Browse Exhibits (3 total)
Building Foundations and Theories of the Gaze
Since the birth of moving pictures, cinema has been used to narrate reality in a way that fantasizes the world in which we exist. The certain way that the camera ‘looks’ at the world is one that exercises God-like power over its sight of the subject. In this chapter I engage with Laura Mulvey’s gaze theory along with bell hooks’ oppositional gaze to try and define these terms in a broader context.
Ethnographic Cinema: Nomadland (2020) and Machines(2016)
By applying theories of the gaze to these two films, I argue that the oppositional gaze transforms the act of looking from a scopophilic act to a defiant act of perception showing an opposite perspective to that of the conventional Hollywood film; it is a ‘look’ which seeks to provoke and refute assumptions.
The Gaze in Practice
The oppositional gaze is not reserved solely for cinema; there are many disciplines which participate in cultural production and commissioned by capital for reinforcing hegemony. However, an oppositional gaze is a method for challenging and reinventing the archives and monuments.