The Gaze in Cinema
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 27 มี.ค. 2020
- The gaze is often misunderstood as the look of the camera or the spectator, but it is instead the point in the filmic image where the spectator's desire is manifested. Through the deployment of the gaze, cinema reveals the spectator's investment in what is seen. This is the key to cinema's political potential because it highlights one's necessary engagement in the world. We see this best in the masterpieces of cinema, including Vertigo and Citizen Kane.
When Scotty finds out that Madeleine is Judy, he realizes he has been drinking coffee without milk instead of coffee without cream
Started off incredibly confused and the Vertigo example was literally exactly what I felt when I watched it. I was thinking how devious Hitchcock was in assembling such a shocking plot. It really did remind me that the film was made for the viewer.
Jimmy Stewart was really brilliant at this.
Thanks, Todd!
Very good. Thank you very much!
Wow, great stuff, Todd! This has really helped me understand the gaze. Thanks for this!
Outstanding presentation, Todd! Looking forward to more like this.
this is amazing... loved The Real Gaze book, and this I believe summa it up perfectly for those reluctant to immerse themselves into a book directly, so I'll definitely be recommending this to friends a starting off point.
❤️ thanks
great! tnx
Thanks
Very, very late to this, but this is very useful for my understanding for the Gaze in film theory for my class on Fellini
The point of the gaze is the point in which the visual field reveals it’s non neutrality. I really do love Todd McGowan. Rare. Beautiful. I can’t not say it.
I was searching about Visual Culture and found this gem, thanks for this.
A quick question about Das Ding:
In Vertigo, there’s a scene right before Judy changes her hair where she is sitting in front of the same window where Scotty sits later in the clip you shared.
Judy is in the foreground in total darkness, with the green lit drapes behind her... is this the “purely virtual outline” of Das Ding? Is Hitchcock showing us that Judy is the object of Scotty’s fantasy?
On that same note, when the nun (or reverend mother if you will) scares Judy in the final scene she is also in total darkness... a “virtual outline.” Do you think this shows how we are haunted by Das Ding? Hitchcock does something similar with darkened figures in Notorious.
Thanks!
I think that the final scene is definitely depicting a haunting by das Ding. Great point. I am less sure how das Ding is operate in the fantasy scene. What's functioning as objet a here is, I think, the necklace, which is why confronting it directly brings anxiety and causes the fantasy to collapse. Judy would have to be functioning as das Ding insofar as she is absent--so perhaps when she is gone fixing her hair. What she's doing then is what he (and we) cannot know. It is a site of unknowing.
Amazing video, is the gaze also why people find so anxiety provoking the cheap movie endings where everything that was narrated was a figment of the protagonists imagination? The fantasy of the fullness of the other is confronted with a crushing blow that everything that the protagonist knew is not?
yes, I think that's right.
What about Films like Dog-ville
Thanks for the video! I was watching it while reading 'The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan'. However, I'm still struggling a bit. If we'd take Benny's Video as an example: a Mulvey-esque reading would be identifying the gaze as Benny's lens through which he (and thus the male spectator) exerts mastery over others to-be-looked-at. But would your reading be something akin to identifying the gaze as the frames that prevent the spectator from seeing the offscreen violence? (and, in doing so, confront us with our desire to witness these events?)
I'd appreciate your take on this. Thanks in advance!
Hi Joy, That's actually exactly how I would analyze the gaze in Benny's Video. By limiting what we can see, we confront the desire to see. I don't think that I fully developed the notion of the gaze as limit either in The Real Gaze or in this video, but it's a crucial point. Thanks.
@@toddmcgowan8233 Thanks so much for your quick reply! Feels good to hear that I seem to be heading in the right direction.
I have a follow-up question if that's ok? It's a strain of thought I haven't exactly worked out yet but I'd be curious to hear your perspective. Simultaneously to reading The Real Gaze I'm also reading 'Perversion' by Stephanie Swales. Swales talks about perverse analysands generally being more difficult to engage in the clinic due to their different response to desire compared to neurotics (from what I understand, the analyst first positions themselves as objet petit a to engage the analysand in the analytical process). Due to the different structural fantasies of the neurotic ($ ◊ a) and the pervert (a ◊ $) Swales states that the perverse subject is the object of the Other's jouissance and as such has a limited ability to desire. In a general sense, I was wondering what (if any) implications for this would be for the functioning of the gaze?
@@JoyBomer Nice question. For the reason you state, I think that perversion obfuscates the gaze, which is why, as Stephanie and others point out, it is so difficult to analyze a pervert or to get a pervert into analysis.
@@toddmcgowan8233 Thanks once again! Excuse the late reply, had some things to attend to besides my reading/writing. I think I'll attempt to dive deeper into the perverse subject in relation to cinema / the gaze in film!
Am I correct in understanding that the gaze is not merely 'fan service,' but rather the point at which the spectator is forced to confront the falsity of the film's overt 'message' of harmony?
Following this, can the gaze be characterised as a moment of failed 'interpellation'? The spectator is beckoned into the narrative, but the gaze-object causes this to unravel.
If that were the case, enjoyment would be structured around this moment, since it's a sort of objet a. Which would make it an even stronger interpellation into the film's 'perverse underside.'
I sense that I'm wrong somewhere here, but I can't quite place it. I apologise -in advance- for my ignorance.
I can see your reasoning, here, which makes a good deal of sense. I think where I would introduce a caution is the identification of the gaze with the perverse underside of ideology. To take a quick example from Psycho: The perverse enjoyment of the spectator derives from the shower murder, but the moment of the gaze (qua objet a) comes afterward, when Norman tries to sink Marion's car into the swamp and it suddenly stops sinking. The enjoyment in this scene is not perverse but tied to the point of ideological failure. I think the key distinction is between the underside of ideology and the point of ideological failure.
@@toddmcgowan8233 Ah! That makes it a little easier to think through.
Thanks for replying, and for the podcasts, too!
@@toddmcgowan8233 Gah! It feels like this should be obvious to me by now, but I still find it difficult to fully grasp the concept. In reading Zizek's Less Than Nothing. In the introductory chapter he writes about Lacan's shift from fictions to semblances, where semblances function on the symbolic plane. The 'truth' within the semblance is structured in the form of 'pretending to pretend'.
Is this analogous to the symbolic universe of a film?
I imagine, if so, the Gaze would be the point at which the film 'pretends to pretend,' so to speak. Conceals its own negativity (a bit like in Gone Girl where Rosamund Pike's character pretends to have been brutalised for the CCTV cameras in Neil Patrick Harris' home; hiding something that wasn't there).
However, if I understand this video correctly, it seems like the gaze rather functions as a point where the symbolic fiction breaks down. This seems to resemble masculine logic where all is smoothly functioning and suddenly something unexpected appears, and the spectator becomes part of the symbolic world (like the face of the detective after Pike's testimony for the FBI, once 'Amy' returns to the community).
I'm fairly new to all this, and I haven't any formal education in the field. The logic of partial objects eludes me completely.
I assume it'll be more worthwhile if I'd study up a lot more, instead of mixing my metaphors in YT comments.
@@noorelahi1997 I see the point. But the idea is that the gaze is affects the image constantly, not just in the moment that is becomes visible for the spectator. This is why the logic of the gaze is not necessarily a male logic of exception. It is the point where the symbolic fiction breaks down, but this point reveals the constant presence of the spectator's desire on the image.
So where (if anywhere) is the gaze in this youtube video?
One place where we can always find the gaze is in cuts--so that would be my first answer.
Could one say the gaze is a point of epiphany experienced by a character or an audience member?
Yes, epiphany in the sense of an experience that clarifies one's own desire and simultaneously lifts one out of an ideologically determined position.
Many movies are adapted from novels,does gaze exist in novel?Or is there a phrase for gaze in novels?
It's a fascinating question. First of all, it seems clear to me that a novel and a film are simply different works of art, so it isn't a matter of translating the gaze from one to another. But that said, I do believe that something like the gaze is at work in many novels. It can't work in the visual field, obviously, but there can be a moment where you grasp that your desire is part of the perceptual field constituted by the novel. Perhaps this happens in Great Gatsby when we learn that Gatsby's parties were designed just to entice Daisy's look and must revaluate everything that we thought about him. There are probably much better examples.
I keep hearing "the gays"
Agh, I don't understand any of this.
bro is speaking a different language
bruh it seems like you are speaking a completely different language i dont understand anything at all
But rosebud is important and does satisfy your desires! It’s the Sims 1 money cheat code. XD