Visual Pleasure And Narrative Cinema Quotes

Woman's desire is subjugated to her image (...) as bearer, not maker, of meaning.

It is said that analyzing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this article.

Woman then stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by im- posing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.

If narrativity brings to cinema the capacity for organizing meaning, which is its primary function since the time of the classical myths, the inheritance of Renaissance per­ spective, that comes to cinema with the camera, could perhaps be understood as Schaulust (scopophilia), Freud's word for visual plea­sure. The scopic drive that maps desire into representation, and is so essential to the work of the film and the productive relations of imag­ing in general, could be itself a function of social memory, recalling a time when the unity of the subject with the world was achieved and represented as vision. Together, narrativity and scopophilia perform the "miracles" of cinema, the modern equivalent of linear perspective for early Renaissance audiences. If psychoanalysis was dubbed by its inventor "the royal road" to the unconscious, surely cinema must be our way of "looking into the soul.

Sadism demands a story, depends on making something happen, forcing a change in another person, a battle of will and strength, victory/defeat, all occurring in a linear time with a beginning and an end.