In traditional Hollywood cinema, narrative film structures its gaze as masculine; films use women in order to provide a pleasurable visual experience for men, as well as symbolizing women as the desire for male. (483-94). The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) however, substitutes women with gold for male desire to fill in the narrative void.
In Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, she presents a number of very interesting facts regarding the ways that the sexual imagery of men and women respectively are used in the world of film. One such fact is that of the man as the looker and the female as the looked upon, she argues that the woman is always the object of reifying gaze, not the bearer if it. And “[t]he determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to be connote to-be-looked-at-ness” (487). Mulvey makes the claim that women are presented and primped into this role of “to-be-looked-at-ness”. They are put into films for this purpose and for very little other purposes. However, this argument cannot be incorporated with The Treasure of the Sierra Madre; the existence of women in the film is extremely insignificant to an extent that could be considered absent. “In a world ordered by sexual imbalance,” male serves as the dominant figures with which the viewer can identify, women only appear in the film for a very short moment of time. For instance, the appearance of women is only shown when Howard rescues the ill child in the village and his return to the village for hospitality reception...
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...ulvey is saying that the role that the woman plays to the cast of male characters and the audience itself, not only does the woman present an erotic image to the characters in the film, but her other function is to do the same to the audience. The concept is the same when woman is substituted with gold. The gold does not only serve as the desire for the trio, but also becomes the audience’s desire as well.
If the traditional Hollywood cinema films use women as the desire for male characters, and utilize women as the visual pleasure for audience as argued by Mulvey; The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is therefore considered as a type of non-traditional, disruptive narrative. The film lacks of the masculine gaze between men and women, instead, this masculine gaze is upon male characters’ desire for gold. Gold is the substitution for male’s desire for women in the film.
In the classical Western and Noir films, narrative is driven by the action of a male protagonist towards a clearly defined, relatable goal. Any lack of motivation or action on the part of the protagonist problematizes the classical association between masculinity and action. Due to inherent genre expectations, this crisis of action is equivalent to a crisis of masculinity. Because these genres are structured around male action, the crises of action and masculinity impose a crisis of genre. In the absence of traditional narrative elements and character tropes, these films can only identify as members of their genres through saturation with otherwise empty genre symbols. The equivalency between the crises of genre and masculinity frames this symbol saturation as a sort of compensatory masculine posturing.
Kraus, Carolyn. "Screening the borderland: transsexualism as cinematic metaphor." CineAction 78 (2009): 17+. Expanded Academic ASAP. Web. 5 Oct. 2011
The male gaze has been a prominent theme in movies, music and other areas of culture for a considerable amount of time. This is something that is primarily categorized by someone who is doing the looking. More specifically it is how the audience is viewing the people or person that is being represented. The male gaze is essentially something that in advertizing, and in movies enables women to become a commodity which enables products to sell, because we all know in society that sex sells, and especially in modern marketing. Something to take into consideration is the fact that woman have not had a considerable amount of involvement in film making over the past 100 years, and even today, this is still a fact. Although women tend to be involved
For the past few decades, women’s positions improve significantly due to feminist movements, which can be presented through contemporary films. Instead of focusing on male-only heroes, an increasing number of filmmakers tend to create female heroines. Nevertheless, women have not yet achieved reproductive rights. In other words, different from men, who can freely express themselves, female’s actions are still limited by societal norm. Thus, female characters, as a reflection of contemporary females in society, demonstrate the fact that females are attempting to challenge gender stereotypes under societal pressures. Katniss, the heroine in Hunger Games, is presented as a role model. However, Marieme, the working class girl in Girlhood, seems
Classic narrative cinema is what Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson (The classic Hollywood Cinema, Columbia University press 1985) 1, calls “an excessively obvious cinema”1 in which cinematic style serves to explain and not to obscure the narrative. In this way it is made up of motivated events that lead the spectator to its inevitable conclusion. It causes the spectator to have an emotional investment in this conclusion coming to pass which in turn makes the predictable the most desirable outcome. The films are structured to create an atmosphere of verisimilitude, which is to give a perception of reality. On closer inspection it they are often far from realistic in a social sense but possibly portray a realism desired by the patriarchal and family value orientated society of the time. I feel that it is often the black and white representation of good and evil that creates such an atmosphere of predic...
The most important events of this film all revolve around the female characters. While there are some male charac...
The film Klute, directed by Alan J. Pakula attempts to subvert this theory, but ultimately proves Mulvey correct in the system of the active male and passive female, that the male controls the film and drives the story forward. Jane Fonda’s character, Bree Daniels, sees herself at the
This essay argues that the film Bridesmaids transcends traditional representations of feminine desire that exhibits women as spectacles of erotic pleasure, through the symbolic reversal of gender identity in cinematic spaces. By discussing feminist perspectives on cinema, along with psychoanalytic theory and ideological narratives of female image, this essay will prove Bridesmaids embodies a new form of feminine desire coded in the space of the comedic film industry.
These movies allowed female characters to embody all the contradictions that could make them a woman. They were portrayed as the “femme fatale” and also “mother,” the “seductress” and at the same time the “saint,” (Newsom, 2011). Female characters were multi-faceted during this time and had much more complexity and interesting qualities than in the movies we watch today. Today, only 16% of protagonists in movies are female, and the portrayal of these women is one of sexualization and dependence rather than complexity (Newsom, 2011).
Led by Laura Mulvey, feminist film critics have discussed the difficulty presented to female spectators by the controlling male gaze and narrative generally found in mainstream film, creating for female spectators a position that forces them into limited choices: "bisexual" identification with active male characters; identification with the passive, often victimized, female characters; or on occasion, identification with a "masculinized" active female character, who is generally punished for her unhealthy behavior. Before discussing recent improvements, it is important to note that a group of Classic Hollywood films regularly offered female spectators positive, female characters who were active in controlling narrative, gazing and desiring: the screwball comedy.
In the article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey discusses the relationships amongst psychoanalysis (primarily Freudian theory), cinema (as she observed it in the mid 1970s), and the symbolism of the female body. Taking some of her statements and ideas slightly out of their context, it is interesting to compare her thoughts to the continuum of oral-print-image cultures.
In “The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine,” Luce Irigaray argues that, because society uses a patriarchal language that privileges male-gendered logic over female-gender emotion, there is no adequate language to represent female desire. She writes that “feminine pleasure has to remain inarticulate in language, in its own language, if it is not to threaten the underpinnings of logical operations” and, because of this, “what is most strictly forbidden to women today is that they should attempt to express their own pleasure” (796). This inability to articulate female desire means that female desire becomes unutterable, something that cannot be expressed. According to Irigaray, this unutterable-ness of female desire in patriarchal language leaves only one option for women to attempt to express their desire and that is the act of mimicry or mimesis. Mimesis is not an attempt to represent female desire in patriarchal language; instead, mimesis is in attempt through the use of patriarchal language to reveal that female desire cannot be presented, a way to “make ‘visible,’ by an effect of playful repetition, what was supposed to remain invisible – the cover-up of a possible operation of the feminine in language” (795). Mimesis exposes how patriarchal language disallows or denies female desire by circling around the absence of that female desire, by making its absence perfectly clear in a patriarchal discourse.
In Brenda Cooper’s article “Chick Flicks,” she argues, the film, Thelma and Louise employs mockery as a narrative tool, and functions to produce a defiant narrative which fiercely confronts and denounces patriarchy. Societal norms are able to create a kind unconscious compliance, resulting in self-imposed coercion and oppression. A film like Thelma and Louise brings consciousness to women’s own complicity in social norms like patriarchy, so they can no longer blindly follow these norms. This leaves women in either a state of denial and resistance or a state of evolution and change. Through mockery this film sheds light on accepted norms, and in some, causes a defensive response, as it
The films message to viewers about gender and power is that women are meant to take care of the home and play the supportive role, while men go out to their jobs and provide. Men are strong and burly and women are naïve and domesticated. Women need men and men always come to the rescue to save women and give them a happy ending. Power is portrayed in the film both visually and through the film’s script and dialogue. The common idea that women are inferior to men is placed subtly in this movie throughout the plot and how these charac...
Kipnis, L. (1993). She-male fantasies and the aesthetics of pornography. In P. C. Gibson & R. Gibson (Eds.),Dirty Looks: Women, Pornography, Power (pp. 124-144). London, England: British Film Institute.