3TH070 Women, Theology and Film - Week 3 Lecture

Feminist Film Theory

 

 

Feminism began as a struggle against inequalities perceived by women between the end of the nineteenth century and the postwar era. Women 'rebelled against the norms of bourgeois Victorian femininity' (Sheila Rowbotham, Hidden from History, 1973). The birth of the women's liberation movement in the 1960s was allied to the political and ideological upheavals of the time. A critique of film grew out of the women's liberation movement, fuelled particularly by the 1960s New Left in French politics and culture. One effect was women making films 'by, for and about women'. They were influenced by the late 60s avant-garde trend in cinema, which appealed to the personal and to women's creativity.

According to feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey, who in 1989 offered a reappraisal of her seminal work on the male gaze written some 14 years earlier, the new critique applied to the popular mass entertainment culture. It used structuralism, semiotics and psychoanalysis to examine the sub-texts of films. It also concerned itself with the contrast between the auteur and the commercialism of the studio system. It will help in understanding the wide-ranging nature of the feminist critique of film to highlight several points, which then can be researched by further reading in feminist film theory.

 

Female Spectatorship

When we look at the major trends in feminist film theory, the nature of female pleasure is addressed in the question 'Is there a cinematic aesthetic specific to women?' This question opens the debate over discourse of women and the issue of female spectatorship. Does a female spectator have an intuitive, unquestioning emotional response to what she sees on the screen? I suppose we could argue that because films are known to wash emotionally over the audience, who 'feel' a film long before they analyse it, it is not a gender-related issue: we are all captives of the silver screen. But the implication that there can be a reaction in an essentialist manner, common to all women, assumes a uniformly passive experience and a patriarchal assigning of qualities.

 

Identification

A related issue when viewing women on the screen, it has been suggested, is how women can identify with a female image when patriarchal systems of narration and identification make it easy for a female spectator to feel distanced from the image. Paradoxically, it was suggested that when female roles are strong, positive models of behaviour, they play into the trap of creating phallic images of women that feature in patriarchal erotic fantasies.

The Male Gaze

Mulvey's theory addressed sexual difference under patriarchy and how Hollywood film combines the masculine, defined as the active pleasure of looking, and the feminine, defined as the image, into the 'male gaze'. John Berger in Ways of Seeing, published and broadcast three years before in 1972, foreshadows the basic tenor of Mulvey's theory when he says: 'Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of women herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object - and most particularly an object of vision: a sight' (Berger, 1972, p 47).

How the spectator negotiates her way into the film relates, then, to the essentialism debate, but also depends upon historical concepts of sexuality which find their way into filmic scenarios.

 

Emerging issues

Feminist critique moved on rapidly to engage with and shape many aspects of film theory. In the late 1970s there was debate surrounding the validity of psychoanalytically-based film theory, and the language of that debate, with the centrality of castration and phallus, is evidence of this emphasis. In the early 80s, issues of masculinity, the male body as spectacle and gay politics broadened the feminist film theory field; another issue to be dealt with later in the decade was the backlash against feminism, shown in such films as Fatal Attraction and Disclosure. In the 1990s feminist film theorists began to apply the feminist critique to the fine arts, and at last took seriously the pluralism of women's cinema, especially black women's film.

 

Conclusion

The maturity of feminist film theory has come with the realisation that criticism and theory are subject to history and context - film as cultural text, with its dominant, oppositional and negotiated readings. As Deidre Pribram observes, 'The relationship between history and so-called subjective processes is not a matter of grasping the truth in history as some objective entity, but in finding the truth of the experience. This…has to do with women's own history and self-consciousness' (Pribram, 1988, p 184).

 

© Gaye Ortiz