Feminism and film theory

1. 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.”

2. 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 • 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.

3. Structural Theory and Psychoanalysis • The early 1970s Claire Johnston was one of the first to draw on semiotics and Lacanian psychoanalysis suggesting: • Cinema provides a male myth of “woman” • Woman in classical cinema serve as an “empty sign” exchanged by men; the object rather than the subject of desire. Johnston was critical of Hollywood cinema, but also saw it as an important site for study and intervention. She called for an alternative narrative cinema.

4. Structural Theory and Psychoanalysis Together these two frameworks provide film theorists with ways for thinking about how the viewer as a subject participates in the meaning of the film. • Semiotics--theory of signs. A tool for analyzing how meaning is produced through language and ideology. • Psychoanalytic theory. A theory of the subject as constituted through sexual difference.

5. Laura Mulvey • Film Theorist, Media Scholar, Filmmaker • Great Britain (1941 - ) • Feminist Film Studies • "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” - 1975 • Psychoanalysis, Semiotics • Sustained dialog on how sexual difference is reproduced in the act of watching classical cinema - 30s, 40s, 50s… • Fascination of cinema • She argues women have been placed in a specific, powerless position in cinema. • How does the cinematic system actively, and passively, make this so? Rear Window (1954), Alfred Hitchcock

6. Representation of women as an aspect of visual pleasure • Cinema reproduces gendered subjects • Men = active | Women= passive • You are positioned as spectator when you identify with the characters • Positioning of camera, lightning, the roles, all decisions set up positions: you thought about yourself as the one looking and not being looked at.

7. Psychoanalytic theory as it is related to film culture; this is not about psychoanalyzing characters, but mechanisms of viewing, this is, spectatorship. • More than the act of looking, the gaze is a viewing relationship, characteristic of a particular set of social circumstances • Even if it was wrong, it influenced a body of work that was very influential • Hypothesis: psychoanalysis + semiotics = understanding film • Analysis does not have to always be tied up to economy or class Jimmy Stewart as Jeffries in Rear Window

8. Sadistic narrative: woman must be punished (usually death or marriage) Fetishism: woman serves as polished object — the ideal of perfect beauty. Female: lure and a threat of castration - • The conflict is resolved through one of two ways:

9. In cinema, the spectator is made to identify with the male look because the camera films from the optical, pint of view of the male character. “Three Looks” The characters in the film look at each other The viewer looks at the screen The camera looks at the event being filmed. • Mulvey aims to disrupt pleasure • Analysis / New Cinema Hitchcock--as voyeur Grace Kelly as Lisa

10. Pleasure functions in two ways: • Scopophilia: pleasure in looking at objects. • Narcissism: identification with on screen (male) as a controlling figure. • Within the order, women are the “other”: the empty object through which identity is constructed. This becomes problematic for women’s identity. • This is where the idea of the women becoming an object in the film arises.

11. Films with women Mary Anne Doane and others began to consider the female spectator in relation to “the Woman’s Film” (during the 1940s there were many films that featured female protagonists targeting female audiences). • A Letter to Three Wives, Joseph Mankiewicz, 1949 • Gentleman Prefer Blondes, Howard Hawks, 1953

12. Recent Feminist Film Theory After the 1980s: an increase in films by women directors and with complex representations of gender and sexuality • An Angel at My Table, Jane Campion, 1989 • Things You Can Tell by Just Looking at Her, Rodrigo Garcia, 2000