The male gaze describes a way of portraying and viewing women that sexualizes and devalues women while empowering them, that treats women as passive objects to be possessed and used as props. The term was first popularized in connection with the portrayal of female characters in films as inactive, often explicitly sexualized as objects of male desire. However, the influence of the male gaze is not limited to the characteristics displayed by women. Instead, it extends to the experience of being seen in this way, both for the female characters on screen and for the audience, and to all women in general.
Obviously, this problem not only appears in individual film texts, but also is known as the convention of mainstream films, forming the gender bias contained in film language, affecting the gender expression of the entire visual culture, becoming a mechanism to dominate the female image, and having a negative impact on female identity.
二.Gaze in film
In the era of visual communication, this staring relationship is also filled with the screen, where the camera reaches the focus of attention, and the female body becomes the object of attention. No matter what kind of film, the women in the show are mostly portrayed as beautiful and sexy, but they often appear only to add light to the male world
For example, Monica in the film “Malena” is a woman who makes people amazing in a public place. In the film, close-ups of wavy long hair, tight culoettes, silk stockings, high heels and other close-ups are used to construct visual symbols and images about women, and these elements are full of various metaphors and suggestions.
Here, Madeleine is no longer a complete woman, but a partial sexual fantasy object that is “dismembered”, produced not only by the characters in the film, but also by the off-screen audience, which follows the inherent mode of male gaze and tries to cater to the mainstream male aesthetic.
