Feminist Film Theory

Introduction

Feminism is a social movement which has had an enormous impact on film theory and criticism. Cinema is taken by feminists to be a cultural practice representing myths about women and femininity, as well as about men and masculinity. Issues of representation and spectatorship are central to feminist film theory and criticism. Early feminist criticism was directed at stereotypes of women, mostly in Hollywood films (Haskell 1973/1987, Rosen 1973). Such fixed and endlessly repeated images of women were considered to be objectionable distortions which would have a negative impact on the female spectator. Hence, the call for positive images of women in cinema. Soon, however, the insight dawned that positive images were not enough to change underlying structures in film. Feminist critics tried to understand the all-pervasive power of patriarchal imagery with the help of structuralist theoretical frameworks such as semiotics and psychoanalysis. These theoretical discourses have proved very productive in analysing the ways in which sexual difference is encoded in classical narrative. For over a decade psychoanalysis was to be the dominant paradigm in feminist film theory. More recenty there has been a move away from a binary understanding of sexual difference to multiple perspectives, identities and possible spectatorships. This opening up has resulted in an increasing concern with questions of ethnicity, masculinity and hybrid sexualities.

Classical Film Narrative

Claire Johnston was among the first feminist critics to offer a sustained critique of stereotypes from a semiotic point of view (1973/1991). She put forward how classical cinema constructs the ideological image of woman. Drawing on Roland Barthes' notion of 'myth', Johnston investigated the myth of 'Woman' in classical cinema. The sign 'woman' can be analyzed as a structure, a code or convention. It represents the ideological meaning that 'woman' has for men. In relation to herself she means no-thing (1991: 25): women are negatively represented as 'not-man'. The 'woman-as woman' is absent from the text of the film (26).
The important theoretical shift here is from an understanding of cinema as reflecting reality, to a view of cinema as constructing a particular, ideological, view of reality. Classical cinema never shows its means of production and is hence characterized by veiling over its ideological construction. Thus, classical film narrative can present the constructed images of 'woman' as natural, realistic and attractive. This is the illusionism of classical cinema.

In her groundbreaking article 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' (1975/1989), Laura Mulvey uses psychoanalysis to understand the fascination of Hollywood cinema. This fascination can be explained through the notion of scopophilia, the desire to see, which is a fundamental drive according to Freud. Sexual in origin, like all drives, der Schautrieb is what keeps the spectator glued to the silver screen. Classical cinema, adds Mulvey, stimulates the desire to look by integrating structures of voyeurism and narcissism into the story and the image. Voyeuristic visual pleasure is produced by looking at another (character, figure, situation) as our object, whereas narcissistic visual pleasure can be derived from self-identification with the (figure in the) image.
Mulvey has analyzed scopophilia in classical cinema as a structure that functions on the axis of activity and passivity. This binary opposition is gendered. The narrative structure of traditional cinema establishes the male character as active and powerful: he is the agent around whom the dramatic action unfolds and the look gets organized. The female character is passive and powerless: she is the object of desire for the male character(s). In this respect, cinema has perfected a visual machinery suitable for male desire such as already structured and canonized in the tradition of Western art and aesthetics.
Mulvey has disentangled the ways in which narrative and visual techniques in cinema make voyeurism into an exclusively male prerogative. Within the narrative of the film male characters direct their gaze towards female characters. The spectator in the theatre is made to identify with the male look, because the camera films from the optical, as well as libidinal, point of view of the male character. There are thus three levels of the cinematic gaze (camera, character and spectator) that objectify the female character and make her into a spectacle. In classical cinema, voyeurism connotes women as 'to-be-looked-at-ness' (1989: 19).
Mulvey tackles narcissistic visual pleasure with Lacan's concepts of ego formation and the mirror stage. The way in which the child derives pleasure from the identification with a perfect mirror image and forms its ego ideal on the basis of this idealized image, is analogous to the way in which the film spectator derives narcissistic pleasure from identifying with the perfected image of a human figure on the screen. In both cases, however, during the mirror stage and in cinema, identifications are not a lucid form of self-knowledge or awareness. They are rather based on what Lacan calls 'méconnaissance' (a 'mis-recognition'), that is to say they are blinded by the very narcissistic forces that structure them in the first place. Ego formation is structurally characterized by imaginary functions. And so is cinema. At about the same time as Christian Metz worked on this analogy in his essays on psychoanalysis and cinema, Mulvey argued that cinematic identifications were structured along the lines of sexual difference. Representation of 'the more perfect, more complete, more powerful ideal ego' (20) of the male hero stands in stark opposition to the distorted image of the passive and powerless female character. Hence the spectator is actively made to identify with the male rather than with the female character in film.

There are then two aspects to visual pleasure which are negotiated through sexual difference: the voyeuristic-scopophilic gaze and narcissistic identification. Both these formative structures depend for their meaning upon the controlling power of the male character as well as on the objectified representation of the female character. Moreover, according to Mulvey, in psychoanalytic terms the image of 'woman' is fundamentally ambiguous in that it combines attraction and seduction with an evocation of castration anxiety. Because her appearance also reminds the male subject of the lack of a penis, the female character is a source of much deeper fears. Classical cinema solves the threat of castration in one of two ways: in the narrative structure or through fetishism. To allay the threat of castration on the level of narrative, the female character has to be found guilty. The films of Alfred Hitchcock are a good example of this kind of narrative plot (see Modleski 1988). The woman's 'guilt' will be sealed by either punishment or salvation and the film story is then resolved through the two traditional endings which are made available to women: she must either die (as in e.g. Psycho (1960)) or marry (as in e.g. Marnie (1964)). In this respect, Mulvey provocatively says that a story demands sadism.
In the case of fetishism, classical cinema reinstates and displaces the lacking penis in the form of a fetish, that is, a hyper-polished object. Mulvey refers here to Josef Sternberg's fetishisation of Marlene Dietrich. Marilyn Monroe is another example of a fetishised female star. Fetishizing the woman deflects attention from female 'lack' and changes her from a dangerous figure into a reassuring object of flawless beauty. Fetishism in cinema confirms the reification of the female figure and thus fails to represent 'Woman' outside the phallic norm.
The notion of 'the male gaze' has become a shorthand term for the analysis of complex mechanisms in cinema that involve structures like voyeurism, narcissism and fetishism. These concepts help to understand how Hollywood cinema is tailor-made for male desire. Because the structures of Hollywood cinema are analyzed as fundamentally patriarchal, early feminists declared that a woman's film should shun traditional narrative and cinematic techniques and engage in experimental practice: thus, women's cinema should be a counter cinema.

A Feminist Counter Cinema

What should a feminist counter cinema look like? For Mulvey, feminist cinema was to be an avant-garde film practice which would 'free the look of the camera into its materiality in time and space and the look of the audience into dialectics and passionate detachment' (Mulvey 1989: 26). That such a counter cinema would destroy the visual pleasure of the spectator was no problem for women; according to Mulvey they would view the decline of classical film narrative with nothing more than 'sentimental regret' (1989: 26).
Feminist counter cinema took its inspiration from the avant-garde in cinema and theater, such as the montage techniques of Sergei Eisenstein, the notion of 'Verfremdung' (distantiation) of Bertolt Brecht and the modernist aesthetic of Jean Luc Godard. As such it was very much part of the 1970s political filmmaking. The privileged examples of feminist counter cinema are Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Belgium 1975), Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen's Riddles of the Sphinx (GB 1977) and Sally Potter's Thriller (GB 1979). It is interesting to note that the radical films of Marguërite Duras have drawn much less attention from Anglophone feminist film critics. Important American experimental films are Yvonne Rainer's Lives of Performers and Film About a Woman Who... (USA 1972 and 1974) and Sigmund Freud's Dora (made by Tyndall, McCall, Pajaczkowska and Weinstock, USA 1979).
How does feminist counter cinema avoid the conventions of classical cinema and how does it accomodate a female point of view? In the short experimental film Thriller, for example, this is achieved by deconstructing a classical melodrama, Puccini's opera La Bohème (1895). The film splits the female character into two: Mimi I, who is placed outside of the narrative in which she is the heroine, Mimi II. The first Mimi investigates how she is constructed as an object in the melodramatic narrative. According to Ann Kaplan (1983), the investigation is both psychoanalytic and Marxist-materialist. On the psychoanalytic level Mimi I learns how the female subject is excluded from male language and classical narrative. The only position she can occupy is that of asking questions: 'Did I die? Was I murdered? What does it mean?' On the Marxist-materialist level Mimi I learns to investigate Mimi II's role as a seamstress and as a mother. As in Potter's second film, The Golddiggers (GB 1980) it is a woman of colour with a deep French-accented English voice (Colette Lafont), who does the critical questioning of the patriarchal image of white womanhood. Thus, in both films it is the 'foreign' female voice that speaks the discourse of theory and criticism.
Thriller communicates these theoretical discourses both visually and acoustically. The sound track includes the dominant female voice, as well as a repeated laugh, a repeated shriek and the sound of a heartbeat. These are typical components of the classical thriller and horror genres, while the film narrative does not give rise to any such suspense. Instead, it refocuses the attention of the spectator on the enigmas surrounding the female subject in classical discourse. Thriller deliberately violates conventional realist codes. The melodramatic story is partly told in shots which are pictures of phographs of a stage performance, and partly in reconstructed scenes in which the actors move in highly stylized movements. Another visual device is the use of mirrors. For Kaplan, the play with repeated and jarring mirror shots illustrate the mental processes that Lacan's mirror phase involves psychoanalytically. For example, when Mimi I recognises herself as object her shadow is thrown up on the screen. Mimi I is then shown with her back to the mirror, facing the camera. This image is repeated in a series of mirrors behind her (instead of 'correctly' reflecting the back of her head). For Kaplan, this complex shot signals Mimi I's recognition of her split subjectivity. The investigation leads the women to understand they are not split in themselves, nor should they be split narratively. The film ends symbolically with both Mimi's embracing.

Feminist counter cinema did not only pertain to fictional film, but also to documentary. The problems of finding an appropriate form and style were maybe even more acute for documentary film, because traditional documentary uses illusionism and realism to capture the 'truth' or 'reality'. For many feminist filmmakers in the 1970s, this idealism was unacceptable. It could not include self-reflexivity, one of the starting points of feminist film practice. Feminist documentary should manufacture and construct the 'truth' of women's oppression, not merely reflect it (Johnston 1983). However, other voices were also heard. Because many stylistically traditional documentaries have been important historical documents for the women's movement, this kind of feminist formalism was questioned. Alex Juhasz criticised this kind of orthodoxy, which proscribed anti-illusionist techniques undermining identification. She points to the paradox that the unified subject which was represented in early feminist documentaries , presented the feminist viewer in fact with a 'radical, new and politicized reinterpretation of that female subjectivity, one which mobilized vast numbers of women into action for the first time' (1994: 174).
We witness a theoretical contradiction of feminism here: while feminists need to deconstruct the patriarchal images and representations of 'Woman', they historically need to establish their female subjectivity at the same time. That is to say, they have to find out and redefine what it means to be a woman. A relentless formalism may be too much of a onesided approach to the complex enterprise of (re)constructing the female subject.
Counter cinema represents only a small fraction of the many films produced by women since the mid 1970s. Yet, these experimental films have been overpraised for their subversive powers while realist women's films were overcriticised for their illusionism (see Kuhn 1982 and Kaplan 1983). The suspicion of collusion cast on realist or narrative film has resulted in either a concentration of critical efforts on classical Hollywood cinema or in a largely unjustified acclaim of experimental women's cinema among the elected few who get to see it. This has resulted in a paradoxical neglect of contemporary popular films made by women for a wider audience; a lack of academic attention which continued long into the 1980s and even 1990s (see for a reappraisal of narrative feminist cinema Humm 1997 and Smelik 1998). Teresa de Lauretis (1984, 1987) was among the first to claim that feminist cinema should not destroy narrative and visual pleasure, but rather should be 'narrative and Oedipal with a vengeance' (1987: 108). According to her, feminist cinema in the 1980s should define 'all points of identification (with character, image, camera) as female, feminine, or feminist' (1987: 133).

The Female Spectator

The account of 'the male gaze' as a structuring logic in Western visual culture became controversial in the early 1980s, as it made no room for the female spectator nor for a female gaze. Yet, women did and do go to the movies. Mulvey was much criticized for omitting the question of female spectatorship. In a later essay (1981/1989), she addressed the vicissitudes of female spectatorship in her analysis of the western Duel in the Sun (King Vidor, 1946). Mulvey suggests that the female spectator may not only identify with the slot of passive femininity which has been programmed for her, but is also likely to enjoy adopting the masculine point of view. Mulvey elaborates on the notion of transsexual identification and spectatorship by pointing to the pre-oedipal and phallic fantasy of omnipotence which for girls is equally active as for boys, and hence, in a Freudian perspective, essentially 'masculine'. In order to acquire 'proper' femininity, women will have to shed that active aspect of their early sexuality. Mulvey speculates that female spectators may negotiate the masculinisation of the spectatorial position in Hollywood cinema, because it signifies for them a pleasurable rediscovery of a lost aspect of their sexual identity. Even so, the female spectator remains 'restless in [her] transvestite clothes' (37) .
It was not until the end of the decade before female spectatorship was theorized outside the dichotomous categories of psychoanalytic theory. An account of female spectatorship in all its cultural contexts and multiple differences was then undertaken in a special issue of Camera Obscura, entitled 'The Spectatrix' (1989: nos 20-21). The editors Janet Bergstrom and Mary Ann Doane chose to give a comprehensive survey of international research on and theories of the female spectator in film and television studies.

The masquerade

It has become a general assumption of feminist film theory that female spectators are more fluid in their capacity to identify with the other gender. For example, in her study of the fan phenomenon, Miriam Hansen (1991) has used the idea of spectatorial flexibility to explain why women in the 1920s were drawn to the feminine positioning of Rudolph Valentino.
This spectatorial transvestism of the woman viewer points to a female masquerade. The concept of masquerade was first introduced into feminist film theory by Johnston (1975) in her analysis of Jacques Tourneur's Anne of the Indies (1951). The notion of masquerade was inspired by the role of the female character who cross-dressed as a male pirate. For Johnston the female masquerade signified not only a masking but also an 'unmasking' in the deconstructionist sense of exposing and criticising.
Mary Ann Doane (1982/1991) explored the notion of masquerade further to understand woman's relation to the image on the screen. Drawing on the psychoanalytic work of Joan Rivière, Doane understands the masquerade, not as cross-dressing, but on the contrary as a mask of femininity. Rivière had noticed in her clinical observations that women who find themselves in a male position of authority put on a mask of femininity that functions as compensation for their masculine position.
How does this concept of the masquerade relate to issues of identification and spectatorship? As we have seen, the male gaze involves voyeurism. Voyeurism presupposes distance. Doane argues that the female spectator lacks this necessary distance because she is the image. Femininity is constructed as closeness, as 'an overwhelming presence-to-itself of the female body' (22). The female spectator can adopt 'the masochism of over-identification' or 'the narcissism entailed in becoming one's own object of desire' (31-32). Doane argues that the female spectator is consumed by the image rather than consuming it. This position can be avoided not only through a transsexual identification, but also through the masquerade. The masquerade is effective in that it manufactures a distance from the image. By wearing femininity as a mask, the female spectator can create the necessary difference between herself and the represented femininity on the screen.
In a study of the Woman's film of the forties, Doane (1987) returns to the rather negative ways in which Hollywood constructs female identification and subjectivity. For Doane, the female spectator of those melodramas is involved in emotional processes like masochism, paranoia, narcissism and hysteria. The Woman's film, in spite of its focus on a female main character, perpetuates these processes and thus confirm stereotypes about the female psyche. The emotional investments of the viewer lead to overidentification, destroying the distance to the object of desire and turning the active desire of both the female character and the female spectator into the passive desire to be the desired object. Mere 'desire to desire' seems to be, then, the only option for women.

The female look

Do these rather dire interpretations of female spectatorship imply that the female look is impossible and that the look or gaze is necessarily male? In the early 1980s this seemed the case in feminist theory. In her analysis of Hollywood woman's films of the 1970's and 1980's, Ann Kaplan (1983) argues that female characters can possess the look and even make the male character the object of her gaze, but being a woman her desire has no power. The neo-feminist Hollywood movies involve a mere reversal of roles in which the underlying structures of dominance and submission are still intact. The gaze is not essentially male, 'but to own and activate the gaze, given our language and the structure of the unconscious, is to be in the "masculine" position' (30).
The difficulties of theorizing the female spectator made Jackie Stacey (1987) exclaim that feminist film critics have written the darkest scenario possible for the female look as being male, masochist or marginal. There have been some different voices, however. Gertrud Koch (1980) is one of the few feminists who early on recognized that women could also enjoy the image of female beauty on the screen. Especially the vamp, an image exported from Europe and integrated into Hollywood cinema, provides the female spectator with a positive image of autonomous femininity. Koch argues that the image of the vamp revives for the female spectator the pleasurable experience of the mother as the love object in early childhood. Moreover, the sexual ambivalence of the vamp, of for example Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich, allows for a female homo-erotic pleasure which is not exclusively negotiated through the eyes of men. In Koch's view the vamp is a phallic woman rather than a fetishized woman, as she offers contradictory images of femininity which go beyond the reifying gaze. The vamp's ambiguity can be a source of visual pleasure for the female spectator. The disappearance of the vamp in cinema, therefore, means a great loss of possible identifications and visual pleasure for the female audience.
A similar focus on the pre-oedipal phase and on the mother as love object and potential source of visual pleasure has been developed by Gaylyn Studlar (1988), though from a very different angle. Analyzing films made by Josef von Sternberg starring Marlene Dietrich, she investigates the Deleuzian notion of masochism. Deleuze views masochism as the desire of the male to merge with the mother and subvert the father's phallic law. Its violence is contractual and consensual, in a way that sadism is not. Sadism is negates difference of the mother and exults in the power of the father. Studlar argues that visual pleasure in cinema resembles more the psychic processes of masochism than of sadism. Cinema evokes the desire of the spectator to return to the pre-oedipal phase of unity with the mother, and of bisexuality. The female spectator can thus identify with and draw pleasure from the powerful femme fatale in cinema. This is a sort of re-enactment of the symbiosis through which the spectator wishes to subject her- or himself to the powerful mother image. The condition of this active masochistic desire is that it be suspended, which is achieved by means of performance and masquerade on the part of the female character. These ritualizations of fantasy keep desire under control. For Studlar the masquerade serves as a defensive strategy for women, by which they deflect and confuse the male gaze. She thus creates a place for the pleasure and desire of the female subject-spectator, albeit the pleasurable pain of desire.
Bisexual identification has also submerged in studies of very different film genres. In her study of the modern horror film, Carol Clover (1992) argues that both female and male spectators identify bisexually. She rests her case on the narrative role of the 'Final Girl': the one girl in the film who fights, resists and survives the killer-monster. The Final Girl acquires the gaze, and dominates the action, and is thus masculinised. The slasher film, like Halloween (1978), Friday the Thirteenth (1980) and Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) (and their sequels), openly plays on a difference between apperance (sex) and behaviour (gender). Clover argues that it is this 'theatricalization of gender' which feminises the audience. Whereas in classic horror (e.g. films by Hitchcock and De Palma) the feminisation of the audience is intermittent and ceases when the Final Girl becomes the designated victim (Marion in Psycho), in the modern horror film the Final Girl becomes her own saviour. Her self-rescue turns her into the hero and it is at that moment that the male viewer 'gives up the last pretense of male identification'. For Clover the willingness of the male spectator to throw in his emotional lot with a woman in fear and pain, points to masochism. Although Clover is aware of the misogyny of the genre of the slasher film, she claims a subversive edge in that it adjusts gender representations and identifications.

Female subjectivity

The question of female spectatorship and the female look circle around the issue of subjectivity. Female subjectivity has been explored not only in relation to spectatorship, but also with respect to the narrative structure of film. One of the key figures in this field is Teresa de Lauretis, who examined the structural representations of 'woman' in cinema (1984, 1987).
De Lauretis (1984) emphasizes that subjectivity is not a fixed entity but a constant process of self-production. Narration is one of the ways of reproducing subjectivity; each story derives its structure from the subject's desire and from its inscription in social and cultural codes. Narrative structures are defined by oedipal desire, which should be understood as both a socio-political economy dominated by men's control of women and as a way of emphasizing the sexual origin of subjectivity. Sexual desire is bound up with the desire for knowledge, that is, the quest for truth. The desire to solve riddles is a male desire par excellence, because the female subject is herself the mystery. `Woman' is the question and can hence not ask the question nor make her desire intelligible. In Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958), for example, Scottie's desire for the enigmatic Judy/Madeleine structures the narrative of the film.
Narrative is not oedipal in content but in structure, by distributing roles and differences, and thus power and positions. One of the functions of narrative, de Lauretis argues, is to 'seduce' women into femininity with or without their consent. The female subject is made to desire femininity. This is a cruel and often coercive form of seduction. Here de Lauretis turns Mulvey's famous phrase around: not only does a story demand sadism; sadism demands a story. She refers to the ways in which the female characters in Vertigo, but also in a 'woman's film' like Rebecca (also by Hitchcock, 1940), are made to conform to the ideal image that the man has of them. The function of portraits of female ancestors in both films is highly significant in this respect: they represent the dead Mother, the ideal that the male hero desires to have and forces upon the female heroine. For de Lauretis the desire of the female character is impossible and the narrative tension is resolved by the destruction (Judy/Madeleine) or territorialization of women (the new Mrs. de Winter). Desire in narrative is intimately bound up with violence against women and the techniques of cinematic narration both reflect and sustain social forms of oppression of women.
De Lauretis is hardly more optimistic than Mulvey about the female spectator. Not that she assumes identification to be single or simple; femininity and masculinity are identifications that the subject takes up in a changing relation to desire. De Lauretis distinguishes two different processes of identification in cinema. The first set is an oscillating either/or identification. It consists of a masculine, active identification with the gaze (Scottie) and a passive, feminine identification with the image (Judy/Madeleine). The second set is a simultaneous both/and identification. It consists of the double identification with the figure of narrative movement (the protagonist, the new Mrs. de Winter in Rebecca) and with the figure of narrative image (here the image of Rebecca). This set of figural identifications enables the female spectator to take up both the active and passive positions of desire: 'Desire for the other, and desire to be desired by the other' (143). This double identification may yield a surplus of pleasure, but it is also the very operation by which a narrative solicits the spectators' consent and seduces women into femininity.
The notion of the female subject, then, seems to be a contradiction in terms, so much so that de Lauretis sometimes refers to the female subject as a 'non-subject' (1985: 36). 'Woman' is fundamentally unrepresentable as subject of desire; she can only be represented as representation (1987: 20). Feminist theory is built on the very paradox of the unrepresentability of woman as subject of desire, and historical women who know themselves to be subjects. For de Lauretis, the self-conscious experience of being both 'woman' and 'women' is the productive contradiction of feminism. Women's films like Les Rendez-vous d'Anna or Jeanne Dielman by Chantal Akerman, Thriller by Sally Potter, or Sigmund Freud's Dora: A Case of Mistaken Identity by Tyndall, McCall, Pajaczkowska and Weinstock, are her privileged examples of films which explore and explode that very contradiction.

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