Laura Pendergest-Holt

Just a few lots to the west of the two Jennings’ farm was the Pelham branch of the Quaker’s the oldest such branch in Canada. The Friends, as they call their members settled in the Niagara region in 1786 many from New Jersey in Sussex County, the same county in which Hannah was born. As Quaker’s they disavowed anything to do with violence and hence took no active part in the Revolutionary War. This stance of neutrality had members suffer double taxation and the loss of some civil rights – and…

In cinema, the act of watching or spying at other peoples’ lives is referred to as voyeurism. Originally, the word voyeurism means “[gaining] sexual pleasure from watching others when they are naked or engaged in sexual activity” (Oxford Dictionary, Oxford University Press), but in cinema, voyeurism has been used as a plot tool for decades. Hitchcock films depict the roles a man and woman have in marriage through various tools, but in Rear Window, it is through voyeurism that the story is set in…

Laura Mulvey argues in her essay that women do not see the world as observers and instead, they are only to be seen. Outlets of popular culture, such as magazines, tell women to wear certain clothes, stand with a specific posture, and make a pouty, sexy face to obtain a man. These attributes put together symbolize the straight female. In a heteronormative world, this is what it means to be beautiful and sexually available. Thus, the male gaze is ubiquitous in culture of the past and present.…

In Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) is a story about a photographer on his last week of recuperation from his last assignment where he was severely injured on the race track taking a picture of the wreckage. While recuperating Jeff has come into the deplorable habit of people watching his neighbors outside his rear view window, while watching he suspects one of his neighbors to have murdered his wife. Not being able to provide an eye witness account to what he believes happened he has his…

is a portrayal of “The Nuclear Family”, DiCaprio clearly being the “Breadwinner” in this whole situation by being the sole provider in the home and Robbie being portrayed as the “Homemaker” or a housewife that has to stay home and be domestic. In Laura Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975) states that “Women Stands in patriarchal as signifier of male others, being bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies”. The movie relates with this point because in one…

inspection that isn’t the case. “His Girl Friday”, though progressive for the time with the main female lead being masculinized, still fits the male-active/female-passive binary set for movies, according to Laura Mulvey’s theories. In her article, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, Laura Mulvey writes of how film form is structured by the unconscious of the patriarchal…

Laura Mulvey’s piece, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, emerged during second wave feminism and the classic Hollywood Film era. Mulvey’s work has since received various criticisms (Torres Lecture 10) however, several of her ideas are still prevalent in films today –specifically male characters as active and female characters as passive (Mulvey). Mulvey theorizes, “pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto…

Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills have been at the centre of Post Modernist and Post-Structuralist discourse since the 1980s. This paper will address the arguments made by Rosalind Krauss, Judith Williamson, Laura Mulvey and Jui-Ch’i Liu surrounding these film stills. The work at hand consists of a series of black and white photographs where Sherman plays the role of the director and the agent to construct an image and mise en scène that has an uncanny resemblance to 1950s snapshots of…

Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) portrays a man's (John’s) passion for control and the dangers of idealisation and desire. Vertigo; "a sensation of whirling and loss of balance, associated particularly with looking down from a great height”1 is a metaphor of protagonist John “Scotty” Ferguson relationship with Judy Barton/Madeleine Elster. The narrative structure of Vertigo is fundamentally driven by the encounters between John and Madeleine/Judy. The relationship between the two progresses on the…

with, but in reality they simply want to control them. Vertigo and Her’s aestheticization of violence and the protagonists’ need for control are emphasized by the fact that both Scottie and Theodore cannot bear the burden of being the object of what Laura Mulvey describes as the ‘male-gaze.’ Mulvey suggests that the male-gaze sexually objectifies women and is a mechanism that allows men to be the object of control. Scotty and Theodore exemplify men who have lost the ability to emit the male-gaze…