Voyeurism In Film

In relation to feminist theory, the new version of ghostbusters had received an onslaught of aggression which is not a surprise to anyone who participates in the online culture nowadays. The rage was manifested in the hate-filled tweets that were directed to the film director and main casts especially Leslie Jones. This has seen the film earn one of the highest dislikes in Youtube’s movie trailer history mainly because of its franchise reimagined with a crew set consisting of just women. Recently, the online culture has experienced various attacks targeted on the women with the online misogyny being predictable to a point that the film had anticipations about the reactions. This saw some the critics decrying the very existence of the film for …show more content…
Classical narratives have been found to stimulate the desire of looking thorough integrating structures of narcissism and voyeurism into the image and story. Narcissist visual pleasure is achieved from the self-identification with the image while voyeuristic visual pleasure is achieved from looking at another as our object. The traditional cinema’s narrative structure has been said to portray men as powerful and active characters while the female character is perceived as powerless and passive. In a cinema, various techniques and narratives can be use to turn the voyeurism to extremely male prerogative. Within a film’s narrative, the male characters usually point heir gaze towards the female characters resulting in the spectators in the theaters to identify with the male’s look. This is because the filming of the cinema is from a libidinal and optical view point of the male character. Three cinematic gaze levels including, the spectator, character and camera are therefore the ones that objectify the female character making her into a particular spectacle. Voyeurism in cinematic narratives connotes the women as “to-be-looked-at-ness”. Narcissist visual pleasures are tacked with the mirror stage and ego formation concept. A child derives pleasure from identifying with the perfect image presented by the mirror and forms its ego based on the idealized image. In the same …show more content…
For some, feminist cinemas should be a film practice that frees the camera’s look into its own materiality in both space and time as well as the audiences’ look into the passionate detachment and dialects (Elsaesser, Thomas, and Malte, ). The fact that this would result in the ruining of the spectator’s visual pleasure was no problem to the women since the classical narrative decline would be viewed as just a sentimental regret. The feminist counter cinema should also avoid the classical cinema convections as well as accommodate a female view point. This can be achieved through the deconstruction of a classical narrative. This involves telling the stories in shots, photograph pictures of a particular stage performance as well as partly in scenes that are reconstructed in which actors engage in stylized movements. Additionally, it can involve use of mirrors. The feminist counter cinemas should use self- reflexivity unlike the realism and illusionism used by the traditional cinemas in capturing reality. The feminist documentary for instance, should construct and manufacture their truth on oppression of women and not merely reflect it. For feminity to be achieved other issues such as female spectatorship, masquerade, female look, female subjectivity; sexual difference in addition to its discontents among