Seduction: Gender, Genre and Power

Abstract

Seduction encapsulates so many of the themes and practices of cinema. Once more, we find ourselves confronted with a familiar entanglement. Cinema itself is seductive — this is one of its most compelling qualities; and cinema has become well practised and skilled at setting up and devising scenes of seduction. To investigate the sorts of relationships which operate between cinema and seduction we need to bear this aspect in mind. The seductive power of the cinematic apparatus has become one of its defining features. Cinema is seduction, and to watch a film is to be seduced. This is true in the very specific sense of a seductive image (or sound, or sequence, and so on), and it is also true in a much broader sense in that all cinema seduces through the very act of spectating. In this sense the gaze is a relationship of seduction, and the film is what draws it in, luring it by its qualities and its representations. The seduced spectator is constructed by, and constructs, the film. Even from this simple line we can note that much of what follows will trace back through a great deal of what has gone before. Seduction may well be a metaphor here, but it does offer the chance to circle back, and to contemplate some of the essential features of film in terms of the construction of the spectator through the cinema’s gaze, the cultural contexts of film, the creation and function of cinematic discourses, and the operation of meaning. In each of these we find seduction.

To seduce is to die as reality and reconstitute oneself as illusion.

(Baudrillard)