Sunday 2 November 2008

Continuation of Mulvey's theory

Mulvey points out that cinema had changed during the course of the 1960s and early 1970s in a way which afforded opportunities for other filmmakers outside of the mainstream because of technological developments in filming and also exhibition. It is worth noting that this is even more pertinent now because of the rise of relatively cheap digital video cameras (DV), relatively cheap software and with the growth of the internet the possibility of distributing to a global marketplace. YouTube is the perfect example of that.

Perhaps it is here that Mulvey's arguments will need to be played out all over again in terms of the representation of women. But Mulvey was writing in a pre-digital era:

'The magic of the Hollywood style at its best...arose, not exclusively but in one important aspect from its skilled and satisfying manipulation of visual pleasure. Unchallenged, mainstream film coded the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order'. (Mulvey in Movies & Methods Vol II, p 306)

It is because this pleasure is already ideologically encoded upon patriarchal society that Mulvey wishes to use analysis to start to destroy that pleasure creating mechanism. This she hope will allow a new language of desire to emerge for humanity.

Source: Laura Mulvey and the Male gaze
http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/michaelwalford/entry/laura_mulvey_and/

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