Freud, Hollywood and the male gaze

In this 10-Minute talk, Laura Mulvey FBA responds to three key questions regarding her 1975 essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’. Returning to the origins of the essay and the concept of the ‘male gaze’, Mulvey explores the cultural climate of feminism and Hollywood which drove the conception of this now-cult term and the newer, controversial term ‘female gaze’.

Speaker: Laura Mulvey FBA, Professor of Film Theory, Birkbeck, University of London

This video is for informative and educational purposes.

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[noodleperson]

A lot of activity in Fred Astaire films (delightful as the dancing and singing are) is basically Fred stalking Ginger (or stand-in girl character) until he gets her. In one, he even moves into her apartment block without her initial knowledge. Creepy.

[LisaPellegrino]

"I feel an immense curiosity about women's visual imagination and what it might open up for us. I imagine this imagination as driven by curiosity about what has hitherto been mute and ineffable in women's lives."

[noodleperson]

Did Freud ever ask women what they felt, wanted etc? He just foisted his own misogynistic views on them.