The readings from this week were “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” by Laura Mulvey and “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism” by Jean-Luc Comolli and Paul Narboni. Having made the transition from photography to cinema, neither of these readings can be related to the previous readings that have been completed throughout the course of the semester. Theses readings can be related to each other in a sense. Mulvey mentions the film journal Screen, which is the same journal that the second reading by Comolli and Narboni came from.
The thesis that was articulated for Laura Mulvey’s paper can be found in two places: in the first and last paragraphs in the introduction. The first part states that the point of this paper is to “…use psychoanalysis to discover …show more content…
Scopophilia can be traced back to Freud’s idea of seeing people as objects and as a “source of pleasure” (835). She is basically stating that the only reason women are shown in film is to be looked at by men. Women are constantly objectified in the film industry. They are portrayed as being submissive and are viewed as sexual objects. They are even dressed in a way that is appealing to men which sexualizes them even further. Their only role in the film industry is to portray the desires of men. This only furthers the divide between the roles of men and women in cinema. The narcissistic approach focuses on how what a person sees in the mirror is a delusion of themselves. Cinema allows for a person to detach from their egos but at the same time encourages their ego to associate themselves with what is being seen in the …show more content…
It states, “A few points, which we shall return to in greater detail later: every film is political, inasmuch as it is determined by the ideology which produces it (or within which it is produced, which stems from the same thing)” (30). The authors continue to discuss how the purpose of cinema is to “’reproduce’ reality” (30). It is just one of the many ways that the world is able to convey the experience as depicted by ideology. Now, the difference between films is whether or not they cut the bond between cinema and