In the film, Rear Window, there is much emphasis placed on the gaze, meaning how people look at each other, and other things. A lot can be said with a simple gaze, some would say a gaze can tell a person more than words can. A gaze, such as the one you see Jeff giving Lisa quite often throughout the film shows his love and compassion for her. He may not be able to express his feelings of love for her with his words, but he shows how he truly feels simply in the way he looks at her.Laura Mulvey discusses this exact ideal of the gaze, but she offers a word for it, scopophilia, or the pleasure in looking. She also brings up the ideal of women as the image and men as the bearer of the look. This is very evident throughout this movie in the way Lisa moves and acts as opposed to the way Jeff looks at her. She is always the image, or the ideal, and he is always looking at her like he wants nothing more out of this world than to be with her. He is not able to use his words to tell her this, but she is a smart woman, and has what she likes to call "a woman's intuition" and she knows that he loves her just as much if not more than she loves him.
The gaze is a powerful tool used in visual cinema. It tells the audience a lot, and is deemed a credible source of the characters feelings. Many people would almost consider it more credible than words, because a person can lie with their words, but the gaze tells all.
i really liked the part in the mulvey text where she talked about how once lisa enters the courtyard of the neighborhood and becomes part of lb's voyeuristic obsession, that's when his feelings for her intensify the most, and after the ensuing confrontation they are able to be together because she has become a part of voyeuristic gaze.
ReplyDeletealong with the gaze, facial expression did a lot of work in the play. i mentioned on skye's blog that i was especially interested in where characters looked when they spoke: did they look at the person to whom they addressed their comments or not?