The Male gaze theory

The concept of the gaze is how the spectator view the female in 3 ways. 

1. How the spectator look at the female character
2. Hoe the male character look at the female character
3. How the spectator look at the female character in the way the male character looks at her.


            This theory was pushed most probably because back in the days Hollywood film often has a male protagonist. Laura Mulvey describe the look as a scopophillic pleasure. Woman are most likely to be used as a sex object for a film or just as passive character which is just needed for an erotic spectacle. It describes how women are somehow force to look at the object from the perspective of a heterosexual male.


The male gaze can also be used in different kind of media not just in film but also in advertising some ads have a sexy woman even if its not needed or sometimes has a sexy woman even if the target audience is still female. The message though was always the same. which is buy the product get the girl or buy the product to get to be like the girl so you can get your man.


In conclusion in Male gaze theory it is said that now matter what the gender the spectator view the women in films as a sex object.Does this mean that every women somehow has lesbianism in them?

Structuralist and Semiotics

Structuralist film theory is how a film coveys message through the use of codes and conventions not dissimilar to the way languages are use to conduct meaning in communication.

                                                                                                                                Structuralism is a method of analyzing a film beyond it physical structure. Meaning you look beyond what is being shown. Just like Louis Althusser’s most influential concept, that is influence by methods of structuralism, the symptomatic reading the art of reading a text,but not focusing on what the text is obviously saying rather you focus on what it leaves out or what it deliberately covers out what althusser called as “structuring absences”.

   There are different things that define a structure of a film or a community. First Is an idea from Claude-Levi Strauss an anthropologist who made famous the structural study of myth. He believes that myth defines what the culture of one country or one person is. He argued how important it is for a society to have their own myth to establish their own identity and culture.

Another method is through cultural artifacts, clothes, lifestyle choices Roland Barthes argued that these can define the deep structures through which social meanings could be classified.

While semiotics is semiotics is the study of symbols in films, meaning symbols in each film can be understood depending on different structural analysis used.