Stories of Telltale Eyes: Filmic Gaze and Spectatorial Agency in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s A Short Film about Love, Ferzan Ozpetek’s Facing Windows and Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom
Stories of Telltale Eyes: Filmic Gaze and Spectatorial Agency in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s A Short Film about Love, Ferzan Ozpetek’s Facing Windows and Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom
Dátum
Szerzők
László, Borbála
Folyóirat címe
Folyóirat ISSN
Kötet címe (évfolyam száma)
Kiadó
Absztrakt
This paper attempts to rethink the concept of the filmic gaze through a comparative analysis of three films, namely, Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Krótki film o miłości (A Short Film about Love, 1988), Ferzan Ozpetek’s La Finestra di Fronte (Facing Windows, 2003), and Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom (2012). ‘Filmic gaze’ here refers not to the production of the filmic/discursive self through suture but, by merging the Lacanian and the Merleau-Pontian concepts of intersubjectivity, to the whole fabric of the film, which is construed as a looking subject. Kaja Silverman’s cinematic suture theory and Descartes’s dark room parable are employed to illustrate how the passivizing filmic gaze of classical narrative cinema confines the spectator to the position of the voyeur, who observes rather than creates the scene that pleases her. A Short Film about Love is analysed to demonstrate conventional film-audience dynamics and is then compared with two contemporary auteur films, Facing Windows and Moonrise Kingdom, which, by addressing viewers through the characters’ telltale eyes, keep reconceiving suture as they go along, blurring the boundary between intra-diegetic and extra-diegetic looks, and thus offering spectators a more active and varied spectatorial agency than that of the voyeur.
Leírás
Kulcsszavak
film and phenomenology, cinematic gaze, spectatorial agency, voyeurism