Feminist film theory
Encyclopedia
Feminist film theory is theoretical
film criticism
derived from feminist politics and feminist theory
. Feminists have many approaches to cinema
analysis, regarding the film elements analysed and their theoretical underpinnings.
within the academy. Feminist scholars began taking cues from the new theories arising from these movements to analyzing film. Initial attempts in the United States in the early 1970s were generally based on sociological theory
and focused on the function of women characters in particular film narrative
s or genre
s and of stereotype
s as a reflection of a society's view of women. Works such as Marjorie Rosen’s Popcorn Venus: Women, Movies, and the American Dream (1973) and Molly Haskell’s
From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in Movies (1974) analyze how the women portrayed in film related to the broader historical context, the stereotypes depicted, the extent to which the women were shown as active or passive, and the amount of screen time given to women.
In contrast, film theoreticians in England began integrating critical theory
based perspectives drawn from psychoanalysis
, semiotics
, and Marxism
, and eventually these ideas gained hold within the American scholarly community in the later 1970s and 1980s. Analysis generally focused on "the production of meaning in a film text, the way a text constructs a viewing subject, and the ways in which the very mechanisms of cinematic production affect the representation of women and reinforce sexism".
In his article, "From the Imaginary Signifier: Identification, Mirror," Christian Metz
argues that viewing film is only possible through scopophilia
(pleasure from looking, related to voyeurism
), which is best exemplified in silent film.
According to Cynthia A. Freeland in "Feminist Frameworks for Horror Films," feminist studies of horror films have focused on psychodynamics where the chief interest is "on viewers' motives and interests in watching horror films".
More recently, scholars have expanded their work to include analysis of television
and digital media
. Additionally, they have begun to explore notions of difference, engaging in dialogue about the differences among women (part of movement away from essentialism
in feminist work more generally), the various methodologies and perspectives contained under the umbrella of feminist film theory, and the multiplicity of methods and intended effects that influence the development of films. Scholars are also taking increasingly global perspectives, responding to postcolonialist
criticisms of Anglo- and Eurocentrism
in the academy more generally. Increased focus has been given to, "disparate feminisms, nationalisms, and media in various locations and across class, racial, and ethnic groups throughout the world".
filmmaking. Budd Boetticher summarises the view thus: "What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance." http://books.google.com/books?id=Q2U0wwTFVwgC&pg=PA28&dq=laura+mulvey+Visual+Pleasure+and+Narrative+Cinema&as_brr=3&ei=uf3RSfPjD4PcygSqz_zZBg#PPA33,M1 Laura Mulvey
's germinal essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (written in 1973 and published in 1975) expands on this conception of the passive role of women in cinema to argue that film provides visual pleasure through scopophilia
, http://books.google.com/books?id=Q2U0wwTFVwgC&pg=PA28&dq=laura+mulvey+Visual+Pleasure+and+Narrative+Cinema&as_brr=3&ei=uf3RSfPjD4PcygSqz_zZBg#PPA30,M1 and identification with the on-screen male actor.http://books.google.com/books?id=Q2U0wwTFVwgC&pg=PA28&dq=laura+mulvey+Visual+Pleasure+and+Narrative+Cinema&as_brr=3&ei=uf3RSfPjD4PcygSqz_zZBg#PPA33,M1 She asserts: "In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness," http://books.google.com/books?id=Q2U0wwTFVwgC&pg=PA28&dq=laura+mulvey+Visual+Pleasure+and+Narrative+Cinema&as_brr=3&ei=uf3RSfPjD4PcygSqz_zZBg#PPA33,M1 and as a result contends that in film a woman is the "bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning." http://books.google.com/books?id=Q2U0wwTFVwgC&pg=PA28&dq=laura+mulvey+Visual+Pleasure+and+Narrative+Cinema&as_brr=3&ei=uf3RSfPjD4PcygSqz_zZBg#PPA29,M1 Mulvey argues that Freud's psychoanalytic theory is the key to understanding how film creates such a space for female sexual objectification
and exploitation
through the combination of the patriarchal order of society, and 'looking' in itself as a pleasurable act of voyeurism, as "the cinema satisfies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking." http://books.google.com/books?id=Q2U0wwTFVwgC&pg=PA28&dq=laura+mulvey+Visual+Pleasure+and+Narrative+Cinema&as_brr=3&ei=uf3RSfPjD4PcygSqz_zZBg#PPA31,M1
Whilst Laura Mulvey's paper has a particular place in the feminist film theory, it is also important to note that her ideas regarding ways of watching the cinema (from the voyeuristic element to the feelings of identification) have been very important in terms of defining spectatorship from the psychoanalytical view point.
Mulvey identifies three "looks" or perspectives that occur in film which serve to sexually objectify women. The first is the perspective of the male character on screen and how he perceives the female character. The second is the perspective of the spectator as they see the female character on screen. The third "look" joins the first two looks together: it is the male audience member's perspective of the male character in the film. This third perspective allows the male audience to take the female character as his own personal sex object because he can relate himself, through looking, to the male character in the film.http://books.google.com/books?id=Q2U0wwTFVwgC&pg=PA28&dq=laura+mulvey+Visual+Pleasure+and+Narrative+Cinema&as_brr=3&ei=uf3RSfPjD4PcygSqz_zZBg#PPA34,M1
In the paper, Mulvey calls for a destruction of modern film structure as the only way to free women from their sexual objectification in film, arguing for a removal of the voyeurism encoded into film by creating distance between the male spectator and the female character. The only way to do so, Mulvey argues, is by destroying the element of voyeurism and "the invisible guest". Mulvey also asserts that the dominance that men embody is only so because women exist, as without a woman for comparison, a man and his supremacy as the controller of visual pleasure are insignificant. For Mulvey, it is the presence of the female that defines the patriarchal order of society as well as the male psychology of thought.
Mulvey's argument comes as a product of the time period in which she was writing. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" was composed during the period of second-wave feminism, which was concerned with achieving equality for women in the workplace, and with exploring the psychological implications of sexual stereotypes. Mulvey calls for an eradication of female sexual objectivity in order to align herself with second-wave feminism. She argues that in order for women to be equally represented in the workplace, women must be portrayed as men are: as lacking sexual objectification.
Mulvey posits in her notes to the Criterion Collection DVD of Michael Powell
's controversial film Peeping Tom
that the cinema spectator’s own voyeurism is made shockingly obvious and even more shockingly, the spectator identifies with the perverted protagonist. The inference is that she includes female spectators in that, identifying with the male observer rather than the female object of the gaze.
B. Ruby Rich
argues that women’s relationships with film is instead dialectical, consciously filtering the images and messages they receive through cinema, and reprocessing them to elicit their own meanings.
Coming from a black feminist perspective, bell hooks
put forth the notion of the “oppositional gaze,” encouraging black women not to accept stereotypical representations in film, but rather actively critique them. Janet Bergstrom’s article “Enunciation and Sexual Difference” (1979) uses Sigmund Freud’s ideas of bisexual responses, arguing that women are capable of identifying with male characters and men with women characters, either successively or simultaneously. Miriam Hanson, in “Pleasure, Ambivalence, Identification: Valentino and Female Spectatorship” (1984) put forth the idea that women are also able to view male characters as erotic objects of desire. In "The Master's Dollhouse: Rear Window," Tania Modleski argues that Hitchock's film, Rear Window
, is an example of the power of male gazer and the position of the female as a prisoner of the "master's dollhouse".
Carol Clover, in her popular and influential book "Men, Women, and Chainsaws
: Gender in the Modern Horror Film" (Princeton University Press, 1992) argues that young male viewers of the Horror Genre (young males being the primary demographic) are quite prepared to identify with the female-in-jeopardy, a key component of Horror narrative, and to identify on an unexpectedly profound level. Clover further argues that the "Final Girl
" in the psychosexual sub-genre of Exploitation Horror invariably triumphs through her own resourcefulness, and is not by any means a passive, or inevitable, victim. Laura Mulvey, in response to these and other criticisms, revisited the topic in “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ inspired by Duel in the Sun” (1981). In addressing the heterosexual female spectator, she revised her stance to argue that women can take two possible roles in relation to film: a masochistic identification with the female object of desire that is ultimately self-defeating or a transsexual identification with men as the active viewers of the text. A new version of the gaze was offered in the early 1990s by Bracha Ettinger, who proposed the notion of the "matrixial gaze".
and narrative cinema. The growing female presence in the film industry was seen as a positive step toward realizing this goal, by drawing attention to feminist issues and putting forth alternative, more true-to-life views of women. However, these images are still mediated by the same factors as traditional film, such as the “moving camera, composition, editing, lighting, and all varieties of sound.” While acknowledging the value in inserting positive representations of women in film, some critics asserted that real change would only come about from reconsidering the role of film in society, often from a semiotic point of view.
Claire Johnston
put forth the idea that women’s cinema can function as "counter cinema". Through consciousness of the means of production and opposition of sexist ideologies, films made by women have the potential to posit an alternative to traditional Hollywood films. In reaction to this article, many women filmmakers have integrated "alternative forms and experimental techniques" to "encourage audiences to critique the seemingly transparent images on the screen and to question the manipulative techniques of filming and editing".
Film theory
Film theory is an academic discipline that aims to explore the essence of the cinema and provides conceptual frameworks for understanding film's relationship to reality, the other arts, individual viewers, and society at large...
film criticism
Film criticism
Film criticism is the analysis and evaluation of films, individually and collectively. In general, this can be divided into journalistic criticism that appears regularly in newspapers, and other popular, mass-media outlets and academic criticism by film scholars that is informed by film theory and...
derived from feminist politics and feminist theory
Feminist theory
Feminist theory is the extension of feminism into theoretical, or philosophical discourse, it aims to understand the nature of gender inequality...
. Feminists have many approaches to cinema
Film
A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...
analysis, regarding the film elements analysed and their theoretical underpinnings.
History
The development of feminist film theory was influenced by second wave feminism and the development of women's studiesWomen's studies
Women's studies, also known as feminist studies, is an interdisciplinary academic field which explores politics, society and history from an intersectional, multicultural women's perspective...
within the academy. Feminist scholars began taking cues from the new theories arising from these movements to analyzing film. Initial attempts in the United States in the early 1970s were generally based on sociological theory
Sociological theory
In sociology, sociological perspectives, theories, or paradigms are complex theoretical and methodological frameworks used to analyze and explain objects of social study. They facilitate organizing sociological knowledge...
and focused on the function of women characters in particular film narrative
Narrative
A narrative is a constructive format that describes a sequence of non-fictional or fictional events. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, "to recount", and is related to the adjective gnarus, "knowing" or "skilled"...
s or genre
Genre
Genre , Greek: genos, γένος) is the term for any category of literature or other forms of art or culture, e.g. music, and in general, any type of discourse, whether written or spoken, audial or visual, based on some set of stylistic criteria. Genres are formed by conventions that change over time...
s and of stereotype
Stereotype
A stereotype is a popular belief about specific social groups or types of individuals. The concepts of "stereotype" and "prejudice" are often confused with many other different meanings...
s as a reflection of a society's view of women. Works such as Marjorie Rosen’s Popcorn Venus: Women, Movies, and the American Dream (1973) and Molly Haskell’s
Molly Haskell
Molly Haskell is an American feminist film critic and author. Her most influential book is From Reverence to Rape: the Treatment of Women in the Movies...
From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in Movies (1974) analyze how the women portrayed in film related to the broader historical context, the stereotypes depicted, the extent to which the women were shown as active or passive, and the amount of screen time given to women.
In contrast, film theoreticians in England began integrating critical theory
Critical theory
Critical theory is an examination and critique of society and culture, drawing from knowledge across the social sciences and humanities. The term has two different meanings with different origins and histories: one originating in sociology and the other in literary criticism...
based perspectives drawn from psychoanalysis
Psychoanalytic theory
Psychoanalytic theory refers to the definition and dynamics of personality development which underlie and guide psychoanalytic and psychodynamic psychotherapy. First laid out by Sigmund Freud, psychoanalytic theory has undergone many refinements since his work...
, semiotics
Semiotics
Semiotics, also called semiotic studies or semiology, is the study of signs and sign processes , indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication...
, and Marxism
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
, and eventually these ideas gained hold within the American scholarly community in the later 1970s and 1980s. Analysis generally focused on "the production of meaning in a film text, the way a text constructs a viewing subject, and the ways in which the very mechanisms of cinematic production affect the representation of women and reinforce sexism".
In his article, "From the Imaginary Signifier: Identification, Mirror," Christian Metz
Christian Metz
Christian Metz may refer to:*Christian Metz *Christian Metz...
argues that viewing film is only possible through scopophilia
Scopophilia
Scopophilia or scoptophilia, from Greek "love of looking", is deriving pleasure from looking. As an expression of sexuality, it refers to sexual pleasure derived from looking at erotic objects: erotic photographs, pornography, naked bodies, etc....
(pleasure from looking, related to voyeurism
Voyeurism
In clinical psychology, voyeurism is the sexual interest in or practice of spying on people engaged in intimate behaviors, such as undressing, sexual activity, or other activity usually considered to be of a private nature....
), which is best exemplified in silent film.
According to Cynthia A. Freeland in "Feminist Frameworks for Horror Films," feminist studies of horror films have focused on psychodynamics where the chief interest is "on viewers' motives and interests in watching horror films".
More recently, scholars have expanded their work to include analysis of television
Television
Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...
and digital media
Digital media
Digital media is a form of electronic media where data is stored in digital form. It can refer to the technical aspect of storage and transmission Digital media is a form of electronic media where data is stored in digital (as opposed to analog) form. It can refer to the technical aspect of...
. Additionally, they have begun to explore notions of difference, engaging in dialogue about the differences among women (part of movement away from essentialism
Essentialism
In philosophy, essentialism is the view that, for any specific kind of entity, there is a set of characteristics or properties all of which any entity of that kind must possess. Therefore all things can be precisely defined or described...
in feminist work more generally), the various methodologies and perspectives contained under the umbrella of feminist film theory, and the multiplicity of methods and intended effects that influence the development of films. Scholars are also taking increasingly global perspectives, responding to postcolonialist
Postcolonialism
Post-colonialism is a specifically post-modern intellectual discourse that consists of reactions to, and analysis of, the cultural legacy of colonialism...
criticisms of Anglo- and Eurocentrism
Eurocentrism
Eurocentrism is the practice of viewing the world from a European perspective and with an implied belief, either consciously or subconsciously, in the preeminence of European culture...
in the academy more generally. Increased focus has been given to, "disparate feminisms, nationalisms, and media in various locations and across class, racial, and ethnic groups throughout the world".
The gaze and the female spectator
In considering the way that films are put together, many feminist film critics have pointed to the "male gaze" that predominates in classical HollywoodClassical Hollywood cinema
Classical Hollywood cinema or the classical Hollywood narrative, are terms used in film history which designates both a visual and sound style for making motion pictures and a mode of production used in the American film industry between roughly the 1910s and the early 1960s.Classical style is...
filmmaking. Budd Boetticher summarises the view thus: "What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance." http://books.google.com/books?id=Q2U0wwTFVwgC&pg=PA28&dq=laura+mulvey+Visual+Pleasure+and+Narrative+Cinema&as_brr=3&ei=uf3RSfPjD4PcygSqz_zZBg#PPA33,M1 Laura Mulvey
Laura Mulvey
Laura Mulvey is a British feminist film theorist. She was educated at St Hilda's College, Oxford. She is currently professor of film and media studies at Birkbeck, University of London...
's germinal essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (written in 1973 and published in 1975) expands on this conception of the passive role of women in cinema to argue that film provides visual pleasure through scopophilia
Voyeurism
In clinical psychology, voyeurism is the sexual interest in or practice of spying on people engaged in intimate behaviors, such as undressing, sexual activity, or other activity usually considered to be of a private nature....
, http://books.google.com/books?id=Q2U0wwTFVwgC&pg=PA28&dq=laura+mulvey+Visual+Pleasure+and+Narrative+Cinema&as_brr=3&ei=uf3RSfPjD4PcygSqz_zZBg#PPA30,M1 and identification with the on-screen male actor.http://books.google.com/books?id=Q2U0wwTFVwgC&pg=PA28&dq=laura+mulvey+Visual+Pleasure+and+Narrative+Cinema&as_brr=3&ei=uf3RSfPjD4PcygSqz_zZBg#PPA33,M1 She asserts: "In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness," http://books.google.com/books?id=Q2U0wwTFVwgC&pg=PA28&dq=laura+mulvey+Visual+Pleasure+and+Narrative+Cinema&as_brr=3&ei=uf3RSfPjD4PcygSqz_zZBg#PPA33,M1 and as a result contends that in film a woman is the "bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning." http://books.google.com/books?id=Q2U0wwTFVwgC&pg=PA28&dq=laura+mulvey+Visual+Pleasure+and+Narrative+Cinema&as_brr=3&ei=uf3RSfPjD4PcygSqz_zZBg#PPA29,M1 Mulvey argues that Freud's psychoanalytic theory is the key to understanding how film creates such a space for female sexual objectification
Objectification
Objectification is the process by which an abstract concept is made as objective as possible in the purest sense of the term. It is also treated as if it is a concrete thing or physical object...
and exploitation
Exploitation
This article discusses the term exploitation in the meaning of using something in an unjust or cruel manner.- As unjust benefit :In political economy, economics, and sociology, exploitation involves a persistent social relationship in which certain persons are being mistreated or unfairly used for...
through the combination of the patriarchal order of society, and 'looking' in itself as a pleasurable act of voyeurism, as "the cinema satisfies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking." http://books.google.com/books?id=Q2U0wwTFVwgC&pg=PA28&dq=laura+mulvey+Visual+Pleasure+and+Narrative+Cinema&as_brr=3&ei=uf3RSfPjD4PcygSqz_zZBg#PPA31,M1
Whilst Laura Mulvey's paper has a particular place in the feminist film theory, it is also important to note that her ideas regarding ways of watching the cinema (from the voyeuristic element to the feelings of identification) have been very important in terms of defining spectatorship from the psychoanalytical view point.
Mulvey identifies three "looks" or perspectives that occur in film which serve to sexually objectify women. The first is the perspective of the male character on screen and how he perceives the female character. The second is the perspective of the spectator as they see the female character on screen. The third "look" joins the first two looks together: it is the male audience member's perspective of the male character in the film. This third perspective allows the male audience to take the female character as his own personal sex object because he can relate himself, through looking, to the male character in the film.http://books.google.com/books?id=Q2U0wwTFVwgC&pg=PA28&dq=laura+mulvey+Visual+Pleasure+and+Narrative+Cinema&as_brr=3&ei=uf3RSfPjD4PcygSqz_zZBg#PPA34,M1
In the paper, Mulvey calls for a destruction of modern film structure as the only way to free women from their sexual objectification in film, arguing for a removal of the voyeurism encoded into film by creating distance between the male spectator and the female character. The only way to do so, Mulvey argues, is by destroying the element of voyeurism and "the invisible guest". Mulvey also asserts that the dominance that men embody is only so because women exist, as without a woman for comparison, a man and his supremacy as the controller of visual pleasure are insignificant. For Mulvey, it is the presence of the female that defines the patriarchal order of society as well as the male psychology of thought.
Mulvey's argument comes as a product of the time period in which she was writing. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" was composed during the period of second-wave feminism, which was concerned with achieving equality for women in the workplace, and with exploring the psychological implications of sexual stereotypes. Mulvey calls for an eradication of female sexual objectivity in order to align herself with second-wave feminism. She argues that in order for women to be equally represented in the workplace, women must be portrayed as men are: as lacking sexual objectification.
Mulvey posits in her notes to the Criterion Collection DVD of Michael Powell
Michael Powell (director)
Michael Latham Powell was a renowned English film director, celebrated for his partnership with Emeric Pressburger...
's controversial film Peeping Tom
Peeping Tom (film)
Peeping Tom is a 1960 British psychological thriller directed by Michael Powell and written by the World War II cryptographer and polymath Leo Marks. The title derives from the slang expression 'peeping Tom' describing a voyeur...
that the cinema spectator’s own voyeurism is made shockingly obvious and even more shockingly, the spectator identifies with the perverted protagonist. The inference is that she includes female spectators in that, identifying with the male observer rather than the female object of the gaze.
B. Ruby Rich
B. Ruby Rich
B. Ruby Rich is an American scholar, critic of independent, Latin American, documentary and gay films, and a professor of Film & Digital Media and Social Documentation also known as "SocDoc" at UC Santa Cruz. She has also taught documentary film and queer studies during spring semesters at UC...
argues that women’s relationships with film is instead dialectical, consciously filtering the images and messages they receive through cinema, and reprocessing them to elicit their own meanings.
Coming from a black feminist perspective, bell hooks
Bell hooks
Gloria Jean Watkins , better known by her pen name bell hooks, is an American author, feminist, and social activist....
put forth the notion of the “oppositional gaze,” encouraging black women not to accept stereotypical representations in film, but rather actively critique them. Janet Bergstrom’s article “Enunciation and Sexual Difference” (1979) uses Sigmund Freud’s ideas of bisexual responses, arguing that women are capable of identifying with male characters and men with women characters, either successively or simultaneously. Miriam Hanson, in “Pleasure, Ambivalence, Identification: Valentino and Female Spectatorship” (1984) put forth the idea that women are also able to view male characters as erotic objects of desire. In "The Master's Dollhouse: Rear Window," Tania Modleski argues that Hitchock's film, Rear Window
Rear Window
Rear Window is a 1954 American suspense film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, written by John Michael Hayes and based on Cornell Woolrich's 1942 short story "It Had to Be Murder"...
, is an example of the power of male gazer and the position of the female as a prisoner of the "master's dollhouse".
Carol Clover, in her popular and influential book "Men, Women, and Chainsaws
Men, Women, and Chainsaws
Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film is a 1992 book by American academic Carol J. Clover. In it she investigates the appeal of horror cinema, in particular the slasher, occult, and rape-revenge genres, from a feminist perspective...
: Gender in the Modern Horror Film" (Princeton University Press, 1992) argues that young male viewers of the Horror Genre (young males being the primary demographic) are quite prepared to identify with the female-in-jeopardy, a key component of Horror narrative, and to identify on an unexpectedly profound level. Clover further argues that the "Final Girl
Final girl
The final girl is a trope in thriller and horror films that specifically refers to the last woman or girl alive to confront the killer, ostensibly the one left to tell the story...
" in the psychosexual sub-genre of Exploitation Horror invariably triumphs through her own resourcefulness, and is not by any means a passive, or inevitable, victim. Laura Mulvey, in response to these and other criticisms, revisited the topic in “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ inspired by Duel in the Sun” (1981). In addressing the heterosexual female spectator, she revised her stance to argue that women can take two possible roles in relation to film: a masochistic identification with the female object of desire that is ultimately self-defeating or a transsexual identification with men as the active viewers of the text. A new version of the gaze was offered in the early 1990s by Bracha Ettinger, who proposed the notion of the "matrixial gaze".
Realism and counter cinema
The early work of Marjorie Rosen and Molly Haskell on representation of women in film was part of a movement to make depictions of women more realistic both in documentariesDocumentary film
Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...
and narrative cinema. The growing female presence in the film industry was seen as a positive step toward realizing this goal, by drawing attention to feminist issues and putting forth alternative, more true-to-life views of women. However, these images are still mediated by the same factors as traditional film, such as the “moving camera, composition, editing, lighting, and all varieties of sound.” While acknowledging the value in inserting positive representations of women in film, some critics asserted that real change would only come about from reconsidering the role of film in society, often from a semiotic point of view.
Claire Johnston
Claire Johnston
Claire Johnston was a feminist film theoretician. She wrote seminal essays on the construction of ideology in mainstream cinema .-Writings:...
put forth the idea that women’s cinema can function as "counter cinema". Through consciousness of the means of production and opposition of sexist ideologies, films made by women have the potential to posit an alternative to traditional Hollywood films. In reaction to this article, many women filmmakers have integrated "alternative forms and experimental techniques" to "encourage audiences to critique the seemingly transparent images on the screen and to question the manipulative techniques of filming and editing".
List of notable feminist film theorists and critics
- Carol J. CloverCarol J. CloverCarol J. Clover is an American professor of film studies, rhetoric language and Scandinavian mythology. She has been widely published in her areas of expertise...
- Molly HaskellMolly HaskellMolly Haskell is an American feminist film critic and author. Her most influential book is From Reverence to Rape: the Treatment of Women in the Movies...
- Dai JinhuaDai JinhuaDai Jinhua is Chinese feminist film critic. She teaches at Peking University as well as in the United States.-Writings:*Cinema and Desire: Feminist Marxism and Cultural Politics in the Work of Dai Jinhua, eds. Jing Wang and Tani E. Barlow. London: Verso, 2002.-References:* . Townsend Center for...
- Claire JohnstonClaire JohnstonClaire Johnston was a feminist film theoretician. She wrote seminal essays on the construction of ideology in mainstream cinema .-Writings:...
- Teresa de LauretisTeresa de LauretisTeresa de Lauretis is an Italian-born author and Professor Emerita of the History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She received her doctorate in Modern Languages and Literatures from Bocconi University in Milan before coming to the United States...
- Laura MulveyLaura MulveyLaura Mulvey is a British feminist film theorist. She was educated at St Hilda's College, Oxford. She is currently professor of film and media studies at Birkbeck, University of London...
- Griselda PollockGriselda PollockGriselda Pollock is a prominent art historian and cultural analyst, and a world-renowned scholar of international, post-colonial feminist studies in the visual arts. She is best known for her theoretical and methodological innovation, combined with deeply engaged readings of historical and...
- B. Ruby RichB. Ruby RichB. Ruby Rich is an American scholar, critic of independent, Latin American, documentary and gay films, and a professor of Film & Digital Media and Social Documentation also known as "SocDoc" at UC Santa Cruz. She has also taught documentary film and queer studies during spring semesters at UC...
- Kaja SilvermanKaja SilvermanKaja Silverman is an American film theorist and art historian. She received her Ph.D. in English from Brown University. She taught at Yale University, Trinity College, Simon Fraser University, Brown University, the University of Rochester and the University of California, Berkeley, before joining...
Further reading
- Sue Thornham (ed.), Feminist Film Theory. A Reader, Edinburgh University Press 1999
- Multiple Voices in Feminist Film Criticism, edited by Diane Carson, Janice R. Welsch, Linda Dittmar, University of Minnesota Press 1994
- Kjell R. Soleim (ed.), Fatal Women. Journal of the Center for Women's and Gender Research, Bergen Univ., Vol. 11: 115-128, 1999.
- Bracha L. Ettinger (1999), "Matrixial Gaze and Screen: Other than Phallic and Beyond the Late Lacan." In: Laura Doyle (ed.) Bodies of Resistance. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2001.
- Beyond the Gaze: Recent Approaches to Film Feminisms. Signs Vol. 30, no. 1 (Autumn 2004).
- Griselda Pollock, Differencing the Canon. Routledge, London & N.Y., 1999.
- Griselda Pollock (ed.), Psychoanalysis and the Image. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006.