Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema Laura Mulvey [This article

Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

Laura Mulvey

[This article originally appeared in Screen 16:3 (Autumn 1975), 6-18.]

Introduction

(a) A Political Use of Psychoanalysis

This paper intends to use psychoanalysis to discover where and

how the fascination of film is reinforced by pre-existing patterns of

fascination already at work within the individual subject and the social

formations that have molded him. It takes as a starting point the way

film reflects, reveals, and even plays on the straight, socially

established interpretation of sexual difference which controls images,

erotic ways of looking, and spectacle. It is helpful to understand what

the cinema has been, how its magic has worked in the past, while

attempting a theory and a practice which will challenge this cinema of

the past. Psychoanalytic theory is thus appropriated here as a political

weapon, demonstrating the way the unconscious of patriarchal society

has structured film form.

The paradox of phallocentrism in all its manifestations is that it

depends on the image of the castrated woman to give order and

meaning to its world. An idea of woman stands as lynch pin to the

system: it is her lack that produces the phallus as a symbolic presence,

it is her desire to make good the lack that the phallus signifies. Recent

writing in Screen about psychoanalysis and the cinema has not

sufficiently brought out the importance of the representation of the

female form in a symbolic order in which, in the last resort, it speaks

castration and nothing else. To summarize briefly: the function of

woman in forming the patriarchal unconscious is twofold, she first

symbolizes the castration threat by her real absence of a penis and

second thereby raises her child into the symbolic. Once this has been

achieved, her meaning in the process is at an end, it does not last into

the world of law and language except as a memory, which oscillates

between memory of maternal plenitude and memory of lack. Both are

posited on nature (or on anatomy in Freud's famous phrase). Woman's

desire is subjected to her image as bearer of the bleeding wound. She

can exist only in relation to castration and cannot transcend it. She

turns her child into the signifier of her own desire to possess a penis

(the condition, she imagines, of entry into the symbolic). Either she

must gracefully give way to the word, the Name of the Father and the

Law, or else struggle to keep her child down with her in the half-light of

the imaginary. Woman then stands in patriarchal culture as signifier of

the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out

his fantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing

them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of

meaning, not maker of meaning.

There is an obvious interest in this analysis for feminists, a

beauty in its exact rendering of the frustration experienced under the

phallocentric order. It gets us nearer to the roots of our oppression, it

brings an articulation of the problem closer, it faces us with the

ultimate challenge: how to fight the unconscious structured like a

language (formed critically at the moment of arrival of language) while

still caught within the language of the patriarchy. There is no way in

which we can produce an alternative out of the blue, but we can begin

to make a break by examining patriarchy with the tools it provides, of

which psychoanalysis is not the only but an important one. We are still

separated by a great gap from important issues for the female

unconscious which are scarcely relevant to phallocentric theory: the

sexing of the female infant and her relationship to the symbolic, the

sexually mature woman as non-mother, maternity outside the

signification of the phallus, the vagina. But, at this point,

psychoanalytic theory as it now stands can at least advance our

understanding of the status quo, of the patriarchal order in which we

are caught.

(b) Destruction of Pleasure as a Radical Weapon

As an advanced representation system, the cinema poses

questions of ways the unconscious (formed by the dominant order)

structures ways of seeing and pleasure in looking. Cinema has changed

over the last few decades. It is no longer the monolithic system based

on large capital investment exemplified at its best by Hollywood in the

1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Technological advances (16mm, etc.) have

changed the economic conditions of cinematic production, which can

now be artisanal as well as capitalist. Thus it has been possible for an

alternative cinema to develop. However self-conscious and ironic

Hollywood managed to be, it always restricted itself to a formal mise-

en-scene reflecting the dominant ideological concept of the cinema.

The alternative cinema provides a space for a cinema to be born which

is radical in both a political and an aesthetic sense and challenges the

basic assumptions of the mainstream film. This is not to reject the

latter moralistically, but to highlight the ways in which its formal

preoccupations reflect the psychical obsessions of the society which

produced it, and, further, to stress that the alternative cinema must

start specifically by reacting against these obsessions and

assumptions. A politically and aesthetically avant-garde cinema is now

possible, but it can still only exist as a counterpoint.

The magic of the Hollywood style at its best (and of all the

cinema which fell within its sphere of influence) 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. In the

highly developed Hollywood cinema it was only through these codes

that the alienated subject, torn in his imaginary memory by a sense of

loss, by the terror of potential lack in fantasy, came near to finding a

glimpse of satisfaction: through its formal beauty and its play on his

own formative obsessions. This essay will discuss the interweaving of

that erotic pleasure in film, its meaning, and in particular the central

place of the image of woman. It is said that analyzing pleasure, or

beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this essay. The satisfaction

and reinforcement of the ego that represent the high point of film

history hitherto must be attacked. Not in favor of a reconstructed new

pleasure, which cannot exist in the abstract, nor of intellectualized

unpleasure, but to make way for a total negation of the ease and

plenitude of the narrative fiction film. The alternative is the thrill that

comes from leaving the past behind without rejecting it, transcending

outworn or oppressive forms, or daring to break with normal

pleasurable expectations in order to conceive a new language of

desire.

II. Pleasure in Looking/Fascination with the Human Form

A. The cinema offers a number of possible pleasures. One is

scopophilia. There are circumstances in which looking itself is a source

of pleasure, just as, in the reverse formation, there is pleasure in being

looked at. Originally, in his Three Essays on Sexuality, Freud isolated

scopophilia as one of the component instincts of sexuality which exist

as drives quite independently of the erotogenic zones. At this point he

associated scopophilia with taking other people as objects, subjecting

them to a controlling and curious gaze. His particular examples center

around the voyeuristic activities of children, their desire to see and

make sure of the private and the forbidden (curiosity about other

people's genital and bodily functions, about the presence or absence of

the penis and, retrospectively, about the primal scene). In this analysis

scopophilia is essentially active. (Later, in Instincts and Their

Vicissitudes, Freud developed his theory of scopophilia further,

attaching it initially to pre-genital antoeroticism, after which the

pleasure of the look is transferred to others by analogy. There is a close

working here of the relationship between the active instinct and its

further development in a narcissistic form.) Although the instinct is

modified by other factors, in particular the constitution of the ego, it

continues to exist as the erotic basis for pleasure in looking at another

person as object. At the extreme, it can become fixated into a

perversion, producing obsessive voyeurs and Peeping Toms whose only

sexual satisfaction can come from watching, in an active controlling

sense, an objectified other.

At first glance, the cinema would seem to be remote from the

undercover world of the surreptitious observation of an unknowing and

unwilling victim. What is seen on the screen is so manifestly shown.

But the mass of mainstream film, and the conventions within which it

has consciously evolved, portray a hermetically sealed world which

unwinds magically, indifferent to the presence of the audience,

producing for them a sense of separation and playing on their

voyeuristic fantasy. Moreover, the extreme contrast between the

darkness in the auditorium (which also isolates the spectators from one

another) and the brilliance of the shifting patterns of light and shade

on the screen helps to promote the illusion of voyeuristic separation.

Although the film is really being shown, is there to be seen, conditions

of screening and narrative conventions give the spectator an illusion of

looking in on a private world. Among other things, the position of the

spectators in the cinema is blatantly one of repression of their

exhibitionism and projection of the repressed desire onto the

performer.

B. The cinema satisfies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking,

but it also goes further, developing scopophilia in its narcissistic

aspect. The conventions of mainstream film focus attention on the

human form. Scale, space, stories are all anthropomorphic. Here,

curiosity and the wish to look intermingle with a fascination with

likeness and recognition: the human face, the human body, the

relationship between the human form and its surroundings, the visible

presence of the person in the world. Jacques Lacan has described how

the moment when a child recognizes its own image in the mirror is

crucial for the constitution of the ego. Several aspects of this analysis

are relevant here. The mirror phase occurs at a time when the child's

physical ambitions outstrip his motor capacity, with the result that his

recognition of himself is joyous in that he imagines his mirror image to

be more complete, more perfect than he experiences his own body.

Recognition is thus overlaid with misrecognition; the image recognized

is conceived as the reflected body of the self, but its misrecognition as

superior projects this body outside itself as an ego ideal, gives rise to

the future generation of identification with others. This mirror moment

pre-dates language for the child.

Important for this article is the fact that it is an image that

constitutes the matrix of the imaginary, of recognition/misrecognition

and identification, and hence of the first articulation of the I, of

subjectivity. This is a moment when an older fascination with looking

(at the mother's face, for an obvious example) collides with the initial

inklings of self-awareness. Hence it is the birth of the long love

affair/despair between image and self-image which has found such

intensity of expression in film and such joyous recognition in the

cinema audience. Quite apart from the extraneous similarities between

screen and mirror (the framing of the human form in its surroundings,

for instance), the cinema has structures of fascination strong enough

to allow temporary loss of ego while simultaneously reinforcing the

ego. The sense of forgetting the world as the ego has subsequently

come to perceive it (I forgot who I am and where I was) is nostalgically

reminiscent of the presubjective moment of image recognition. At the

same time the cinema has distinguished itself in the production of ego

ideals as expressed in particular in the star system, the stars centering

both screen presence and screen story as they act out a complex

process of likeness and difference (the glamorous impersonates the

ordinary).

C. Section II. A and B have set out two contradictory aspects of

the pleasurable structures of looking in the conventional cinematic

situation. The first, scopophilic, arises from pleasure in using another

person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight. The second,

developed through narcissism and the constitution of the ego, comes

from identification with the image seen. Thus, in film terms, one

implies a separation fo the erotic identity of the subject from the object

on the screen (active scopophilia), the other demands identification of

the ego with the object on the screen through the spectator's

fascination with and recognition of his like. The first is a function of the

sexual instincts, the second of ego libido. This dichotomy was crucial

for Freud. Although he saw the two as interacting and overlaying each

other, the tension between instinctual drives and self-preservation

continues to be a dramatic polarization in terms of pleasure. Both are

formative structures, mechanisms not meaning. In themselves they

have no signification, they have to be attached to an idealization. Both

pursue aims in indifference to perceptual reality, creating the

imagized, eroticized concept of the world that forms the perception of

the subject and makes a mockery of empirical objectivity.

During its history, the cinema seems to have evolved a particular

illusion of reality in which this contradition between libido and ego has

found a beautifully complementary fantasy world. In reality the fantasy

world of the screen is subject to the law which produces it. Sexual

instincts and identification processes have a meaning within the

symbolic order which articulates desire. Desire, born with language,

allows the possibility of transcending the instinctual and the imaginary,

but its point of reference continually returns to the traumatic moment

of its birth: the castration complex. Hence the look, pleasurable in

form, can be threatening in content, and it is woman as

representation/image that crystallizes this paradox.

Woman as Image, Man as Bearer of the Look

A. In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking

has been split between active/male and passive/female. The

determining male gaze projets its fantasy onto the female figure, which

is styled accordingly. 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. Woman displayed as sexual object is the leitmotif

of erotic spectacle: from pin-ups to strip-tease, from Ziegfeld to Busby

Berkeley, she holds the look, plays to and signifies male desire.

Mainstream film neatly combined spectacle and narrative. (Note,

however, how in the musical song-and-dance numbers break the flow

of the diegesis.) The presence of woman is an indispensable element of

spectacle in normal narrative film, yet her visual presence tends to

work against the development of the story line, to freeze the flow of

action in moments of erotic contemplation. This alien presence then

has to be integrated into cohesion with the narrative. As Budd

Boetticher has put it:

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.

(A recent tendency in narrative film has been to dispense with

this problem altogether; hence the development of what Molly Haskell

has called the "buddy movie," in which the active homosexual

eroticism of the central male figures can carry the story without

distraction.) Traditionally, the woman displayed has functioned on two

levels: as erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and

as erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium, with a shifting

tension between the looks on either side of the screen. For instance,

the device of the showgirl allows the two looks to be unified technically

without any apparent break in the diegesis. A woman performs within

the narrative, the gaze of the spectator and that of the male

characters in the film are neatly combined without breaking narrative

verisimilitude. For a moment the sexual impact of the performing

woman takes the film into a no-man's-land outside its own time and

space. Thus Marilyn Monroe's first appearance in The River of No

Return and Lauren Bacall's songs in To Have and Have Not. Similarly,

conventional close-ups of legs (Dietrich, for instance) or a face (Garbo)

integrate into the narrative a different mode of eroticism. One part of a

fragmented body destroys the Renaissance space, the illusion of depth

demanded by the narrative, it gives flatness, the quality of a cut-out or

icon rather than verisimilitude to the screen.

B. An active/passive heterosexual division of labor has similarly

controlled narrative structure. According to the principles of the ruling

ideology and the psychical structures that back it up, the male figure

cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification. Man is reluctant to

gaze at his exhibitionist like. Hence the split between spectacle and

narrative supports the man's role as the active one of forwarding the

story, making things happen. The man controls the film fantasy and

also emerges as the representative of power in a further sense: as the

bearer of the look of the spectator, transferring it behind the screen to

neutralize the extra-diegetic tendencies represented by woman as

spectacle. This is made possible through the processes set in motion

by structuring the film around a main controlling figure with whom the

spectator can identify. As the spectator identifies with the main

male{1} protagonist, he projects his look onto that of his like, his

screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he

controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both

giving a satisfying sense of onmipotence. A male movie star's

glamorous characteristics are thus not those of the erotic object of the

gaze, but those of the more perfect, more completely, more powerful

ideal ego conceived in the original moment of recognition in front of

the mirror. The character in the story can make things happen and

control events better than the subject/spectator, just as the image in

the mirror was more in control of motor coordination. In contrast to

woman as icon, the active male figure (the ego ideal of the

identification process) demands a three-dimensional space

corresponding to that of the mirror recognition, in which the alienated

subject internalized his own representation of this imaginary existence.

He is a figure in a landscape. Here the function of film is to reproduce

as accurately as possible the so-called natural conditions of human

perception. Camera technology (as exemplified by deep focus in

particular) and camera movements (determined by the action of the

protagonist), combined with invisibile editing (demanded by realism),

all tend to blur the limits of screen space. The male protagonist is free

to command the stage, a stage of spatial illusion in which he

articulates the look and creates the action.

C.1 Sections III. A and B have set out a tension between a mode

of representation of woman in film and conventions surrounding the

diegesis. Each is associated with a look: that of the spectator in direct

scopophilic fantasy) and that of the spectator fascinated with the

iamge of his like set in an illusion of natural space, and through him

gaining control and possession of the woman within the diegesis. (This

tension and the shift from one pole to the other can structure a single

text. Thus both in Only Angels Have Wings and in To Have and Have

Not, the film opens with the woman as object of the combined gaze of

spectator and all the male protagonists in the film. She is isolated,

glamorous, on display, sexualized. But as the narrative progresses she

falls in love with the main male protagonist and becomes his property,

losing her outward glamorous characteristics, her generalized

sexuality, her showgirl connotations; her eroticism is subjected to the

male star alone. By means of identification with him, through

participation in his power, the spectator can indirectly possess her too.)

But in psychoanalytic terms, the female figure poses a deeper

problem. She also connotes something that the look continually circles

around but disavows: her lack of a penis, implying a threat of

castration and hence unpleasure. Ultimately, the meaning of woman is

sexual difference, the absence of the penis as visually ascertainable,

the material evidence on which is based the castration complex

essential for the organization of entrance to the symbolic order and the

law of the father. Thus the woman, as icon, displayed for the gaze and

enjoyment of men, the active controllers of the look, always threatens

to evoke the anxiety it originally signified. The male unconscious has

two avenues of escape from this castration anxiety: preoccupation with

the re-enactment of the original trauma (investigating the woman,

demystifying her mystery), counterbalanced by the devaluation,

punishment, or saving of the guilty object (an avenue typified by the

concerns of the film noir); or else complete disavowal of castration by

the substitution of a fetish object or turning the represented figure

itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous

(hence over-valuation, the cult of the female star). This second avenue,

fetishistic scopophilia, builds up the physical beauty of the object,

transforming it into something satisfying in itself. The first avenue,

voyeurism, on the contrary, has associations with sadism: pleasure lies

in ascertaining guilt (immediately associated with castration), asserting

control, and subjecting the guilty person through punishment or

forgiveness. This sadistic side fits in well with narrative. Sadism

demands a story, depends on making something happen, forcing a

change in another person, a battle of will and strength, victory/defeat,

all occurring ina linear time with a beginning and an end. Fetishistic

scopophilia, on the other hand, can exist outside linear time as the

erotic instinct is focused on the look alone. These contradictions and

ambiguities can be illustrated more simply by using works by Hitchcock

and Sternberg, both of whom take the look almost as the content or

subject matter of many of their films. Hitchcock is the more complex,

as he uses both mechanisms. Sternberg's work, on the other hand,

provides many pure examples of fetishistic scopophilia.

C.2 It is well known that Sternberg once said he would welcome

his films being proejcted upside down so that story and character

involvement would not interfere with the spectator's undiluted

appreciation of the screen image. This statement is revealing but

ingenuous. Ingenuous in that his films do demand that the figure of the

woman (Dietrich, in the cycle of films with her, as the ultimate

example) should be identifiable. But revealing in that it emphasizes the

fact that for him the pictorial space enclosed by the frame is

paramount rather than the narrative or identification processes. While

Hitchcock goes into the investigative side of voyeurism, Sternberg

produces the ultimate fetish, taking it to the point where the powerful

look of the male protagonist (characteristic of traditional narrative film)

is broken in favor of the image oin direct erotic rapport with the

spectator. The beauty of the woman as object and the screen space

coalesce; she is no longer the bearer of guilt but a perfect product,

whose body, stylized and fragmented by close-ups, is the content of

the film and the direct recipient of the spectator's look. Sternberg plays

down the illusion of screen depth; his screen tends to be one-

dimensional, as light and shade, lace, steam, foliage, net, streamers,

etc., reduce the visual field. There is little or no mediation of the look

through the eyes of the main male protagonist. On the contrary,

shadowy presences like La Besiere in Morocco act as surrogates for the

director, detached as they are from audience identification. Despite

Sternberg's insistence that his stories are irrelevant, it is significant

that they are concerned with situation, not suspense, and cyclical

rather than linear time, while plot complications revolve around

misunderstanding rather than conflict. The most important absence is

that of the controlling male gaze within the screen scene. The high

point of emotional drama in the most typical Dietrich films, her

supreme moments of erotic meaning, take place in the absence of the

man she loves in the fiction. There are other witnesses, other

spectators, watching her on the scree, their gaze is one with, not

standing in for, that of the audience. At the end of Dishonoured,

Kranau is indifferent to the fate of Magda. In both cases, the erotic

impact, sanctified by death, is displayed as a spectacle for the

audience. The male hero misunderstands and, above all, does not see.

In Hitchcock, by contrast, the male hero does see precisely what

the audience sees. however, in the films I shall discuss here, he takes

fascination with an image through scopophilic eroticism as the subject

of the film. Moreover, in these cases the hero portrays the

contradictions and tensions experienced by the spectator. In Vertigo in

particular, but also in Marnie and Rear Window, the look is central to

the plot, oscillating between voyeurism and fetishistic fascination. As a

twist, in further manipulation of the normal viewing process, which in

some sense reveals it, Hitchcock uses the process of identification

normally associated with ideological correctness and the recognition of

established morality and shows up its perverted side. Hitchcock has

never concealed his interest in voyeurism, cinematic and non-

cinematic. His heroes are exemplary of the symbolic order and the

law--a policeman (Vertigo), a dominant male possessing money and

power (Marnie)--but their erotic drives lead them into compromised

situations. The power to subject another person to the will sadistically

or to the gaze voyeuristically is turned onto the woman as the object of

both. Power is backed by a certainty of legal right and the established

guilt of the woman (evoking castration, psychoanalytically speaking).

True perversion is barely concealed under a shallow mask of ideological

correctness--the man is on the right side of the law, the woman on the

wrong. Hitchcock's skilful use of identification processes and liberal use

of subjective camera from the point of view of the male protagonist

draw the spectators deeply into his position, making them share his

uneasy gaze. The audience is absorbed into a voyeuristic situation

within the screen scene and diegesis which parodies his own in the

cinema. In his analysis of Rear Window, Douchet takes the film as a

metaphor for the cinema. Jeffries is the audience, the events in the

apartment block opposite correspond to the screen. As he watches, an

erotic dimension is added to his look, a central image to the drama. His

girlfriend Lisa had been of little sexual interest to him, more or less a

drag, so long as she remained on the spectator side. When she crosses

the barrier between his room and the block opposite, their relationship

is reborn erotically. He does not merely watch her through his lens, as a

distant meaningful image, he also sees her as a guilty intruder

exposed by a dangerous man threatening her with punishment, and

thus finally saves her. Lisa's exhibitionism has already been

established by her obsessive interest in dress and style, in being a

passive image of visual perfection; Jeffries's voyeurism and activity

have also been established through his work as a photojournalist, a

maker of stories and captor of images. However, his enforced

inactivity, binding him to his seat as a spectator, puts him squarely in

the fantasy position of the cinema audience.

In Vertigo, subjective camera predominates. Apart from one

flashback from Judy's point of view, the narrative is woven around what

Scottie sees or fails to see. The audience follows the growth of his

erotic obsession and subsequent despair precisely from his point of

view. Scottie's voyeurism is blatant: he falls in love with a woman he

follows and spies on without speaking to. Its sadistic side is equally

blatant: he has chosen (and freely chosen, for he had been a

successful lawyer) to be a policeman, with all the attendant

possibilities of pursuit and investigation. As a result, he follows,

watches, and falls in love with a perfect image of female beauty and

mystery. Once he actually confronts her, his erotic drive is to break her

down and force her to tell by persistent cross-questioning. Then, in the

second part of the film, he re-enacts his obsessive involvement with

the image he loved to watch secretly. He reconstructs Judy as

Madeleine, forces her to conform in every detail to the actual physical

appearance of his fetish. Her exhibitionism, her masochism, make her

an ideal passive counterpart to Scottie's active sadistic voyeurism. She

knows her part is to perform, and only by playing it through and then

replaying it can she keep Scottie's erotic interest. But in the

repetition he does break her down and succeeds in exposing her guilt.

His curiosity wins through and she is punished. In Vertigo, erotic

involvement with the look is disorientating: the spectator's fascination

is turned against him as the narrative carries him through and

entwines him with the processes that he is himself exercising. The

Hitchcock hero here is firmly placed within the symbolic order, in

narrative terms. He has all the attributes of the patriarchal superego.

Hence the spectator, lulled into a false sense of security by the

apparent legality of his surrogate, sees through his look and finds

himself complicit, caught in the moral ambiguity of looking. Far from

being simply an aside on the perversion of the police, Vertigo focuses

on the implications of the active/looking, passive/looked-at split in

terms of sexual difference and the power of the male symbolic

encapsulated in the hero. Marnie, too, performs for Mark Rutland's

gaze and masquerades as the perfect to-be-looked-at image. He, too,

is on the side of the law until, drawn in by obsession with her guilt, her

secret, he longs to see her in the act of committing a crime, make her

confess, and thus save her. So he, too, becomes complicit as he acts

out the implications of his power. He controls money and words, he can

have his cake and eat it.

IV. Summary

The psychoanalytic background that has been discussed in this

essay is relevant to the pleasure and unpleasure offered by traditional

narrative film. The scopophilic instinct (pleasure in looking at another

person as an erotic object), and, in contradistinction, ego libido

(forming identification processes) act as formations, mechanisms,

which this cinema has played on. The image of woman as (passive)

raw material for the (active) gaze of man takes the argument a step

further into the structure of representation, adding a further layer

demanded by the ideology of the patriarchal order as it is worked out

in its favorite cinematic form--illusionistic narrative film. The argument

returns again to the psychoanalytic background in that woman as

representation signifies castration, inducing voyeuristic or fetishistic

mechanisms to circumvent her threat. None of these interacting layers

is intrinsic to film, but it is only in the film form that they can reach a

perfect and beautiful contradiction, thanks to the possibility in the

cinema of shifting the emphasis of the look. It is the place of the look

that defines cinema, the possibility of varying it and exposing it. This is

what makes cinema quite different in its voyeuristic potential from,

say, strip-tease, theater, shows, etc. Going far beyond highlighting a

woman's to-be-looked-at-ness, cinema builds the way she is to be

looked at into the spectacle itself. Playing on the tension between film

as controlling the dimension of time (editing, narrative) and film as

controlling the dimension of space (changes in distance, editing),

cinematic codes create a gaze, a world, and an object, thereby

producing an illusion cut to the measure of desire. It is these cinematic

codes and their relationship to formative external structures that must

be broken down before mainstream film and the pleasure it provides

can be challenged.

To begin with (as an ending), the voyeuristic-scopophilic look that

is a crucial part of traditional filmic pleasure can itself be broken down.

There are three different looks associated with cinema: that of the

camera as it records the pro-filmic event, that of the audience as it

watches the final product, and that of the characters at each other

within the screen illusion. The conventions of narrative film deny the

first two and subordinate them to the third, the conscious aim being

always to eliminate intrusive camera presence and prevent a

distancing awareness in the audience. Without these two absences

(the material existence of the recording process, the critical reading of

the spectator), finctional drama cannot achieve reality, obviousness,

and truth. Nevertheless, as this article has argued, the structure of

looking in narrative fiction film contains a contradiction in its own

premises: the female image as a castration threat constantly

endangers the unity of the diegesis and bursts through the world of

illusion as a intrusive, static, one-dimensional fetish. Thus the two

looks materially present in time and space are obsessively

subordinated to the neurotic needs of the male ego. The camera

becomes the mechanism for producing an illusion of Renaissance

space, flowing movements compatible with the human eye, an

ideology of representation that revolves around the perception of the

subject; the camera's look is disavowed in order to create a convincing

world in which the spectator's surrogate can perform with

verisimilitude. Simultaneously, the look of the audience is denied an

intrinsic force: as soon as fetishistic representation of the female image

threatens to break the spell of illusion, and the erotic image on the

screen appears directly (without mediation) to the spectator, the fact

of fetishization, concealing as it does castration fear, freezes the look,

fixates the spectator, and prevents him from achieving any distance

from the image in front of him.

This complex interaction of looks is specific to film. The first blow

against the monolithic accumulation of traditional film conventions

(already undertaken by radical filmmakers) is to free the look of the

camera into its materiality in time and space and the look of the

audience into dialectics, passionate attachment. There is no doubt that

this destroys the satisfaction, pleasure and privilege of the "invisible

guest," and highlights how film has depended on voyeuristic

active/passive mechanisms. Women, whose image has continually

been stolen and used for this end, cannot view the decline of the

traditional film form with anything much more than sentimental regret.