The movie men: The male body as spectacle in European cinema
Item
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Title
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The movie men: The male body as spectacle in European cinema
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:94858f11e51e:11019
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identifier
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11388
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Creator
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Galbussera, Giorgio,
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Contributor
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Mary Ann Caws
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Date
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2011
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Film studies | Gender studies | LGBTQ studies | desire | European cinema | homosexuality | male body | masculinity | nudity
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Abstract
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This dissertation is a study of the ways in which several European directors have put the male body at the center of their cinematic vision, potentially reversing the traditional mechanism of filmic objectification of the female body. My analysis traces the display of the male body in a selection of films by Luchino Visconti, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Derek Jarman, Pedro Almodovar, and several contemporary French filmmakers. While all of these directors engage in a more or less open voyeurism in the way they offer attractive male bodies to the visual enjoyment of the spectator, highlighting the homoerotic potential of the cinematic gaze, they simultaneously use the exposed bodies to promote a critique of the mechanisms of mainstream narrative cinema, in particular as it relates to masculinity and the construction of gender.;As they explore male bodies that are desirable but often fragile, malleable, and open to manipulation, these films contest the construction of masculinity as a normative, solid category, and suggest ways in which cinema can expose, through the display of the male body, the contradictions existing within a socially enforced conception of masculine identity and the system of gender altogether. The 'soft' bodies, young and slender, presented to the desiring gaze ideally oppose the 'hard' male bodies that are at the center of visual desire in mainstream genres like the action or war film; even as they reclaim an on-screen presence for the articulation of homoerotic desire, often in militant ways, these filmmakers reveal the problematic nature of every act of looking and desiring, exposing its potential for exploitation and controlling manipulation.;In an attempt to avoid a mere reversal of roles between the traditionally defined cinematic positions of male activity and female passivity, while these directors eroticize openly their gaze at the male body, they experiment new ways in which the body can be framed and observed without being necessarily and univocally reduced to object of consumption; at times violently, at times more playfully, such visions of the male body promote a dismantling of traditional masculinity.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Comparative Literature
