It was strange to read about masquerade and the representation of women in cinema during a week where I was also casting three women for two upcoming short film projects. The strangest/most difficult part of filmmaking has got to be the casting. You post a role, you get literally hundreds of applicants, there is absolutely no way that you can audition them all so you start narrowing them down solely based on their physical characteristics. It is unavoidable but the superficiality of it is a bitter pill. (Actors must have a very resilient personality type if they can face rejection day after day and keep going.)

As Sangeeta mentioned below, I am also trying to wrap my head around psychoanalysis and many of this week's readings were difficult to process, like Riviere’s conflation of womanhood and masquerade. In Mary Ann Doane’s article, Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator, she talks about the ownership given to viewers of cinema. “A ‘plastique pertinent to the camera’ constitutes the woman not only as the image of desire but as the desirous image—one which the devoted cinephile can cherish and embrace. To ‘have’ the cinema is, in some sense, to ‘have’ the woman” (page 26). Although Doane continues this by referencing characters of films, specifically Now Voyager, and speaking about male and female spectators, this “ownership” that she mentions is really possible because of the cinema’s re-playability and reproducibility. Theater and other forms of live performance may also incite a lascivious gaze but do not carry the same implication of ownership of the characters being viewed.

Other note: I appreciate Gaylyn Studlar’s clear distinction between sadism and masochism in her article, Masochism, Masquerade, and the Erotic Metamorphoses of Marlene Dietrich. Studlar says that while sadism “demands a true victim, masochism is a contractual alliance” (pg 235). She uses this distinction to say that Marlene Dietrich’s actions “do not belong to the domain of sadism.” It makes me wonder how we would categorize others?