Representation - The Gaze.

The gaze is a technical term originally used in film theory in the 1970's to refer to the ways viewers look at images of people in any visual medium. The male gaze can be described as feminist reference to the voyeuristic way in which men look at women. Jonathan Schroeder quoted..

Forms of gaze

• the spectator's gaze (us)
• the intra-diegetic gaze (within)
• the direct address or extra-diegetic (looking out)
• the look of the camera (man)
• the gaze of the bystander
• the gaze of an audience

The Fourth Wall
The fourth wall is the front part of the stage which is between the stage and the audience. This is what involves the audience during filming and it breaks this illusion by making the audience think that it is actually a film.

Direction of gaze
Trevor Millum came up with many different directions of gaze, these include:

• attention directed towards others
• attention directed towards an object
• attention directed to oneself
• attention directed to a reader/camera
• attention directed to middle distance

Laura Mulvey - The male gaze

• Mulvey wrote a book called "Visual pleasure and narrative cinema" in 1975
• She believed that males are active and females are passive
• She also thought women are viewed as an image and men are the bearers of the look
• She introduced the idea of voyeuristic and fetishistic looks

Criticisms

• There is a failure to account for a female spectator
• It looks only at the spectatoras being a hetrosexual male
• since the 1980's there has been an increasing display and sexualisation of the male body in mainstream cinema and TV advertising

Categorising facial expressions

Women

• chocolate box
• invitational
• super-smiler
• romantic/sexual
• Marjorie Ferguson (1980)

Men:

• carefree
• practical
• seductive
• comic
• catalogue
• Trevor Millum (1975)