Philosophy Of Film Book

Like many students my age, my first introduction (and for a long time my only introduction) to Laura Mulvey was through her essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." In this work, Mulvey outlines the dynamics of cinema as voyeurism, both for the audience and for the characters on screen. She coins the term "the male gaze" in this article, a descriptor of images made to appeal to men, with women as object rather than subject of the film.
Maybe I took a few too many photography courses in college, or maybe it was the course entitled, "Psychoanalysis and Literature (yes, I did have impractical majors), but I've always felt an affinity with the views expressed in this one article. So I decided to have a look at more of Mulvey's work.
In Visual and Other Pleasures, several of Mulvey's most important and influential works are compiled. They are presented in chronological order, for ease of reading and divided into sections with titles like "Melodrama" and "Boundaries". I came to realize that perhaps the reason for the canonization of "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" in particular comes from ease of its references. Nearly everyone has seen Alfred Hitchchock's Vertigo, one of the movies mentioned in this essay.
Such is not the case for the examples in equally interesting closer to this compilation "Thoughts on the Young Modern Woman of the 1920s and Feminist Film Theory". In this article, Mulvey doesn't recant her earlier hypothesis of the male gaze so much as she finds the alternative to it she has been seeking. In this text she examines the movies of the "flapper era", early films of modernity and modernism in which women are given the agency most Hollywood talkies later robbed them of.
This collection covers a lot more than simply cinema, however. Mulvey delves into Freud, and particularly the Oedipus myth, as well as the paintings of Frida Kahlo and the visual art of Tina Modotti and Barbara Kruger. For so long I have thought of Mulvey purely as the author of one article I read repeatedly for class, I am glad to see more of her range and intrigued by it.