Feminism and film

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Feminism and film

• Sue Thornham

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Unit One

• The Male Gaze

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The Male Gaze

• Judith Mayne (1978)
• One of the most basic connections between
  women's experience in this culture and women's
  experience in film is precisely the relationship
  of spectator and spectacle. Since women are
  spectacles in their everyday lives, there's
  something about coming to terms with film from
  the perspective of what it means to be an object
  of spectacle and what it means to be a spectator
  that is really a coming to terms with how that
  relationship exists both up on the screen and in
  everyday life.

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Is the gaze male?

• Mulvey, Visual Pleasure Narrative Cinema
  (1975)
• Forerunners and contemporaries
• John Berger Ways of Seeing (1972)
• Men look at women. Women watch themselves
  being looked at. This determines not only most
  relations between men and women, but also the
  relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of
  woman in herself is male the surveyed female.
  Thus she turns herself into an object and most
  particularly an object of vision a sight.

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2. Psychoanalysis and Cinema

• Freud desire and fantasy
• Jacques Lacan the imaginary and the symbolic
• Cine-psychoanalysis
• Cinema and regression (Baudry The apparatus
  1976)
• Cinema and absence/lack (Metz The Imaginary
  Signifier 1975)
• Cinema and identification/voyeurism (Metz)

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Freud (1856-1939) Desire and Fantasy

• 1. Acquisition of identity
• Oedipus complex
• Sexual difference and the visible
• Voyeurism
• fetishism
• 2. Dream theory
• Visual images
• Displacement
• Condensation
• Secondary revision

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Undies to be sold in (1969)
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• 3. Fantasy theory
• Staging of desire
• Mixed nature of fantasy
• Primal fantasies
• the present

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Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) the imaginary and the
symbolic

• 1. The Mirror Phase
• Infant initially an homme-lette
• In mirror image it sees a whole self, a being in
  control (ideal ego)
• This self is illusory, a misrecognition
• Identification with this image produces splitting
  of the self
• And produces desire
• This process belongs to the realm of the
  imaginary

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• 2. The Entry into Language/Culture
• In entering language/culture, we enter a
  structure which pre-exists us
• By saying 'I' our subjectivity is constructed
• We move from a world of needs in the real, to a
  world of desires in the symbolic
• Entry into the symbolic also creates
• (i) gendered difference
• (ii) the unconscious

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3. Cine-psychoanalysis

• Cinema and regression (Baudry The apparatus
  1976)
• First of all, ... taking into account the
  darkness of the movie theater, the relative
  passivity of the situation, the forced immobility
  of the cine-subject, and the effects which result
  from the projection of images, moving images, the
  cinematic apparatus brings about a state of
  artificial regression. It artificially leads back
  to an anterior phase of his development - a phase
  which is barely hidden, as dream and certain
  pathological forms of our mental life have
  shown. (1976 119)

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• Cinema and absence/lack (Metz The Imaginary
  Signifier 1975)
• Cinema and identification/voyeurism/
• fetishism (Metz, The Imaginary Signifier 1975)
• During the projection the camera is absent,
  but it has a representative consisting of another
  apparatus, called precisely a 'projector'. An
  apparatus the spectator has behind him, at the
  back of his head, that is, precisely where
  fantasy locates the 'focus' of all vision.
  (1975 52)

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4. Feminist Film Theory

• The centrality of sexual difference
• Using psychoanalysis to explain patriarchal
  culture
• Laura Mulvey

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Laura Mulvey (1975)

• Cinemas structures are gendered
• Looking confers power
• Cinema structures ways of seeing/pleasure in
  looking according to sexual difference
• Cinema offers pleasures of voyeurism/ scopophilia
  to the male gaze
• Men in film function as ideal egos
• But masculinity precarious women sites of
  anxiety as well as objects of desire
• Dominant cinemas 3 looks
• Function of narrative