Gaze
In the early 1970s, Christian Metz and Laura Mulvey separately explored aspects of the "gaze" in the cinema, Metz stressing the viewer's identification with the camera's vision, - an identification largely "constructed" by the film itself - and Mulvey the fetishistic aspects of (especially) the male viewer's regard for the onscreen female body.
The viewing subject may be offered particular identifications (usually with a leading male character) from which to watch. The theory stresses the subject's longing for a completeness which the film may appear to offer through identification with an image, although Lacanian theory also indicates that identification with the image is never anything but an illusion and the subject is always split simply by virtue of coming into existence (Aphanisis).
Read more about this topic: Psychoanalytical Film Theory
Famous quotes containing the word gaze:
“Go forward while you can, but if your strength fails you, sit down near the road and gaze without anger or envy at those who pass by. They don’t have far to go, either.”
—Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (1818–1883)
“Though I knit my brow,
my gaze is fixed
longingly
anyway.
Though I check my tongue,
this tortured face of mine
dissolves in a smile.
Though I drive my heart to hardness,
my body bears
the gooseflesh
of desire.
When I see that man,
how on earth
can my anger
survive?”
—Amaru (c. seventh century A.D.)
“I shall die as my fathers died, and sleep as they sleep; even so.
For the glass of the years is brittle wherein we gaze for a span;
A little soul for a little bears up this corpse which is man.
So long I endure, no longer; and laugh not again, neither weep.
For there is no God found stronger than death; and death is a sleep.”
—A.C. (Algernon Charles)