VISUAL PLEASURE AND NARRATIVE CINEMA
How to: ANALYSIS PAPER
Analysis - using a framework to make radical and critical claims about your OS
Framework - theory/concept established in prior studies
E.g. Feminism -> male gaze, colonization -> hybridity
Radical - uncovering core truths; scratching beneath the surface
Critical - uncovering power relations embodied by the text
Beyond what is obvious
How exactly???
How to look for a framework?
1. Read studies similar to your own, and study the theory/concept used
2. Look at tertiary sources
a. Keywords: (literary) theory
Criticism
Cultural studies
I. Introduction
a. Political use of psychoanalysis
i. The paradox of phallocentrism
b. Destruction of pleasure as a radical weapon
i. Cinema and manipulation of pleasure
II. Pleasure in looking/fascination with the human form
Male gaze
"Ways of seeing"
Why do we watch movies?
Hollywood narrative films use women in order to provide a pleasurable visual experience for men.
Objectification of the image
Identification with it
Scopophilia in films is a structure which functions on an axis of passive/active with the man always on
the active gazing side and the woman on the passive "to-be-looked-at-ness" side.
demystification of the female figure is the dismantling of her mysteries (in films: the female figure is
punished or saved by the male figure). The other way to escape fear of being castrated by the woman is
through the fetishization of her (for instance as the glamorous unobtainable star
woman as an image, and a man as an owner of the sight
Important to spectacle; detrimental to narrative
Styled accordingly/male hero(leading man)
Castration is powerless
Female (spectacle); male (narrative)
ENG 13 A.Y. 2019-2020
INSTRUCTOR: ALEXANDRA MAY CARDOSO
