Imagens do prazer em Uma janela para o amor e Maurice

Abstract

According to Laura Mulvey (1983), Hollywood cinema structured the erotic following patriarchal order through visual pleasure. But in English heritage films, this arrangement is challenged, once we notice the interchange between subjects and objects of pleasure by means of an opening to conveying female looks and homoerotic images. In this work I analyze images centered on man’s figure or that of romantic love from female and gay perspectives in A Room with a View (1986) and Maurice (1987), directed by James Ivory. Such films seem to offer an alternative way in order to balance traditional representations in cinema which placed women as object of male desire. By that I mean Ivory’s films incorporate female and gay visual pleasure, whose looks project themselves into conservative spaces, as it is the case of English society in the beginning of 20th century, thus they fulfil an important role for the expression and diversification of desires, identifications, and narratives, challenging oppressive mechanisms and prejudice typical of patriarchal order. Besides some notions taken from Mulvey (1983), I go through Caughie (1997), Higson (2003) and Monk (2011), attempting contextualize important issues on British cinema, and Jost (2004), in order to analyze the construction of point of view in the cinema.