Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

In terms of the cinema, diegesis refers to the spatial-temporal world a film presents. Those elements outside of the diegesis, such as music that does not have a source in the film world, are referred to as “extra-diegetic.”

Freud writes that “normal” male development entails overcoming the castration complex by transforming the horror of female lack into desire. If the boy/man cannot surmount the trauma associated with the discovery of “the bleeding wound” (15), he will displace his desire onto another body part or substitute object. In his 1927 essay, “Fetishism,” Freud explains that this is a process of “disavowal,” or one in which the individual both denies and affirms, simultaneously, the threat of castration.

In Lacanian theory, the “imaginary” refers to the earliest stage of the child’s psychical development. It is a prelingual state of existence in which the child has no defined sense of self and feels “himself” to be one with the mother. The mirror-moment marks the beginning of the end of the imaginary, as it introduces the Other outside of the mother-child union and brings about the child’s first inklings of autonomy, as well as alienation.

According to Lacan, sometime between the age of six and 18 months, the child glimpses his reflection in the mirror, thus precipitating the child’s first inkling of himself as an autonomous subject, separate from the mother (or caregiver, but Lacan uses the term “mother”). Because the child recognizes his reflection outside of himself, and thus as other than himself, this mirror-moment is also the moment of self-alienation. Moreover, the child mistakenly attributes to the reflected image a coherence and completeness that far exceeds what the child feels he possesses. As Mulvey explains, “[r]ecognition is thus overlaid with misrecognition: the image recognised is conceived as the reflected body of the self, but its misrecognition as superior projects this body outside itself as an ideal ego, the alienated subject […]” (18). It’s important to note that Lacan considers the mirror stage to be prelingual, and so pre-subjective. Only when the child acquires language does he acquire subjectivity.

This film term is borrowed from the theater and refers to the staging of individual shots, including lighting, framing, focus, sets, movement, and more.

The “Name of the Father” is Lacan’s reformulation of Freud’s castration complex in the register of language. Where Freudian theory isolates the moment of ego-formation as that when the (male) child, fearing castration, identifies with the father, Lacan posits that the child gains subjectivity when he acquires the language “of the father.” Lacan thus transforms Freud’s biologically-based process into one that is symbolically based: The Name of the Father (language) disrupts the child’s one-to-one unity with the mother and establishes the child in the symbolic order (which can be loosely understood as society).

Lacan uses the term “Phallus” as the supreme symbol in the symbolic order. It symbolizes the illusory wholeness and plentitude subjects seek through language and also expresses the ideological value of patriarchal authority. Phallocentrism refers to those discourses and practices in a patriarchal society that uphold the primacy of the phallus.

The “pro-filmic event” (26) refers to the action, individuals (actors), and material items (sets, costumes) that the camera records to make the film.