Gaze: Encyclopedia II - Gaze - Forms of gaze

Gaze - Forms of gaze

The gaze can be characterized by who is doing the looking:

• the spectator's gaze: the spectator who is viewing the text. This is often us, the audience of a certain text,
• intra-diegetic gaze, where one person depicted in the text who is looking at another person or object in the text, such as another character looking at another,
• extra-diegetic gaze, where the person depicted in the text looks at the spectator, such as an aside, or an acknowledgement of the fourth wall, or
• the camera's gaze, which is the gaze of the camera or the director's gaze.

These are not the only forms of gaze. Other forms include the gaze of an audience within a "text within the text", such as Lisa Simpson and Bart Simpson watching the cartoon-within-a-cartoon Itchy and Scratchy on The Simpsons, or editorial gaze, whereby a certain aspect of the text is given emphasis, such as in photography, where a caption or a cropping of an image depicting one thing can emphasize a completely different idea.

Other theorists such as Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen provide the idea of the gaze as a relationship between offering and demanding gaze: indirect gaze is an offer by the spectator, where we initiate the gaze, and the subject is not aware of this, and direct gaze is a demand by the subject, who looks at us, demanding our gaze.

Gaze can also be further categorized into the direction of the gaze, where the subjects are looking at each other, apart, at the same object, or where one is gazing at another who is gazing at something else.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Forms of gaze", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki