The Fiery Gaze. A Modest Proposal for a Better Seeing

2014

2014

Situated at the boundary between Liberal Arts and diverse scientific approaches, artistic research has been developed within the last few years in terms of admitting various forms of knowledge acquisition. My presentation will deal with a film project which is actually not meant to be artistic research: In „Through the Eyes of Others“ Heike Schuppelius (2001) sent out four performers equipped with video-glasses (a small, not visible camera, built into ordinary spectacles) on foot through a certain area. The resulting filmed sequences are determined by the field of vision and by the head movements of the participants. The scenes are therefore supposed to present an approximation of the authentic view-point of the performer. They follow up the subjective awareness of a path determined by the actions and reactions, personal customs and interests of each of the acting persons. Also unplanned events, chance encounters and the urban environment are written into the film. I argue that this...

A Companion to Photography, 2020

2022

As we approach the 50th anniversary of Laura Mulvey’s seminal work “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, the essay that theorized the “Male Gaze” in cinema theory, it is as important to consider how much a challenge to this gaze has advanced as it is to consider how this concept remains entrenched and how its codes remain prevalent in the 21st century. Has the contemporary generation challenged this theorized Gaze, or has this way of seeing become even more pervasive and enmeshed into our visual culture? As time goes by, the question seems to remain the same: What might an alternative to the Male Gaze look like? Is an alternative even possible? And have any alternatives in fact developed in the last 50 years? First I’ll review some points extracted from Laura Mulvey’s essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in which she coins the term “the Male Gaze”, a term that has helped provide the basis of an analytical way of looking at cinema and other visual culture products with a feminist lens. Then I will apply some of the points of this theory in order to analyze two contemporary films: Blue is the Warmest Color, and Portrait of a Lady on Fire and compare their depiction of queer love. To conclude, I will use these two films to illustrate whether the proposition of another kind of gaze, for example, the Female Gaze is even possible or achievable in our culture.

2009

In 1956 Erich H. Gombrich wrote that "no era can be compared to ours in which visual representation is so cheap, in every sense of the word. Posters, advertisements, comic and visual magazine illustrations surround us and besiege us constantly. We see the images of reality illustrated on television, in movies, on mailing stamps and food packaging." The only change in the situation has been the aggravation of the "siege" of technical images due to the appearance of more modern technologies of image recording, opening up new front lines. While images had become the fundamental carriers of information in the 20th century, there also happened a considerable change in the perception of reality. That is, the technical images perfected the ways of representation to such an extent that differentiating between the original (signified) and the copy (signifier) had become problematic. In fact, in the last couple of decades one can notice the "turn of the vector of mean...

ILAe, 2019

It. Sguardo; Fr. Regard; Germ. Blick; Span. Mirada. Theories of the gaze, especially since the 1970s and 80s, have enjoyed particular fortune in three main fields of knowledge: art history, psychoanalysis (starting from Lacan in particular) and reflections on the relationship between the gaze and alterity, in their various declinations within the fields of gender studies, feminist studies and postcolonial studies (Elkins 2010; Pinotti, Somaini 2016). Moreover, studies of the gaze have become closely linked to the birth and development of the Visual culture studies. Aside from the different instruments and methods of research and in the absence of a unitary definition of the concept, the notion of the gaze, as opposed to the simple physiological and natural exercise of the eye, defines a historical, cultural and political mode of observation and reception of images by active observing subjects.

English in Australia, 2003

Approaches to teaching film. This article was written at a time (early 2000s) when "film as a visual text" was a new curriculum requirement. It considers the practitioner — the classroom teacher — as being called upon to navigate critical, cultural, and textual requirements and assumptions.

Eye-tracking studies of film (as well as eye-tracking studies in general) focus on seeing. In this chapter, I shall propose that the human visual system relies not just on seeing, but also on moments of not seeing. That is, I shall argue that moments in which we do not see are not 'fl aws' in a visual system that otherwise strives towards total vision. Rather, such 'fl aws' (moments of blindness) are crucial components of vision and what it means to be human more generally. I shall illustrate this need for temporary blindness by looking at three films that are comprised uniquely (or almost uniquely) of photographs, including Jonás Cuarón's Año uña/Year of the Nail (Mexico 2007), Chris Marker's La Jetée (France 1962) and Jean-Luc Godard's Je vous salue, Sarajevo (France 1993).

2014