In Alice Doesn’t, Teresa De Lauretis examines semiotics and narrativity in cinema, reconfiguring psychoanalysis — specifically Freud’s concept of identification and Oedipal narrative codes — through an anti-idealist lens. Engaging with Mulvey’s gaze theory, she reinvestigates “women’s consent” in relation to narrative cinema’s role in “seducing the woman into femininity”. De Lauretis qualifies Mulvey’s initial…

This week’s readings and class discussions collided at the conversation of homogeneity and difference. It seems that the theories surrounding gendered cinematic gaze and participation fall short in its ability to include without homogenizing such differences. Is it productive to demand applicability of theory to all critical discussions, a question that feels to me analogous…

This week’s readings synthesized several responses to questions that came up for me during last week’s sojourn into Baudry and Metz’s apparatus-theory, particularly in its examination of spectatorship. Apparatus-theory seems to lean on identification that comes from ideological capabilities of film apparatus. The eye participates, through the theory’s reliance on the ocular-apparatus alongside cinematic-apparatus, but…

This week I felt very intrigued by the ways in which the theorists Metz and Baudry, through utilizing Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, establish the possibility of one’s “floating” perception in cinema and make sense of cinema’s ‘absence’ that is an inherent, and perhaps integral, aspect of spectatorship in Appartus-theory. My interpretation of Metz is that…

From the several theories analogous to either frame or window, presented within Cinema as Window and Frame — alongside our closer looks as Arnheim and Kracauer in Critical Visions — I began to feel a tension being drawn between forced perspective and calculated coercion of the audience’s engagement with films. Arnheim’s moderate Gestalt theory sits…