In level 3 BTEC Media we learn several critical theories used in the analysis of film, television and other media. This is knowledge needed to succeed in the Unit 1 Media representations exam.

Laura Mulvey is a Professor of Media and Film at Birkbeck, University of London. She is also a successful screenwriter, producer and director, and has written and edited many books and articles on the subject of contemporary film and feminist theory and practice.

Her most famous work to date is her seminal essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, written in 1973 and first published in 1975 in the British film theory journal Screen.

At a simple level, this work, based on her own conceptual analysis of classical Hollywood film texts , argued the feminist position that the typical audience member is assumed to be male.

Furthermore, the typical audience member becomes aligned with the film’s male protagonist, by identification, admiration or aspiration

According to the theory, which really assesses the representation of gender and the relationship between the text and the audience from a solely feminist perspective, women in film are simply objects for ‘the gaze’ of the protagonist/male audience.

Applying ideas from psychology based on Freud ( and others) to Hollywood film viewing, Mulvey suggested that women in film are represented as ‘objects’, images with visual and erotic impact, which she termed their ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’.

Classical Hollywood films positioned the audience as male, and through identification with the male protagonist gave him an active role in viewing the female subject and gaining pleasure from doing so (Freud). This look, from audience to actress, is termed ‘the look’ or ‘the gaze’. According to Mulvey the look could be ‘voyeuristic’ (women are viewed as virtuous and beautiful) or ‘fetishistic’ (women are viewed as excessively sexual beings).

Throughout the decades following Mulvey’s essay, the concept of the gaze was developed to incorporate a number of different viewer-positions. For example:

• The spectator’s gaze: the audience looking at the subject on the screen.

• The male gaze: in keeping with Mulvey’s theory describes the male viewing the female, either voyeuristically or fetishistically.

• The female gaze: accepts that women can also gain voyeuristic pleasure from looking at a subject, and that film techniques can sometimes be used to position the female audience to do so.

• The intra-diegetic gaze: when one character in the text looks/gazes at another character in the text. Through the process of identification, this may lead to the spectator’s gaze also.

 • The extra-diegetic gaze: when a character in the text looks out of the text at the audience, breaking the imaginary ‘fourth wall’.

Updating the Gaze

Mulvey’s essay was much discussed in the decades following its publication; she herself re-assessed it in 1981, when she pointed out that she had written the original essay as a starting point for further study and debate, rather than a reasoned academic study.

• The original essay assumes that the film audience is a heterosexual male. This denies the possibility that women can enjoy films as much as men and considerably dates her argument. We now consider that an individual makes their reading from a highly subjective personal standpoint: male, female or transgender, straight, gay or bisexual, as well as influences from class and age and region.

• It also assumes the protagonist is male, which may be the case for much of the classical Hollywood output (1910s-1960s, approx.), but is no longer always the case.

The excellent Media teacher and commentator Mrs Fisher has a very clear and concise explanation of the theory on her excellent youtube channel:

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