Lacan's theory- the mirror stage & lack +apply

The mirror stage (French: stade du miroir) is a concept in the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan. The mirror stage is based on the belief that infants recognize themselves in a mirror (literal) or other symbolic contraption which induces apperception (the turning of oneself into an object that can be viewed by the child from outside themselves) from the age of about six months. The Ego is born when we first realise our sense of self- when we see ourselfs in the mirror as babies.

Initially, Lacan proposed that the mirror stage was part of an infant's development from 6 to 18 months, as outlined at the Fourteenth International Psychoanalytical Congress at Marienbad in 1936. By the early 1950s, Lacan's concept of the mirror stage had evolved: he no longer considered the mirror stage as a moment in the life of the infant, but as representing a permanent structure of subjectivity, or as the paradigm of "Imaginary order". This evolution in Lacan's thinking becomes clear in his later essay titled "The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire".

The centrality of Lacanian psychoanalysis to psychoanalytic film theory requires observation of a third distinction, one that separates Freudian psycho- analysis from Lacan, and that is the difference
between science and metaphysics.
Although I would argue that Freud’s discovery is better understood as one that involves conceptual
innovation rather than empirical discovery (see Cioffi 1969; Allen 1997b), it has traditionally been construed as an empirical discovery of hitherto unrecognized causal processes that govern mental life. Freudian psycho- analysis is considered to be a science of the mind that uncovers and explains these causal processes. The cogency of Freudian psychoanalysis and its application to film theory can be judged on the grounds of whether or not the phenomena explained through psychoanalysis bear the requisite hallmarks of irrationality, and where cinema is ascribed causal effects, the cogency of this ascription may be judged by reference to the behavior of actual spectators. However, Lacan recasts Freud’s psychological theory of unconscious agency as a philosophical theory that describes the essential or constitutive paradox of self-representation. Laca- nian theory is given an aura of empirical legitimacy by borrowing the language of psychological (and linguistic) theory, but because it is a metaphysical theory it is actually immune from empirical confirmation or refutation and cannot be used to justify or support causal hypotheses. Lacan’s theory has its roots in the philosophy of Hegel, but its metaphysical foundations are perhaps best displayed by comparing Lacanian themes to the ideas of Sartre, who was hostile to and repudiated psychoanalytic theory. For Sartre, human self-consciousness is defined by a perpetual struggle between being-for-itself (pour-soi), expressing absolute freedom, nonfixity, mobility, transformation, and change, and being-in-itself (en-soi), expressing fixity, thing- hood, and stasis. In bad faith, the for-itself defines itself as an entity, but while Sartre condemns this as inauthentic, he offers no way out of the dilemma or paradox of self-representation. When I represent myself to another being-for- itself by expressing my desire for them, I necessarily misrepresent myself, for I am fixed in the look of the other as a being-in-itself. The perpetual process of self-alienation that defines the condition of consciousness and the relationship of self to the other is stabilized for Sartre only by the gaze of a third person who stands for the social order as whole, bestows an apparent equivalence between self and other, and gives the illusion of commonality and community. (1)

• the need of subject a. perpetual cycle of pleasure and suffering in the search of the phallus. jouissance is all weve got. the spectre of pure loss in the back of our mind is called 'the thing' 
• 
  
• "Desire is a relation to being to lack. The lack is the lack of being properly speaking. It is not the lack of this or that, but lack of being whereby the being exists.“(2)

Sex and the City, is a great example to discuss as its a show about blatant and extravagant materialism. The show uses the main characters, four best friends dating their way through the city of New York sleeping with hundreds of men, drinking thousands of cosmopolitans, and spending what seems like millions on designer shoes.

While Sex and the City attempts to redefine the modern woman as one who is independent and empowered, the show’s emphasis on consumption and materialism reinforces traditional hegemonic feminine roles. Specifically, this hegemonic portrayal is perpetuated by the way in which the characters consume as a coping mechanism, use shopping to fill the void in their lives, obsess over their appearances in order to attract men, and emphasise  and idolise luxury and designer commodities, representing the idea of 'never having enough'.











Bibliography

1.https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227584959_Psychoanalytic_Film_Theory
2.https://www.lacanonline.com/2010/05/what-does-lacan-say-about-desire/

Mulvey's theory -male gaze +apply

 In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female form which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. Woman displayed as sexual object is the leit-motif of erotic spectacle: from pin-ups to striptease, from Ziegfeld to Busby Berkeley, she holds the look, plays to and signifies male desire. Mainstream film neatly combined spectacie and narrative. (Note, however, how the musical song-and-dance numbers break the flow of the diegesis.) The presence of woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film, , yet her visual presence tends to work against the development of a story line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation. This alien presence then has to be integrated into cohesion with the narrative. As Budd Boetticher has put it: "What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance.

An active/passive heterosexual division of labor has similarly controlled narrative structure. According to the principles of the ruling ideology and the psychical structures that back it up, the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification. Man is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like. Hence the split between spectacle and narrative supports the man's role as the active one of forwarding the story, making things happen. The man controls the film phantasy and also emerges as the representative of power in a further sense: as the bearer of the look of the spectator, transferring it behind the screen to neutralise the extradiegetic tendencies represented by woman as spectacle. This is made possible through the processes set in motion by structuring the film around a main controlling figure with whom the spectator can identify. As the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look on to that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence. A male movie star's glamorous characteristics are thus not those of the erotic object of the gaze, but those of the more perfect, more complete, more powerful ideal ego conceived in the original moment of recognition in front of the mirror."1 

Mulvey argued that most popular movies are filmed in ways that satisfy masculine scopophilia. Although sometimes described as the “male gaze”, Mulvey's concept is more accurately described as a heterosexual, masculine gaze. Visual media that respond to masculine voyeurism tends to sexualise women for a male viewer.  2

• Women are displayed as a spectacle to be looked at 
• womens bodies are exhibited as objects of desire 
• women are constructed as a spectacle for voyeuristic pleasure 

for female audience is easy to identify with the females when they are being objectified- the female scpectators are no longer looking through their own eyes but instead the male gaze has manipulated their perseption of the character

• camera movement- slowly scaning the female body 
• slow motion 
• exadareted camera angles 

FEMINIST FILM STUDIES, WRITING THE WOMAN INTO CINEMA JANET McCABE   A Wallflower Paperback First published in Great Britain in 2004 by Wallflower Press 

Mulvey turns to psychoanalytic studies on the scopophilic subject - most notably Freud's child who desires to control the object through the gaze and Lacan's jubilant infant caught in the image - as 'a political weapon* to psychoanalyse 'the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form' (1975: 6). She begins with the contention that dominant cinema, as exemplified by Hollywood, appeals to a preconscious desire for pleasurable looking. Deconstructing how the subject gains pleasure in looking would, she argues, reveal the manner in which the patriarchal unconscious genderises those pleasures: 'Unchallenged, mainstream film coded the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order' (1975: 8). Patriarchy encodes a gender imbalance within ways of seeing, in which 'the pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female' (1975:11). Chief among the pleasures offered is that of voyeuristic-scopophilic gazing, where the spectator gains gratification from indulgingin unlicensed looking at an image, typically of a woman. The active and curious (male) gaze translates the (female) image into an object of sexual fantasy, so granting the voyeur a position defined by control and mastery with its implied separation from the source of erotic stimulation. Narcissistic (mis)recognition of self in an idealised figure on screen, typically the male hero, is the other visual pleasure; a structure of seeing that allows for a 'temporary loss of ego while simultaneously reinforcing if (1975:10). Replicating the child's discovery of its own image during the Lacanian mirror scenario, the spectator 'projects his look onto that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence' (1975: 12). Structured in the language of the patriarchal unconscious (instinctual libidinal drives and processes of ego formation), visual pleasures in dominant cinema constitute the spectator as male while the woman 'holds the look, and plays to and signifies male desire' (1975: 11). In turn, this gendered active/passive divide structures film narrative with the male hero advancing the story and the woman-as-image disrupting narrative movement, 'to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation' (ibid.). 

The sight of woman stimulates pleasure, her 'appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact ... [connotes a] to-be-looked-at-ness' (ibid.). Yet, and at the same time, her image provokes anxiety for the spectator. Because she constitutes the castrated male Other, a signifier of sexual difference, the woman as object is concomitant with the threat of castration that needs to be somehow disavowed. To allay castration fears the film narrative renders the woman-as-image non-threatening through two basic strategies. The first associates voyeurism with sadism: 'pleasure lies in ascertaining guilt (immediately associated with castration), assert-ing control and subjugating the guilty person' (1975: 14). The narrative here is concerned with investigating the 'woman' in order to demystify and control her, resulting finally in her punishment, devaluation or moral rescue. She is subjected to and subordinated by the male gaze as he tries to gain control and discipline her for arousing forbidden desire in him. An undercover investigation in Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) gives Scottie Fergusson (James Stewart) license to scrutinise the spectacle of Madeleine (Kim Novak), 'a perfect image of female beauty and mystery' (1975: 16). Soon sexual attraction turns into an obsession with mastering her image, as he sadistically forces Judy to become 'Madeleine'. The film concludes with Scottie exposing Judy's guilt and her death: 'True perversion is barely concealed under a shallow mask of ideological correctness-the man is on the right side of the law, the woman on the wrong' (1975:15). 

The second strategy is fetishism. Drawing on its original significance within Freudian accounts of sexual difference (Freud 1977a), Mulvey demonstrates how turning the woman-as-image (as opposed to the cinematic apparatus identified by Metz) into fetish conceals castration anxiety. Rather than lacking, the woman-as-image is idealised as being complete. The flawless female body, or parts of it at least, are given an importance to compensate for the lack that she originally signified, hence the exces-sive over-valuation of the female star-image - Greta Garbo's face, Marilyn Monroe's mouth, Marlene Dietrich's legs. Translating the woman into fetish diverts attention away from the female lack' - her lack of penis, her bleeding wound - so that she no longer represents a menacing figure but an idealised spectacle of beauty and perfection. 'She is no longer the bearer of guilt but a perfect product, whose body, stylised and fragmented by close-ups, is the content of the film and the direct recipient of the spectator's look' (1975:14).  3

The representationof ‘Woman’ as a spectacle to be looked at pervades visual culture. In such representations, ‘Woman’ is defined solely in terms of sexuality,as an object of desire, in relation to, or as a foil for, ‘Man’. Mulvey’s1975 essay explored the inscription of this tendency in mainstreamnarrative cinema, where it arguably has the most far-reaching effects.She argued that mainstream cinema is constructed for a male gaze,catering to male fantasies and pleasures. Uncovering the voyeuristicand fetishistic responses of male spectators to images of women, theessay was the first attempt to consider the interplay between the spec-tator and the screen in feminist terms.

As Mulvey says, ‘women’s struggle to gain rights over their bodies could not be divorced from questions of [the] image’ (Mulvey1989a: vii).4 

Mulvey's theory can still be seen and applied to many mainstream films and her theory on how women are portrayed in film and the media is just as prevalent today as it was in 1975 when her text was first published.
In Michael Bay‘s Transformers, we clearly see that through firstly the difference in male/female character ratio, making it unrepresentative and also by the fact that all women in the franchise are highly sexualised in some way, having no relavance to the story line- 'the pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female'

 All the females in the franchise are also deemed stereotypically attractive, as their careers in acting are secondary to their modelling careers.
Another example is the model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley plays the role of Sam’s girlfriend in Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011)

Bibliography

1 Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Film Theory and Criticism : Introductory Readings(1975) 

 2 https://www.filminquiry.com/film-theory-basics-laura-mulvey-male-gaze-theory/

 3 FEMINIST FILM STUDIES, WRITING THE WOMAN INTO CINEMA JANET McCABE A Wallflower Paperback First published in Great Britain in 2004 by Wallflower Press

4 Feminist film theorists  Chaudhuri, Shohini.  2009. London: Routledge. 

Film Studies- short film +evaluation

https://youtu.be/N1k1lbphWUo

For my short film Ive included  the theoretical ideas of Lacan and the idea of the lack, never having  enough and Mulvey's theory of the male gaze in cinema.

At the start of the film I wanted to incorporate a series of shots of a female doing feminine tasks such as brushing her hair, putting lipstick on, painting her nails, putting tights on, to further justify the idea presented by Mulvey, that females are only seen as objects to gaze at in cinema, with no real purpose or meaning to the plot. 

Something that i changed from my original idea was the dream  sequence. Instead of waking up on a street and seeing only other females around I wanted the audience to know they are watching a dream or something unrealistic , to portray the scene and the meaning behind it i used a green screen instead and used footage from a meat factory and a Barby doll factory to again portray Mulvey's ideas through my perspective- women seen as nothing more than 'meat' and brainless  dolls made in a factory. The T-shirt also worn at the scene has the words 'fearless and feminine' which juxtaposes the scene as the girl is scared and the idea of the feminine has turned around. 

As the dream sequence ends i wanted to show the audience that the only lesson that the girl took was that she simply  needs more materialistic items and be pretty to do better- looking through pages of makeup, wanting more. I also wanted to use the audio from the Advert to show that even when not on, the thought of it its still there.

To end my short film I wanted to have the advert play once more after the girl has bough the lipstick, showing the repetition of the circle, as she is not going to be satisfyied and will keep on buying to fill the lack of the 'thing' in nthe back of our mind as Lacan calls it.

short film unit 11 timing and plan

a female seating on a chair watching tv, then an advert pops up in fast pace with ideas about looking better objectifying females, projecting unrealistic images, the camera then looking at her face as the advert is projected onto her face. the image blurres into a different scene of the female waking up in the middle of the street( or a forest-making it more dream like?). as she starts walking down there are only females around her- we see shots of the females objectifying her, the camera moving slowly up her body, then back to the females looking at her, then shots fragmenting of her body,  going back and forth. wakes up in middle of the night in sweat. we see a sequence-montage of her rushing out, buying product. "I thought this would make me happy" cut to end, slow pan of camera moving from floor, going up her body slow as the start,  she is seating on sofa again, her face- dark circles under her eyes, mouth open, reflection of an advert on tv on his face. camera zoom out to her surrounded by products she's bought, while looking at an advert. cut to black screen, doly shot of the girl jumping up in bed, everything is dark. the sound of cash and The End come on the screen as the girl is heavy breathing seating in bed, looking at the camera, 'then why am i not?'

-the dream part is longest
-shoul i keep females 'objectifying' females or males? What is achievable?
-the pressure is coming from all sides(adverts and people)
-have short part of females in different films under the 'male gaze' idea in the 'dream sequence', jump cut, nightmare/flashbacks like?


TIMING
00.00-00.10 -zoom out from extreme close up of females face into the room she is in, clean room, empty
00.10-00.20- pan of camera going up slow on females body
00.20-00.30- close up of her face while advert is projected on
00.30-00.35-the camera moves from her face onto advert in fast pace
00.35-00.59- forth and back between advert and extreme close up of girls eyes
01.00-01.10- blured image, as advert is projected on the girls face, while the previous shot is still jumping back and forth, screen goes to black in a blur
01.10-01.40- slow wake up of girl, her eyes slowly open as the camera zooms out from extreme close up of her eyes then to an establishing shot
01.40-01.50- camera goes in a slow pan, upwards, mid shot, the picture is hazy, as the girl stumbles up
01.50-02.10-whispers of girls, as the girl is walking down an empty street
02.10-03.00- girl is walking down as the camera goes back and forth from different females eyes and faces to girls body going up, segmenting