In 2001, Michael Haneke directed a film called, The Piano Teacher. Haneke’s view, as conveyed to the viewer, is not to rail against pornography, per se, but to rail against its impact as generated by a capitalist-patriarchal society. This stems from a similar modality of thinking introduced by Linda Williams in 1989, in which she “...moves beyond the impasse of the anti-porn/anti-censorship debate to analyze what hard-core film pornography is and does…” (Slade 656). Haneke’s method is interesting in that while he portrays and stays true to a patriarchal approach to a film narrative, he does so through the gaze of a woman and her scopophilic desires. “Scopophilic, arises from pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation
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“...[P]ornography is neither explained nor accounted for by its explicitness (...by leaving out elements, by heightening expectations), for the development of a feminist politics of pleasure it might be necessary to reverse the process and account for how the explicitness does …show more content…
This is the first instance of how Erika views sexual relations between men and women and her conceptualization fits into society. This is firmly a man’s arena and when Erika enters this world, she disrupts the patriarchy by her bodily presence as she moves across the store and violates the society in which she lives. Pornography is an accepted and, at the same time, shunned form of explicit material intended to produce erotic feelings thought of to be predominately viewed by males. When the adult male's gaze at her with disbelief and disdain, it is because of their societal/cultural belief that only men should partake of this practice. Upon viewing hardcore pornographic film, she gives no indication of pleasure and the indifference she exhibits is almost as if she is causally researching the sexual relations between men and women, She exhibits more euphoria listening to Mr. Klemmer’s sensual playing of music even though later when determining if he will enter her class, she expresses resentment of his style as if she feels it was used as a weapon. The next scene also depicts the relationship between pornography in
“...[P]ornography is neither explained nor accounted for by its explicitness (...by leaving out elements, by heightening expectations), for the development of a feminist politics of pleasure it might be necessary to reverse the process and account for how the explicitness does …show more content…
This is the first instance of how Erika views sexual relations between men and women and her conceptualization fits into society. This is firmly a man’s arena and when Erika enters this world, she disrupts the patriarchy by her bodily presence as she moves across the store and violates the society in which she lives. Pornography is an accepted and, at the same time, shunned form of explicit material intended to produce erotic feelings thought of to be predominately viewed by males. When the adult male's gaze at her with disbelief and disdain, it is because of their societal/cultural belief that only men should partake of this practice. Upon viewing hardcore pornographic film, she gives no indication of pleasure and the indifference she exhibits is almost as if she is causally researching the sexual relations between men and women, She exhibits more euphoria listening to Mr. Klemmer’s sensual playing of music even though later when determining if he will enter her class, she expresses resentment of his style as if she feels it was used as a weapon. The next scene also depicts the relationship between pornography in