I published the internet article on Sunday to follow up on my presentation in Prof. Betty Brown class:
http://www.videodigitallive.com/lauramulvey/
that provides the detailed analysis of Mulvey's work "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema". As I was reading the article and working on my presentaion, I realized that it's impossible to fully understand the content without in-depth structural analysis and the diagrams that illustrate the key points. So I followed through trying to resolve some contradictory aspects of her writing.
The current research attempts to explain the central part of Mulvey's article: "Desire, born with language, allows the possibility of transcending the instinctual and the imaginary..." , and it opens up a number of questions.
Analysis reveals the important points of Mulvey's writing:
- The language of patriarchy affects woman's unconscious
- The concept of Woman's Desire is a subject for further research.
The research also:
- 1. provides the analysis of relationships between Freud and Lacan in reference to Modernism and Post-Modernism
- 2. attempts to define the position of Mulvey in relationship to Freud, Lacan and Feminism.
- 3. defines the central theme of her article - "new concept of desire"
- 4. suggests further analysis of relationship between Mulvey's work, Lacanian psychology, and contemporary psychology (main aspects: woman's desire, castration complex, gaze, looking, self-awareness)
- 5. suggests detailed analysis of the movie "Riddles of Sphinx"
Note: This research is in progress, so the list of the items to be continued. I'm extremely interested in further analysis of Mulvey's and Wollen's work, biography, historical research and the possibility of the interview. It would be also helpful to have a psychologist involved in the research.
The diagrams below provide:
a. historical background
b. overview of Lacanian psychology in relationship to Mulvey's work
c. in-depth structural analysis of Mulvey's work
Lacan:
Laura Mulvey:
Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema
Voyeuristic Scopophilia
Scopophilia in its Narcissic Effect (Lacan-Mirror Stage)
Cinema Contradiction
Pleasurable Structure 1 - Scopophilic
Pleasurable Structure 2 - Narcissism / Constitution of Ego
Mulvey makes an analogy between the world of the cinema and Freudian definition of pleasure as tension between instinctual drives. The diagram above corresponds to both the world on the screen (emotional tension between the movie characters) and the relationship between the cinema screen and the viewer.
She also makes an analogy between the cinema world and Lacanian definition of symbolic orders / stages of development : the viewer corresponds to the silent world of Real (instinctual) and imaginary (Mirror stage), while the screen is the analogy of Symbolic that produces language and desire.
"Desire, born with language, allows the possibility of transcending the instinctual and the imaginary, but its point of reference continually returns to the traumatic moment of its birth: the castration complex."
"Hence the look, pleasurable in form, can be threatening in content, and it is woman as representation/image that crystallises this paradox."
I think at this point it would be interesting to go back to her previous premise that looking represents self-awareness and do further analysis.
