When studying Media Histories last semester, i looked into the representation of women in film in the late 70's. I concentrated my research on Sigourney Weaver's character, Ellen Ripley in the Alien film in 1979. I spoke about how her character was groundbreaking for the repersentation of women in science fiction, however in this post i'm going to speak about her representation in the chosin image.
As we know characters can be represented in different ways and in this image Weaver is portrayed as an object of desire due to what she is wearing and where the audience are placed. With this in mind Laura Mulveys 'male gaze' theory can be applied. She argues that women, especially in film are objectified as a sexual desire for audiences through the 'male gaze', which is the subconcience way males view women.
As mentioned in a previous post, the main character is looking away from the camera, making the audience passive. However in this case, the shot is set up to make the audience see Ellen Ripley's character as a sexually desired character, therefore they don't need to be active in the shot. Also within the shot we can see three quarters of her body, and as shes not wearing much this objectification is made more apparent.
From this post i've learnt theres a lot more to setting up a shot. You need to think about how people are represented and wether it's the representation you want to communicate with your audience. This is something i will bare in mind when making my media product.
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