“The place of the look defines cinema, the possibility of burying it and exposing it. This is what makes cinema quite different in its voyeuristic potential from, say, strip-tease, theater, shows and so on. Going far beyond highlighting a woman’s to-be-looked-at-ness cinema builds the way she is to be looked at into the spectacle itself. 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, 441)
The concepts of the scopophilic instinct and the ego libido clicked for me when reading through the summary, as well as how they serve as mechanisms for the formal attributes of cinema. This quote , to me, emphasized the importance of the element of drawing the watchers eyes and maintaining their gaze in order to satisfy that sense of desire in an audience.
A scene from a film that specifically reminds me of the scopophilic instinct is the Salma Hayek scene from Dusk Til Dawn. The scene draws the eyes of all the characters and audience alike from the way that it’s shot , to the reaction of the characters, to the cameras fixated on Hayek’s dancing. The scene really emphasizes that being looked at/desirable sensation.
Class Film: Born in Flames (Borden 1983) The most striking image from this film to me was the dead woman in the jail cell, the scene happened with a strange subtle build up yet still came off super suddenly and it added a major layer of grimness to the film.
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Mulvey uses the viewing situation of apparatus theory and applies it to film feminism. She connects apparatus theory to her questioning of the normative representation of females in films and challenges that concept with propositions of concepts and ideas that reveal what a feminist film would look like.