Download Document

Announcements

Luna Fest - March 4th - 6pm-9pm in the
Price Center Ballrooms.
Lunafest is a film festival fundraiser for, by, and about women.
7 short films, refreshments, and a raffle. Tickets are $6 for students/$7
general public.
All proceeds go to The Breast Cancer Fund and the UCSD Sexual Assault
Center.
Gender and Media
Gender and Media


What do we mean by gender?
Do films construct or reflect gender?
Early Feminist Critiques


Early criticism focused on stereotypes of women and
their negative impact on female spectators
Advocated for corrective positive images of women.
Feminist Theory: Structural
Theory and Psychoanalysis
In 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.
Feminist Theory: 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 idoelogy.

Psychoanalytic theory. A theory of the subject as
constituted through sexual difference.
Feminist Psychoanalytic Film
Theory
Laura Mulvey’s groundbreaking 1975 essay,
“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”
initiated a sustained dialog on how sexual
difference is reproduced in the act of
watching classical 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?

Feminist Psychoanalytic Film
Theory

Mulvey looks to psychoanalytic theory for an explanation
of how cinema reproduces gendered subjects:
Men=active
Women=passive
It was a powerful argument insofar as it shifted analysis to
the relationship of the spectator to the image.
Theory of Spectatorship: Not an approach to analyzing the
psychological relationships represented in the film, but the
ways in which cinema positions us as viewers.
“The Gaze”: three looks
More than the act of looking, the gaze is a
viewing relationship characteristic of a
particular set of social circumstances.
Mulvey argues that the cinema spectator 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. It does this through the
ways that:
n
n
n
The characters in the film look at each other.
The viewer looks at the screen.
The camera looks at the event being filmed.
Mulvey’s example: Hitchcock

Rear Window, Alfred Hitchcock, 1954, 114
min.
 Alfred Hitchcock - 1899-1980, The “Master of
Suspense”, Vertigo (1958) and Psycho (1960)
Mulvey

Looks at cinema as a system of erotic
spectacle
 Examines how cinema works within
patriarchal structure of society
 Aims to disrupt pleasure through analysis:
“It is said that analyzing pleasure or beauty
destroys it. That is the intention of this
article.”
Mulvey and Psychoanalysis
“Psychoanalytic film theory is thus appropriated
here as a political weapon, demonstrating the
way the unconscious of patriarchal society has
structured film form”
Psychoanalytic film theory:
 Uses Freudian and Lacanian frameworks for
understanding how identity is structured and
applies them to cinematic experience.
 Examines desire in film: construction and
regulation
Mulvey and Pleasure
Pleasure functions in two ways:
1. Scopophilia: Pleasure in looking at objects
(Voyeuristic gaze)
2. Narcissism: Identification with on screen (male)
protagonist as a controlling figure
Mulvey and Scopophilia




Objectified Others subject to controlling
and curious gaze
Voyeurism: desire to see
Freud: a basic drive; pre-genital autoerotic stage
Film : dark space, viewers separated
 Bright screen - attraction, promotes
voyeuristic separation
 Repressed spectator projects desire
Mulvey and Narcissism
Lacan: the Mirror Stage and becoming a subject
Lacan uses this term to refer to the way in which
our egos are constituted
 Child looks at mirror and enters into the symbolic
order (language).
 It is a recognition / misrecognition : Identification
with reflection different from person reflected
 First identification of “I” and subjectivity
 Subjectivity is always relational and unfixed.
Mulvey and Pleasure


Pleasure derived from looking at an erotic
object (scopophilia)
Pleasure structured through identification
with screen (narcissism)
Type of cinema is important - Hollywood
Cinema
Mulvey: Image of Woman as
Ambivalent
Mulvey suggests that the image of the woman is at
once an object of desire and a threat.
Castration anxiety - woman as bearer of the look
sparks fear because she represent the lack of a
phallus.
Resolved through one of two ways:
1. Sadistic narrative: woman must be punished
(usually death or marriage)
2. Fetishism: woman serves as polished phallic
object (denial)
Example of Rear Window
How are we encouraged to identify with Jeffries?
How do we view Lisa Freemont?
A Feminist Counter-Cinema
Mulvey advocates for an alternative Cinema. One
that doesn’t adhere to narrative
representational conventions.



Feminist filmmaking - must deconstruct and destroy the
gaze
Destroy the satisfaction, pleasure and privilege.
Employs techniques of distanciation (limiting
identification).
Why not just have active female protagonists? (The gaze is
masculine within patriarchal logic.)
A Feminist Counter-Cinema
Why not just have active female protagonists?


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'
The gaze is masculine within the terms of
patriarchal culture.
Feminist Filmmaking
What are techniques of distanciation?

Film About a Woman Who…,Yvonne Rainer, 1974
Story of a woman whose sexual dissatisfaction
masks an enormous anger.

Removed, 1999, Naomi Uman
1970’s porn film - found footage - painted on
Eliminated images of women
Replaced the sound
Response to Mulvey
What are some of the problems of her argument?
Response to Mulvey
Mulvey’s essay has inspired many challenges and
critiques within feminist film theory:

Is her argument complicit with normative
heterosexual order insofar as it denies the
possibility of other forms of spectatorship?

How can she deny forms of female spectatorial
pleasure in cinema?

Is the spectator always straight?

Do men see women as representing their castrated
selves? What other psychoanalytic models are
available?

Does the emphasis on psychoanalysis
overemphasize the binary of gender? How do we
reconcile other forms of identity and difference?
Questions about the
interpretation of Rear Window



Lisa Freemont is an empowered character when we first see her she announces
herself, looms over Jeff (both negative and
positive). Lisa is “perfect”
Parallels between Lisa and Thorwald / Jeff
and wife
Lisa has mobility freedom and power
Questions about the
interpretation of Rear Window




“For feminist criticism to ignore the full complexity
of women’s contradictory situation is to risk
acquiescing in masculine contempt for female
activities.” Tania Modleski
Fashion as a space of female power within
patriarchy
Cannot damn Lisa for occupying that space
Lisa’s aggressive sexuality
Lisa is a female spectator and her spectatorial
experience is different from Jeff’s
Films with women
protagonists
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
More Recently

An Angel at My Table, Jane Campion, 1989

Things You Can Tell by Just Looking at Her, Rodrigo Garcia,
2000
Fan Culture and Reception
Theory
Meeting of Two Queens, Cecilia Barriga,

Reuses clips from films staring Greta Garbo and
Marlene Dietrich

Uses motifs, gazes, and gestures to link the shots
and to imply same sex desire.
Recent Feminist Film Theory





Female spectatorship and masquerade
Gender as performed
Gender is problematic / wonderful / complex
Oppositional Viewing
Psychoanalytic theory becomes less monolithic as
discussions move beyond the binary of
masculine/feminine gender and address other
aspects of identity (race, age, ability, etc)