Almanac Reading Group February 2019 – Cartaburro

For the next reading group + discussion lead by Jo Harrison at Almanac, the central focus will be inspired by the current exhibition by Anna Franceschini, CARTABURRO, and consider the gaze, or, the sexualised nature of the act of looking. For this session, we will refer to a seminal text by Laura Mulvey: ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1973), followed by her own analysis of this text in “Afterthoughts on Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema Inspired by King Vidor’s ‘Duel in the Sun’ (1946)” (1981).

In ‘Visual Pleasure’, Mulvey discusses the male gaze as we know it from psychoanalysis – that is, the sexualised objectification of woman by man, as a way to destabilise any insecurities associated to woman as a symbol of the castration threat – and confronts how this trope of ‘woman as image, man as bearer of look’ found its way into mainstream cinema.

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