To feminists and structuralists film theorists in the 70s, cinema raised the question of who is the viewer and who is looking? Gaze theory takes a deep dive about how the audience views a film and is subjected to view a film and its characters. Before the birth of gaze theory, film theorists like Sergei Eisenstein or Andre Bazin were more interested in the ontological essence of cinema, the topic of the subject was not discussed. To Eisenstein, cinema is dialectical montage, to Bazin, realism. This essay discusses gaze theory and its relation to identity.
To understand who is looking in a film and why it matters, we shall first lay out the foundations of the cinematic code, invented by Classical Hollywood Cinema. In his essay, “The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema,” Daniel Dayan explains that the cinematic code hides its ideological origin and nature of cinematographic statements (Dayan 22). In other words, the cinematic code trains the way the audience perceives a film and understands its unfolding of events. The code does this through the filmic system of enunciation called the tutor code, an underlying structure that builds the fictional level of cinema.
One may wonder, it’s impossible that the tutor code trains the audience to watch films in a certain way because it feels natural, films are for entertainment purposes. In a scene, the audience would see a shot, cutting to another, and it continues. However, Dayan argues that this method of training the audience to watch films is in fact, unnatural.
The cutting of shots originates from a system called suture, in which it masks the real origins of an image by making the audience believe in a false origin (Dayan 31). This is to say that suture lies to the audience by connecting them to the fictional (story/plot) level rather than the filmic level (how the story is told). As a result, the audience mistakes the effect for the cause. CHC establishes itself as a ventriloquist of ideology whereby the end product is formed without a producer/filmmaker. The audience mistakes that the story speaks for itself.
Why should one matter about how the audience is trained to watch a film? Because it means that the audience is being subjected by an invisible, overpowering force. An example that Dayan used to illustrate this point is the painting “Las Meninas.” (Dayan 26)The painting shows the painter painting a subject with the company of other people in the room. At first glance, a viewer would notice a couple of eyes looking back at them. The viewer might think that the painter considered its viewers and paint from that perspective in mind. Upon closer inspection, the painter is actually looking off-screen at the king and queen, whose presence is reflected from the mirror behind the painter, slightly off-center in the painting. The painting demonstrates that ideology is hidden in plain sight that is necessary to produce the painting as Dayan cites Schefer.
To break down the structure of the tutor code, we will look at the system of suture- which is structured in a shot-reverse shot sequence. Jacque Lacan’s “Mirror Stage” comes into play in this system. Take the opening scene of “Barbara” by Christian Petzold (2012) starting from 1’04”. Shot 1 shows Barbara boarding off the bus as she walks toward a bench. This is the psychic realm of the real where Lacan explains it is the realm with plentitude and abundance. The audience looks at the film and thinks they are in charge of this shot. This shot is filmed at a high angle and at a fairly long distance from Barbara. The unconscious mind would slowly become aware of the frame and ask, “Who’s perspective am I viewing this frame from?” This demonstrates that there is someone else who is more powerful than the audience, who is the presumed beholder of the frame for now. Right before the audience asks, “Who is looking at this shot?,” shot 2 (reverse shot) shows Andre looking out the window briefly before inhaling a cigarette puff. The audience now knows that they are viewing shot 1 through Andre’s point of view.
Suture explains that with the shot/reverse-shot sequence, the audience mis-associates themselves with the character that’s conventionally beautiful with a good personality. This illustrates the psychic realm of symbolic. The meaning of shot 1 depends on the meaning of shot 2, the audience would never know what shot 1 means until shot 2 is revealed. This demonstrates that the audience is subjected to the tutor code.
Laura Mulvey provides an extension of how the audience is being subjected by the tutor code in her essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Mulvey argues that the audience is subjected to view mainstream films through the male gaze. She said that Classical Hollywood Cinema reinforces pre-existing patterns of societal value- mainly patriarchy (Mulvey 833). This impacts women greatly as they are being subjected to the practices of the patriarchal system.
Mulvey argues that when women are on film, they serve the purpose of being objectified or sexualized, her presence in film would also freeze the plot to show moments of sexualized scenes (Mulvey 837). She claims that the male character is the beholder of the gaze, while the female is to be looked at. This suggests that the male controls film fantasy where they get to be breadwinners of the family, successful achievers, whereas the female’s primary purpose is to be a spectacle.
Mulvey points out that in order to change the gaze of viewing films through the male’s perspective, the underlying structure in which the cinema is built on needs to be broken down. “It is the place of the look that defines cinema,” Mulvey said (843). The three different looks in cinema are the camera’s, the audience’s and the character’s. The male gaze may first be produced through the camera’s eyes, which is usually directed by a male. Mulvey continues that the audience also assumes the male gaze through the dark theaters where the audience watch the film voyeuristically. Finally, the character’s interaction with each other on-screen. Mulvey said the only way to change the male gaze is to create distance in film where the audience perceives the shot and its meaning concurrently. This is so that we are not fully immersed in the film as we mis-recognize ourselves as the protagonists of the films.
On another note, the topic of viewing has brought upon different intersections of identity. It shouldn’t be presumed that a female audience watches a film through Mulvey’s perspective of the male gaze as humans are diverse beings after all. People of color might view Mulvey’s perspective differently. In bell hooks’ essay, “The Oppositional Gaze,” she argues that a Black woman’s viewing perspective is different from that of a White woman, which is a counter argument to Mulvey’s theory. Mulvey’s theory relies on an ahistorical notion of gender that isn’t inflective of race & ethnicity (123).
Speaking for a broader audience of people of color, hooks argues that the violent erasure of Black womanhood is presented in history as cinematic racism. This goes to say that many Black female actresses were not credited on-screen for their roles. Hooks continues, saying the function of Black women on-screen was to serve and enhance their white counterparts as objects of the male gaze.
In conclusion, we see that the cinematic code subjects us on how the audience views a film despite having different backgrounds. Filmmakers need to create a necessary fiction and start somewhere to break down the three looks that we discussed to counter mainstream cinema.