It was for the first time that any of us
attended an M.Phil defense and to say the least, we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves.
I think it would be an injustice not to mention that Sreyashi Dhar’s paper on
“Representation of Female Body in Select Films of Alfred Hitchcock and Basic Instinct 1 & 2” won accolades
from the external examiner who even mentioned that it was perhaps one of the
best defenses that he had attended thus far.
Sreyasi explored the diegetic gaze in
the movies of Hitchcock and in Basic
Instinct 1 & 2. While in Hitchcock the woman is “voiceless” and always
“victimized” and “objectified,” in Basic
Instinct, parts one and two, Sharon Stone shatters all these patriarchal
norms using her “body as a weapon” and an agent of empowerment. The graphic
inputs and the visual aids enhanced the audiences’ understanding of the key
elements of Sreyashi’s discussion—woman’s body in sexual terms, body element,
male gaze and voyeurism, sadism and fetishism. The theories and frameworks that
Sreyashi uses, and simultaneously refutes, while her argument progresses,
include Michel Foucault’s “theory of repression,” the psychoanalytic framework
used by Laura Mulvey, Lacan’s concept of the “mirror stage” and Freud’s
psychoanalytic theory.
Laura Mulvey in her essay writes, the
woman “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 commands by imposing them in the silent image of woman still
tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not marker of meaning” (834). In the
section: Pleasure in Looking/Fascination with the Human Form, Mulvey explains
that one of the pleasures that cinema offers is “scophophilia,” where both
looking and being looked at become sources of pleasure, but later in the
section on “Woman as Image, Man as Bearer of the Look,” Mulvey seems to be
passing a judgment that Sreyashi contradicts through the portrayal of Sharon
Stone in Basic Instinct. Mulvey says:
“In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been spilt
between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its
phantasy on to female figure which is styled accordingly” (837). Sreyashi
counter-argues that Mulvey completely overlooks the idea of a “female gaze,” an
example of which is Sharon Stone’s seductive gaze in the movies in question. However,
the external examiner raised a pertinent question, saying Stone was merely
aping the male gaze, and arriving at a concept of “female gaze” was hurried,
but at the same time he acknowledged that the counterargument to Mulvey was
indeed a prospective contributory step in the realm of post-feminism, especially
the concept of the manipulation of the male gaze for the empowerment of the
objectified female on screen.
Sharon Stone’s explicit sexuality as
contrasted to Hitchcock’s representation of the body as sexual, completely, in Sreyashi’s
words, “shatters all norms of the repressive hypothesis” and the notion of “guilt”
that Michel Foucault talks about. What is the repressive theory? “Stated
broadly, the repressive hypothesis holds that through European history we have
moved from a period of relative openness about our bodies and our speech to an
ever increasing repression and hypocrisy” (Dreyfus and Rabinow 128). In the
blog, Foucauldian Reflections, Ali
Rizvi mentions that “the point of repressive hypothesis is to reject a simplistic
conception of power as domination and repression and consequently simplistic
conception of freedom as ‘exit’ and ‘way out.’” One of the insights that he
gives, and which becomes all the more relevant in the context of Sreyashi’s
argument is: “But these notions are dangerous in the context of the workings of
modern power, which does not work by ‘starving’ desire but prospers on
creating, inducing and multiplying and through ramification of desire”
(Foucauldian Reflections).
The
Defender’s Insights:
ü Mulvey
fails to talk about the female gaze
ü Mulvey
does not take into consideration the process empowerment of the one who is
objectified, through manipulation of the male gaze
ü There
is a complete breakdown of Michel Foucault’s repressive theory in the context
of Basic Instinct 1 and 2
ü Sharon
Stone’s representation is post-feminist
ü Sharon
Stone does not define or exemplify any gender stereotypes and archetypes
The
Expert’s Insights:
While it is definitely a refined and
progressive understanding of the male gaze, the inter and extra diegetic gazes
have been overlooked. Comment.
[Defense: Limitations of the scope of
the research]
We cannot yet theorize about a “female
gaze” but the insights on “gaze” are a definite contribution towards
post-feminist theories. Comment.
[Defense: Female informant reversing the
male gaze]
Does the research contribute to new ways
of looking at gender?
[Defense: She is neither the masculine
stereotype nor the feminine stereotype. Also, in the film she claims to be a
lesbian*]
*Sharon
Stone is also a self declared bisexual, and whether casting her in the role of
Catherine Tramell is deliberate or otherwise, is speculative, but this
definitely strengthens the argument with regard to the contribution of the
research towards redefining ways of looking at gender
Class-room Discussion:
The class-room discussion ensued with
individual reactions and observations pertaining to Sreyashi’s defense. The
contributions that the class made were:
ü We
cannot dismiss any cinema as being commercial
or use it in the derogatory sense. There is an excellent analysis of the
difference between art and commercial cinema in Art and Commercial cinema – The different shades by Sreesha
Belakvaadi, and I quote:
“Today, the idea of an
art movie is that – it is slow moving; but that is not genuinely true. This is
a gross misconception about art movies. The pace of a movie whether it is
slow-moving or fast-moving is fundamentally a subjective matter. When we say
slow, the question is : what is slow? Is it the story or the acting or the
script or the music or the camera movement; and if slow, it is slow relative to
what? And only such questions can throw some light here.
There is certainly a
difference between art and commercial movies; but is it not how the general
audience tries to infer the meaning. It has more than mere branding and
labeling movies. The idea to perceive a movie as art or commercial lies in the
“observation” of the beholder” (OurKarnataka).
Commercial to go by the
Online Dictionary of Etymology is an adjective that came into being in the
“1680s, ‘pertaining to trade,’ from commerce + -al”(Online Etymology
Dictionary). So anything that is shown to a larger audience and reaches the
theatre would then become commercial.
ü In
the context of discussing cinema we discussed Stuart Hall. Hall in his essay on
‘Encoding/Decoding’ proposed a model of mass communication which highlighted
the importance of active interpretation within relevant codes. The following
image explains the concepts of coding and encoding as understood by Hall (Semiotics
for Beginners).
To
understand Hall’s concept let us take an example: If X tells Y that the latter
has to make a movie for the Nazi’s that show the Jews as traitors, Y (as
director) would give it to Z (a script writer). So at the script writing level
some form of coding will occur and when the script is filmed, the director will
enforce his own set of codes, the actor his own, and finally the audience will
read it through a different coding system all together. Thus Hall’s argument
justifies that the audience also has an agency.
ü From
the idea of the audience as having agency, we moved to cinepolitics and
discussed Madhav Prasad who makes an interesting observation regarding South
Indian and North Indian stars; the former never presenting themselves as stars
off-screen but the latter live their image even off-screen.
ü This
difference necessitated a mention of S.V. Srinivas’ concept of mass
mobilization, especially through politics, where he shows that the South Indian
stars significantly abstain from such political mass mobilization strategies.
We finally returned to Zima and began
reading the 6th chapter. The two questions raised were:
§ Why are we constantly
returning to the question of meaning in literary texts, i.e. trying to reduce
it to concepts?
§ Why does Zima use
“remotely” in brackets when he says: “Eco’s idea for example, that the
aesthetic object imposes limits on conceptual knowledge is (remotely) Kantian?”
We also discussed how Terry Eagleton in
his essay does not delve into or trace the Prague structuralism, thereby
eliminating the concepts of literariness and
Greimas’ concept of identifying meaning in texts.
Citation
Belakavaadi, Sreesha. Art and Commercial
Cinema—The Different Shades. OurKarnataka.Com,
Inc. 1998. Web. 30 Sept. 2011.
Chandler, Daniel. Semiotics for
Beginners. Aberystwyth University. 19
Sept. 2001. Web. 30 Sept. 2011.
Dreyfus, Hubert l., and Paul Rabinow. Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics.
The University of Chicago: Britain, 1983: 128. PDF.
Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary. 2001-2010. Web. 30 Sept. 2011.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and
Narrative Cinema.” Film Theory and
Criticism: Introductory Readings. Eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. New
York: Oxford UP, 1999: 833-44. PDF
Pinto, Anil.
Literature and Philosophy. Christ University. 30 Sept.2011. Lecture.
Rizvi, Ali. “The Repressive Hypothesis.”
Foucauldian Reflections. Blogspot.com, 16 Dec. 2004. Web. 30 Sept. 2011.
Zima, Peter. The Philosophy of Modern Literary Theory. New Jersey: The Athlone Press, 1999. Print.
Prepared by: Suchismita Das
