Phallocentrism and Psychoanalysis

• This paper uses psychoanalysis to explore how film's fascination is linked to pre-existing patterns within the individual and social formations.
• It examines how film reflects and uses socially established interpretations of sexual difference, controlling images, erotic ways of looking, and spectacle.
• Psychoanalytic theory is used as a political weapon, revealing how patriarchal society's unconscious structures film form.

Phallocentrism

• Phallocentrism depends on the image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to the world.
• The idea of woman serves as the foundation, with her perceived lack leading to the phallus as a symbolic presence.
• Her desire to compensate for this lack reinforces the phallus's importance.
• The representation of the female form in a symbolic order, ultimately signifying castration.
• Woman symbolizes the castration threat through her perceived absence of a penis, and raises her child into the symbolic order.
• Woman's desire is linked to her image as bearing a "bleeding wound," limiting her existence to castration and preventing transcendence.
• Woman stands as a signifier for the male other, tied to a symbolic order where men express fantasies through linguistic control.
• Men impose these fantasies on the silent image of women, who remain bearers of meaning but not creators.
• This provides feminists with an understanding of the frustration experienced within a phallocentric order.
• The challenge is to fight unconscious structures formed at the arrival of language, while still within the patriarchy's language.

Destruction of Pleasure

• The cinema raises questions about how the dominant order structures unconscious ways of seeing and pleasure.
• Technological advances have allowed the development of an alternative cinema.
• It allows a cinema to emerge that defies the basic assumptions of mainstream film in both an aesthetic and politically radical manner.
• Mainstream film reflects society's psychical obsessions, and alternative cinema must react against these assumptions.
• Mainstream film codes the erotic within the dominant patriarchal order's language.
• It explores the interplay of erotic pleasure in film, the meaning, and the image of women as central.
• The intent is to attack the satisfaction and ego reinforcement represented by film history thus far.
• The goal is to allow for the negation of narrative fiction film's ease and completeness.
• The alternative is the thrill of moving beyond the past, transcending forms, and breaking from normal pleasurable expectations.

Fascination with the Human Form

• The cinema offers multiple pleasures, including scopophilia.
• Freud identified scopophilia as a component of sexuality, linked to taking others as objects of a controlling gaze.
• Examples include children's voyeuristic activities and curiosity about genitals.
• Analysis views scopophilia as active, leading to voyeurs and peeping toms finding sexual satisfaction in watching.
• Mainstream film portrays a sealed world, creating separation and using voyeuristic fantasy.
• The contrast between darkness in the auditorium and the screen's brilliance promotes the illusion of voyeuristic separation.
• The setting and narrative create an illusion of looking in on a private world.
• Cinema represses exhibitionism and projects desire onto performers.

Narcissistic Scopophilia

• The cinema satisfies a wish for pleasurable looking and develops scopophilia in its narcissistic aspect.
• Conventions focus attention on the human form, with scale, space, and stories being anthropomorphic.
• Fascination mixes with likeness and recognition of human forms.
• Lacan described the mirror stage as vital for ego constitution, influencing fascination with reflections.
• Recognition is mixed with misrecognition, with the image conceived as the reflected self but idealized as superior.
• The mirror moment predates language.
• The image constitutes the matrix of the imaginary, recognition/misrecognition, identification, and subjectivity.
• Film structures are strong enough to cause temporary ego loss while reinforcing the ego.
• Stars center both screen presence and screen story as they portray complex processes of likeness and difference.
• Scopophilia arises from pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight.
• Identification comes from identification with the image seen, demands the ego's identification with the object.
• The first is linked to sexual instincts, while the second is linked to ego libido.
• The tension between self-preservation and instinctual drives creates tension.
• They must be attached to an idealization, and have no signification in themselves.
• Both create an eroticized concept of the world, mocking empirical objectivity.

Illusion of Reality

• Cinema has developed an illusion of reality where libido and ego find a complementary fantasy world.
• Desires allow for the possibility of transcending the instinctual and the imaginary, with traumatization as its reference point.
• The look becomes threatening in content, and women become the representation that crystallizes this.

Woman as Image

• Looking has been split between the active male gaze and passive female.
• The male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly.
• Women are looked at and displayed, coded for visual and erotic impact to connote "to-be-looked-at-ness."
• Woman appears as a sex object, holding the look and signifying male desire.
• Her presence tends to counteract the development of the story, freezing action in moments of erotic contemplation.
• She has to be integrated into the narrative's cohesion.
• Women displayed function as erotic objects for characters on screen and spectators in auditoriums, with tension.
• Close-ups integrate a mode of eroticism, destroying Renaissance space and giving a flatness.
• Male figures cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification.
• This supports the man's role in making things happen and forwarding the story.
• The man controls the film fantasy and represents power as the bearer of the spectator's look.
• Film structure follows a main controlling figure.
• In the mirror moment, men are more in control of motor coordination.
• Male figures demand a space corresponding to mirror-recognition.
• Camera technology reproduces natural conditions of human perception.

Narrative Structure

• Sections have set out a tension between the representation of woman and conventions.
• They are associated with a look: direct scopophilic contact with the female form and fascination with the image of his like set in natural space.
• As the narrative progresses, she becomes his property, her eroticism subjected.
• Through identification with him and participation in his power, she can be possessed by the spectator indirectly.
• The female figure also connotes the lack of a penis, posing a castration and unpleasure.
• To prevent this anxiety, the castration must be re-enacted or disavowed.
• Voyeurism involves ascertaining guilt and subjecting the guilty person to punishment or forgiveness.
• The beauty of the object is built up so as to be pleasing.
• Sadism is a part of narritive.
• Sadism depends on making something happen, forcing change, and resulting in a battle of will and strength, with victory/defeat.
• Vertigo in particular sees fascination with an image though erotic scotophilia as the subject of the films.

voyeruism

• Hitchcock has never hid his interest in voyeruism.
• While on the right side of the law, the perversion remains behind the shallow mask of an officer and dominant male.
• He brings the spectators deeply into the protagonist's side
• Despite this, Jeffries' looks into the apartment block add an erotic element to the drama.
• However, his inactivity puts him in the viewers' position of the films.
• Women's exhibitionism is seen through her obsessive nature.

Hitchcock

• The spectator's fascination is turned on himself as the narrative carries him through.
• Hence the spectator is lulled into a false sense of security, and exposed as complicit.
• Vertigo focuses on the implications of active/looking, passive/looked-at split in terms of sexual difference.
• Women too can appear as the perfect image to be looked at and masquerades it with their actions.
• He too needs to act out the implications of his power and long to save her.
• The scotophilic instinct (looking at another person as an erotic object), and the ego libido act as mechanisms this cinema has played on.
• One could argue, that the image of the passive woman is raw material to be looked at.
• However, woman as a representation always signified castration, with makes voyeruistic or fetishistist devices take part.
• The place of the look that dictates the changing of cinematic codes.
• Each piece that makes up what the main codes consist of, must be broken before the pleasure it provides can be challenged.

Breaking Down Traditional Filmic Pleasure

• To begin cutting the voyeruistic-scotophillic pleasure can be broken down.
• Three different looks associated with the cinema is the cameras, the audiences, and the actors in the film.
• The audience aims for both: elimination of intrusive camera presence awareness.
• The camera producing illusion Renaissance space.
• As soon as the female's image threatens to break the illusion, the viewer will not be able to get any distance from the image.