Playing with the Gaze in Hitchcock. The Experience of Visual Pleasure in Rear Window Vertigo and Psycho

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2011 in the subject Communications - Movies and Television grade: 10 University of Heidelberg language: English abstract: Woman [...] stands in patriarchal culture as a signifier for the male other bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer not maker of meaning (Mulvey Visual Pleasure 15).Ever since Laura Mulvey published her essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema in 1975 feminist film theorists have challenged her assertion that films are directed at an exclusively male spectatorship. Despite the fact that Mulvey herself has revised some of her ideas in Afterthoughts on 'Visual Pleasure andNarrative Cinema' inspired by King Vidor's Duel in the Sun (1946) (1981) theorists are still struggling to understand if and how visual pleasure manifests itself for female viewers.In classical Hollywood cinema this visual pleasure is the result ofsuccessful audience manipulation. Cinema is often regarded as a 'narrative machine' because the narrative is delivered so effortlessly and efficiently to the audience that it appears to have no source (Belton American Cinema 22). As a rule the film's artifice is hidden so well that it remains unnoticed by the audience conveying the impression that the narrative is spontaneously creating itself in the presence of the spectators [...] for their immediate consumption and pleasure (ibid.). Thus cinema's visual manipulation techniques enable viewers toexperience visual pleasure as they enter the world on screen and become involved in the lives of their screen surrogates.Among the many talented directors in the history of film making Alfred Hitchcock is known for being one of cinema's most productive auteurs and a pioneer in the field of visual manipulation. Through his way of directing the camera - and with the camera also the gaze of t