Abstract
This paper intends to use psychoanalysis to discover where and how the fascination of film is reinforced by pre-existing patterns of fascination already at work within the individual subject and the social formations that have moulded him. It takes as its starting-point the way film reflects, reveals and even plays on the straight, socially established interpretation of sexual difference which controls images, erotic ways of looking and spectacle. It is helpful to understand what the cinema has been, how its magic has worked in the past, while attempting a theory and a practice which will challenge this cinema of the past. Psychoanalytic theory is thus appropriated here as a political weapon, demonstrating the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form.
Written in 1973 and published in 1975 in Screen.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Copyright information
© 1989 Laura Mulvey
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Mulvey, L. (1989). Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. In: Visual and Other Pleasures. Language, Discourse, Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19798-9_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19798-9_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-333-44529-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-19798-9
eBook Packages: Palgrave Religion & Philosophy CollectionPhilosophy and Religion (R0)