Laura Mulvey

Peter Greenaway’s 1996 film, The Pillow Book is riddled with physical, metaphorical and emotional surfaces that challenge the idea of skin, and that skin existed before writing and is simply there as a blank, bodily canvas awaiting the penetration of culture and society. The Pillow Book also presents writing on human skin as a sensory experience, highlighting through a visual metaphor the sensitive, emotional and tactile aspect of text. Greenaway’s use of artistic text projection, colour and…

movie, as well as, much of the ideals surrounding the 1950s, which is the present factor that things may seem fine from the outside, but there is conflict and betrayal all happening within the home between each the character. In the article by Laura Mulvey, she mentions, “[Sirk’s] trademark use of mirrors to break up the surface of the screen”, on top of which Sirk and Haynes both use reflections to express the emotional distance between characters and the avoidance of confrontation. In All That…

This dissertation will be an exploration of the change in the role of women in the cinema within the ‘horror’ genre. It will consider the changes in the representation of women in the ‘horror’ genre over a 30 year period; through consideration of the film Carrie (De Palma, 1976) and its remake Carrie (Peirce, 2013). The two ‘Carrie’ films will be a useful guide to show the genre's treatment of women, character agency and victimization. Although the story of Carrie is an unusual basis for the…

In this evaluation I will be looking at how semiotics, ideology and visual signifiers all link in to both media as well as our society as a whole, and how that has supported me in my journey of creating a truly gender neutral/non biased product packaging that is suitable and appealing towards my target audience. I have looked at a multitude of examples in my research that have shed light on why society has so many constricting boundaries, and how I needed to approach these issues with an outcome…

Everyday women are judged for how they look, act, or say. No matter where a woman goes she must always worry about someone looking at her as nothing more than an object of pleasure. Because of this some women try to escape this reality by watching movies, but cinema itself is judging women. We live in such a male gaze driven society that women are now body shaming themselves because of how self-conscious they have become because they always believe they are being judged on their appearance.…

Women were seen as sex symbols and tools to make the male lead, or hero, more appealing. They were the assisting actor who was to never steal the spotlight, and to only make the male character more relatable for the audience. In Laura Mulvey’s essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” we see how women are truly portrayed in the business of entertainment. Women are seen in Hollywood films as expendable and an untainted, virgin body image. Their characters weren’t as important as males, or as…

This is supported in the movie “Scream”, released in 1996, by having strong female roles whom when are not damsels in distress are out fighting to find the killer, in a previously male role. When Gale rescues Sidney she is wearing a rather masculine looking leather trench coat and it stands very dominantly. This is an example of a woman in a male hero role. The masculinity is usually a sign of competence or strength, rather than anything related to gender or sexual preference. The female…

Media is everywhere. Even more so today than ever before. We get bombarded with pictures of what’s important to society everyday on television, movies, and social media. A huge majority of these images perpetuate gender inequality. It is by no means blatantly telling people that women are the weaker sex. All of this is happening in a slightly subtle way. It starts with the under-representation of women, the definite lack of women in speaking roles or any roles at all. If a women is there, more…

Gender and representation In Marleen Gorris’s ‘A Question of Silence’ During the mid 1970s and into the early 1980’s, feminists critiqued ideologies and the system of beliefs in the patriarchal society. Feminist filmmaking became key to portraying fairer representations of women in film denied to them in Early Hollywood, whilst also using experimental techniques to give authorial voice to women filmmakers. Marleen Gorris’s Dutch film ‘A Question of Silence’ (1982), is considered one of the…

You enter an art gallery and you come upon Cindy Sherman’s #10 untitled film still (fig. A.1.). In this photograph you see women squatting down on the floor; her skirt is pulled up. You are taken aback by the girl in this sexual position, and frankly, you are a bit uncomfortable. You then see the spilled groceries on the ground and place her in the place of a housewife, running around to cook dinner for her husband. The way that we view this photograph can be attributed back to the theory, of…