Jujube/methods-research-group
Calendars:Networked_Media_Calendar/Networked_Media_Calendar/06-03-2019_-Event_1
research group + own research
group information
Susanna, Jue, Marieke
Keywords: affect, gaze and gender
My core research questions up to the point are: how do people feel, specifically, how do people feel empathic?
After reading Eric Schouse's essay, Feeling, Emotions, Affect, I realize that affects closely connect to core emotions. As a person fortunate to have experienced it in therapy, I believe the acknowledgement of and clarity about core emotions will enrich and enlighten one's self.
My then therapist recommended three books to me. All of them seem relevant to my recent projects (not as foreshadowing frameworks, but as an emerging pattern as I make them). The books touch on neuroscience, development psychology, psychotherapy (A General Theory of Love); suffering, revisiting the past, healing (Reconciliation); and ways to access core emotions and arriving at clarity (It's Not Always Depression).
I will start to externalize these connections and position my work in the framework of affect theories.
What have I been reading so far?
When it comes to theory, I read based on keywords. I am fond of the series of readers called Documents of Contemporary Art, published by Whitechapel (London) and MIT Press (Boston). I have leafed through titles like: Work, Practice, Chance, Memories, The Archive, The Sublime, etc.
At the beginning of the program the word "autobiography" appeared frequently in my attempts. I noted the early, loose thoughts in the page named memoir. [1] For a couple of months, the driving force of my readings was personal memories, more specifically, how my own memory (and experience) can move others. I noticed my tendency of archiving without articulating the significance of that act, or only doing so in a half-baked way. A breakthrough came when I finished the essay investigating my relationship with autobiographic work. [2] I have since shifted more definitively from my own images (words, storylines, specific events) to those of an external origin.
I briefly investigated mythology as a potential framework. [3] After reading some contextualizing texts about myths, I found mythology's cultural indications and specific mechanisms (for example, reproduction to perpetuate in public memory) did not quite speak to what I wanted to create. I shifted my attention to tales and stories.
Relying on my experience with narrative forms (playwriting, stage storytelling), I wanted to read about realms I knew little about. The Cinematic (Documents of Contemporary Art) has introduced me to photography and film theories. I like this volume because it makes an effort to distinguish between photography and cinema, not from a technological/historical point of view, but with more in-depth analysis of each medium. I have written synopsis of the essays from which I learned. [4]
What am I reading now?
My interest in cinematography emerges, somewhat coincidentally, with The Cinematic readings and a work I created over December 2018 to Feb 2019 (Seek). [5]
I have selected my readings directing towards the specificity of the techniques and studies of cinema, including haptic aesthetics and screen as a situation.
reading Mulvey
Contextualizing Mulvey: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Mulvey
Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema
(pdf from Film: Psychology, Society)
Braudy, L., & Cohen, M. (1999). Film theory and criticism: Introductory readings (5th ed.). New York: Oxford University Press.
Written in 1975, this essay uses Freud's psychoanalysis as a theoretical framework. Although most of Freud's theory is outdated in 2019, Mulvey has been conscious about its fallacy from the beginning. With a critical eye, she calls her use of psychoanalysis "political."
We are still separated by a great gap from important issues for the female unconsious which are scarcely relevant to phallocentric theory... But, at this point, psychoanalytic theory as it now stands can at least advance our understanding of the status quo, of the patriarchal order in which we are caught. (833)
In the first part of her analysis, she focuses on the pleasures offered by mainstream Hollywood cinema of her time. (She is aware of the "politically and aesthetically avant-garde" and is a maker of those films, but it is not the focus of this essay.) The pleasures from scopophilia ("a person's deriving aesthetic pleasure from looking at something and from looking at someone" [6]) relates to the formation of ego (psychoanalysis lingo), and alludes to the discussions on subjectivity and "the objectified other."
The cinema setting (darkness in the auditorium, contrast of the brilliance of the screen, isolation between one spectator and another) perpetuates a voyeuristic illusion. The spectators (given privacy) look into a private world on screen — so the illusion goes. +
The pleasure of looking surrounds the human form, i.e. anthropomorphic scales, space, stories. The psychoanalytic term used here is "narcissism." Mulvey maps out the relationships between "the imagery, the recognition/mis-recognition and identification, hence the articulation of the 'I', of subjectivity." The human form on the big screen is similar to the mirroring of a pre-language child. As she continues to analyze: the structures of the cinema "allow temporary loss of ego" through narrative of a fictional story, "while simultaneously reinforcing the ego" through the process of identification. The stars of the film produce ego ideals. The images from cinema make the everyday, perceptual reality mundane and create an idealized, "eroticized" concept of the world, making "a mockery of empirical objectivity". (836-7) ++
In the second part of the essay, Mulvey writes in-depth about the gendered portrayal and perception on screen. Women's "traditional exhibitionist role", i.e. "the woman displayed", becomes a spectacle supported by the narrative. She suggests that the gaze of the male character and that of the spectators synchronize as the woman performs in the narrative, reinforced by cinematography of fragmented body close-ups. Again, it is interesting how different surfaces, space and mechanism play into one another: the screen story (i.e. the narrative), the space of the auditorium and "either side of the screen". (837-8)
While woman becomes the spectacle, the man's role serves to drive the story forward. "The man controls the film phantasy and also emerges as the representative of power in a further sense: as the bearer of the look of the spectator..." The spectator's gaze becomes the male gaze because they can identify with the main controlling figure. The male star is the "more perfect, more complete and more ideal ego" rather than the erotic, objectified female star. To achieve this kind of power portrayal, the male figure is closer to "natural conditions of human perceptions."Techniques of cinematography — deep focus (?), camera movements following the action of the protagonist, and invisible editing — all give the illusion of realism, and naturalize the male figure. (838-9) +++
Mulvey uses the opening of Only Angels Have Wings and To Have and Have Not as case studies. They open "with the woman as object of the combined gaze of spectator and all the male protagonists"; through identification with the main male character "the spectator can indirectly possess her too." The next part of the essay aligns the image of woman with psychoanalytic terms. "The meaning of woman is sexual difference" — in today's view, the theories of castration anxiety are no longer valid, but this difference and the power and control that it convinces the spectators of are worth noting. The female star and the film in which they are produce two kinds of pleasures: voyeurism (sadism "ascertaining guilt") and fetishistic scopophilia ("builds up the physical beauty of the object").
"Sadism demands a story, depends on making something happen, forcing a change in another person, a battle of will and strength, victory defeat, all occurring in linear time... [F]etishistic scopophilia can exist outside linear time as the erotic instinct is focused on the look alone." (840) The two kinds of pleasures allude to the two types of image/processes in cinema: one driven by narrative (or "degesis", as she calls it) and the other by fetishized icons. ++++
Mulvey compares works from Hitchcock and Sternberg. Hitchcock investigates voyeurism while Sternberg produces the "ultimate fetish." In Sternberg's films, the woman is the "perfect product, whose body, stylized and fragmented by close-ups is the content of the illusion of screen depth." +++++
Sternberg's plots concern with "misunderstanding rather than conflict," thus blurring the story. The male character does not become the surrogate for the audience; the "male" gaze here comes from the iconic images of the woman. (Or do they sympathize??) In contrast, Hitchcock's camera is "subjective from the point of view of the male protagonist". (841)
Mulvey captures one of the most interesting characteristics of cinema, "the look." (underlines are mine)
None of these interacting layers [woman as icon, as sexual difference, as threat to the ego, as the perfect product, etc.] is intrinsic to film, but it is only in the film form that they can reach a perfect and beautiful contradiction, thanks to the possibility in the cinema of shifting the emphasis of the look. It is the place of the look that defines cinema, the possibility of varying it and exposing it. This is what makes cinema quite different in its voyeuristic potential from, say, strip-tease, theatre, shows, etc... Playing on the tension between film as controlling the dimension of time (editing, narrative) and film as controlling the dimension of space (changes in distance, editing), cinematic codes create a gaze, a world, and an object, thereby producing an illusion cut to the measure of desire."
Mulvey breaks down the cinematic codes for scopophlia and voyeurism. She defines the look in three ways: "that of the camera as it records the pro-filmic event, that of the audience as it watches the final product, and that of the characters at each other within the screen illusion." The conventional, mainstream narrative film hides the first two while focusing on the third. However, without the recording process and the curiosity of the spectator, "fictional drama cannot achieve reality, obviousness and truth." She suggests disrupting the conventions by consciously including the first two looks, "destroying the pleasure, satisfaction and privilege of the 'invisible guest'." (843-4)
Movies mentioned in the essay:
Only Angels Have Wings, To Have and Have Not
Sternberg: Morroco, Dishonoured
Hitchcock: Vertigo, Marnie, Rear Window
Explore more
+ spaces for illusions, collective viewing and privacy, darkness as a setting, the difference between cinema and gallery
++ rather than propagandizing cinema as manipulative, how can we use cinema as a space for empathy?
+++ how do focus, camera movement, editing affect the spectator's identification process (whom are they identifying with)?
++++ how do narrative and fetish influence the spectator's distance with the subject on screen?
+++++ what roles do close-ups play, does fragmentation of an entity distance the spectator?
Other academic text regarding
screen image, screen depth, cinema space, narrative space, fetish v. narrative
Afterthoughts on “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” Inspired by Duel in the Sun
In this essay Mulvey analyzes how cinema "inherited" traditions from traditions of story-telling in other forms of folk and mass culture. While the previous "Visual Pleasure" concludes with the uniqueness of cinema (the 3 looks), this essay focuses on the use of narrative structures in cinema.
Mulvey again uses Freud's theories the hero in narrative. "Three elements can thus be drawn together: Freud's concept of 'masculinity' in women, the identification triggered by the logic of a narrative grammar, and the ego's desire to fantasise itself in a certain, active, manner."
She analyzes the narrative of the Western and the dividing point of "marriage" in the Western. Getting married or not for the protagonists represents the "symbolic... and nostalgic narcissism." She continues about how other elements add to the develop of the story. "The issue at stake is no longer how the villain will be defeated, but how the villain's defeat will be inscribed into history."
Stillness in the Moving Image
This essay is included in The Cinematic. See synopsis --> Jujube/methods-session-3#Laura_Mulvey:_Stillness_in_the_Moving_Image.2C_2003