John Berger and Jean-Luc Godard argue that the history of cinema, is the story of men looking at women. The male gaze is central to the formulation of classical Hollywood cinema and the 'star system' which is intrinsic to any understanding of this mode of expression. The above image from Psycho (1960) implicates both the viewer and the filmmaker as peeping Toms, illicitly gazing at the unsuspecting woman as she undresses. Norman Bates covers this peephole with a traditional painting of a nude woman, linking this activity to the Renaissance objectification of the female form by the male artists and patrons. For Hitchcock, this male gaze is as much a part of art history as it is film history, and by implicating himself in this frame he illustrates the centrality of the gaze to the male psycho-sexual pathology.
The above frame begins and ends our First Semester discussion of expressionism in cinema. By concentrating on Classical Hollywood, we are by implication focusing on the years 1930-1960, the heyday of the industrial studio system, which operated an assembly-line mode of production linked both to the integrated system of the studio brands (MGM, Paramount, Warner Brothers, Universal etc.) and to the architectural entities of the warehouse-style studios and sound stages themselves. Psycho is a film by arguably the master of this system, the culmination of years of flourishing practice under the restrictions of the commercial requirements of the industry. It also marks the end of the very system which allowed it to exist. It literally takes a knife to the established order and kills off its star before we are half way through the film and in its way opens up the possibilities for a more independent American cinematic expression.
Further Reading:
The seminal text on the male gaze in Classical cinema is Laura Mulvey's 1975 essay 'Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema', which was originally published in the British periodical Screen, and is one of the key texts in feminist film theory.
Here's a link to a pdf of the article:
imlportfolio.usc.edu/ctcs505/mulveyVisualPleasureNarrativeCinema.pdf
_02.jpg)
