A screen reader in sexuality

The cinema offers a number of possible pleasures. One is scopophilia. There are some circumstances in which looking itself is a source of pleasure, just as, in the reverse formation.
At first glance, the cinema would seem to be remote from the undercover world of the surreptitious observation of an unknowing and unwilling victim. What is seen of the screen is so manifestly shown. But the mass of mainstream film, and the conventions within which unwinds magically, indifferent to the presence of the audience, producting for them a sense of separation and playing on their voyeuristic phantasy. Moreover, the extreme contrast between the darkness in the auditorium (which also isolates the spectators from one another) and the brilliance of the shiftingpatterns of light and shade on the screen helps to promote the illusion of voyeuristic separation. Alought the film is really being shown, is there to be seen conditions of screening and narrative conventions give the spectator an illusion of looking in on a private world, Among other things, the position of the spectators in the cinema is blatantly one of repression of their eshibitionism and projecton of the repressed desire on to the performer.


The cinema satisfies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking, but it also goes further, developing scopophilia in its narcissistic aspect. The conventions of mainstream film focus attention on the human form. Scale, space , stories are all anthropomorphic. Here curiosity and the wish to look intermingle with a fascination with likeness and recognition: the human face, the human body, the relationship between the human form and its surroundings, the visible presence of the person in the world.