Male Gaze and Racism — Page 5:
21 In the following, I would like to "take into view" the aspect of desire, and to debate how it can usurp the power of the intercepting, voyeuristic gaze. Silverman shows that the investedness of the gaze in structures of desire as look prevents the look from becoming identical with the gaze. The desire, which lures the subject to peek trough the keyhole, cannot just be understood as a visual pleasure of an active male subject of the gaze of the subject, "that exercises his power when gazing at the female object using photographic technology" (Williams 67).
22 As Linda Williams has shown in her research on pornography, the focus on only one form of visual desire fails to encompass the complexity of the issue. Williams critiques the description of the male desiring gaze on pornographic photos as disembodied powerful vision, suggesting visual possession. This possession remains imaginary. For Williams the eroticism of the viewing beholder represents a new level of physicality and not the passive submission to the power of images or their voyeuristic mastery. (Williams 75) The voyeur must realize that his secret, always coveted view always contains the risk of being looked at himself. The object of the gaze can reciprocate the gaze and look back. (For a summary of gaze theories see Elkins 26)
Alternatives to the voyeuristic gaze
23 Mulvey has historicized and relativized her own approach in her late work. Her analysis generated out of specific historical conditions of production and a historico-material film dispositive, as well as a certain political practice at a time when feminist and socialist utopias could claim their request for practicability. The film had to be viewed, for example, in the darkness of a movie theater, in which a heavily bundled light lit the screen so that viewers could retreat into the total immersion of a privileged vision and assume — in the midst of other viewers — that he was alone. Add to this the production conditions of the Hollywood cinema with its star system in which female stars were eroticized and objectified. This voyeuristic approach has meanwhile be replaced and supplemented by other models of looking.
24 Mulvey developed a distinctive concept of the "curious spectator", an audience or a spectator, "driven by curiosity and a desire to decipher the images unfolding on the screen" (Past to Present 1289). This curious spectator was again a historical product that emerged in the discursive network of feminism and the avant-garde, grounded on a deliberately different relationship to cinema. This curious spectator is needed for the genealogy of another type of viewing, in which, thanks to the digitalization of the picture, an experimental approach to the technical apparatus of filmmaking has become possible. This means, among other things, a weakening of the pure narrative cinema in favor of other narrative registers, which have enhanced the documentary mode of the cinema. Narrative coherence is shaken in this way, chronology is broken and as a consequence, the master narrative is difficult to realize in film. Thus history can be problematized in film history, evoking a new type spectator, "the pensive spectator", a concept borrowed from Raymond Ballour by Mulvey, but originally stemming from Roland Barthes. (Past to Present 1289, 1292)
25 Roland Barthes tried to distinguish between film and photography. While in the moving images of a film the present and the present tense reigned, it was the immobility, the past and a certain absence that prevailed in photography. On the one hand, there is the acceptance of the illusion, while on the other hand, we have the quest for the hallucination. Here is a fleeting image that takes us as if in flight, there is a complete and immobile picture that cannot be grasped completely. On one hand the doubling of life through time, on the other hand the return of the time touched by death — according to Barthes.