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:
“Gaze no more in the bitter glass
The demons, with their subtle guile,
Lift up before us when they pass,
Or only gaze a little while....”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“Bind us in time, O seasons clear, and awe.
O minstrel galleons of Carib fire,
Bequeath us to no earthly shore until
Is answered in the vortex of our grave
The seal’s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.”
—Hart Crane (1899–1932)
“The masses always end up wholeheartedly believing and following those individuals whom they themselves mock, individuals whom they curse and persecute, but individuals who, not fearing their curses or their persecution, continue steadily forward, having fastened a spiritual gaze on the only goal such individuals can see.”
—Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (1818–1883)