Alignment essay

How far does a spectator’s gender affect their viewing experience in contemporary cinema?

intro

Gender plays a big part in alignment in contemporary cinema as it does in life. Women tend to see things in more of a positive light where as men seem to be more pessimistic about life. So I believe that applying this to contemporary cinema it will be the same. But as a male teenager I can only say it through my own point of view and only guess what women are going to align with in contemporary cinema.

Paragraph 1

A person’s development in personality is powered by those person’s events in early childhood. For example a super hero film will not apple to a female audience as much as it will to men. As the film is an escapism for men as through out there childhood they have been taught not to be violent even though violence is a masculine trait. This will help them align with the character as this is something they have wanted to experience them self as superhero’s all seem to be hyper masculine.

Paragraph 2

The mirror stage in film is when the audience become omniscient. When the audience know more than the characters in the film. The only way the mirror stage can be broken is if the audience have a say on how the events in the film are going to take place. A good example of the mirror stage is the film crash.

Paragraph 3

The male gaze plays a big part in a lot of films. “Men act and women appear” this will mean that as women are in films to be looked at, this would mean that a women would find it harder to align to a female character in a film as they are just there to be looked at. A good example is Naomi Watts in King Kong although she is one of the main characters in the film all her character seems to do is scream and play the damsel in distress. I would say that it is quite a negative stereotype for the female audience. Where as a male character would be easier or a male spectator to align with as they are normally the dominant ones in the film and have all the power and are in charge and the characters are normally something a western straight white man has wanted to be at some point in his life.

Paragraph 4

Black swan I would say that the alignment of this film would be heavily to do with the gender of the spectator as it is about swan-lake and ballet dancers. As a male spectator the only things that kept my in the film was when Nina stabs Lily just before the performance as she sees her getting ready to play the white swan and also the lesbian sex scenes but these are all in her head.

But I suspect that a female spectator would take it differently as a young girl stereotypically would want to be a ballet dancer at some point. 

Conclusion

All the points I have made back up my answer in my introduction. That gender effects the alignment of a spectator as majority of films are made with a male audience in mind.