GENDER AND REPRESENTATION IN FRENCH MEDIA SINCE 1970

1. GENDER AND REPRESENTATION IN FRENCH MEDIA SINCE 1970 Week 2: Regimes of the Gaze in Narrative Cinema

2. (Late) Landmarks in Legislation Around Women’s Rights in France • Early 1900s: women allowed to manage property and income – around a century later than women in the US and Britain. • 1944: women’s suffrage

3. (Late) Landmarks in Legislation Around Women’s Rights in France • Early 1900s: women allowed to manage property and income – around a century later than women in the US and Britain. • 1944: women’s suffrage (1918 in Britain, 1920 in the US). • 1969-72: legislation grouped together under the heading of the LoiNeuwirthlegalising contraception, notably the pill (1961 in Britain, for married women). • 1975: Loi Veil, decriminalising abortion (1967 in Britain).

4. May ‘68

5. Christine Bard, ‘Les Antiféminismes de la deuxième vague’ Her thesis throughout her book Un siècle d’antiféminismeis that feminist movements are always shadowed by anti-feminist backlashes (cf. Susan Faludi, Backlash: the Undeclared War Against American Women, 1991, Susan J. Douglas, The Mommy Myth, 2004, or in France Elisabeth Badinter, Le conflit: la femme et la mère, 2010, and others). A key feature of 1970s French feminism: Two strands: the previously dominant ‘courant différentialiste’ versus the new more globally-influenced, equality-focused movements spearheaded by the Mouvement de libération des femmes (MLF).

6. pp. 309-10 ‘L’enjeu de la libérationsexuelle’: a problem area for feminism ‘Avoirunesexualité “épanouie” estdésormaisreconnucommeune condition nécessaire à l’équilibrepsychique. Les années 1970 célèbrent la fin d’un long siècle victorien. Les féministesontparticipé à cetteévolution, maisellesjouentaussi les trouble-fête, car nombreuxsontceux qui pensentqu’une femme “libérée” estune femme disponible, sexuellement, pour eux.’

7. La Marianne

8. Gender Representation in French Cinema • In 1988 GinetteVincendeau has identified an ‘incestuous’ ‘father-daughter’ model of couple pairing in classical (1930s) French cinema, in Vincendeau, ‘Daddy's Girls (Oedipal Narratives in 1930s French Films).’ Iris no. 8: 70-81. • Noël Burch and Geneviève Sellier(see extra reading) identify this paradigm in 300 out of one thousand films produced in that period and still frequent in decades since then. They point out that the term ‘incest’ allows us to relate screen thematicsto ‘a psychosocial paradigm in real life, where the sexual abuse of young girls by men having power over them is not merely a daydream’. (Burch and Sellier 2002, p.153)

9. Burch and Sellier also find this model to be frequent if not dominant in the portrayal of romances in subsequent decades. What about the New Wave? See Geneviève Sellier, La Nouvelle Vague: un cinéma au masculin singulier. Paris: Broché, 2005, Vincendeau(2000) in ‘New Wave, New Stars’ on ‘phantasmic male projections’ (p.113). Truffaut: ‘Filmmaking is pointing the camera at beautiful women.’

10. Les Valseuses(1974) 5.7 million entries at French box office - succès de scandale

11. France’s answer to Easy Rider (1969)? Compare Mammuth(Benoît Delépine and Gustave de Kervern, 2010)

12. Bertrand Blier filmography includes:

13. Mulvey and her Antecedents • Christian Metz, Essais sur la signification au cinéma (1968 et 1973), Langage et Cinéma (1971), Les Essais sémiotiques (1977) and Le Signifiant imaginaire (1977). • Jean-Louis Baudry, ‘The arrangement of the different elements—projector, darkened hall screen […] reconstructs the situation necessary to the release of the “mirror stage” discovered by (Jacques) Lacan.’ • Baudry, “The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in Cinema” (1976), trans. Jean Andrews and Bertrand Augst. In Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen, 299-318. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.

14. Baudryemphasises the idea that the subject is constructed by the apparatus, which in fact constructs a subject who pursues the desire to return to the origins of desire. Cf. Mulvey on the centrality of pleasure in the cinematic experience in general, not only narrative but also VISUAL pleasure, notably through: Scopophilia– sexual pleasure derived from looking (linked to the libido) N.B. Influence of the Women’s Movement in Britain on Mulvey, as outlined in her later Introduction to 2nd Edition of Visual and Other Pleasures (2009).