23rd March - The Gaze

This week we studied The Gaze which put basically is looking at looking. The Gaze largely explores feminism and we focused mainly on the male gaze. The example of the male gaze we saw first was a great introduction to helping me understand it, it was a photograph by Robert Doisneau called The Oblique Glance.
The image portrays a woman talking to her husband about a painting, but he isn't paying attention to her rather he is staring at a painting of a nude woman. This represents the male gaze because we see what he sees, not what she sees, it is in his point of view. In this way the joke seems to be on her as she is oblivious to what he is doing, but it also catches him in the act. Tessa mentioned a quote: "all dirty jokes are at the woman's expense" which is very directly about feminism and also makes this seemingly small moment very stereotypical and kind of a big deal as we can only imagine how she would feel if she knew.

The next image we saw was by Barbara Kruger, Your Gaze Hits the Side of my Face, which linked really well with the Hitchcock film we watched.

This image shows a literal representation of women being objectified in art (a bust of a woman). Because her face is side on she doesn't get to return the gaze, so she has no choice, therefore it is the male gaze. It seems that in art women are always the recipient of a males gaze, his desire, interest etc.

This image with the words Your Gaze Hits the Side of my Face links to the sequence we watched in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. The film is about a San Francisco detective who investigates the strange activities of an old friend's wife, all the while becoming dangerously obsessed with her, in the sequence we watched he is trailing her, watching her and we see everything in his point of view. We as an audience see his gaze, we are looking at him looking at her and we only see her profile. We don't see what she is looking at unless he looks at it afterwards, even the music is in tune with his emotions as he follows her and discovers things about her. Something I noticed also was that although she is the subject under his gaze, she is the one doing the leading.