Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

In the introductory section of “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey notes that her essay centers on the style of filmmaking predominant in Hollywood during the first half of the 20th century. The studio system, as film historians call it, evolved in the 1920s and reached its zenith by the 1940s. It was, as Mulvey writes, a “monolithic system based on large capital investment” (15), in which studios controlled the production, distribution, and exhibition of their feature-length films. By the 1930s, the Hollywood industry was dominated by a handful of big companies, including MGM, Warner Brothers, and Paramount, and had established an international monopoly.

To ensure profits, studios cultivated a roster of actors with “star” appeal and cast them in formulaic reiterations of films that had proven “pleasurable” to audiences. Each studio had a distinctive style (Warner, for example, was known for crime dramas) and churned out generic vehicles for the stars they “owned” (by contract). Working at Paramount, director Joseph von Sternberg cast Marlene Dietrich in a series of star-genre formula features that, as Mulvey notes, are distinguished more by spectacle than story. This factory-style system was enormously successful with audiences, and it defined film style and standards for decades, including the visual style that Mulvey identifies as patriarchal.