Laura Mulvey media theory

2. Laura Mulvey (born August 15, 1941) was
educated at St Hilda’s Collage, Oxford. She is
currently professor of film and media studies
at Bribeck, University of London. She worked
at the British Film Institute for many years
before taking up her current position.

3. The feminist theory of film is criticism
derived from feminist politics and
feminist theory. Feminists have many
approaches to cinema analysis; regarding
the film elements analyzed and their
theoretical underpinnings.

4. In considering the way that films are put together,
many feminist film critics have pointed to the “male
gaze” that predominates in classical Hollywood
filmmaking. Budd Boetticher summaries the view
this; “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
that he does. In herself the woman has not the
slightest importance. Laura Muley’s germinal essay
“visual Pleasure and Narrative cinema”. Expands on
this conception of the passive role of women in
cinema to argue that film provides visual pleasure
through scopophilia, and identification with the on
screen make actor. She says that “in there traditional
exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked
at the displayed, with their appearance coded for
strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be
said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.” and as a
result contends that in film a woman is the “bearer
of meaning, not maker of meaning”. Mulvey argues
that Freud’s psychoanalysis theory is the exportation
through the combination on the patriarchal order of
society, and ‘looking’ in itself as a pleasurable act of
voyeurism, as the cinema satisfies a primordial wish
for pleasurable looking.”