| Laura Mulvey is a famous film theorist,film critic and director in contemporary Britain.Her article "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" published in 1975 mainly uses psychoanalysis as a weapon to reveal the operation mechanism of patriarchal ideology behind narrative films and the status of "the other" of female images as the objects of gaze in films,breaking through the limitations of sociological methods of American feminist film theory since the early 1970s,which leads the focus to the relationship between the audience and the film,thus opening a new development period of Western feminist film theory.The study of gaze centered on this article has aroused great attention and extensive discussion in the theoretical circle.Along with the quotation,discussion,query and reflection around it,feminist film theory has been constantly exploring and achieving rich theoretical and practical results on sexual differences,female audiences,female subjectivity,female desires and other issues.The study of gaze is the beginning of Mulvey’s image theory.In more than 40 years of academic career,Mulvey constantly reflected and adjusted her early views to respond to the changing times and cultural conditions as well as the new trend of the development of feminist film criticism.It can be said that "feminism"is a starting point and outstanding aspect of Mulvey’ s image culture theory,but it is not the only part.In the later research,Mulvey aims to focus on some problems that the article "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,put forward but failed to solve,and makes more in-depth thinking in changing the "seen" status of female images,exploring the position of female subject,deconstructing narrative pleasure and calling for the "intellectual" audience.From the 1970s till now,Mulvey has re-examined the theory of gaze,and at the same time,she has also extended the research scope to narrative research,melodrama research,technology and image research,involving the perspectives of psychoanalysis,structuralism and semiotics,Althusser’s ideology theory,anthropology and other research fields,and tried to make discussions on narrative closure,fetishism and cinema ontology in a larger context of social,historical and cultural research,even to this day,it still has important reference value.This paper mainly uses the methods of literature analysis,text interpretation,comparative research and case analysis to analyze Mulvey’ s theory,and attempts to introduce and analyze the track of the development and change of Mulvey’s image theory in the development framework of feminist film criticism,the British cultural background of the same period and historical context,combining the methods of diachronic research and subject research.Specifically,this paper is divided into the following six parts:The introduction part mainly introduces the reasons for choosing the topic,domestic and abroad research status,the research methods and the framework of the paper.The reasons why this paper chooses Laura Mulvey’ s image culture theory as the topic are that,on the one hand,it has great influence on the feminist film theory research,image culture criticism and creative practice;on the other hand,the researches and discussions on Mulvey’ s theory after 1990s and its relation with early theory still need to be further carried out.From the perspective of current research situation,domestic and abroad scholars have made many achievements in the study of Mulvey’ s image theory.They have made more detailed explanations and criticisms to her gaze theory and subsequent views from the 1970s to the 1980s,and there are also many research results in applying her theory to the analysis of specific film works or film type.However,there are still some deficiencies and shortcomings in the current research,such as there are too much attention to the relevant viewpoints of Mulvey’s early feminist gaze study,but less discussion on her later theoretical exploration and the overall theoretical development context,and insufficient attention is made to the thematic study of her theory and her left identity and political background,etc.This paper aims to supplement these neglected parts in order to be helpful.The first chapter introduces and explains the background,contents and questions of Mulvey’s study on gaze.The theoretical background,historical conditions and personal reasons for the emergence of Mulvey’ s gaze theory are the introduction of French theories by British cultural and academic circles since the 1960s,the profound influence of feminism movement and the practice of female avant-garde films in the same period,and the complex emotion and attitude change of the author for Hollywood films.The study of feminist film theory came into being in the second wave of feminism.At last,British feminist film criticism,represented by Mulvey’ s gaze theory,combined with European theories such as psychoanalysis,semiotics and Althusser’s ideology theory,occupied the mainstream position.Based on Freud’s theory of sexual instinct,Mulvey discusses the two sources of visual pleasure in the article "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema",and further points out the binary opposition mode of female/passive,male/active in the process of watching film and its relationship with the narrative convention of Hollywood film.Finally,the strategy of resisting the patriarchal ideology mechanism in the film with destroying narrative pleasure as the core is put forward.After its publication,the theory of gaze arouses not only excitement but also doubts in the field of feminist film research.Many feminist scholars began to discuss issues of female audience,and criticized the closure and single dimension of Mulvey’s theory.Mulvey also made a positive response to these issues in her later academic research.The second chapter analyzes the narrative research of Mulvey.Under the background of the integration of feminist film criticism and practice with the avant-garde concept of "counter cinema" and anti traditional narrative,Mulvey gradually formed her own style and views on the film narrative,structure,audio-visual language and other aspects.In this process,her radical views on narrative also developed and changed in the later period.Riddles of the Sphinx is a representative work of the avant-garde film practice of Mulvey and Peter Wollen.This paper mainly analyzes and discusses the picture,structure and expression methods of this work,and explains Mulvey’s developed view of film narrative and the theoretical purport of resisting patriarchal ideology from two aspects of content and audio-visual language.Mulvey’s gaze theory in the 1970s exposed the patriarchal ideology behind the narrative films and was also trapped in the binary opposition mode.In the 1980s,Mulvey put forward that the closed structure of narrative not only exists in literature,film and other art forms,but also in Oedipus complex and the narrative of capitalist history.She re-excavated the concept of "threshold"in anthropology,and gave carnival rituals belonging to the threshold stage the possibility to destroy both of them.At the beginning of the new century,Mulvey reflected on the neglect of Freud’ s death instinct theory in her gaze study,and then used Peter Brooks’ s point of view to analyze the death driving force of the narrative process in order to correct the early overemphasis on the role of "pleasure"·Mulvey’ s concern about delayed films is related to the influence of Jill Deleuze’s film philosophy.With the method of textual analysis,she found a mechanism which can hinder and delay the narrative process influenced by death driving force in the works of Robert Rossini,Abbas Kiarostami,etc.The third chapter is about Mulvey’s study of Melodrama.From the perspective of a European intellectual,Mulvey first discusses the changing position and role of Hollywood films,especially Hollywood melodramas in European film criticism.Then,she discusses the development and evolution process of melodramas from the early 19th century to the 1950s from the perspectives of economics,mythology,aesthetics,-etc.Combining the method of post structuralist feminist film theory and that of the culture research,this paper analyzes the relationship between the melodrama,the opposite space inside and outside the family and the identity of the mother,and discusses the "mother’s dilemma" in Douglas Sirk’s melodramas in the 1950s based on this.In view of the continuous attention paid by the academic circles to the related topics of female audience and the doubts on her early theories,Mulvey put forward the transvestism theory related to the pleasure of female audience in the analysis of the specific melodrama films,which caused the attention and response of the feminist film theorists.From the late 1980s to the 1990s,Mulvey tried to integrate Marxism and Freud’s psychoanalytic theory through the concept of "fetishism" when analyzing the female images in melodrama films,and proposed to crack the fetishism strengthened by the film by means of "curiosity".The fourth chapter analyzes and explains Mulvey’s technology and image research.At the end of the 20th century,the changes of the way of showing and consumpting films greatly influenced the research perspective of Mulvey’ s image theory.Mulvey combines two seemingly different interpretations of the sense of uncanny by Jentsch and Freud,and analyzes the psychological source of the "technical uncanny" caused by the early films.Then she further points out that the new technology of watching films makes the uncanny attribute of the films return,which may become a factor to interfere with the narrative process.Mulvey believes that the combination of new and old technologies in the film has changed the way of watching it.The audience can rethink the dual temporality of the film,and at the same time explore some details that would have been ignored in the past.The new way of watching films has contributed to the transformation of democratization and personalization of the image.Then Mulvey tries to further explore whether these new viewing practices effectively eliminate the problem of sexual differences and representation in Hollywood films.In the end,Mulvey puts forward the concepts of " the possessive spectator" and " the pensive spectator",which can be regarded as an extension and development of the analysis of fetishistic spectator and voyeuristic spectator in her gaze theory.In her opinion,the application of new technology may bring a richer experience for the spectator who are willing to try a special way of watching films.The conclusion part discusses the significance and limitations of Mulvey’s image culture theory,including its important reference value for contemporary Chinese film culture research which include the feminist film criticism.Generally speaking,Mulvey’ s image theory system is groundbreaking,pioneering,developing and dynamic.Although there are some contradictions and defects in its theory itself,it has a positive reference function for the current domestic image culture research on these issues,such as the construction of local theoretical discourse system,the reflection on the the relationship between content and form,the public praise and commerciality of feminist films,and the correct view on the application of new technology in film production. |
PDF Full Text Request