Feminism in cinema

Go and see a Marilyn Monroe movie, in which she is effectively candy offered to the camera. Feminism has come a long way - Gwen Stefani was given as an example of someone who has since appropriated the bombshell ironically and "safely".

It all began in the 60s, with women claiming emancipation from traditional gender roles. Along with the liberation movement came philosophical reflection on female supression in western culture. Then along comes "Second Wave Feminism" in the 70s, and I'm sure Calypso will correct me if I haven't got this exactly right, but it was accompanied by new exciting freedoms. Contraception was freely available, people were talking about abortion, and the personal became political. This struggle had elements of practice (investigating social living/working conditions) as well as the cultural, which focused on questioning traditional disources on femininity/sexuality in dominant culture.

Film was a vital battleground for all this. They reassessed female representation, contribution to film history, and also explored and reevaluated the traditional concepts of masculinity as well.

The big essay was "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" by Laura Mulvey, and our lecturers have frothed happily and assured us that we would be referring to it on a regular basis for the rest of our academic lives. It applies the theories of Freud and Lacan to cinema as a whole, seeing it as a grandscale institution of images. And now, we're going to have to talk about Freud. I think Freud is a chauvanist nutcase - Lacan has a little more going for him, but I hate the way psychoanalysis has dominated literature and cinematic studies.

In brief, then, Freud defines woman in terms of what she doesn't have, i.e. the penis. Any system which starts off by telling me I'm not a complete being, but actually a failed man, has already lost my respect. He continues to explain that all women have to overcome the trauma of not having One Of Their Own, and this expresses itself sexually, as we can only desire the phallus we have been denied. Cute theory. Female sexuality full stop is defined as "the dark continent", at which point I want to scream "hmmm, perhaps it only seems so dark because you is male!" In turn, puberty for men is about the trauma of learning their mother is "castrated", leading him to take up the role of father through rejecting the mother.

Still with me? Frankly, the only useful contribution Freud has made to the world is the robotic psychologists in Doctor Who, known as "Freudroids". Ms Mulvey then drags this through the prism of Lacan, who I like rather better. Lacan understands Freud through linguistics and semiotics. He begins with an imaginary phase, until the child recognises itself in the mirror. It then understands it is a thing. Then the symbolic phase is entering the social sphere through language - now the child understands "I" is different from "other" and "you". We also lose something at this point, because language is a prison and ties us down to "signifiers". For Lacan, the phallus is a signifier of subjectivity and power (arguably correct). He also sees this as the moment the self is alienated from the self, because the original bond to the mother is lost through this formalised separation from "the Other"*

*damn Lungbarrow - the Other is an academic concept I have to use on a regular basis, but I can only think about one of the three legendary founders of Gallifrey, and how much I hate the New Adventures continuity and Cartmel Masterplan.

In any case, Mulvey then applied all this to cinema, and this is the point at which things stop being ridiculous, because she argues that cinema is an expression of male desire, and oppression of the female "Other" (i.e. not male, no phallus, in cinematic terms "bearer, not maker, of meaning"). Cinema for her is coded in masculine terms, broadly known as the "male gaze" - I hinted at something like this yesterday, because the camera is "normal", and part of being normal is being a man.

You can see this in many-a-movie - remember the first time the hero sees the heroine, and time slows and she walks into an impossibly brilliant, unnatural lighting setup. Apparently, Blade Runner is particularly bad for it's gazing, and thats before you appreciate that every woman in the film is a robot created by man. I wonder what Mulvey would make of Cylon 6 in Galactica.
This runs into the basic scopophilia and narcissism of cinema into a very bad thing. Scopophilia is broadly speaking voyerism, sexual pleasure from looking at stuff, and narcissism is identifying with both the camera and image seen.

Mulvey argues that what this does is protect male unity - by turning woman into a fetish, the threat is neutralised. In movies women are either narried off, or if they are a femme fatale, punished as a way of containing their sexuality. Furthermore, by fetishising fragmented parts of the body - the eyes, the hairstyle - it distracts from women's castration which, as we have already observed, really alarms men. My notes then read "signifier for beloved one, substitute for other, covers absence", which I'm sure is all very meaningful, but can't make out now.

The point of all of this is that cinema is basically disempowering to women. Narrative cinema does not represent female subjectivity - and she claims that the only challenge available to the patriarchy is "unpleasure". I find this rather frustrating, because I like gorgeous movies, and ogling gorgeous starlets is a part of that.

To sum up then, how do women relate to female images (the B/W test suggests "as a man", but I'll explain that later), and can a woman as spectator derive pleasure from mainstream cinema on her own terms?

I've been turning back the clock all day. Every time I get to 2 o'clock, I turn my watch back to 11. The theory is I work better between 11 and 2, thus by chaning the time I can lengthen the hours of the working day. Does time exist? I mean yes, things happen, change, evolve, grow, but time is merely a measure of that - days, years, hours are all meaningless fictions. So if you change the system, you can change time. I know I work better in that four hour period in the middle of the day. Does it actually matter when these four hours happen? I've been between 11 and 2 for at least six hours now, and still working marvellously. In 45 minutes, I'm going to back again.

It is almost working.



marry her or punish her - ontained




Women's cinema

It's no secret that Hollywood is male dominated. I've probably tested you before, to see if you could name 10 female directors (I can get to 7), or with the Bechdel-Wallace test which continues to stun me even today.

This movement arose from female critics responding to Mulvey's article. They question the visibility of women in cinema - as images, stars and objects - the opposite of everything above. Furthermore they investigate the historic invisibility of women as a cultural producer and as a spectator. To put it another way, "reclaiming authorship for women, but in different terms to those imposed by mainstream cinema".

I actually loathe it as a catagory. I appreciate the necessity of having a forum for female cinema, and promoting its visibility - but I feel it is divisive. I don't want to be a female director. I just want to be a director. There are two aspects I find problematic:

1) many, though not all, female directors make films on minority politics. Rightly so, to an extent, because these things are important but neglected. They still don't interest me.

2) having two catagoires implies that you can tell when a woman or man is directing. This is emphatically false. Some people say you can tell with writing - I disagree, because my inner reading voice tends to assume everyone is male. But in films you can't tell from style, or even substance. Katheryn Bigelow is one of my heroes, because she's the director I want to be. She makes war movies, crime movies, and vampire-westerns. Similarly, Ang Lee directed Brokeback Mountain and Sense and Sensibility.

Furthermore, having a gal behind the camera makes it more likely that sexist myths and iconography will be subverted. The Legally Blonde movies take the Marilyn bombshell cliche that Hollywood has been recycling since forever and takes it to its extreme. But in recognising and reassessing stereotypes, are they not being reasserted also?

I don't think this is necssarily true either. The shock of the B-W test relies on the fact no one notices that women have nothing to do in cinema, not even women. We've been conditioned not to notice. And even now I have noticed, would I do anything different? Despite personal concerns about the portrayal of women in film, if I made movies they would fail the Bechdel-Wallac test stunningly. I wanna make tough-guy movies, and if there was a female character they would be reduced by genre and historical context to starry-eyed images of perfection, filmed in dreamy long shot. This is where Tarantino and I get along, because I would want to interact with these cinematic myths - and the virgin/vamp starlet is one of these.I would still objectivise women in films. Is this a good thing? Probably not. But it does undermine the idea of the "woman director".

So I feel, along with many other critics, that it is a constraint to reaching a wider audience - in other words, it's merely a construct for academics. They feel that the catagory shouldn't be applied by default, on the basis of chromosomes, unless it also has a political dimension (no. 1 above)

What I do like about the Women's cinema movement is the reclamation and rediscovery of female auteurs from the past. We discussed Dorothy Arzner and Ida Lupino, who were making movies in the 30s and 40s. This fact amazed me, because it is in many ways a history entirely forgotten.