Critical Essay on Daisies (1966) and Blow-up (1966)

Introduction

Blow-up (1966) by Michelangelo Antonioni details the boring life of Thomas, a photographer, looking for an "out of the ordinary" life. In Mulvey's view in the book Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, second-wave feminism was more rampant in the 1960s in the Western world equalling the rights of a working, freer family-life. From the perspective of the feministic opinions, the male gaze theory entails three key ideas: the manner in which men look or view women, the way women view or present themselves and how they look at their fellow women. In the 1960s women were objectified as passive objects to be seen by heterosexual eyes of a man, arousing and satisfying their sexual desire.

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In an era of majorly the "Male Gaze" where the image of a woman wasn't common yet, Blow-up breaks into the norm of the narrative cinema insulting feminists through the introduction of a "woman image." The audience first confronts the woman in the scene where models are being taken photos by Thomas, with Antonioni showing them in; however, the author highlights a woman as a being that arouses sexual desire in men through the male gaze, exhibiting them as objects. In Mulvey's perspective, the film reveals, reflects and play on the social interpretations of sexual differences between male and female controlling the images and erotic ways of spectacle and looking. The superiority of a man is established at the park through the angle from which Jane's photos are taken as well as the dialogical masculinity between the two individuals. In what Mulvey terms as "scopophilia," the male gaze is also pointed out in the essay when the Thomas is seemingly relieved of his boredom by gazing at a woman passing by his table as he shares coffee with a friend.

Vera Chytilova authored the Daisies (Czechoslovakia), the semi-surrealist film in 1966 on two women or rather girls who decided to be 'spoiled' because their world was also spoiled. Their 'spoiled' character entailed engaging with both society and men in a sort of negative transference. Mulvey introduces the "Male Gaze" concept splitting into dialectical effects that deliver the subject to the privilege of desire. I this regard, the gaze is regarded to as the desire of another individual in the Avante-Garde films, which in essence fails to eschew economic and cultural influence to remain anti-commercial. In her movie, Vera highlights that in Daisies, the woman figure is brilliantly liberated to an aesthetic paradise where she is free from conservative conventions dictating the etiquette of a woman. The girls decide that "we're going bad as well" because according to them "Everything is going bad in the world." Mary I and II choose to "go bad" to introduce the idea of a "Female Gaze" in a world where the male gaze dominates, overshadowing women in every sense. They choose to unapologetically smash feminine taboos by embracing visual stereotypes of girlishly cute dresses while at the same time reveling in sheer gluttony, wasting food "like men do." Their last scene, in light of Mulvey's theory, is meant to remind the audience to invest more time protesting Communist authoritarianism rather than worrying and focusing on social transgressions where the Daisies announce that "This film is a dedication to those people that get upset only over some stomped-up bed of lettuce." -

According to Murvey's theory, determining male gaze often entails a projection of the man's fantasy onto the figure or image of a woman styled and shaped . He thus employs the male gaze theory to downplay the exhibitionist, traditional roles that women were accorded in the 1960s, terming the display of women as sexual objects as an inferior leitmotif of erotic spectacles. Drawing from both Blow-up (1966) and Daisies (1966), typical examples on the male gaze theory as employed in the two books entail the use of medium close-up shots of females over the shoulders of male figures, shots panning and fixating on the female body, as well as scenes frequently showing a man admiringly and sensuously observing a woman.

The narrative cinema, as employed in Mulvey's male gaze theory, is a suggestion that female viewers ought to experience the plot narrative secondarily by identifying with the male figure. The male gaze theory, therefore, in a sense is not only relevant to the narrative cinema but also is associated and correlates with daily life where the sexualized and objectified portrayal of women's body is often employed, to date in situations that do not have anything to do with the products being advertised.

Mulvey's theory, the male gaze, applies to movies in the 1960s and still in the present where women are often passively objectified as beings that arouse the sexual desire in men. However, through the highlights of the male gaze and its feministic perspectives, Mulvey's theory evokes in audiences the tendency to refresh the way "a woman" is looked at, transforming the female image to powerful, strong and independent positions without the "male image" by their side. Such a perspective will indisputably prompt male directors to enforce an important conviction that women, just as men, can play a variety of various, versatile roles, that will put an end to their objectification rather presenting them in a manner that does not necessarily sexualize and patronize them in the eyes of the Male Gaze.

Bibliographies

Patterson, Maurice, and Richard Elliott. "Negotiating masculinities: Advertising and the inversion of the male gaze." Consumption, Markets and Culture 5, no. 3 (2002): 231-249.

Leger, Marc James. Drive in Cinema: Essays on Film, Theory, and Politics. Intellect Books, 2015.

Mulvey, Laura. Visual and other pleasures. Springer, 1989.

Leger, Marc James. Drive in Cinema: Essays on Film, Theory, and Politics. Intellect Books, 2015.

Mulvey, Laura. "Visual pleasure and narrative cinema." Feminisms: An anthology of literary theory and criticism (1997): 438-48.