Research-group-sjm

AFTER LAURA: AFFECT, GAZE, GENDER IN RELATION TO LENS-BASED ART

Members: Susanna, Jue, Marieke

This is how we do it.

core text: Laura Mulvey

• Essay: Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975) [1]
• Essay: Afterthoughts on “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” Inspired by Duel in the Sun (1989( (p181, The Narrative Reader) - abstract here
• Death 24x times per second (2005)
• Introduction: 1970s Feminist Film Theory and the Obsolescent Object (2015) [2]
• Gaze (wikipedia page) [3]

synopsis and annotations

Synopsis of the early Mulvey essays by Jue

Notes Marieke

specific research questions & branching text

Jue

Inquiries regarding spaces, affect and cinema(tography):

What are the psychological processes of (collective) viewing? What is the difference between, say, cinema and gallery (physical space), or cinema and netflix (screen space)? How do focus, camera movement, editing affect the viewer's thoughts and feelings? How can we use cinema as a space for empathy? How do interacting layers of aesthetics and narrative change the viewer's distance with what is shown on the screen?

Note: Unless discussing specific text from the 70's, I am adopting a contemporary vocabulary and critically distancing my synthesis from Freud, Marx and Peirce.

Readings:

• Narrative Spaces - Stephen Heath - selected from File:The Narrative Reader - Martin McQuillan.pdf
• Stories [4] -- start with:
  • Screen Narrative in the Digital Era
  • “Storification”: Or, What Do We Want Psychology and Physiology to Tell Us about Screen Stories?
  • Music Structuring Narrative – A Dialogue
• Screens [5] -- start with:
  • Archaic Paradigms of the Screen and Its Images
  • The Stuff of Screens
  • Gulliver Goes to the Movies: Screen Size, Scale, and Experiential Impact – A Dialogue
  • The Concept of the Mental Screen: The Internalized Screen, the Dream Screen, and the Constructed Screen
• Feeling, Emotions, Affect - Eric Shouse [6] ▶︎ synopsis◀︎
• Feminisms [7]
  • Introduction: 1970s Feminist Film Theory and the Obsolescent Object - Laura Mulvey
  • The Promise of Touch: Turns to Affect in Feminist Film Theory - Anu Koivunen
• Fire and Ice - Peter Wollen (1984) ▶︎ synopsis◀︎
• Photography and Fetish - Christian Metz (1985) ▶︎ synopsis◀︎
• Stillness in the Moving Image: Visualizing Time and Its Passing - Laura Mulvey (2003) ▶︎ synopsis◀︎
• Photography and Cinema, Catherine David (1989)

Susanna

My questions:

• What is left to the female spectator? Does she identify with active male hero despite the obvious gender difference? Does she identify with the passive and exhibitionist female despite the flat and restrictive personality?
• What is left to the female filmmaker? Can she make mainstream narrative based films and at the same time destroy patriarchal impositions? Can she be free? How aware does she have to be?
• New gazes: filmmakers, characters and spectators in a non binary present.

My readings:

• Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. (Mulvey)
• Cinema Studies, the key concepts. (Hayward) - Chapters on Feminist Film Theory
• Manic Impositions: The parasitical Art of Chris Kraus and Sophie Calle. (Watkins Fisher)
• The Narrative Reader (McQuillan) - Chapter 5/ Sexual Difference

Marieke

How can you create a narrative/discourse? Why do some become more accepted as truth?

• Invention of Hysteria - Georges Didi-Huberman

Story about the emergence of modern subjectivity from the netherworld and darkrooms of nineteenth-century medicine. This provocative landmark study is indispensable for anyone interested in questions of gender, the history of science, photography, and medicine: in short, in how we see ourselves as who we are.

• Death 24x times per second - Laura Mulvey

The book explicitly revises Mulvey’s account of the male gaze in her essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1978). In what she describes as the current ‘delayed cinema’, rather than the male spectator’s voyeuristic look and male protagonists driving the narrative momentum forward, film is opened up to a non-linear, feminine aesthetic of ‘fetishistic’ spectatorship, which lingers on pose, detail and cinematic style.

• Why I am not a feminist - Jessa Crispin

Quote: Feminism is: A fight to allow women to participate equally in the oppression of the powerless and the poor.

Crispin rejects the idea of contemporary feminism because it, “focuses dementedly on “self-empowerment” …[and] requires no thought, no discomfort, and no real change”

• The Emergence of Cinematic Time - Mary Ann Doane

In The Emergence of Cinematic Time, Mary Ann Doane suggests temporality as a master discourse for 19th century concerns relating to continuity and discontinuity. Modernity, and cinema, become equally characterised by control and a valorising of “the contingent, the ephemeral, chance – that which is beyond or resistant to meaning”

• The burden of representation: Essays on photographies and histories - John Tagg

A democracy of the image; photographic portraiture and commodity production; evidence, truth and a democracy of the image; photographic portraiture and commodity production; evidence, truth and evidence in law; a legal reality - a photograph as property in law; the currency of the photograph - new deal reformism and documentary rhetoric; contacts, worksheets - notes on photography; history and representation.

• An Atlas of Infrared Plates of the Unseen - Edward Thompson

British documentary photographer Edward Thompson set out to explore the boundaries of our perception. The projects have come together within the book to create a wider narrative that questions the nature of our reality, our past and what could be our future.

• Objectivity - Lorraine Daston, Peter Galison

In Objectivity, Daston and Galison challenge the received view that it is possible to observe nature without contaminating it with preconceived notions, prejudices and above all over-interpretation. This ahistorical view embraces the possibility of knowing the world as it “really is” without the involvement of a knower subject.

• Through the Looking Glass? Sexual agency and subjectification in cyberspace - Feona Attwood

Focuses on alternative pornography in the contemporary Western context where the rapid development of media and communication technologies offers women unprecedented access to various forms of cultural production. Attwood’s discussion of alternative pornographies highlights women’s active agency in making different forms of erotica and argues that ‘camgirls’ can be understood as defying objectification and controlling the gaze.

• The Body and the Screen, Theories of Internet Spectatorship - Michele White

Drawing on apparatus and feminist psychoanalytic film theories, art history, gender studies, queer theory, critical race and postcolonial studies, and other theories of cultural production, White conceptualizes Internet and computer spectatorship and provides theoretical models that can be employed in other analyses. She offers case studies and close visual and textual analysis of the construction of spectatorship in different settings.

shared text

• The new brutality film: race and affect in contemporary Hollywood cinema - Paul Gormley ----- maybe
• Death 24x Times per secon - Laura Mulvey [8]
• The Narrative Reader
• Feminisms: Diversity, Difference and Multiplicity in Contemporary Film Cultures - Laura Mulvey & Anna Backman Rogers [9]

related films

• Afternoon Delight - Jill Soloway.

The camera's gaze comes from a female director (n. b.: at the time Soloway identified as female but they now identify as non-binary) and the gaze between characters is predominantly female. A woman drives the narrative with her actions and her will to save another woman, her own marriage with her husband and herself. The spectator can identify with her and therefore project a female gaze onto the screen, following her in her actions and identifying with her desires.

• The Florida Project - Sean Baker

Follows the gaze of a child: Moonie, set in a cheap Florida motel near Disney's Magic Kingdom. For Moonie all of this is one big adventure while the reality deals with poverty and homelessness.

• Guusje America - Video Home System

A family portrait that combines old VHS footage with digital footage. It combines the past and present while touching themes of forgiveness and reconciliation --> Interesting for Jue: It was part of the Iffr program - Say: no more domestic silence (the program dealt with silence, how a film can create a silent moment in the audience)

• White Noise - Antoine d'Agata

The film shows life through a dark and agonized lens, monologues of prostitutes from different part of the world are the leading narration in the film. The director immerses himself in their drug use and prostitution gaining their trust, raising questions on the role of a director and exploitation.

• Marnie - Hitchcock

Quote article: But looking at “Marnie” now, with its scene of spousal sexual abuse, it’s also hard not to see a story that would have to be told very differently today – or maybe, simply, not told at all.

• Vertigo - Hitchcock

Vertigo focuses on the implications of the active/looking, passive/looked-at split in term of sexual difference and the power of the male symbolic encapsulated in the hero.

• Lost Highway - Lynch

Like Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 film Vertigo, the film examines male obsessions with women, who merely represent emotions that relate to them.

• Belle de Jour - Luis Bunuel

Analyzes man-woman power structure and sexual freedom (voluntarily working in prostitution as a bourgeoisie citizen). Erotic drama but not that erotic at all in this age.

• Beach Rats - Eliza Hittman

Hitman's perspective is distinctly female and feminist: Beach Rats sexualizes young male bodies while presenting a tender coming-of-age tale about the lead character Frankie's true sexuality.

• Alma Har'el - Bombay Beach

Three portraits of manhood, in its various ages and guises, the cinematography is gentle and hypnotic. Alma Har'el questions with her film if these men are a product of their world or if their world is a construct of their own imaginations. (A female gaze on manhood)

Discussions

Movie night 23.03: Vertigo

We planned to see Lost Highway on the same night but did not end up watching it.

We discussed the (ir)relevance of this film to our own research afterwards.

Jue's thought: I was "bummed" after the film because it portrayed the characters in blatant power dynamics and the acting and music were exaggerated — I am aware that I am not used to the 60's aesthetics and am judging a 1958 film with the lens of 2019. I would like to see movies that can "touch" one's heart and am not so interested in a visual survey of gendered gazes in films. (I will try to watch clips of the movies planned to be watched together, but perhaps not the entirety of them.)

20.03

By the end of the day we would like to have done:

• organize branching text according to our specific research questions
• outline relevance to listed text/films

17.03

We met to discuss the two essays. We started with Mulvey's conscious use of psychoanalysis as a framework and expressed our frustration towards the outdated vocabulary in Freud's theories. Susanna provided visual references (posters and still shots) to all the movies mentioned in Visual Pleasure.

Threads mentioned in the discussion:

• the three looks, i.e. gazes, in the cinema: the camera, the spectator, and from one character to another
• female poses (e.g. Rear Window)
• Hitchcock's storytelling and cinematography
• meme as an analogy of "stillness" (or fetishizing process) with new technologies
• the lack of perspective/analysis of the female spectator
• humanism as the new feminism

We were reminded of our own upbringings and how that contributed to how we viewed and experienced gender.

We then formulated the questions we want to further research. (via an interview-style conversation).

In terms of writing.

Specific research questions: Laura Mulvey as a point of departure

Jue

• physical space: What are spaces for illusions? what are the psychological processes of collective viewing? What is the difference between cinema and gallery?
• cinematography: how do focus, camera movement, editing affect the spectator's identification process (whom are they identifying with)? What do close-ups do?
• film theory: how do interacting layers of narrative and icon change the spectator's distance with the subject on screen?

Susanna

• How does the female spectator identify? How do female filmmakers come around male-centered conventions?
• The 3 female gazes

Marieke

• How can you create a narrative/discourse? Why do some become more accepted as truth?

Proposed content of the reader

We envision a reader consisting of:

• a selection of essays from the titles we will be reading
• one article (academic and/or creative) written by each of us
• transcript of one interview-style discussion

Next actions

Organize the "branching text" above to reflect our specific research questions.

Movie night #1 is happening on Saturday 23/03.

06.03 (day of forming research group)

Questions from our practice

- How has the spectator/observer/viewer/audience changed over time?

- How do we feel/relate to people when we present an idea/image as a certain gaze (doesn't have to be defined according to gender)?

- What is gaze?

- Should I/we, as female artists be aware of our gaze and our gender when creating culture?

The male gaze is slowly becoming an outdated term.

Let's define gaze intuitively: We look at something for some time, we are intrigued, and we try to understand from our own (cultural) framework of reference.

- Why do filmmakers want to show work? What is inside the filmmaker?

- What's in our work?

Marieke:::subvert norms: make a statement to make the audience (for the lack of the word) aware - how do people relate?

Jue:::meditation: affect - how are people moved in cinema?