Feminism and film theory

1. Feminism and film theory • To understand and critique gender hierarchies and patriarchal ideologies in commercial narrative cinema. • To define the terms of an alternative, feminist aesthetics; the search for a “feminine” style or language. • in popular films (e.g., Arzner) • in experimental or avant-garde films by feminist filmmakers. • To define the specificity of female spectatorship; i.e., forms of identification, understanding, and pleasure that are appropriate to the psychology and cultural experience of women as opposed to men.

2. Feminism and film theory • 1972: the first two women's film festivals organized in New York and Edinburgh; • Women and Film begins publishing in California. • 1973: Season of women's cinema organized by Claire Johnston at the National Film Theatre in London; publication of "Notes on Women's Cinema." • 1975: Screen begins publishing feminist film theory, beginning with Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” • 1976: Camera Obscura, Frauen und Film.

3. Feminism and film theory • Essentialism: a core identity that defines women psychologically. That there is a repressed, integral experience appropriate to women's bodies and lives that is no less powerful because of its invisibility or marginality in patriarchal culture. • The objective of women's filmmaking (and history) is to restore the visibility of women's experience to the screen, or to replace negative images of women with positive ones. • In contrast, the anti-essentialist position argues that sexual difference was constructed in language and through aesthetic forms.

4. Laura Mulvey • A feminist (counter)aesthetic must examine, challenge, and transform the form and position of identification offered by dominant cinema. • “A politics of the unconscious”: • The structuring of desire in relation to lack is most often articulated as an imaging of women from the point of view of male fantasies. • The forms of visual pleasure and point of view in Hollywood cinema work for the control of the male subject by objectifying images of women. • Construction of these images is meant to contain a threat that can be a source for a potential feminist counter-cinema.

5. Laura Mulvey • “An active/passive heterosexual division of labor controls narrative structure.” Male Female Active Passive Origin of look Object of look Narrative Spectacle

7. Laura Mulvey • Fetishism overplays the woman's objectification, puts her on a pedestal, builds up the glamour and physical beauty of the female store, invests in her the potential for erotic satisfaction. • Voyeurism is associated with a fantasy of mastery and control, • "asserting control, and subjecting the guilty person through punishment or forgiveness. The sadistic side fits in well with narrative. Sadism demands a story, depends on making something happen, forcing a change in another person, a battle of will and strength, victory/defeat, all occurring in a linear time with a beginning and ends" (205).

8. Feminism and counter-cinema • The feminist critique of Screen’s project. • To define the terms of a feminist counter-cinema • Popular cinema expresses contradictions concerning sexual difference that it fails to master. • The aggressivity of looking can be turned against the spectator. • The female image given as lack "constantly endangers the unity of the diegesis and bursts through the world of illusion as a one-dimensional fetish" (209).

9. Feminism and counter-cinema Voyeurism Fetishism Sadism [Negation] Narrative Spectacle --------------------------------------------- Linearity Stasis Unity Disunity Action Interruption Depth Flatness Illusion Defamiliarization

10. Mary Ann Doane • Address. How the “woman’s film” targets a female audience through marketing, themes, plot structures, and prominence of female protagonists. • Spectatorship. What Doane calls “the projected image of the female spectator”: How films organize scenarios of looking in order to outline how they prefer to be read. • (In the woman’s film, the activity of looking on the part of the female protagonist is often punished and returned to the male.) • Subject-position or identification. What psychoanalytic concepts best characterize femininity or feminine identification?

11. “Film and the Masquerade” • The woman as image is assigned a special place in narrative cinema, yet positions of point of view, identification, and pleasure seem to be denied to her. • “What, then, of the female spectator? What can one say about her desire in relation to this process of imaging?”

12. Doane on the female spectator • Proximity and distance • Female spectatorship as transvestitism • Female spectatorship as “masquerade” of femininity. • “The masquerade, in flaunting femininity, holds it a distance.” • “Masquerade . . . constitutes an acknowledgment that it is femininity itself which is constructed as mask . . . . To masquerade is to manufacture a lack in the form of a certain distance between oneself and one’s image.”

13. Doane on the female spectator • The characterization of femininity as closeness or over-identification is a cultural stereotype closing off other possibilities of identification. • The options of female spectatorship in this respect: 1. Adopting masculinity. 2. The masochism of over-identification or losing one’s self in the image. 3. Narcissism in becoming one’s own object of desire. This too is a fantasy of being one with the image; in Hollywood cinema, this often mean’s becoming one with the fantasized image of masculine desire. • “The effectivity of masquerade lies precisely in its potential to manufacture a distance from the image, to generate a problematic within which the image is manipulable, producible, and readable by the woman.”