LaUrA MuLvEy

Mulvey is best known for her essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", written in 1973 and published in 1975 in the influential British film theory journal Screen. It later appeared in a collection of her essays entitled Visual and Other Pleasures, and numerous other anthologies. Her article was one of the first major essays that helped shift the orientation of film theory towards a psychoanalytic framework, influenced by the theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan.

Prior to Mulvey, film theorists such as Jean-Louis Baudry and Christian Metz had attempted to use psychoanalytic ideas in their theoretical accounts of the cinema, but Mulvey's contribution was to inaugurate the intersection of film theory, psychoanalysis, and radical feminism.

Mulvey's article engaged in no empirical research of film audiences. She instead stated that she intended to make a "political use" of Freud and Lacan, and then used some of their concepts to argue that the cinematic apparatus of classical Hollywood cinema inevitably put the spectator in a masculine subject position, with the figure of the woman on screen as the object of desire. In the era of classical Hollywood cinema, viewers were encouraged to identify with the protagonist of the film, who tended to be a man.

She looks into the male gaze theory, and argues that women have less equality then men. I agree with Laura Mulvey and beleive that women in the media are used to be looked upon by the audience as sexual objects. Alot of women are sexually objectified and looked upon by males to fufil their desire and requirements, thus making them only good for one thing (to be looked upon). One of the reasons that this happens is because the majority of the audeince is seen to be men, therefore this is why in the film industry most viewpoints are seen froma males perspective, this then explains the shortage in women directors.