What is Cinema? Critical Approaches Psychoanalysis & Feminism II

Psychoanalysis and feminism: interwoven strands of film theory Mulvey: feminists can ‘appropriate’ psychoanalysis ‘as a political weapon’ (‘Visual Pleasure…’)

Lecture structure 1. Early feminist film theory: female stereotypes 2. Is a feminist cinema possible? 3. The female spectator 4. The female voice

1. Early feminist film theory: female sterotypes Context: feminist film theory emerges in conjunction with ‘second wave’ feminism in the 1960s and 1970s.

‘Stereotype analysis’ (eg Majorie Rosen’s Popcorn Venus (1973) and Molly Haskell’s From Reverence to Rape (1973)) Film as reflection of reality, a ‘looking glass into the past’ (Haskell, p. xxxviii), which mirrors distorted images of women in society (different from Lacan’s mirror stage)

‘The virgin-whore dichotomy took hold with a vengeance in the uptight fifties, in the dialectical caricatures of the “sexpot” and the “nice girl”. One the one hand, the tarts and tootsies played by [Marilyn] Monroe, [Elizabeth] Taylor, [Jane] Russell – even the demonesses played by Ava Gardner – were incapable of an intelligent thought or a lapse of sexual appetite; on the other, the gamines, golightlys and virgins played by [Audrey] Hepburn, … Doris Day and Debbie Reynolds were equally incapable of a base instinct or the hint of sexual appetite’ (Haskell, From Reverence to Rape, p. xxxii)

Stereotype analysis: criticised for focusing primarily on characters, at the expense of consideration of film form.

Semiotic-psychoanalytic feminist approaches ask instead: what is the meaning of the sign ‘woman’ in the cinema? How is vision gendered? How has the patriarchal unconscious structured film form (Mulvey)?

2. Is a feminist cinema possible? Late 1960s and 70s: emergence of feminist counter-cinema (directors include Chantal Akerman, Sally Potter, Marguerite Duras, Mulvey and Peter Wollen) Aimed to denaturalise (patriarchal) conventions of classical Hollywood Self-reflexivity; exposing means of production

Stills from Jeanne Dielman 23, Quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975), and Thriller (Sally Potter, 1979)

Réponse de femmes (Women’s Reply; Agnès Varda, 1975); feminist self-reflexive documentary ‘ciné-tract’

1980s and 1990s: feminism enters mainstream cinema

Narrative trajectories for female protagonists Phallic women

The Piano (Jane Campion, 1992) A different narrative trajectory

3. The female spectator Mulvey’s ‘afterthoughts’ (1981): the female spectator may either identify with a passive, victimised female character (a masochistic identification) or gain pleasure from briefly ‘borrowing’ the male gaze (trans-sex identification). Identification increasingly conceived as mobile and fluid.

4. The female voice Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror (1988) Male desire is engaged not only by the female body (as spectacle), but also by the female voice (the man desires to extract speech from the woman) Possessed (Curtis Bernhardt, 1947)

the maternal voice as a ‘sonorous envelope’ containing the child maternal voice (sound, formlessness) vs paternal word (meaning, form)

disembodied male voice-over vs disembodied male voice-over vs. the female voice, which ‘is confined to the “inside” of the narrative’ and ‘forced again and again into diegetic “closets” and “crevices”’ (Silverman, p. 76) women are required to make ‘involuntary sounds’, to ‘cry’.

sound in feminist cinema Ada’s voice-over The Piano reworks the trope of female inarticulacy viewing relations female desire