Mulvey reading

What struck me about this reading was the comparison of the how the film Un Chien Andalou, the work of Georges Melies, Kruger's We Won't Play Nature to Your Culture, and Burgin's Hotel Latone use imagery in different ways to exact a psychological reaction from the viewer. They each employ the image as a medium in contrasting ways.
While Melies' film A Trip to the Moon, employs the narrative ability of cinema, and instead uses the first special effects exhibited in a film to provide the psychological stimulation. The viewers at the time were still beginning to understand narrative film in general, and the inclusion of images of aliens, and a rocket hitting the man in the moon in the eye must have shocked and inspired the imagination of its audiences. By contrast, Un Chien Andalou, forsakes narrative completely and uses garishly realistic images to "attack" the viewer. When we watched this film in my French Cinema course (Louis Bunier was French although Dali was Spanish), it impacted me because not only had I never before been so horrified by a 15 minute movie, but I was surrounded by a large group of people who were similarly disgusted. The ability of the images to flash from one to the next, without me being able to stop or fully process them gave me the feeling that I had just undergone some sort of psychological assault. Like the images in Melies' work, these seemed unexplainable by reality, and therefore became more significant to me because I had just seen them in reality.
Burgin's Hotel Latone functions similarly in its book format because the images are meant to seen in the sequence in which they are arranged, bringing narrative into play. It is this narrative that We Won't Play Nature to Your Culture interrupts in its exhibited form. However, the text included with Hotel Latone and We Won't Play Nature to Your Culture, engages the viewer and turns them into a reader. This process triggers the mind in a way that looking alone does not accomplish. The effect of the images in combination with the text effects the psyche similarly to the examples of cinema.
With the differences in subject matter of these films to these photographic works, I had not realized the similarities in the approach to the psychological that they employ. However, the different ways in which they engage the mind sheds light on the mechanism of sight, and the image.

Haley Taylor