always represented as the male other, reminding me of de Beauvoir’s idea of the ‘other’. To Mulvey, films produce two major effects; scopophilia and ‘developing scopophilia in the narcissistic aspect.’ The repressed self is further exhibited and projected when audiences chose to view these films to derive sexual pleasure. Moreover, they start to associate the project images with their bodies, imagining ‘his mirror image to be more complete’. Mulvey’s analysis can contribute to the existing literature as it provides a critical reading and digs deeper into the mainstream films that many tend to neglect.
All the readings this week point out how film and radio serve to reiterate and structure the dominant hegemonic discourse within society in a way that seems to be logical and rational. And over time, when these discourses are left unquestioned, they become a taken for granted part of social life and are deeply entrenched in society.
In her writing, Mulvey uses the theory of pyschoanlysis to show how society’s patriarchal discourse impacts both the way we watch movies and the way we interact with the cinema itself. Mulvey posits that cinematic visions are aligned with the cultural subconscious that is in essence, patriarchal. Therefore, women are bearers of meaning and serve as a signifier for the male other. Hence, her central argument is that the Hollywood films utilize women to incite an enjoyable visual experience for men and this structures the gaze as a masculine one, while the women are always gazed upon as reified objects. When these films are not questioned and left unchallenged, the erotic is slipped into the language of the dominant patriarchal order and it is hard to extract it.
According to Doane, time is no longer passed but is instead, spent. It is reified and cinemas played an essential role in representing and structuring time in this manner. With the Industrial Revolution and Taylorization, time was commodified and made to adhere to a strict structure that mechanized the human body and eliminated unproductive time. Hence, the notion of leisure time was no longer a given but was earned. Time was now based on value and the monetary terms, and this rationalization produced an obsession with contingency and indexicality, which can be observed in films.
Adorno asserts that music has become a reified commodity that has completely transformed its meaning. Music was no longer an end in itself but a means to an end. It did not result as a product of human force and creativity, but instead was used a moneymaking entity. This strips away the listener’s ability to make meaning and alienates him from his human consciousness. To Adorno, music is now a type of false consciousness, as the listener believes the radio to be providing him with a sort of culture as he sells his labor power and toils away. Hence, the standardization of music and the mass dissemination through radio takes away the ability for humans to make their own choices and reduces their intellectual ability.
“We live in a society of commodities”. According to Adorno, this “commodity character of music tends radically to alter it”, where it “becomes a means instead of an end”, and produces “commodity listening” (the absent-minded audience with suspended critical facilities), cloaking the commodity in “culture and erudition” (like Benjamin’s aura), standardizing commodity and enthusiasm. An illusion of ownership is created, such that the man in the street becomes smug and self-satisfied, and less inclined to question social realities. The antagonisms in the cultural sphere are not easily recognized. Their being hidden also draws attention away from more obvious antagonisms in other spheres. The new technique of musical reproduction, radio, does not bring about anything new. It does not fulfil its promises. Instead of progression, there is retrogression. Repetition of the standardized creates the illusion of a crowd that consumers follow and form without realising that their “free choice” is “pseudo-individualism”. The crowd does not understand itself. The crowd is entertained.
Doane talks about the (mechanical) representability of time, in records fixing life and movement, in immersive experiences of other spaces and times. “The vision of life must be paid for in life itself”. The immortality and extensions of the human body depend on the initial finite body. The representation is neither “proper” nor “normal”, but shocking and threatening. This is the shock mentioned by Benjamin that accompanies new technologies. Cinematic technology is brought up as a “time-based media” enabling the access to time and its representation(s) and the structuring of time and contingency. Time becomes felt, structuring other aspects of modernity, even being worn. Time is externalized from the human subject that is situated in it. Time becomes “uniform, homogenuous, irreversible, and divisible into verifiable units”. Time becomes a measure of value, and is thus of value, a currency that can be stored and spent. Other features are emphasized due to the change in the nature of time, such as increased linear thinking, reification, standardization, stabilization and rationalization. Memories gained as a record of time. But is the unknowable “instant” really able to be represented? Or should it be assumed that time and memory are two systems, the conscious and the unconscious? The conscious does not remember, shielding the shock from the effects of modernity on the human existence, leading to experiences which slip away, and rationalization that mimics meaning. When time becomes an instant, e.g. in film, the present becomes inseparable from the past. There is “thisness”, the promise of restoration (manipulation). Discontinuity at the same time is continuity. Other key terms include abstraction/rationalization, and an emphasis upon the contingent, chance and ephemeral, description/narration, statistics, temporal compression, historical trauma and rupture, indexicality and multiple temporalities. There is the temporality of the apparatus, the temporality of the diegesis, and the temporality of reception.
Mulvey talks about gender and its relation to the cinema via notions of psychoanalytic theory. The scopophilic instinct (pleasure in viewing another person as an erotic object, or a dangerous object) and the ego libido (narcissistic identification with main, male, character) within the cinematic codes create a gaze, a world (patriarchal) and an object. These are possible due to the three looks associated with the cinema: the subordination of the looks of the camera and the audience to that of the characters at each other within the screen illusion (the last look being the cinematic codes that reflect the patriarchal reality).
I find it difficult to see a link between the three articles.
Mulvey explains how film is patriarchal as it reestablishes societal norms of gender and sexuality. She then goes on to write about scopophilia which is the pleasures of looking. It makes people objects that are being subjected to another’s gaze. In cinemas, it allows for a voyeuristic phantasy whereby spectator can feel as though they are looking in on a private world. The spectator is in a position where their exhibitionism is repressed and that they place their repressed desires onto the performer on screen. The film lets the spectator identify him/herself with the performer. It works like a mirror. In film, women are there to be looked at compared to men who are there to perform. Women are there not to help in the plot in any way, they are placed in films as eye candy and to provide pleasure viewing for the spectators.
Doane harps a lot about representation of time and how cinematic technology played an important role in establishing time representation. There’s this obsession with time in modernity. The standardization of time came with improvements in speed of transportation and communication. She wants to put across her point that contingency that was formed in the 19th century was an important factor in the development and rise of the cinema as a central representational form of the 20th century.
Adorno is critical of radio music. He believes that radio music is produced to manipulate the masses. Radio music is seen as music for the masses. The way one listens to a symphony has different effects. He mentioned something like this: is symphony on a radio still considered a symphony? And how would people listen to the symphony on the radio? He believes that music has become a commodity and that it is connected to standardization and mass production. Music is no longer a force. It has become a regular commodity. There is no longer a need to be intelligent in appreciating music. All the listener has to do is just listen. To him, that is not music. Music requires the brain to work. For him music may have been brought to the masses but it does not mean a rise in music culture as the music brought to the masses is not desirable. What role does music play? For him, music is a commodity forced onto the masses to consume instead of the masses participating in the culture of music.