> In Lacan 'the gaze' is not anywhere identified with any personal
> agency, nor is it identified with a human eye, male or female;
> instead, it's rather like a cosmic mal occhio ["evil eye"], a
> derangement of the sense that one tries to make of things and of
> one's self.
There is a film that can be interpreted to (if we must) fit Lacan's
theory better than Hollywood films that Laura Mulvey analyzed.
It's a film titled "The Film" based on Samuel Beckett's screenplay, produced by Barney Rosset, then the owner of Grove Press:
<blockquote>The Beckett section, titled "Film," was directed in New York in 1964 by the playwright's theatrical mainstay Alan Schneider, and financed in part by a fan at Dick Powell's Four-Star Theater. After failing to interest Charlie Chaplin and the Beckett alumni Zero Mostel and Jack MacGowran, they cast the aging Buster Keaton. Beckett, who had never been to America, came to observe the filming. The comic short is literally a philosophical sight gag, based on the Irish thinker Bishop George Berkeley's principle "To be is to be seen": It follows a man who tries to avoid being perceived at all costs - by pet cats, parrots, goldfish, paintings, photographs and even the all-seeing camera eye. When it played the New York Film Festival the next year, by at least one account it was booed, although Mr. Rosset doesn't remember that part. "That could mean I'm in a state of denial," he said.
(Paul Cullum, "Samuel Beckett Is Ready for His Close-Up," <http:// www.nytimes.com/2005/12/04/movies/MoviesFeatures/04cull.html>)</ blockquote>
Available at <http://www.learmedia.ca/product_info.php/products_id/967>.
Yoshie Furuhashi <http://montages.blogspot.com> <http://monthlyreview.org> <http://mrzine.org>