Pipilotti RIst: Looking at Feminism with the help of Laura Mulvey - Essay Example

dium has increased and as he had anticipated, there is a huge explosion of different sort of ways in which the artists are showcasing their art and also have great liberty with their voice. Particularly, video movies have established a whole new world for modern artists to showcase their ideas in just few minutes with a powerful impact. Pipilotti Rist is one of those artists. She has come up with some brilliant work through the short videos which last only for few minutes, have blurry images, incoherent music and unique ways of expression.

She is considered to be unconventional, brilliant and feminist in the her work [1] . Feminism in the cinema has been a topic of debate since a long time. Whether cinema treats woman as an object of sexual desire and nothing else has been a topic of discussion for many thinkers from the film world. Laura Mulvey has studied cinema from the perspective of psychoanalytical theory by Freud. Taking Freud’s theory into consideration and comparing it with the way the sexuality is described in the movies, she has argued that the woman’s participation in the movie has not gone beyond her sexuality.

Woman has remained just a commodity ( Mulvey P.8). To understand what Laura Mulvey has discussed in her essay “Visual Pleasure and narrative cinema”, we have to first understand the theory of ‘psychosexual stages of development’ by Freud. The particular stage in this theory that Laura Mulvey refers to in her essay, is the stage called ‘The Phallic Stage’. According to Freud, in the phallic sage, woman comes to think herself as someone who does not have penis and becomes envious of the penis.

So, rather than considering herself ‘complete’, she