Laura Mulvey Male Gaze Theory

This piece of work is focusing on theory of the male gaze created by Laura Mulvey. I shall be able to understand what the male gaze and be able to recognise when it is being displayed within a media text.

Laura Mulvey

·   A British Feminist film theorist

·   Currently professor of film and media studies at Birkbeck, University of London

·   She previously worked at the British Film Institute

 

·   She introduced the concept of the “male gaze”

 

The Male Gaze

The male gaze is a theory, which shows how women are represented differently to men in mainstream cinema. The mainstream cinema

industry is dominated by men, who often not only dominate in front of the camera but also behind the camera as well. In cinema women are often represented as weak,  sexualised characters who are dependant on men. The male gaze shows how the audience is put into the

perspective of the male and shows us how the gaze of a man will often linger on the sexualised parts of the female body.

An example of the male gaze, is a scene in Love Actually where Colin Firths character is seen watching his housekeeper undress and jump into the lake to rescue his book which she had accidently allow to be blown away.

The  character Aurelia is shown undressing slowly, the camera follows the fall of her dress to the floor. The camera stays constantly in line of her body, moving up and down, stopping to focus on her breasts and bum. In this scene the character is sexualised by not only the

character watching her, but also the camera operator most likely a male and also the male audience watching the film. This is the male gaze.

Laura Mulvey’s argument is that in mainstream cinema, the male gaze almost always is more dominant than the female gaze.

After this research on Laura Mulvey's male gaze I am now able to recognise this theory in action with film texts. I agree that the male gaze is almost always more dominant than the female gaze in mainstream cinema however I am unsure of the importance of this and why this matters, as of yet. I am still undecided of my film narrative which means that I do not know whether the male gaze will be included into my short film.

In my short film the male gaze theory can be applied when the female character is the one who is being watched from a high angle by the male character. However the male character is not sexualising the female character and the theory has been broken as the female character is the one that is taking control by standing up to the male character in being honest about the fact that she does not know who she is.