Laura Mulvey on Visual Pleasure, Feminism & Film Theory

Peter Wollen's 1972 article on Godard and counter-cinema established a influential framework for distinguishing between two cinematic approaches. Classical Hollywood cinema (associated with the representative regime) features clear linear stories, character identification, transparency techniques like shot-reverse-shot and the 180-degree rule, closed endings, and pleasure-giving narratives that take spectators away from reality. Counter-cinema, by contrast, employs ambiguous narratives, estrangement techniques, foregrounding of the apparatus, open endings, and aims to give spectators access to reality rather than fictionality. This framework has remained remarkably persistent in film studies despite being over fifty years old.

The 'Long 1970s' (1968-1980) in Britain encompassed radicalization from French May 1968 movements, ending with Thatcher's election and neoliberal politics. This period saw the London Filmmakers Co-op's founding (1968) and Channel 4's launch (1980). Over 50 years, cinema transformed technologically, socially (women's voices gained impact), sexually (expanded beyond heterosexual norms), and racially (race became everyday politics). The transition from writing about film to making films represented a shift from critique to creative practice, influenced by the women's liberation movement. Key theoretical foundations included: the UK independent film movement's collective solidarity; state support from the British Film Institute; Argentine filmmakers' 'imperfect cinema' and Italian 'arte povera'; and psychoanalytic theory to analyze how images of women circulated in patriarchal society, making representation a political struggle. Counter-cinema strategies emerged as deliberate approaches to negating dominant conventions: anti-editing using elongated shots; pattern and symmetry; and 'impure cinema' incorporating music, stories, characters, and language. Mythology serves as a questioning force because it provides familiar stories that demand retelling at different historical moments. Retelling myths from marginalized perspectives involves working hard on the sociology of context rather than simply adapting stories.

Avant-garde cinema functions as research rather than entertainment, leading the charge against conventions. Soviet montage theorists like Eisenstein and Vertov established shots as cinema's fundamental building blocks, connecting them to create ideological explosions. Stan Brakhage pushed further, treating individual frames (the literal atom of 24fps film) as complete images, examining how each frame connects to others in terms of rhythm and pattern. This progression from shot-level to frame-level analysis represents avant-garde cinema's evolution as increasingly exploratory research into cinematic possibilities. The post-WWII era of nuclear anxiety and high modernism provided the cultural context for this development, with Clement Greenberg promoting abstract expressionism as achieving medium specificity—the purest self-referential art—while New York City became the epicenter of avant-garde activity, fostering counter-cultural bohemian communities that produced distinctive visual experimentation movements.

Avant-garde cinema emerged in the late 1920s-early 1930s when cinema institutions (with genre systems and distribution networks) were established. While technical aspects changed dramatically, fundamental structures remained. Artists dissatisfied with the industry noticed cinema lacked attention to what it fundamentally represents. Cinema consists of three essential components: light, the movement of light, and the time during which this movement occurs. These determine whether cinema exists and is perceived, regardless of technical variations. Avant-garde filmmakers turned away from literary adaptations to explore cinema's own nature - what light can do to create visual images. They emphasized light itself as divine, and the movement of light and colors as fundamental phenomena. Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling created 'absolute films' - abstract films that were essentially visualized music. Man Ray's experimental films 'Return to Reason' and 'Emak-Bakia' contain experiments with 'aragraphs' - images created without cameras through light passage. László Moholy-Nagy created a light-space modulator - a motorized rotating device with plates and shapes through which light passed to create images, representing attempts to create images using minimal materials.

University exposure to avant-garde cinema (from Stan Brakhage to Hollis Frampton) expands understanding beyond traditional film studies canons. This exposure reveals cinema's full range of possibilities and provides techniques for combining different traditions. The encounter with filmmakers like Derek Jarman demonstrates how avant-garde approaches can marry diverse cinematic influences, offering tools for innovative storytelling that challenge conventional boundaries.

The female gaze is a feminist theory term representing the perspective of female spectators, characters, or directors in artistic works. It emphasizes representing women as subjects with agency rather than objects. The term was coined as a response to Laura Mulvey's concept of the male gaze, which depicts women from a masculine heterosexual perspective as sexual objects for male pleasure. The male gaze has three perspectives: the man behind the camera, male characters within the film, and the spectator gazing at the image. The female gaze is characterized by active female subjects with control over their own destinies.

The female gaze is different from the male gaze, though some argue it's just the male gaze in disguise because women often judge other women based on apparent desirability to men. When performing in straight clubs, women feel competitive toward other women and hate when men look at them, feeling uncomfortable with the predatory energy and entitlement. Women often avoid wearing certain outfits in public because of how men make them feel, preferring to wear comfortable clothing only around other queer women. Even women who have never been harassed by men still feel uncomfortable around men due to the male gaze. Women are in the minority who have never been 'assaulted' by a man, and even lesbians who are not interested in men still feel uncomfortable around them. Even good men see the world through the male gaze because their entire world has been served to them through a man's perspective. This includes movies, TV, porn, art, and locker room talk. Many women have lost guy friends because they realized they weren't going to sleep with them. Men have disregarded women's orientation or relationship status and made women feel uncomfortable because they view them through the male gaze of entitlement. These are universal experiences across women. Women are taught from childhood that boys can hurt them, touch them, and do what they want because they 'like' them. This normalization of male entitlement affects women throughout their lives. The speaker has experienced thousands of instances of this in her burlesque career, which began performing in gay bars for queer women. There is a stark difference in energy when performing for different audiences. Performing for queer women feels safe, sexy, fun, kind, giving, loving, and respectful. The energy exchange feels good, and the way they look at performers feels electric and nice. In contrast, performing for straight men feels predatory and icky, with men assuming they can touch performers, grind on audience members, or get lap dances. Straight men who come to queer spaces often assume they're entitled to that space and the people in it, even when it's explicitly stated to not be for them. While there are respectful allies, the creepy, overstepping men who make women feel icky far outweigh the respectful ones. This is why creating spaces specifically for queer women is necessary because the general world is dominated by the male gaze. When women feel like a space is safe for them and is for them, they 'light up' and 'blossom.' The speaker makes announcements at shows that men should move so women can have better viewing spots, and watching women react to having their space reasserted is incredible. This demonstrates how important it is for women to have spaces where they are the main characters, not secondary characters.

The female gaze is a reclaimed perspective from anyone othered by the male gaze, including women, queer people, and people of color. It is not the opposite of the male gaze (which would objectify men for women's pleasure) nor a feminine aesthetic (flowers, pastels, frilly things). The female gaze is fundamentally about subjective experience—feeling seeing the camera and understanding characters' internal feelings through experiencing rather than rigid visual codes. Joey Soloway describes it as the camera becoming dedicated to the viewer's inner feelings. The 'gazed gaze' from the perspective of the objectified person encapsulates what it feels like to be judged as an exterior thing. Returning the gaze—a fourth wall break—confronts the gazer, demanding mutual looking and equality. The female gaze is fluid and unidentifiable—it doesn't have to be all about suffering from the male gaze but can be any authentic experience. Anyone can have the female gaze, including straight white men, though it is most often harnessed by women, people of color, queer people, and disabled folks. It doesn't have to be intentional; it can emerge from experience. The female gaze sees the body as natural and existing, not posed—movements as extensions of how it feels to live in that body.

The male gaze, coined by Laura Mulvey in 1975, describes how visual arts and literature depict women from a masculine point of view, presenting women as objects of male pleasure. Operating through a triangular structure involving creators, characters, and spectators, this gaze permeates virtually all mainstream media. Intersectionality reveals how multiple forms of oppression are linked across identity categories. Cisgender identity distinguishes those who identify with their assigned gender from transgender individuals. Historically, language itself may have been invented as technology problematic to goddess culture, prioritizing male thinking. The divided feminine splits women into 'Madonnas' (honored mothers, wives) and 'whores' (available for male conversation), activating male lives while shaming women's desire. The female gaze emerges as a necessary counter-force, offering three approaches: feeling seeing, the gazed gaze, and returning the gaze, representing a conscious effort to create empathy as political tool for changing how women move through the world.

This segment examines Poison Ivy's complex relationship with female gaze and queer elements. While the film is directed by a woman, the explicit scenes are clearly intended to appeal to a male audience. The film contains subtle queer elements, particularly in the relationship between Sarah Gilbert's character and Drew Barrymore's Ivy, including a notable same-sex kiss. However, these elements are quickly dismissed or overshadowed by the film's primary heterosexual narrative, demonstrating how female directors in the 1990s often had limited creative autonomy.

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