Editing Feminist film theory (section)

===The gaze and the female spectator===
Considering the way that films are put together, many feminist film critics have pointed to what they argue is the "[[male gaze]]" that predominates [[Classical Hollywood cinema|classical Hollywood]] filmmaking. [[Budd Boetticher]] summarizes the view:
:"What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself, the woman has not the slightest importance."<ref name="books.google.com">{{cite book|title=Issues in Feminist Film Criticism|author=Erens, P.|date=1990|publisher=Indiana University Press|isbn=9780253319647|url=https://archive.org/details/issuesinfeminist00eren|url-access=registration|access-date=October 27, 2014}}</ref>{{rp|28}}
[[Laura Mulvey]] expands on this conception to argue that in cinema, women are typically depicted in a passive role that provides visual pleasure through scopophilia,<ref name="books.google.com"/>{{rp|30}} and identification with the on-screen male actor.<ref name="books.google.com"/>{{rp|28}}  She asserts: "In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote ''to-be-looked-at-ness'',"<ref name="books.google.com"/>{{rp|28}} and as a result contends that in film a woman is the "bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning."<ref name="books.google.com"/>{{rp|28}} Mulvey argues that the psychoanalytic theory of [[Jacques Lacan]] is the key to understanding how film creates such a space for female sexual [[objectification]] and [[Exploitation of labour|exploitation]] through the combination of the [[patriarchal]] order of society, and 'looking' in itself as a pleasurable act of scopophilia, as "the cinema satisfies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking."<ref name="books.google.com"/>{{rp|31}}

While Laura Mulvey's paper has a particular place in the feminist film theory, it is important to note that her ideas regarding ways of watching the cinema (from the voyeuristic element to the feelings of identification) are important to some feminist film theorists in terms of defining spectatorship from the psychoanalytical viewpoint.

Mulvey identifies three "looks" or perspectives that occur in film which, she argues, serve to sexually objectify women. The first is the perspective of the male character and how he perceives the female character. The second is the perspective of the spectator as they see the female character on screen. The third "look" joins the first two looks together: it is the male audience member's perspective of the male character in the film. This third perspective allows the male audience to take the female character as his own personal sex object because he can relate himself, through looking, to the male character in the film.<ref name="books.google.com"/>{{rp|28}}

In the paper, Mulvey calls for a destruction of modern film structure as the only way to free women from their sexual objectification in film. She argues for a removal of the voyeurism encoded into film by creating distance between the male spectator and the female character. The only way to do so, Mulvey argues, is by destroying the element of voyeurism and "the invisible guest". Mulvey also asserts that the dominance men embody is only so because women exist, as without a woman for comparison, a man and his supremacy as the controller of visual pleasure are insignificant. For Mulvey, it is the presence of the female that defines the patriarchal order of society as well as the male psychology of thought.<ref name="books.google.com" />

Mulvey's argument is likely influenced by the time period in which she was writing. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" was composed during the period of [[second-wave feminism]], which was concerned with achieving equality for women in the workplace, and with exploring the psychological implications of sexual stereotypes. Mulvey calls for an eradication of female sexual objectivity, aligning herself with second-wave feminism. She argues that in order for women to be equally represented in the workplace, women must be portrayed as men are: as lacking sexual objectification.<ref name=:0>{{cite web|url=https://www.asu.edu/courses/fms504/total-readings/mulvey-visualpleasure.pdf|access-date=1 April 2023|website=asu.edu|title=Visual narrative and narrative cinema}}</ref>

Mulvey proposes in her notes to the [[Criterion Collection]] DVD of [[Michael Powell]]'s controversial film, ''[[Peeping Tom (1960 film)|Peeping Tom]]'' (a film about a homicidal voyeur who films the deaths of his victims), that the cinema spectator's own voyeurism is made shockingly obvious and even more shockingly, the spectator identifies with the perverted protagonist. The inference is that she includes female spectators in that, identifying with the male observer rather than the female object of the gaze.<ref>
{{cite web
|url=http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/65-peeping-tom
|title=Peeping Tom
|author=Laura Mulvey
|access-date=August 27, 2010}}
</ref>