SUTURE: The techniques used by film to make us forget the camera that is really doing the looking. Laura Mulvey argues that there are, in fact, three looks implied by film: 1) the look of the camera itself; 2) the look of the audience watching the film; and 3) the look of the characters on screen (Mulvey 25). In traditional Hollywood cinema, we are invited (through various tricks of editing, camera angles, etc.) to identify with the look of the male characters so that we will forget the mechanical look of the camera and our own invested look at the screen. As Kaja Silverman explains, "This sleight-of-hand involves attributing to a character within the fiction qualities which in fact belong to the machinery of enunciation: the ability to generate narrative, the omnipotence and coercive gaze, the castrating authority of the law" (232).

 

 

 

 

 

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