Blood, Sperm, and Tears in Extreme Cinema : A phenomenological study in hegemonic masculinity through Gaspar Noé's Love from a psychoanalytical perspective

• Main Author: Hjelm, Zara Luna
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: Linköpings universitet, Tema Genus 2020
• Subjects: Love; Gaspar Noé; psychoanalysis; Brecht; homunculus; film analysis; gender; hegemonic masculinity; sexuality; body horror; Gender Studies; Genusstudier
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-166936

This thesis will analyze how masculinity is depicted in the French-Argentinean director Gaspar Noé’s movie Love (2015), and how it is orientating and disorientating through an intersectional lens. In his films, the filmmaker often uses haptic images and sound traversing to interrogate the existence and to express a clear and abject visuality to expose the flesh. On that notion, the study will use a psychanalytic theoretical framework with hegemonic masculinity, and a phenomenological methodology with Bertolt Brecht’s theories on theatre to examine the bodily performances of the cinematic body, the bodies of the characters on screen, and the spectator’s body to reflect on the film’s thematic, aesthetic, and ideological features. Additionally, this study will explore how the viewer embodies the self-images and memories of the characters on the screen, and how that affects the spectator.