  In film gender studies, the concept of 'male gaze' refers to the way the
characters are portrayed on-screen as objects of desire rather than subjects.
In this article, we introduce a novel video-interpretation task, to detect
character objectification in films. The purpose is to reveal and quantify the
usage of complex temporal patterns operated in cinema to produce the cognitive
perception of objectification. We introduce the ObyGaze12 dataset, made of 1914
movie clips densely annotated by experts for objectification concepts
identified in film studies and psychology. We evaluate recent vision models,
show the feasibility of the task and where the challenges remain with concept
bottleneck models. Our new dataset and code are made available to the
community.
