The present inquiry, attempts to analyse the multiple expressions of the human gaze and it’s polymorphus relationship with cinema. A combination of psychoanalytic, social studies and observations of film studies are used as foundation. It is based on the works of Sartre, on how self-consciousness comes from the realization that someone is in the scopic field of the Other. Lacan expands on Sartre’s theory, but eventually separates the vision from the gaze by including in it the wider objective surroundings of the subject- defined as the “Other” - and associates it with the “mirror stage”. Foucault refers to the examining gaze, based on Bentham’s Panopticon, in order to analyze the control methods used by modern hierarchical power structures, applied on modern-day subjects. Laura Mulvey refers to the way cinema reflects and reveals a socially established representation of gendered and sexual differences which controls images, erotic ways of looking and spectatorship.
Cinema offers different ways of seeing, such as scopophilia, developed by Freud and associates it with the voyeuristic activities of the children. The constitution of the Ego exists as an erotic basis of pleasure in looking at another person as an object. But the dominant way of looking, according to Mulvey, concerns the “active” male heteronormative gaze, in cinema, which projects his phantasy onto the female figure, which is constantly treated as an eroticised object.
The above were applied on a diverse array of movies, ranging from the classic cinema of Hitchcock to contemporary independent cinema and post-modern sci-fi in order to investigate the potential existence of patterns in cinema history. One noteworthy and potentially subversive pattern is the rise of the female gaze which has become a source of empathy and understanding of the “female experience”, has turnt the gaze of the camera towards the audience in order to re-examine their media consumption, as well as “activate” the female gaze.