CoP Lecture - The Gaze

This lecture was about the 'gaze', and the many different definitions of this which are: to look intensely, in admiration, surprise or thought. In film theory the 'Gaze' is a technologic term which is now used to refer to the ways in which viewers look upon people or subjects with in a visual medium. This can also be referred to as a 'feministic cliche' where is which the way males look at women, and Laura Mulvey was on of the first to introduce the term. She is known best for her essay 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinematic' and points out that in films, women are typically the objects of the 'gaze' and quotes "the control of the camera comes from factors such as the assumption of heterosexual men as the default target audience from most film genres".

There are four different key forms of the 'gaze' which are intra-diegetic gaze, direct, look of the camera and spectator's gaze. Intra-diegetic gaze is where the main male character looks at the female character as part of the films story, this gaze is often created by a subjective point of view shot. Direct gaze addresses to the viewer so the gaze of a person in the film looking 'out of the frame' as if at the viewer. Looking at the camera is the way that the camera itself appears to look at the characters depicted; less metaphorically, the gaze of the film maker. Finally the Spectator's gaze is the gaze of the viewer at an image of a person or animal, or object in the film.

The 'gaze' can also derive pleasure out of people from watching films and one way of doing this is Scopophilia and is mentioned by Laura Mulvey that nature desire to look, curiosity of others' bodies emerges in childhood. She then goes on to say that "at the extreme (scopophilia) 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." (Mulvey.L, Visual Pleasure, 1975, pg. 162).

The film theory terms of the 'Gaze' definitely relates to the field of practice of my own work because as an animator we can use the camera to are advantage and use different camera angles and shots to divert our audiences attention. An example of this in the well known and used shot in cinematography called the 'Dolly Zoom' where this focuses your attention on the main character of the story but it also add a dramatic tone to the scene as well. This can be seen in the famous French film La Haine.