И еще, ребятки. Кто знает игру Have you met Ted?
Лора таким образом познакомила Алину, еще одну нашу однокурсницу, с мужиком. Они уже долго встречаются.
А всё благодаря have you met Ted?

ДЖЕЕЕЕЕЕЕЕЕЕЕЕЕФФФФ

Всё. Я написала ровно 2500 слов, но походу всё как-то сыро и глупо, ну и похуй.
Завтра утром напишу референс и библиографию И Я ФРИ ФОРЕВА.

*бегает по комнате и смеется*

Первая половина эпизода была уныла как моя жизнь.
Затем вроде как-то подправилась, Сомерхалдер зря тусит на CW, надо ему уже эмми всякие получать, да глобусы.
Концовку не поняла. С точки зрения развития сюжета это было явно лишним. Целых 39 минут нам показывали эволюцию Деймона, и тут вот такое. Дурачины сценаристы.

Зато вернулся мистер ХОТ. Папа Джоооооооооооон!!!!

PS
Ах да, чуть не забыла.
Тайлер с Кэролайн химичат так, что Чернобыль плачет.
Давайте уже хотманкивулфлав, а Мэтта можно мне отдать. У него такой голос, просто вах..

ладно. заканчиваю с соплями и иду валять эссе дальше

Внезапно наваляла 700 слов.
Могу потом выложить эссе про пенисы. Кому-то интересно?

Drawing on at least two examples from specific film texts, critically discuss the view that the cinema constructs a ‘male gaze’ in the way Laura Mulvey describes.



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I don't mind living in a man's world as long as I can be a woman in it.

- Marilyn Monroe



«Men act and women appear. Men look at women. And woman turns herself into an object - a surveyed object of vision» (Berger, 1972, p. 47). This was clearly written by a man. «A woman turns herself into an object». Indeed, in the society of spectacle, it is women's bodies that have become a sexual object and the primitive sexual sight for the pleasure of the male gaze. However, in this essay, the writer will be exploring the feminists' view of the male spectatorship and a 'male gaze' that the cinema constructs, particularly the theories by Laura Mulvey, the feminist film researcher, and the psychoanalytic theories based on Sigmund Freud's works, with the examples from specific film texts, such as infamous Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Hawkes, USA, 1953), starring Marilyn Monroe, Belle de Jour (Bunuel, France, 1967), a French film starring Catherine Deneuve, and the critically acclaimed Spanish film Volver by Pedro Almodóvar.

The cinema offers a number of pleasures, and the main pleasure for men always are attractive female movie stars. Although the film industry and movies themselves are believed to have changed over the course of time, traditionally, women in films are functioning at two levels: as an erotic object for the characters within the screen story and as erotic object for the spectators in the audience. Laura Mulvey thinks that the 'male gaze' projects its fantasy onto female actresses, so women are at the same time looked at and displayed, with their looks coded for visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote 'to-be-looked-at-ness' (Mulvey, 1989, p. 19).

Wise and cunning minds of Hollywood promptly came up with the idea of musicals and films about showgirls, where a woman performs within the narrative, so the gaze of male spectators and the gaze of the male characters/actors are neatly combined without breaking narrative believability. The actresses are required to wear sexy clothes, corsets, pin-up lingerie, outre dresses, and, therefore, the device of the show-girl allows women act in films at two levels suggested by Laura Mulvey, without any apparent break in diegesis. (Mulvey, 1989, p. 19-20).

A1953 film adaptation of the stage musical, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, is a classic example of Mulvey's 'male gaze'. The film starts with an on-stage performance by two glamorous Hollywood stars – Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe. They are in low-cut shiny red dresses with slashed skirts, high-heeled shoes, dancing and singing about being «two little girls from Little Rock». The audience's reaction within the story, in the film, is obviously the same as in the cinema auditorium. Men are excited, lost in admiration, already in love with those two women. The female characters are constructed as spectacle in the image as 'to-be-looked-at' and are confirmed as such not only by the spectators' gaze, but also by the male protagonists of the film. The rowd is pleased in both reality and fantasy/ fiction. Throughout the whole film, Lorelei and Dorothy (or Marilyn and Jane) are accompanied by the looks of dozens of men. Rather intentionally, Marilyn's Lorelei and Jane's Dorothy spend time on a ship, full of men. Sometimes, the viewer cannot really see any women other than Marilyn Monroe and, to a lesser degree, Jane Russell. All men in the scenes at a restaurant, or in the swimming pool, or at the gym, are looking at the girls like no-one else exists. The male characters objectify the female ones through their desiring look, but what is encouraging is the fact that Lorelei and Dorothy are absolutely aware of this and do not seem to mind at all. They are enjoying the looks, they are playing their roles, and what the writer finds ironic, these two powerful women seem to have absolute control over men, not vice versa.

«The woman on the screen is no longer the bearer of guilt but a perfect product, whose body, stylised and fragmented by close-ups, is the content of the film and the direct recipient of the spectator's look» (Mulvey in Stacey, 1994, p. 10).

There is a scene where Jane Russell's character is surrounded by a half-naked Olympic male team. The fact is, it is not the 'male gaze' that can be seen in the sequence, but the Jane Russell's Dorothy being the one observing the exercising men. Thus, it seems that Laura Mulvey considered the spectators to be heterosexual men only, forgetting about other kinds of people in the audience.

Mulvey's 'woman as image' approach is obviously ignoring the question of how female spectators make sense of such representations.

According to Mulvey, there has been another, third, look within the dominant mode of the Hollywood cinema. The first and second looks were the male spectators and male actors and characters within the film story, but the third one, respectively, would be the look of the camera man, the director and the editor, who make a particular selection of shots and angles. This recalls a gratuitous camera angle in Volver, a 2006 Spanish film starring Penelope Cruz, that stares down into the gulf of her cleavage, «the earth mother's nurturing centre of gravity», while she is washing dishes (The Observer, 2006). This example is more related to the pleasure for male spectators in the audience rather than the camera man or director. «Because from a heterosexual director, reveries like these would be evidence for the feminist complaint that movies are a sleazy contrivance of male voyeurism. But what does a gay man see in a woman's breasts and buttocks? Fussing over Cruz's mascara and making finicky choices about the cardigans she wore, Almodovar protests: 'The role is about her humanity, her heart as well as her face. Pretty girls do not usually get such parts. In America, they do not know how to use actresses. I saved her from Hollywood (The Observer, 13 August, 2006). This reminds of the famous dialogue from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, when, at the end of the film, Marilyn Monroe's character tells her future father-in-law: 'Don’t you know that a man being rich is like a girl being pretty? You wouldn’t marry a girl just because she’s pretty, but my goodness, doesn’t it help?' (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, 1953). Smart women can use their beauty and sexuality and, while being objectified by male viewers, at the same time are successful professional actors and Oscar-winners. Sadly, this did not happen to Marilyn Monroe, as she always dreamt about being recognised as an actress and being taken seriously by men (Marilyn Monroe: Beyond the legend documentary, USA, 1987). Monroe was an obvious choice to play Lorelei, the dumb blonde. Her dialogues as written are self-aware and witty, signaling amusement and excitement at her actions even if she is playing the fausse-naive heroine. In the film, all the weight is put on Monroe's innocence, however, she and her character are fully aware of their sexuality, and as Graham McCann describes in a book dedicated to Marilyn Monroe, «Lorelei (Marilyn) is aware of sexuality for herself rather than for men» (McCann, 1988, p. 98). On the other hand, the 'not taken seriously' issue striked Marilyn, as her certain childish manner of speech excited men no less than her perfect body. Also, the blondeness and 'child-woman' image were used as a source not only of light comedy, but also could relate to a Freudian theory of infantile sexuality.

Marilyn Monroe was and still is considered America's most favourite fetish (Shiach, 1999, p. 330). The fascination with a film star, according to Anne Fridberg, is not a fascination with a single signified person (Marilyn Monroe, Jane Russell, Penelope Cruz, etc.) or with a single signifier (their characters), but with an entire system of signifiers and codes within the commercialised erotic system, what fits in a so-called 'metaphor of fetishism' (Kaplan, 1990, pp. 42-43).

Using Freudian psychoanalysis, Laura Mulvey explores the ways in which popular cinema offers the spectator not only voyeuristic, but also fetishistic pleasures.

In her article ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' (1975), Laura Mulvey uses psychoanalysis to explain the concept of scopophilia, the desire to look at someone else and narcissistic voyeurism. Mulvey claims that scopophilia in cinema has a structure that is based on activity and passivity. Women in film are there for male requirements. They are usually seen as powerless whereas males are seen as powerful. The structures of looking in the cinema which produce voyeuristic pleasures are dependent upon an illusion. The spectator has the privilege of 'invisibility', looking without being looked at (Mulvey, 1975, p. 18). The spectators indulge in the 'lawless seeing', as the woman is unaware of their look. It becomes even more intimate in surrealistic films. Usually, the directors play with unconscious and dreams in non-narrative films, but the French director Luis Bunuel was a great exception. In his Belle de Jour, he formally emphasises the nature of desire.

In this case, the very narrative itself remains caught up in a cycle of repetition that forces male spectators to see the secret fantasies of the heroine. "Belle de Jour" offers the voyeur a chance to witness wish fulfillment without guilt or consequences. People desire to follow a promiscuous married woman during her daily life and watch her perverse sex fantasies. This is the power of the film. It has the ability to utterly satisfy bizarre cravings and leave the audience with a clean finish, the freedom to walk out of the cinema, clear of conscience and morality intact.

In Belle de Jour, the main character, Severine, daydreams of being beaten and raped by a couple of strangers. Freud describes daydreams as "primal phantasies". Mulvey suggests that «the visual pleasures of a narrative film are built around two contradictory processes: the first involves objectification of the image of a woman and the second, identification with it. The first process depends upon the scophophilic contact with the female form displayed for the spectator's pleasure: here the spectator's look is active and feels powerful. This form of pleasure necessitates the separation of the erotic identity of the subject from the object on the screen» (Stacey, 1994, p. 21). This 'distance' between a viewer and the screen contributes to the voyeuristic pleasure of looking in on a private world. The second form of pleasure, in Murley's opinion, depends upon the opposite process: identification with the image on the screen, which «is developed through narcissism and the constitution of the ego» (Murley, 1975, p. 10). She is drawing this argument on the theory of Jacques Lacan about 'the mirror phase'. It basically describes the unconscious origins of pleasure in identification (how a child's recognition of separation between girls and boys and so on is a vital step in the constitution of the ego) (Stacey, 1994, pp. 21-22). Sigmund Freud asserted the unconscious components of identification and insisted that identification was not «mere imitation, but an assimilation» (Kaplan, 1990, p. 37).

Speaking of Freud, there is a scene in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, where Marilyn's Lorelei gets into hilariously improbable circumstance, when the male character demonstrates on her how a python kills a goat by strangulation. Lorelei plays the role of a goat, and in the next scene demonstrates her friend the whole process, using gestures and kinetics which might be decoded in different ways, depending on the depravity of the spectators' minds. Moreover, there is an obvious mention of a python, which is commonly known as a symbol of the phallus in Freudian view. Here, Monroe acts not only as a sex object, but also as a reminder of the primal instincts and 'phantasies' of the male spectators.

Ending on this note, it may seem as if only men were watching films, with a singular purpose - the intention to escape from their dreadful lives and 'please' themselves. Mulvey has been criticised by other feminist researchers and film theorists because of her exclusion and little concern over female spectatorship. The films like Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Volver have shown that although women are frequently appearing on the screens simply because of their sexuality and femininity, there are examples of women feeling confident and even enjoying being observed, of female actresses are being recognised as serious performers. Also, there are examples of female characters providing scopophilic pleasure for their male audience through fantasy sequences and sex scenes, just like in Luis Bunuel's Belle de Jour.

The good thing is, as Marilyn Monroe once said: «I have feelings too. I am still human. All I want is to be loved, for myself and for my talent». Even if male characters and spectators cannot appreciate women for their talent, why not let them look at women with their 'male gaze'? There always are Academy Awards, critics' favourable reviews, and amazing dresses for the red carpet arrivals, which make women quite happy and satisfied.

запись создана: 27.01.2011 в 23:43

Интернеты негодуют по поводу отмены каналом СW показа спн и смолвиля на этой неделе.
А мне вот кажется, что тут как-то всё вполне логично- американ айдол и дебильный FOX засунет любую серию с СW в глубокую жопу, а так хоть повтор кто-то посмотрит.
Люди какие-то бестолочи.

[21:49:02] wAzzER(Алексей Горбач): vkontakte.ru/video37078872_159101793

АЛЁНА- ЧЕМПИОН ПО БОКСУ. АЛЁНА ДААСТ.

Что за дела?
Лора пригласила завтра потусить в честь ее дня рождения.
Придется быстрее валять эссе и приводить себя в порядок. А то я с этой сессией совсем ugly!Robin...

С вас последний волшебный пендель, ребятки!
Я сегодня особенно ленивая задница, легла уже вроде не так поздно, в пять точно дрыхла уже. Специально положила телефон в другую комнату, чтобы тащиться туда, когда будильник прозвенит. Но нет, я его вырубила и пошла дальше спать, лошара.

У меня есть сутки.