class: title, smokescreen, shelf, no-footer background-image: url(tim-mossholder-UcUROHSJfRA-unsplash.jpg) -- # Review: Gender and the Gaze --- <br> > One might simplify this by saying: _men act_ and _women appear_. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object — and most particularly an object of vision: a sight. >— <cite>John Berger, <span style="text-decoration: underline;">Ways of Seeing</span> (1972), p. 47 ??? 1970s visual culture; blatant objectification Active / passive binary looking vs watching Women adopt the gaze of men - reflexive --- class: color-white, fit-h1 background-image: url(psycho.jpg) # Laura Mulvey on the male gaze in Hollywood cinema -- <br /> <blockquote> <div style="background: rgba(0,0,0,0.4); color: white; padding: 20px;"> "In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female form which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness"<br /><br /> — Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975: 11)</div></blockquote> --- class: center # Internalized Self-Surveillance  ??? On the one hand: Internalization of surveillance On the other hand: Agency of the female gaze; the queer gaze (as opposed to the hegemony of the heteronormative male gaze) --- class: col-2, compact # Lacan and the "Mirror Stage" --  -- Three Orders of the Psyche -- * **The Imaginary** - an image of the ideal, whole self. Coherent, not fragmented. At first external but internalized. -- * **The Symbolic** - self as constituted by (interpellated by) culture and language, difference from the Other / the "not-I" -- * **The Real** - the order of the psyche which resists representation, what cannot be symbolized and loses its "reality" once it is made conscious through language. ??? According to Lacan, when the infant stumbles upon a mirror (see Mirror), she is suddenly bombarded with an image of herself as whole – whereas she previously experienced existence as a fragmented entity with libidinal needs. The image itself in the mirror is described by Lacan as the "Ideal-I" (Lacan, Mirror, 2). This ego ideal, for Lacan, provides an image of wholeness which constitutes the ego. As in Freud, this is formed through an external force; in this case, the sudden realization of a complete image of self that appears in the mirror to counteract an infant’s primordial sense of her fragmented body. This jubilant assumption of his specular image by the child at the infans stage, still sunk in his motor incapacity and nursling dependent, would seem to exhibit in an exemplary situation the symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in a primordial form, before it is objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal its function as subject (Lacan, Mirror, 2). This image in the mirror is the image of coherence – of what makes the world and our place as complete subjects in it make sense. It becomes a process of identification of internal self with that external image. The mirror stage thus represents the infant’s first encounter with subjectivity, with spatial relations, with an external sense of coherence, and with a sense of "I" and "You." It also plays a key function in the interpellation of subjectivity within theories of Althusserian ideology – through the various Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA’s) which provide culturally specific images of coherence. --- # Signification vs Affect Images affect us *not only* at the level of representation, of signification. > **<q>A photograph made me pause.</q>** > <cite>– Roland Barthes, _Camera Lucida_</cite> --- # According to Barthes, photography is _deictic_ -- * A photograph “points a finger” -- * A photograph is _“here, now”_ but it always points to _“what was there, then.”_ -- * “Look” “See” “Here it is” --- class: compact, fit-h1 # Barthes' suggests we apprehend an image in two ways: ### *studium* -- * an relationship to the photograph characterized by “general and . . . _polite interest_,” the order of “liking” -- * focus on the informational (semiotic) character of photography: what did the photographer (“operator”) intend to convey? -- * apprehended “in reverse”, as spectator -- -- ### *punctum* -- * “this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me” -- * Latin word: wound, prick, or mark made by a pointed instrument -- * “that accident which pricks me” -- * NOT the result of analysis: “In order to perceive the punctum, no analysis would be of any use to me” ??? Note how studium aligns with Lacan's notion of the Symbolic, whereas punctum with the Lacanian Real --- class: title, smokescreen, shelf, no-footer background-image: url(steven-wei-yfgkWX-2vEA-unsplash.jpg) # Realism and Perspective ### From Renaissance Painting to Digital Media<br>October 3, 2022 --- # Signifying Realism What are the conventions of realism? --- # Realism * A key tenet: “the realist image depicts something as if it would be seen by the human eye.” <span style="text-decoration: underline;">The goal is to produce reality “as it is.”</span> -- * “a **set of conventions** or a **style of art or representation** that is understood at a given historical moment to accurately represent nature or the real or to convey and interpret accurate or universal meanings about people, objects, and events in the world.” -- <span style="text-decoration: underline;">Realism is historical</span>. -- What is considered “realistic” or “realism” is historical, historically shifting, and based on convention and deeply tied to naturalized worldviews about knowledge and reality. --- class: compact, col-2 # Renaissance Realism * use of perspective to render spatial depth * represented figures and their relative size both proportionally and accurately * employed compositional techniques & conventions for symmetry/balance * often depicted Biblical scenes and narratives set in real/recognizable spaces and architectures <br /><caption><small>Pietro Perugino, _Christ Handing the Keys to St. Peter,_ 1481-1482</small</caption> ??? Note the illusionistic sense of three-dimensional depth on a two-dimensional surface created by Perugino’s use of single-point perspective --- class: center <iframe width="80%" height="80%" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/cGYZ5847FiI" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe> <small>Dziga Vertov, Man with a Movie Camera (1929)</small> ??? despite its fragmented, prismatic, non narrative style — it focuses on snapshots of soviet life from dawn to dusk . . . --- class: col-2, compact, fit-h1 # Socialist Realism - Stalin’s mandate, 1930s: “Art for the People” <br /><small>Increase the Productivity of Labor (1927)<br>Artist: Yuri Pimenov</small> <br /><small>Vasilii Yefanov, _Stalin and Molotov with Children_ (1939)<small> ??? * Constructivism and other avant-garde movements were forcibly replaced by Socialist Realism under Stalin (c. 1930s) as the official style of political art * art designed to promote nationalism and support for Soviet ideology. * “Official Style” of the Soviet Union from 1932-1988 * pictorial realism — **against abstract** — art for the people * Return to naturalistic representation * Depictions of heroic political figures, everyday laborers, significant events in the history of the Russian Revolution, and scenes of imagined everyday working life * Propaganda. Glorification of communist values and ways of life under communism --- class: center compact # Poetic Realism <video width="70%" height="70%" controls> <source src="https://trailers.mubicdn.net/683/t-children-o_fr_en_800_640x496_50_683.m4v" type="video/mp4"> Your browser does not support the video tag. </video> <small>Marcel Carne’s _Children of Paradise_ (1945)</small> ??? Here the term realism refers to the fact that films made in this style tended to dramatize the social conditions of the French working class, mostly through fictional stories featuring tragic antiheroes. Director Marcel Carné and screenwriter Jacques Prévert resurrect the tumultuous world of nineteenth-century Paris, teeming with hucksters and aristocrats, thieves and courtesans, pimps and seers. --- class: center compact # Italian Neorealism <iframe width="70%" height="70%" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/njLcOqW7xV0?start=243" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe> <small>Vittorio De Sica’s _The Bicycle Thieves_ (1948)</small> ??? shot on grainy black and white stock, reminiscent of WWII-era newsreels --- # For Wednesday * _Practices of Looking_, Chapter 4 (pp. 158-177)