Q2 With detailed reference to your specific area of study, analyse and discuss the relationship between women and film. eg Charlies Angels

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Q2 With detailed reference to your specific area of study, analyse and discuss the relationship between women and film.

Gilligan (2003) explains that 1970s feminist film theory described "woman" in three forms:

* The constructed image or cinematic representation of woman on the screen

* Real life women who watch films

* The feminist film theorist who speaks "as a woman"

In 1975 Laura Mulvey, a feminist film theorist, wrote an article for Screen magazine called "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema". Laura Mulvey did not carry out any studies on actual filmgoers, but instead used psychoanalytical theory in a study of cinema spectatorship. She suggested that cinema is filmed from a "male camera" position. She suggests that film is a voyeuristic experience (the spectator acts like a peeping Tom) and that females are portrayed as sex objects in close up in popular films of the time. Women in films at the time were there for the benefit of a male protagonist and a male audience, reflecting their position in a patriarchal society.

The fact that women went to the cinema and enjoyed these films was explained by Antonio Gramsci through the concept of hegemony where, in sophisticated 20th C society, the dominant groups retain power not through physical force, but through maintaining the attitudes and values of the dominant group until it appears "natural". So in a patriarchal society, where the vast majority of the individuals controlling the film making process are male, females will be portrayed as passive individuals, sex objects for the male protagonists and spectators, and women in the audience will accept this as natural. Mulvey argues that in a dark cinema, the spectator may look without being seen which allows the spectator to watch in a voyeuristic way. Conventional Hollywood films typically have a male protagonist who is active and controlling. Females tend to be passive objects of desire for the men in the story and the audience. Mulvey argues that the male spectator identifies with the male protagonist and also views the female as an object. Mulvey coined the term the "controlling male gaze" in relation to cinema in a patriarchal society. Men do the looking and females are there to be looked at.

Mulvey states that the cinematic codes of popular films are based around the "needs of the male ego". Males are active, females passive.

Many film theorists did not agree because Mulvey does not take into account female spectatorship. Jill Nelmes (1999) states that: Reception analysis in film differentiates between audience and spectator. An audience is a collective of people, the spectator is an individual. Film spectatorship theory assumes that the spectator is reading the film narrative in a traditional cinema auditorium, which is a very different experience from watching a film at home on a DVD player or television. The technology of cinema exerts a more powerful control over the spectator: the size, shape and clarity of the screen demand more attention, the film cannot be put on "pause" and talking can only be a whisper. The individual enters the cinema as part of an audience, but when the lights go down and the credits start, we are alone with the sound and images - a spectator rather than a member of the audience.
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Early theories saw the spectator as "passive" - being controlled by the overwhelming cinema experience. Now spectators are seen as more "active" individuals who are able to read the narrative and images, make sense of the film in their own way.

In the 1980s, a new way of looking at spectatorship developed. This was called Post Structuralism. This introduced the idea of a more active audience, where the spectator constructs a meaning from the film text, which is based on a huge number of variable experiences in their own past. However, hegemony still causes the audience as ...

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