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Feminism and Film Swarthmore College Works Film & Media Studies Faculty Works Film & Media Studies 1998 Feminism And Film Patricia White Swarthmore College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-film-media Part of the Film and Media Studies Commons Recommended Citation Patricia White. (1998). "Feminism And Film". Oxford Guide To Film Studies. 117-131. https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-film-media/18 This work is brought to you for free by Swarthmore College Libraries' Works. It has been accepted for inclusion in Film & Media Studies Faculty Works by an authorized administrator of Works. For more information, please contact [email protected]. 13 Feminism and fiim Patricia White Feminism is among the social movements and cul­ inist politics and women's studies in the academy, tural-critical discourses that most definitively shaped feminist film studies has extended its analysis of gen­ the rise of Anglo-American film studies in the 1970s; in der in film to interrogate the representation of race, turn, film studies, a relatively young and politicized class, sexuality, and nation; encompassed media such field, provided fertile ground for feminist theory to as television and video into its paradigms; and con­ take root in the academy. Feminist film studies, emer­ tributed to the rethinking of film historiography, most ging from this juncture, has been both highly special­ notably in relation to consumer culture. The feminist ized in its theoretical debates on representation, interest in popular culture's relation to the socially spectatorship, and sexual difference, and broad in its disenfranchised has influenced film studies' shift cultural reach and influence. It has also involved a dual from textual analysis and subject positioning to focus on critique and cultural production. broader cultural studies of institutions and audiences. As a critical methodology, feminism makes salient A postmodern, globalized, technologically saturated the category of gender and gender hierarchy in all social reality has set new questions for feminist theory forms of knowledge and areas of inquiry. The female and methodology as for the whole of film studies. image—the female as image—has been a central fea­ ture of film and related visual media; in film criticism and theory, making gender the axis of analysis has entailed a thoroughgoing reconsideration of films for, j In film criticism and theory, making by, and about women, and a consequent transforma­ I gender the axis of analysis has entailed tion of the canons of film studies. Bringing into focus a thoroughgoing reconsideration of the overlooked contributions of women to film history I films for, by, and about women, and a has been a key objective of feminist film studies as well I consequent transformation of the as an organizing principle of women's film festivals and journalism. A concern with representation, in both a * canons of film studies. political sense(of giving voice to or speaking on behalf of women) and an aesthetic sense, has also united the activist and theoretical projects of women's film An account of principal issues, texts, and debates culture. that have established feminist critical studies of film as Over the past two decades, in the context of fern- a unique area of inquiry will be followed by a 117 CRITICAL APPROACHES discussion of some of the diverse women's film produc­ 1960s and 1970s); the high point is represented by the tion practices with which the field has engaged. strong, independent heroines of the 1940s, which reached its apotheosis in stars such as Katharine Hep­ burn. Presenting herself as a maverick critic, Haskell Feminist fiim criticism and theory frequently distances herself from feminism, neglects to consider non-white women, and betrays a profound Most histories of the field of feminist film studies find a heterosexism (Hepburn and Tracy are for her the starting-point in the appearance of several book- romantic ideal of complementarity of the sexes). Yet length popular studies of women in film in the United she makes several useful contributions, and criticism of States in the early 1970s (e.g. Rosen 1973; Haskell the reductionism of her study can itself be reductive. 1974; Mellen 1974). Theirfocus on 'images of women' She diagnoses violence against, and marginalization was immediately critiqued by 'cinefeminists' inter­ of, women in acclaimed 'New Hollywood' films, as ested in theorizing the structure of representation. As reactions to the emergence of feminism and the threat a result, an opposition—rhetorical in part—arose posed by women's autonomy, and she is wary of the between 'American'sociological approaches and 'Brit­ mystifications of European art cinema, which would ish' theory, of 'cinefeminism', which was based upon a appear to place women and their sexuality more cen­ critique of realism. trally in their stories, while offering only a new version of the 'eternal feminine'. Finally, Haskell's comments on the woman's picture, or 'weepie'—a production Reflection theory category denigrated by the industry and most Molly Haskell and Marjorie Rosen's studies are usually critics—suggest that such films actually did represent considered exemplars of 'reflection theories' of the contradictions of women's lives in patriarchal capit­ women and film: they assume that film 'reflects'social alism and inaugurated one of the most fruitful areas of reality, that depictions of women in film mirror how feminist film studies. society treats women, that these depictions are distor­ tions of how women 'really are' and what they 'really Semiotics and ideology critique want', and that 'progress' can be made (see Retro 1994). Such accounts are related to powerful feminist Reviewing Haskell and Rosen's books, Claire Johnston critiques of the effects of mainstream media, porno­ (1975b) notes the inadequacies of the 'images of graphy, and advertising on body-image, sex roles, and women' approach: while it grasps the ideological violence against women, which, in turn, fuelled advo­ implications of cinema, images are seen as too easily cacy for women's intervention in image-making. Typi­ detached from the texts and psychic structures cally, such studies present and critique a typology of through which they function, as well as the institutional images of women—an array of virgins, vamps, victims, and historical contexts that determine their form and suffering mothers, child women, and sex kittens. The their reception. For Johnston, film must be seen as a emerging film criticism of lesbians, as well as African language and woman as a sign—not simply a transpar­ American and Asian American women, and other ent rendering of the real (see also Pollock 1992). In women of colour, also tends to identify and reject perhaps the most influential statement of this position, stereotypes—such as the homicidal, man-hating les­ 'Women's Cinema as Counter Cinema', Johnston bian, the African American mammy, the tragic mulatto, (1973) combines Roland Barthes's concept of myth as and the Asian dragon lady—and advocates more com­ the rendering natural of ideology with auteur theory to plex representations. These are categories, however, decode the function of women in Hollywood films by which tend to limit consideration of the social function Howard Hawks and John Ford, as well as women of stereotypes and frequently lead to simplistic 'good'- auteurs Dorothy Arzner and Ida Lupino. This, in turn, 'bad' readings of individual films. The identification of set a pattern for subsequent feminist studies of Holly­ types and generic conventions is an important step, wood genres such as film noir, the musical, and the but simply replacing stereotypes with positive images western, which showed how woman as signifier per­ does not transform the system that produced them. formed precise iconographic and ideological func­ Haskell narrativizes the history of film as an arc from tions, either constituting a genre's structural 'reverence' (the silent era) to 'rape' (Hollywood in the dimensions (woman = home in the western) or expos- 118 FEMINISM AND FILM ing its ideological contradictions (the femme fatale and desire—from, in short, what Jacques Lacan called figure in film noir; see Kaplan 1978). the symbolic register. Freud's description of scopophi- In this latter case, as Janet Bergstrom (1979) points lia—pleasure in looking—was Mulvey's starting-point. out, Johnston and others were influenced by the con­ Dominant cinema deploys unconscious mechanisms in cept of the 'progressive text' derived from the French which the image of woman functions as signifier of journal Cahiers du cinema. Indeed, the progressive sexual difference, confirming man as subject and text, or popular film which 'displayed the ideology to which it belonged' (Comolli and Narboni 1969), was maker of meaning. These mechanisms are built into the chief inheritance offeministfilm studies from Marx­ the structure of the gaze and narrative itself through ist cultural theory (through the Russian Formalist notion the manipulation of time and space by point of view, of 'making strange', to Brechtian 'distanciation' and framing, editing, and other codes. Althusserian 'contradiction') and shaped the ongoing interest in Flollywood film. Cahiers' methodology was I This position derived from her account also assimilated by the British journal Screen, which emerged as the dominant venue of work combining I of the gendered processes of structuralism, semiotics, Marxism, and psychoanalysis I spectatorial
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