Footnote #61 - The Gaze

The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!

The Fantasy/Animation Footnotes return to psychoanalysis in order to make sense of the world through gazing and gaze theory. Alex once again takes the lead in discussing Laura Mulvey’s seminal work on the gaze but also how it offers just one way of thinking about the topic, drawing instead on Lacanian psychoanalysis to distinguish between the qualities of looking and gazing. Topics include the conscious and unconscious processes involved in Lacan’s ‘mirror stage’; the politics of cinema and the illusion of mastery; how the gaze both affirms identity through our engagement with the cinematic object and emerges as something not that we have but that we react to; and how ‘gazing’ represents a way of seeing the world through the paradigm of consciousness, concepts, and ideas.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Suggested Readings

  • Baudry, Jean-Louis. 1985. “Basic Effects of the Cinematographic Apparatus.” In Movies and Methods Vol. 2, edited by Bill Nichols, 531-542. Berkeley: University of California Press.

  • Lacan, Jacques. 2006 [1949]. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Fonction of the I as Revealed at Psychoanalytic Experience.” In écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, B. Fink (Trans.), 1-7. New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company. 

  • Metz, Christian. 1983. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

  • McGowan, Todd. 2007. The Real Gaze: Film Theory after Lacan. Albany: State University of New York Press.

  • Mulvey, Laura. 1975. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16, no. 3: 6–18.

  • Sergeant, Alexander. 2014. “Zack Snyder's Impossible Gaze: The Fantasy of "looked- at- ness" manifested in Sucker Punch (2011).” In Sensational Pleasures in Cinema, Literature and Visual Culture: The Phallic Eye, edited by Gilad Padva and ‎Nurit Buchweitz, 127-139. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

  • Tyrer, Ben. 2018. “The Reality of Fantasy: VFX as Fantasmatic Supplement in Game of Thrones (2011–).” In Fantasy/Animation: Connections Between Media, Mediums, and Genres, edited by Christopher Holliday and Alexander Sergeant, 91-106. London and New York: Routledge.

FOOTNOTE PODCASTChristopher Holliday and Alexander SergeantTHEORY, PSYCHOANALYSIS, SPECTATORSHIPComment