engleski

Feminist Film Theory of Laura Mulvey in the Context of Classical Film Noir

Film noir challenged the norms and conventions usually found in the classical noir ; it portrayed a world somewhat different from the perfect society depicted in the melodrama, one of the most popular genres of that time. Melodrama was concerned with the patriarchal values and emphasized the current gender differences and assigned male and female roles. As an answer to those conventions, feminist film theory approach was found within the cinema analysis, regarding the analysis of film elements and their theoretical correspondences. In this work the focus is on the groundbreaking article of Laura Mulvey, because her essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema is regarded as an important framework for the feminist film theory. Mulvey argues how cinema is mainly directed through the eyes of a male spectator, thus positioning woman as a passive object whose only role is to be looked at. The influence on feminist film theory mostly emerged from the theoretical work of psychoanalysis and the work of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan and Christian Metz. In this paper, feminist film theory is explained within the terms of fetishism, voyeurism and scopophilia. The cinema fosters the narcissist identification of the spectator with the main protagonist who drives the narrative in the film noir. The theory is developed through the three representatives of the classical film noir period: Vertigo, Leave Her to Heaven and Double Indemnity.

film noir; melodrama; feminism; identification; Laura Mulvey; psychoanalysis

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