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| '''Synopsis: Look at the video / Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema'''
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| In this Synopsis I will compare my film: Look at the video with Laura Mulvey's essay: Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.
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| Notes:
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| Woman, stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.
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| '''Destruction of Pleasure as a Radical Weapon'''
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| The alternative cinema provides a space for a cinema to be born that is radical in both a political and an aesthetic sense and challenges the basic assumptions of the mainstream film. This is not to reject the latter moralistically, but to highlight the ways in which its formal preoccupations reflect the physical obsessions of the society that produced it, and further, to stress that the alternative cinema must start specifically by reacting against these obsessions and assumptions.
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| The magic of the Hollywood style at its best (and of all the cinema that fell within its sphere of influence) arose, not exclusively but in one important aspect, from its skilled and satisfying manipulation of visual pleasure. Unchallenged, mainstream film coded the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order. In the highly developed Hollywood cinema it was only through these codes that the alienated subject, torn in his imaginary memory by a sense of loss, by the terror of potential lack in fantasy, came near to finding a glimpse of satisfaction: through its formal beauty and its play on his own formative obsessions.
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| This essay will discuss the interweaving of that erotic pleasure in film, its meaning, and in particular the central place of the image of woman. '''It is said that analyzing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it.''' That is the intention of this essay. The alternative is the thrill that comes from leaving the past behind without rejecting it, transcending outworn or oppressive forms, or daring to break with normal pleasurable expectations in order to conceive a new language of desire.
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| '''Scopophilia: The obtaining of sexual pleasure by looking at nude bodies, erotic photographs, etc.'''
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| The cinema offers a number of possible pleasures. One is scopophilia. There are circumstances in which looking itself is with a source of pleasure, just as, in the reverse formation, there is pleasure in being looked at.
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| Freud isolated scopophilia as one of the component instincts of sexuality that exists as drives quite independently of the erotogenic zones. At this point he associated scopophilia with taking other people as objects, '''subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze.'''
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| Although the instinct is modified by other factors, in particular the constitution of the ego, it continues to exist as the erotic basis for pleasure in looking at another person as object. At the extreme, it can become fixated into a perversion, producing obsessive voyeurs and Peeping Toms, whose only sexual satisfaction can come from watching, in an active controlling sense, an objectified other.
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| At first glance the cinema would seem to be remote from the undercover world of the surreptitious observation of an unknowing and unwilling victim. What is seen of the screen is so manifestly shown. But the mass of mainstream film, and the conventions within which it has consciously evolved, portray a hermetically sealed world that unwinds magically, indifferent to the presence of the audience, producing for them a sense of seperation and playing on their voyeuristic fantasy.
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| Although the film is really being shown, is there to be seen, conditions of screening and narrative conventions give the spectator an illusion of looking in on a private world. Among other things, the position of the spectators in the cinema is blatantly one of repression of their exhibitionism and projection of the repressed desire onto the performer.
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| The cinema satisfies a promordial wish for pleasurable looking, but it also goes further, developing scopophilia is its narcissistic aspect. The conventions of mainstream film focus attention on the human form. Scale, space, stories are all anthropomorphic. Here, curiosity and the wish to look intermingle with a fascination with likeness and recognition: the human face, the human body, the relationship between the human form and its surroundings, the visible presence of the person in the world.
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| '''Two contradictory aspects of the pleasurable structures of looking in the conventional cinematic situation:'''
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| 1. Scopophilic, arises from pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight.
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| 2. Developed through narcissism and the constitution of the ego, comes from identification with the image seen.
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| The first is a function of the sexual instincts, the second of ego libido. Both pursue aims in indifference to perceptual reality, creating the imagized, eroticized concept of the world that forms the perception of the subject and makes a mockery of empirical objectivity.
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| Sexual instincts and identification processes have a meaning within the symbolic order that articulates desire. Desire, born with language, allows the possibility of transcending the instinctual and the imaginary. The look, pleasurable in form, can be threatening in content, and it is woman as representation/image that crystallizes this paradox.
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| '''Woman as image, Man as bearer of the look,'''
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| In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The 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 connote ''to-be-looked-at-ness''. Women displayed as sexual object is the leitmotiv of erotic spectacle: from pinups to striptease, from Ziegfeld to Busby Berkeley, she holds the look, plays to and signifies male desire. Mainstream film neatly combined spectacle and narrative.
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| The presence of woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film, yet her visual presence tends to work against the development of a story line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation. This alien presence then has to be integrated into cohesion with the narrative.
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| '''As Budd Boetticher has put it:'''
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| ''What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance.''
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