Laura Mulvey

Laura Mulvey's arguement that she put forward in 'Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema (1975) discusses many issued raised in film over the last 50 years, that questions the representations of women in films. Mulvey argues that the dominant point of view in cinema is masculine. When we consider the 'male gaze' that provides audiences with a male view point towards what is on the screen in front of them, as other women are almost forced to watch from the male point of view. This leads back to the representations of a patricarchal society and film tends to cater to these representations.

When watching films, the main protagonist more than often is male, so the audience is shown to watch the film from his point of view and identify with him. As Hollywood traditions pass on this they also assume a male spectator, however males are only half of the audience. Whereas her theory describes how if audiences are only assumed to be male, everything is seen from the male's point of view so the female is left as a passive object in the threatres and also on the screens. Much of which the female is seen as a sexual object and a lot of the time when going into deeper analysis of many films seen to be very stereotypically represented and shown as almost second class citizens.