Week 6: Apply and Reflect

 

Picasso with The Weeping Woman 

Source

The gaze placed on a subject says more about the person that is looking then about the subject. The subject reflects the desires, fears, aspirations, and failures of the person looking. In “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” by Laura Mulvey expresses how females are portrayed in film to be seen and not heard. To be looked at and touched in the form of sexual conquest then out of human connection. Male characters and even the directors manage to be the power holders over time, space, money, and the law. Albert Hitchcock movies proudly boast this power dynamic through his male characters, and through his own personal relationships with the lead actress too. Mulvey writes “the power to subject another person to the will sadistically or to the gaze voyeuristically is turned onto the woman as the object of both. Power is backed be a certainty of legal right and the established guilt o the woman (evoking castration, psychoanalytically speaking).” 1 The castration Mulvey speak of is “ she also connotes something that the look continually circles around but disavows: her lack of a penis, implying a threat of castration and hence unpleasure.”1 If man loses control they can  be punished by the form of castration. Which is why it is the utmost importance not to lose the control over the woman in their sexual grasp.  The concept of control can be seen in the artist, Pablo Picasso. His gaze is the focus of all the women he loved and had affairs with. Pablo and the women’s relationships are not painted on canvas by both him and his lover. Picasso painting is the possession he has over his lovers. It is no longer about his lovers, but about what he wants them to be. Picasso only wants them as his lovers and muses for his art only.  Dora Maar was the muse and lover of Picasso and she too was an artist. She is the model for The Weeping Woman (1937). Her photography has been forgotten and the fact she helped paint Guernica too. In Dora Maar own words "I'm still too famous as Picasso's mistress to be accepted as a painter." 2 Pablo Picasso art of his lovers needs to be viewed through a feminist lens as does film. To allow women to be women and not sexual object that need to be possessed.

1.)     Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Cinema Narrative.” Columbia University Archives. Screen. Accessed 2020. http://www.columbia.edu/itc/architecture/ockman/pdfs/feminism/mulvey.pdf.

2.)        Ramsay, Max. “Dora Maar Is No Longer Picasso's 'Weeping Woman'.” CNN. Cable News Network, November 20, 2019. https://www.cnn.com/style/article/dora-maar-picasso-tate/index.html.