The camera as voyeur
The argument that narrative cinema's default camera position is a watcher who wasn't invited.
- camerawork
- film-language
- theory
A theory-side concept: the claim, sharpest in Mulvey, that mainstream cinema is built on scopophilia — pleasure in looking — and that the camera's habitual position aligns the audience with an unseen, empowered watcher. Whatever one makes of the full psychoanalytic apparatus (and Psychoanalysis in postwar America explains why that apparatus felt natural when it did), the descriptive core is very teachable.
Canonical case
Psycho (1960) states the thesis inside the film itself. Psycho — the opening has the camera prowl a skyline and pick a window to enter; later, Norman watches Marion through a hole in the parlour wall, and Hitchcock cuts to his eye — then gives us Marion in the shower from a position nobody innocent could occupy. The film keeps convicting its own audience of watching.
Caution for the wiki
Mulvey's essay is about Sternberg and Hitchcock as limit cases, and about 1970s theory-making, not a general skeleton key. Use the concept where the film itself thematises looking, as Psycho does.