Difference, Identity and Representation: Communication and Spectatorship

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Difference, Identity and RepresentationCommunica
tion and Spectatorship

• Anneka Smelik "Feminist Film Theory
• Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative
  Cinema, Movies and Methods vol. II, 1985, pp.
  303-315.
• bell hooks, The Oppositional Gaze, Black Looks,
  1992, pp. 115-131.

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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.

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Structural Theory and Psychoanalysis

• 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.

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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
  ideology.
• Psychoanalytic theory. A theory of the subject as
  constituted through sexual difference.

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Laura Mulvey

• Film Theorist, Media Scholar, Filmmaker
• Great Britain (1941 - )
• Feminist Film Studies
• "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema - 1975
• Psychoanalysis, Semiotics
• Sustained dialog on how sexual difference is
  reproduced in the act of watching classical
  cinema - 30s, 40s, 50s
• Fascination of 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?

Rear Window (1954), Alfred Hitchcock
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Mulveys key example Alfred Hitchcock

• Vertigo, Alfred Hitchcock, 1958
• Alfred Hitchcock - 1899-1980, The Master of
  Suspense, Rear Window (1954), and Psycho (1960)

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• Representation of women as an aspect of visual
  pleasure
• Cinema reproduces gendered subjects
• Men active Women passive
• You are positioned as spectator when you identify
  with the characters
• Positioning of camera, lightning, the roles, all
  decisions set up positions you thought about
  yourself as the one looking and not being looked
  at.

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• Psychoanalytic theory as it is related to film
  culture this is not about psychoanalyzing
  characters, but mechanisms of viewing, this is,
  spectatorship.
• More than the act of looking, the gaze is a
  viewing relationship, characteristic of a
  particular set of social circumstances
• Even if it was wrong, it influenced a body of
  work that was very influential
• Hypothesis psychoanalysis semiotics
  understanding film
• Analysis does not have to always be tied up to
  economy or class

Vetigo
Jimmy Stewart as Jeffries in Rear Window
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• Psychoanalysis - Freud
• Conscious / Pre-Conscious / Unconscious
• Repression
• Id / Ego / Superego
• Interrelation of Individual/Society/Biology
• Talking Cure Bring into the consciousness what
  is making the patient suffer

Sigmund Freud

• Model of Psychosexual development
• Individual - Civilization
• Libido develops by changing its object
  Sublimation
• Stages - Oedipus complex

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• Key theoretical figures she is in dialogue with
• Louis Althusser - Sigmund Freud - Jacques Lacan
• The State apparatus as a set of cultural
  institutions
• Althusser the ideal spectator, the text and
  interpellation it demands a particular type of
  spectator.
• There is no true subject you are always product
  of social relations - there is always the
  possibility of psychosis.

Louis Althusser
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• Feminist theorists present Freuds model of the
  unconscious and sexuality as accurate description
  of the place of women in the phallogocentric
  culture--not as a necessary or natural condition,
  but one specific to contemporary society.
• The unconscious shapes cinematic practices
• Male pleasure, dominant pleasure
• Male ambivalence toward the female figure leads
  toward extreme positions - to devalue, punish,
  save her, or to make a pedestal figure, a fetish
  out of her.

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• The conflict is resolved through one of two ways

Sadistic narrative woman must be punished
(usually death or marriage) Fetishism woman
serves as polished phallic object (denial) the
ideal of perfect beauty. Female lure and a
threat of castration - she lacks a penis - Lacan
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• Lacan mirror stage
• Formative of the I
• Permanent structure of subjectivity
• Paradigm of the imaginary order
• Dual relationship
• Body - Ego
• Imaginary - Real
• Fragmentation - Wholeness
• IDENTIFICATION with the image

Jacques Lacan
Entering into the symbolic language Real /
Symbolic / Imaginary
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• In cinema, the spectator is made to identify with
  the male look because the camera films from the
  optical, as well as libidinal, pint of view of
  the male character.
• Three Looks
• The characters in the film look at each other
• The viewer looks at the screen
• The camera looks at the event being filmed.
• Mulvey aims to disrupt pleasure
• Analysis / New Cinema

Hitchcock--as voyeur
Grace Kelly as Lisa
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• Pleasure functions in two ways
• Scopophilia pleasure in looking at objects
  (voyeuristic gaze)
• Narcissism identification with on screen (male)
  protagonist as a controlling figure.
• Within the patriarchal order, women are the
  other the empty object through which identity
  is constructed. This becomes problematic for
  womens identity.
• This is where the idea of the women becoming an
  object in the film arises.

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A Feminist Counter-Cinema

• Mulvey advocates for an alternative Cinema. One
  that doesnt 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.)

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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.

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• Challenges and critiques
• Is her argument complicit with normative
  heterosexual order?
• Other forms of spectatorship?
• How can she deny forms of female spectatorial
  pleasure in cinema?
• 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?

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Films with women protagonists

• Mary Anne Doane and others began to consider the
  female spectator in relation to the Womans
  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

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bell hooks

• Theorist, activists, feminist
• Substance of the books, not the I (1952 - )
• Aint I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism -
  1981

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• The Oppositional Gaze
• Political dimension of the Gaze
• Power Stuart Hall - Hegemony
• Agency awareness / looking to resist
• Television - negation of Black representation
• Manthia Diawara Rupture
• Critical Discussion

Manthia Diawara
Lena Horne
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• Looking too deep hurt - Black women and cinema
• Mulvey woman as image, man as bearer of the
  look
• Mainstream feminist film criticism ignores Black
  women
• Women effaces differences in specific
  socio-historical contexts

1986
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• Connection between the realm of representation
  in mass media and the capacity of black women to
  construct ourselves as subjects in daily life
  (p. 127)
• Is there a black female gaze? Essentialist notion
• Trinh T. Minh-ha subjectivity does not merely
  consist in talking about oneself be this talking
  indulgent or critical
• Not offering diverse representations, but
  imagining transgressive possibilities for the
  formulation of identity

Trinh T. Minh-ha
Sankofa Passion of Remembrance 1986
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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)
• After the 1980s an increase in films by women
  directors and with complex representations of
  gender and sexuality
• An Angel at My Table, Jane Campion, 1989
• Things You Can Tell by Just Looking at Her,
  Rodrigo Garcia, 2000