Structure of Session
• Mulvey in context
- A brief history of film theory: semiotics and structuralism
- Group exercises: semiotic analysis of imagery
- The role of structuralism in film theory
- Introduction to pyschoanalysis
• Close group reading of ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’
• Surrealism and Luis Buñuel
- A bit of background
- Cet obscur objet du désir: film analysis in conjunction with Linda Williams reading

Dr. Mary Harrod; m.g.m.harrod@warwick.ac.uk

What came before?
Classical Film Theory
A multi-volume collection of the writings of highly influential post-
World War II film theorist Bazin.
A focus on cinema’s ability to capture objective reality.
Develops pioneer analyses of the work of auteur filmmakers, notably Italian ‘neorealists’ such as Luchino Visconti and
Vittorio de Sica as well as others including Howard Hawks, Orson Welles and Jean Renoir.

Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)
Ladri di biciclette/Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio de Sica, 1948
Une partie de campagne/A Day in the Country (Jean Renoir, 1936)
)

1970s Theory: Contesting the Claims of Film’s Direct Link to
Reality
A turn to TEXTUALITY: media as a complex system of meanings.
Roland Barthes: Roland Barthes, ‘Rhétorique de l’image’. In:
Communications, 4, 1964. pp. 40-51.
See also:
‘La Mort de l’auteur’, 1967

Key figure in structural linguistics
Two basic categories in language – signifiant and signifié.
E.g. ‘tr-ee’ (or the sound of those letters) is the signifiant
[signifier] of the signifié [signified] ‘tree’(N.B. Not a tree as such – the référent
[ referent] - but the mental image of one those sounds produce.)
Saussure: Course in General Linguistics (1916)

CONCEPT
SOUND-
IMAGE
Example:
Saussure: Course in General Linguistics (1916)
Outside the sign:
Referent ( the object in the real world)

The relationship between signifier and signified is an arbitrary one.
Meaning is a result of the arbitrary differences between the signifiers of any given language system, and not the result of any intrinsic connection between reality and words.
e.g.
J'aime bien la pâte aux amandes.
Tu dois payer une amende de 50 euros.

Barthes, ‘Myth Today’
in Mythologies (1957), p.116

Barthes, ‘Rhetoric of the image’: “The literal message appears as the support of the ‘symbolic’ message”
Sign 2 [what Barthes calls myth ]
CONNOTATION
CONNOTATIVE
SIGNIFIED:
“the greatness of the
French empire”
“belonging and nondiscrimination”
“patriotism as a response to critics of colonialism”
CONNOTATIVE
SIGNIFIER
=
DENOTATIVE SIGNIFIED
Frenchness + the military + young soldier + race
Sign 1 [ Language ]
DENOTATION
Young black soldier saluting the French flag
(analogon of a referent in the real world)
DENOTATIVE SIGNIFIER
Photograph exhibiting certain traits of style and presentation of the subject matter.
Roland Barthes, “Myth Today” (in Mythologies, 1957, p. 116)

ROLAND BARTHES: ad analysed in
“‘Rhétorique de l’image’
The ‘three messages’ of the image working together:
1) Linguistic: given by the caption and the text (‘Panzani’)
2) Non-coded (denoted message): objects represented: pasta, cheese, vegetables: the
having-been-there of objects asserts the direct link of the photograph with ‘reality’
3) Coded (connoted message): meanings of the image: signs that depend on specific accrued meaning: colours, composition, etc. communicate ‘quality’
‘wholesomeness’ ‘italianicity’.

Back to Saussure…
Paradigmatic structure (language working through selection):
•J’ai trouvé mon chien dans l’entrée .
•J’ai découvert mon terrier dans le couloir .
Syntagmatic structure (language working through combination):
•J’aime mon chien.
•NOT Je mon chien aime.

Language as a collection of structures that operate through selection (paradigmatic relations) and combination
(syntagmatic relations)
Example: bat ate the insect hat lay on the chest
The cat sat on the mat
Language as a system of oppositions

See Christian Metz, Essais sur la signification au cinéma ( 1968 et 1973 ), Langage et Cinéma
( 1971 ), Les Essais sémiotiques ( 1977 )
Metz’s work attempts a taxonomy of syntagmas for classical (paradigmatically Hollywood) narrative cinema:
For example, 3 editing conventions denoting temporal and space relations between shots:
1. Alternation (e.g. His Girl Friday)
2. Simultaneity (e.g. The Godfather, baptism scene
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfbYp9oaIT8)
3. CLIP Parallelism (e.g. Extract Un Chien Andalou (Bu ñuel, 1929)

Psychoanalysis and Mulvey
(N.B. Metz also influenced by psychoanalysis later, notably in Le Signifiant imaginaire, quoted in
Williams)
• Mulvey engages critically with the psychoanalytical theories on feminine sexuality developed by Sigmund FREUD (1856-1939) and Jacques LACAN (1901-1981)
• Freud: ‘Oedipus complex’ (child’s encounter with sexual difference): the lack of penis (castration) operates as fundamental difference for the male and female child.
• Oedipal narrative – access to normative sexual identities: the male child grows up to identify with the father – the position of power; the female child seeks substitute love objects and comes to terms with her ‘lack’ (identification with the mother castration).

Lacan: the phallus equals subjectivity and power, the realm of the
‘ Symbolique [Symbolic]’ (as opposed to the un -symbolised
‘ Imaginaire [Imaginary]’, which also evolves following the ‘ stade du miroir ’ [mirror stage].
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.
‘Visual Pleasure’, pp. 307 -8 (Bill Nichols edition)

“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975)
• Psychoanalysis positions woman as the *Other* of man. She is castrated, she does not posses the phallus, she does not have access to self-representation.
“Woman… stands in patriarchal culture as a signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions … by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer, not maker, of meaning”
[Mulvey , section 1.A “A Political Use of Pyschoanalysis ”, p. 305 ]
For Mulvey, narrative cinema is driven by male desire: the position of the seer is masculine by default: the MALE GAZE.

B uñuel: underlying interest in psychoanalysis and
Surrealism
Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978)
Amour fou (mad love), a Surrealist theme.
The Disquieting Muses (1947)

Belle de jour (1967)
The Later Works
Tristana (1970)
Female narrative focus – but whose gaze?

Cet Obscur objet du désir
“ The presence of woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in a normal narrative film, yet her visual presence tends to work against the development of a story line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation” (Mulvey, Section III.A, p. 309)
“[Women’s appearance] is 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 striptease … she holds the look, and plays to and signifies male desire” (Mulvey, Section III.A
“Woman as Image, Man as Bearer of the Look”, p. 309)

CLIP Mateo watches Conchita have sex with her young lover (starting 01.22)
How do mise-enscène, cinematography and sound help construct the characters and our relation to them?
Linda Williams, ‘Contemporary Surrealism’
‘Mateo witnesses a satisfaction […] far beyond possession of the withheld portion of Cocha’s own anatomy through an associated chain of signifiers extending back to the originally repressed “lost object” that motivates the desire of every human subject.’ (pp. 195 -6)

Questions for Discussion
• How does this film conform to or depart from Mulvey’s account of mainstream narrative cinema’s representation of gender and address to the spectator in terms of:
1. Narrative
2. Gaze structures (a function of cinematography)?
Consider in particular here the role of the two protagonists.
• What is the tone of the film and how is it established?
What does this tell you about its ideal audience? Does this inflect our reading? As (perhaps) with Blier, do we need to make a distinction between a sexist film and a film about sexism?