Task 11...Laura Mulvey

a) A Political Use of Psychoanalysis
Film reflects the langauge of partriarchy by being bound up in the same story of sexual difference that all patriarchy is founded on. In film women is seen as Other, as an object not a subject. In a way she represents the unconscious of the male because she is always the object he is looking at and never is able to speak for herself.
Phallocentrism -- a world view which sees the penis (symbolic and otherwise) as the defining center of meaning. In other words-- there is a central, stable meaning to things; that meaning is defined largely by men who associate their power to name and define and control reality with their masculinity.
Symbolic Order -- the realm of meaning controlled by the Law of the Father (in Lacan's theorizing): the language of partriachy. As opposped (by Kristeva) to the Imaginary -- the primal language of connectiona sscoiated with pre-Oedipal bonding with the mother.

b) Destruction of Pleasure as a Radical Weapon
Hollywood film reflects the dominant ideology of their culture. We get our pleasure from films from this presentation of the erotic. If we learn to make films which do not encode these ideologies, a lot of people will lose their pleasure in looking at film.
Mise-en-scene means staging an action. It is historically to do with directing plays, and became later to do with film to express how the material in the frame is directed.

http://virtual.clemson.edu/groups/womenstudies/flc436/mulvey.html