Laura Mulvey - Male Gaze

The male gaze is a concept coined by feminist film critic Laura Mulvey. It refers to the way visual arts are structured around a masculine viewer. It describes the tendency in visual culture to depict the world and women from a masculine point of view and in terms of men's attitudes.

The male gaze consists of three different gazes:

• that of the person behind the camera,
• that of the characters within the representation or film itself, and
• that of the spectator.

The concept was first developed by feminist film critic Laura Mulvey in her 1975 essay entitled "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema". Mulvey posits that the gender power asymmetry is a controlling force in cinema and constructed for the pleasure of the male viewer, which is deeply rooted in patriarchal ideologies and discourses. The concept has subsequently been prominent in feminist film theory, media studies, as well as communications and cultural studies.

The male gaze occurs when the camera puts the audience into the perspective of a heterosexual man. It may linger over the curves of a woman's body, for instance. The woman is usually displayed on two different levels: as an erotic object for both the characters within the film and for the spectator who is watching the film. The man emerges as the dominant power within the created film fantasy. The woman is passive to the active gaze from the man. This adds an element of "patriarchal" order, and it is often seen in "illusionistic narrative film". Mulvey argues that, in mainstream cinema, the male gaze typically takes precedence over the female gaze, reflecting an underlying power asymmetry.

Mulvey' also states that the female gaze is the same as the male gaze because women look at themselves through the eyes of men. A feminist may see the male gaze as either a manifestation of unequal power between gazer and gazed, or as a conscious or subconscious attempt to develop that inequality. From this perspective, a woman who welcomes an objectifying gaze may be simply seeking to benefit men, welcoming such objectification may be viewed as akin to exhibitionism.

The Male Gaze typically focuses on:

-         Emphasising curves of the female body

-         Referring to women as objects rather than people

-         The display of women is how men think they should be perceived

-         Female viewers, view the content through the eyes of 

     a man

The Clip above is from 'Project X', which contains large amounts of sexualised images of Women.

Development Of Editing Techniques

Although the earliest films in cinema were done in one shot without any editing, cutting is so fundamental to the medium that it began to emerge relatively quickly. There was a basic disparity between the amount of film that a camera's magazine could hold and the evolving desire of filmmakers and audiences for longer and more elaborate story films. Only by editing shots together could longer narrative forms be achieved. A Trip to the Moon (1914), directed by Georges Méliès creates a narrative by assembling a series of scenes, with each scene filmed in a single shot. The edit points occur between the scenes, in order to link them together.

The 1903 film ‘The Great Train Robbery’, is one of the most iconic films of the early film years, simply because it was one of the first films to use more than one scene. This was the first narrative film that audiences could see going somewhere and was very successful amongst different audiences. It is not clear that he means for the parallel editing to establish that two lines of action are in fact happening simultaneously. In other respects, editing in The Great Train Robbery remains very primitive, with cuts used only to join scenes and with no intercutting inside a scene.

The film ‘Life of an American Fireman’ includes one of the most famous uses of crosscutting, and was a massive step in editing history. Edwin S. Porter, the Editor, was celebrated for his unusual but exciting style of editing. He wanted his audiences to feel worried for people in the film who were stuck in a burning house, unsure of whether the fireman would be able to rescue them; he wanted to build up tension in his audience, and did this by the use of crosscutting. Similar to Sergei Eisenstein, Porter used editing to try and get an emotional response from his audience.

Porter’s techniques were very different from those of D. W. Griffith. A man names Cecil Hepworth wanted to try and bridge the gap between the two styles of editing, and bring all the different styles together. He created a film known as ‘Rescued by Rover’ in 1905 and was a British silent film (A film with no voices). The film was the most advanced film seen at the time, due to its use of fantastic storytelling, production and editing.

In contrast with Porter, D. W. Griffith freed the camera from the conventions of stage perspective by breaking the action of scenes into many different shots and editing these according to the emotional and narrative rhythms of the action. 

Cutting from full-figure shots to a close-up accentuated the drama, and matching the action on a cut as a character walks from an exterior into a doorway and, in the next shot, enters an interior set enabled Griffith to join filming locations that were physically separated but adjacent in terms of the time and place of the story.

Griffith became famous for his use of crosscutting. In The Girl and Her Trust (1912), for example, Griffith cuts back and forth from a pair of robbers, who have abducted the heroine and are escaping on a railroad pump car, to the hero, who is attempting to overtake them by train. By intercutting these lines of action, Griffith creates suspense, and by shortening the lengths of the shots, he accelerates the pace. Crosscutting furnished a foundation for narrative in cinema, and there is little structural difference between what Griffith did here and what a later filmmaker such as Steven Spielberg does in Jaws (1975). 

Griffith extended his fluid use of continuity editing and crosscutting in his epics The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916). The latter film is a supreme example of crosscutting, which is here used to tell four stories set in different time periods in simultaneous fashion.

Sergei Eisenstein is a wholly unique figure in cinema history. He was a filmmaker and a theoretician of cinema who made films and wrote voluminously about their structure and the nature of cinema. Both his filmmaking and his writing (which fills several volumes) have been tremendously influential.

Frustrated by the creative limitations of his work in the theater, Eisenstein turned to cinema and in 1925 completed his first feature, Stachka ( Strike ), which depicted the plight of oppressed workers. Eisenstein's next two films are the ones by which he remains best known, Bronenosets Potyomkin ( Battleship Potemkin , 1925) and Oktyabr (Ten Days That Shook the World and October , 1927), each depicting political rebellion against czarist rule.

Eisenstein believed that editing was the foundation of film art. For Eisenstein, meaning in cinema lay not in the individual shot but only in the relationships among shots established by editing. Translating a Marxist political perspective into the language of cinema, Eisenstein referred to his editing as "dialectical montage" because it aimed to expose the essential contradictions of existence and the political order. Because conflict was essential to the political praxis of Marxism, the idea of conflict furnished the logic of Eisenstein's shot changes, which gives his silent films a rough, jagged quality. His shots do not combine smoothly, as in the continuity editing of D. W. Griffith and Hollywood cinema, but clash and bang together. Thus, his montages were eminently suited to depictions of violence, as in Strike , Potemkin , and Ten Days . In his essays Eisenstein enumerated the numerous types of conflict that he found essential to cinema. These included conflicts among graphic elements in a composition and between shots, and conflict of time and space created in the editing process and by filming with different camera speeds.

Film Editing Techniques

Before the widespread use of non-linear editing systems, the initial editing of all films was done with a positive copy of the film negative called a film workprint by physically cutting and pasting together pieces of film. Strips of footage would be hand cut and attached together with tape and then later in time, glue. Editors were very precise; if they made a wrong cut or needed a fresh positive print, it cost them money for the lab to reprint the footage and push the editing process back farther. 

With the invention of a splicer and threading machine with a viewer such as a Moviola, or "flatbed" machine such as a K.-E.-M. or Steenbeck, the editing process sped up a little bit and cut came out cleaner and more precise.

Moviola - A Moviola is a device that allows a film editor to view film while editing. It was the first machine for motion picture editing when it was invented by Iwan Serrurier in 1924. 

Flat bed - Picture and sound rolls load onto separate motorized disks, called "plates." Each set of plates moves forward or backward separately, or locked together to maintain synchronization between picture and sound.

But the past 20 or so years has also seen the rise of "digital editing", which makes any kind of editing easier. The notion of editing film on video originated when films were transferred to video for television viewing. Then filmmakers used video to edit their work more quickly and less expensively than they could on film. The task of cleanly splicing together video clips was then taken over by computers using advanced graphics programs that could then also perform various special effects functions. Finally, computers convert digital images back into film or video. These digital cuts are a very far cry from Méliè's editing in the camera.

Most films are edited digitally (on systems such as Avid, Final Cut Pro or Premiere Pro) and bypass the film positive workprint altogether. In the past, the use of a film positive allowed the editor to do as much experimenting as he or she wished, without the risk of damaging the original. With digital editing, editors can experiment just as much as before except with the footage completely transferred to a computer hard drive; losing the original footage is an only one computer crash away.

Scene Analysis - Breathless

This is an example of me labelling my work, ensuring my workspace is tidy and organised. It also allows me to keep my useful text and footage apart meaning I am not spending too much time sorting through material.

4 Hour Film Challenge - The Conversation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GO6qM4I8kxo

The 4 hour film challenge

This film challenge was incredibly harder than I imagined. As we had to create a short film based around the title, 'The Conversation', we decided to play to our strengths and we made a short film involving a montage.

Film Synopsis

A young boxer has the most important fight of his life coming up. With no family, his only companion is his close personal friend/trainer, who inspires him to work hard and train hard after 'the conversation'.

I was responsible for filming this short film, we wanted to shoot as much footage as we could in this short amount of time. We decided to use two Canon DSLR and a GoPro Hero 4 for the filming. The DSLR allowed us to shoot good quality shots, whilst the GoPro gave us unique angles and made the film almost interactive for the viewer as it felt like they were in the eyes of the character.

                          
For the audio, as the DSLR doesn't have the best of microphones within it, we decided to use a slide on zoom mic which is attached on the top of the camera. In certain shots the characters are holding the microphone in order to increase the sound quality further. I was then responsible for editing the sound together with the footage.


                          

Overall I am extremely pleased with how this video has turned out. We wanted the montage sequence to look like an actual 'Rocky' themed montage, so to do this, we spent time slowing down certain 'Rocky' montages and viewing the shots that were used to make it look so effective.  The onstage need to cut from scene to scene extremely sharp, a variety of angles needed to be used and most importantly tense music was needed! I edited the video so that each scene cut extremely quick and sharp to another shot, with the two Canon DSLRs and the GoPro we were able to capture a number of angles and when we combined this with the montage music, we were extremely pleased.

As we wanted the montage to be a decent length, we came across the problem of getting long lengths of footage in a short length of time. For certain shots of the montage we decided to speed up the footage to make it seem as though his training his starting to become beneficial, so therefore this didn't turned out quite effective.

Contextual Studies Video Essay

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ENWOb8bZ3A

 
Bibliography


http://www.filmeducation.org/pdf/resources/secondary/FrenchNouvelleVague.pdf

http://www.newwavefilm.com/new-wave-cinema-guide/nouvelle-vague-where-to-start.shtml

http://www.newwavefilm.com/french-new-wave-encyclopedia/francois-truffaut.shtml

http://www.newwavefilm.com/french-new-wave-encyclopedia/jean-luc-godard.shtml

http://www.newwavefilm.com/french-new-wave-encyclopedia/claude-chabrol.shtml

http://www.newwavefilm.com/french-new-wave-encyclopedia/jacques-rivette.shtml

http://theculturetrip.com/europe/france/articles/the-french-new-wave-revolutionising-cinema/

http://www.theblackandblue.com/2010/03/29/the-french-new-wave-a-cinematic-revolution/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hii6sZBoBXs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJbPHboAsbQ

Evaluation

To produce my French New Wave essay I had to do large amounts of research on why it had such an effect on cinema. I started by researching the key individuals who went from writing reviews for the film magazine 'Cahiers Du Cinema'. Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol and Rivette all shared a vital role in the New Wave as they decided to go from writing about films, to directing them. I then watched a few of the most famous texts from the New Wave. This included the likes of Godard's 'Breathless' (A Bout De Souffle) and Truffaut's 400 Blows (Les 400 Coups).

For my video essay I decided to really go into depth with how the French New Wave started in a country that was seriously lacking real entertainment. Therefore the first half of my essay solely focuses on France during the start of the New Wave and how the individuals who were part of it, went on to make a large impact in later cinema. I have tried to find footage and pictures of France during the 1950's and 60's whilst the voiceover describes life during those times, to show how cinema was a vital part of culture damaged, post-war France. Once I felt that I had gone into detail on the culture at the time, I began to one by one, explain how each of the Cahiers critics went from writing about films to actually making them. To do this I had to find lots of images of the likes of Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol and Rivette whilst they were making these New Wave films. I was able to find useful footage of each of them participating in interviews. I then placed the focus of the essay on Godard's 'Breathless' and Truffaut's '400 Blows' as I began to go into detail about the changes that the New Wave brought to cinema. Along with the voiceover explaining the commonly used features during the New Wave, I used examples of footage and stills from both of the films so the viewer of my essay can visually recognise the conventions that the French New Wave consisted of. I then finished off my essay by explaining the effect that the French New Wave has had on today's cinema. For example, as Quentin Tarantino is inspired by the New Wave and specifically Godard, it is said that 'Pulp Fiction' is inspired by 'Breathless', so therefore accompanying my voiceover are clips from films such as Pulp Fiction.

French New Wave - Video Plan & Design Brief

Location

I will shoot my French New Wave video at Liberty Way, Nuneaton. Featuring a Football Ground and surrounding industrial estates it will make a unique setting for my French New Wave video

When

Week commencing 23/11/15

                                                                                                                                       
How

I want my New Wave film to have a unclear narrative, with multiple shots intertwining with one another. I intend to use a large variety of angles, some of which I will take from the French New Wave genre and experiment with. The majority of my camera shots will be inspired by the French New Wave, especially jump cuts which I intend to base my film around; I want the shots to jump sharply to one another. This shot in 'Vivre Sa Vie' is a shot/reverse shot. I'm planning on using this type of shot to introduce my characters.    

I also want to experiment by breaking the 180 degree rule and seeing the effect I can create for the viewer. The 180 degree rule is used to restrict confusion for the viewer, by breaking it, the footage all of a sudden becomes unclear and loses it's sense of direction, making it difficult for the viewer to fully understand; an example of this can be viewed in 'The Shining'

Kit Required 

x 1 Digital SLR

x 1 Tripod

x 1 Standard lens

x 1 2.8mm lens 

Health and Safety / Risk Assessment 

Despite the estate being quiet around the time I plan on filming, recording on the road will always be a risk so we have to ensure that we record in safe places only. When shooting with tripods we will have to make ensure they will not fall over and break anything or hurt anybody. As well as this is important for us to ensure we were not in anybodies personal work space or private property.

Brief

My New Wave film will have an unclear narrative, it will contain a variety of different length shots of which some will connect to each other, others will be purposely out of place. All of my footage will contain natural lighting and diegetic sounds, when shooting outside I will deliberately try to capture the sound of the wind to enhance the realism of my film. I may over certain shots use a non-diegetic track however my plan at the moment is to use music in a diegetic way when recording, again to try and enhance the naturalism of my shot. Large parts of my video will be shot inside a car and I am going to shoot like this as I was inspired by Godard's Breathless in which the opening scene is in the protagonist's car.

video essay bibliography

http://www.filmeducation.org/pdf/resources/secondary/FrenchNouvelleVague.pdf

http://www.newwavefilm.com/new-wave-cinema-guide/nouvelle-vague-where-to-start.shtml

http://www.newwavefilm.com/french-new-wave-encyclopedia/francois-truffaut.shtml

http://www.newwavefilm.com/french-new-wave-encyclopedia/jean-luc-godard.shtml

http://www.newwavefilm.com/french-new-wave-encyclopedia/claude-chabrol.shtml

http://www.newwavefilm.com/french-new-wave-encyclopedia/jacques-rivette.shtml

http://theculturetrip.com/europe/france/articles/the-french-new-wave-revolutionising-cinema/

http://www.theblackandblue.com/2010/03/29/the-french-new-wave-a-cinematic-revolution/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hii6sZBoBXs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJbPHboAsbQ

Health and Safety

Health & Safety 


Despite the majority of filming taking place on the college site, there are various subjects that mean extra safety precautions must be made:

* When filming in a general classroom environment we must make sure that there weren't any wires that people could trip over

* Also when shooting with tripods we will have to make ensure they will not fall over and break anything or hurt anybody. As well as this it was important for us to ensure we were not in anybodies personal/work space

* In the photography studio, we must ensure all wires are taped to the floor to make sure no one trips or damages the lighting equipment. When the studio lights are not in use they must be switched off at the wall and left to cool before being handles as the bulbs become very hot and could burn someone or break when moved.