Representation- The gaze (Laura Mulvey)

Representation- The gaze (Laura Mulvey)

Introduction: Technical term originally used in film theory in the 1970's to refer to the ways viewers look at images of people in visual medium. The "male gaze" can be described as femenist reference to the voyeuristic way in which men look at women. Jonathan Schroder (1998) once said- "to gaze implies more than to look at, it signifies a psychological relationship of power in which the gazer is superiors to the object of the gaze"

Forms of the gaze

The spectators gaze
the intra-digetic gaze
the direct address (or extra digetic) to the viewer.
The look of the camera
The gaze of a bystander
The gaze of an audience within a text.

Direction of gaze

Trevor Millum distinguished between these forms of attention in his study of women in magazine advertisements.

Attention directed towards others
Attention directed towards an object
Attention directed towards one self
Attention directed to the reader
Attention directed into the middle distance.
Criticisms with Mulvey's Theory

There is a failure to account for a female spectator.

Looks only at the spectator as being a heterosexual male.

Since the 1980's there has been an increasing display and sexulisation of the male body in mainstream cinema and television and in advertising.


In my film i think this "gaze" will occur alot, because it is all about one woman, who will be very beautiful, but has a bad controlling side to her. So the males of soiciety will be looking at her and wondering HOW to see her. As she has lots of good and bad points x