Ways of Seeing Every Image embodies a way of seeing ~ John Berger Looking is not indifferent. There can never be any question of ‘just looking.’ ~Victor Burgin

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Ways of SeeingEvery Image embodies a way of
seeing John BergerLooking is not
indifferent. There can never be any question of
just looking. Victor Burgin

• The Spectators Gaze
• (Notes taken from Daniel Chandlers website on
  The Gaze)

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Core Concepts

• As Jonathan Schroeder notes, to gaze implies
  more than to look at - it signifies a
  psychological relationship of power, in which the
  gazer is superior to the object of the gaze
  (Schroeder 1998, 208).
• In other words, looking is inherently
  ideological it has its own discursive and codes.

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Key forms of Gaze in filmic texts

• The most obvious typology is based on who is
  doing the looking, of which the following are the
  most commonly cited
• the spectators gaze the gaze of the viewer at
  an image of a person (or animal, or object) in
  the text
• the intra-diegetic gaze a gaze of one depicted
  person at another (or at an animal or an object)
  within the world of the text (typically depicted
  in filmic and televisual media by a subjective
  point-of-view shot)
• the direct or extra-diegetic address to the
  viewer the gaze of a person (or quasi-human
  being) depicted in the text looking out of the
  frame as if at the viewer, with associated
  gestures and postures (in some genres, direct
  address is studiously avoided)
• the look of the camera - the way that the camera
  itself appears to look at the people (or animals
  or objects) depicted less metaphorically, the
  gaze of the film-maker or photographer
• the gaze of a bystander - outside the world of
  the text, the gaze of another individual in the
  viewers social world catching the latter in the
  act of viewing - this can be highly charged, e.g.
  where the text is erotic (Willemen 1992).

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The Eye of the Camera

• Looking at someone using a camera (or looking at
  images thus produced) is clearly different from
  looking at the same person directly. Indeed, the
  camera frequently enables us to look at people
  whom we would never otherwise see at all. In a
  very literal sense, the camera turns the depicted
  person into an object, distancing viewer and
  viewed.
• In controlling the image, the photographer
  (albeit temporarily) has power over those in
  front of the lens, a power which may also be lent
  to viewers of the image. In this sense, the
  camera can represent a controlling gaze.
• In relation to film and television narrative,
  camera treatment is called subjective when the
  viewer is treated as a participant, as when
• when the camera imitates the viewpoint or
  movement of a character (a point-of-view shot)
  here we are shown not only what a character sees,
  but how he or she sees it.

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The Eye of the Camera cont.-

• In her classic book, On Photography Susan
  Sontag referred to several aspects of
  photographic seeing which are relevant in the
  current context (Sontag 1979, 89)
• To photograph is to appropriate the thing
  photographed (ibid., 4)
• Photographing is essentially an act of
  non-intervention... The act of photographing is
  more than passive observing. Like sexual
  voyeurism, it is a way of at least tacitly, often
  explicitly, encouraging what is going on to keep
  on happening (ibid., 11-12)
• The camera doesnt rape, or even possess, though
  it may presume, intrude, trespass, distort,
  exploit, and, at the farthest reach of metaphor,
  assassinate - all activities that, unlike the
  sexual push and shove, can be conducted from a
  distance, and with some detachment (ibid., 13).

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Appropriating the Other through the Gaze Dear
John Wayne

• Dear John Wayne as metacommentary on the
  viewer-text relationship
• Chippewa Indians as spectators, initially.
• They become the object of the white imperial
  gaze, embodied in the iconic figure of John
  Wayne, who represents White, western
  imperialism/hegemony.
• Always the lookout spots the Indian first, /
  spread north to south, barring progress.
• The sky fills, acres of blue squint and eye
• Everything we see belongs to us.
• The eye sees a lot, John, but the heart is so
  blind.
• John Waynes gaze as a trope for a dominant
  cultures way of seeing Native Americans. The
  line acres of blue squint points to the
  pervasiveness of this dominant mythology the
  effects of which Erdrich underscores in the
  embodiment/disembodiment binary (the white gaze
  effaces Indians humanity) We are back in our
  skins. The Indian spectators both consume and
  are consumed by the adversarial history presented
  to them in film the mosquitoes are a metaphor
  for the internalization process of negative media
  images that break through the smoke screen for
  blood.

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Connections to Spike Lees Malcolm X

• The opening scene, American Nightmare, forces
  us as viewers into an uncomfortable
  spectator-viewer role. It draws attention to the
  act of spectatorship.
• i.e, The Rodney King beating
• Through an unknown third person, we passively
  see the beating and share in the bystanders
  gaze. In other words, the camera forces us into a
  voyeuristic actwe are invisible. Are we then
  innocent? What is Lee suggesting about the
  dynamic of looking? The one being looked at?
• Interpretations?