Feminist Film Studies

Writing the Woman into Cinema

Janet McCabe

• Publisher: WallFlower Press
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9780231503006
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

An introduction to feminist film theory as a discourse from the early seventies to the present. McCabe traces the broad ranging theories produced by feminist film scholarship, from formalist readings and psychoanalytical approaches to debates initiated by cultural studies, race and queer theory.

1	STRUCTURING A LANGUAGE OF THEORY

Claire Johnston begins her seminal article, ‘Women’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema’ (2000a: 22–33) by taking issue with the sociological ‘image of women’ readings undertaken by the likes of Majorie Rosen and Molly Haskell. Her dismissal of a feminist film criticism that took as ‘its starting point the manipulation of woman as sex objects’ (1973: 3) heralded the emergence of new approaches to film theory and criticism shaped by the new continental theories of ideology, semiotics and subjectivity (especially the writings of Louis Althusser and Jacques Lacan). Her intervention indicated a significant theoretical shift from interpreting cinema as reflecting reality to understanding cinema as putting forward a particular ideological construction of reality. It led feminists to interrogate how the operations at work in the film text constituted meaning. Contemporary approaches to psychoanalysis opened out the discussion further and allowed feminist critics to contribute with new ideas about the unconscious processes involved in viewing a film. These various interventions into finding an appropriate language with which to articulate a theoretical position supplied new perspectives and a fresh direction for film feminism.

Before considering textual analysis as a crucial tool, and how this theoretical phase to structure a language for feminist film theory developed, it is important to recognise the intellectual context that made possible these groundbreaking theoretical interventions in the first place. Along with a number of women’s film festivals – the New York International Festival of Women’s Films (1972) and the Toronto Women and Film Festival (1973) – and the publication of several books on feminist film criticism detailed in the introduction, film journals began to give space to the debate. Established film periodicals such as Velvet Light Trap devoted an entire issue to investigating the place of women within Hollywood in 1972. Newer film studies periodicals moved away from journalistic approaches and sociologically-based methodologies, to take up different theoretical positions and introduce new critical models in a bid to formulate a more ‘scientific’ theory of cinema. Especially after 1971, the British film journal Screen would extend the philosophical and methodological work initiated by post-1968 Cahiers du cinéma and become an important bridge in the migration of ideas from Europe to Britain and America. Training attention on linguistic/semiotics that explored ways of distinguishing film form from other cultural forms, and underpinned by a radical left-wing political agenda, the journal embarked on an ambitious project to theorise the relationship between ‘ideological effects’, cinema signification and subjectivity.¹ It first introduced the ideas of Althusser, Lacan and Christian Metz to Anglophone film theory, and pioneered the application of psychoanalysis (particularly the work of Sigmund Freud and Lacan) to the study of film and its visual pleasures. In particular it gave space to a feminist polemic searching for ways to explain how women are represented and positioned in cinema.

Among the first to be completely devoted to the feminist film theory debate was the West German journal Frauen und Film, founded by feminist filmmaker and critic Helke Sander in 1974. With its Marxist bias, the journal carried articles focused on denouncing women’s cultural discrimination – her exclusion from producing dominant art forms, her image subject to sexist exploitation – as well as on formulating a feminist response aimed at identifying alternative cinematic codes and conventions for representing the woman on film. Women and Film (published in Berkeley, California between 1972–75) and later the feminist journal m/f, can be said to have initiated and developed further discussions on the politics of representation. Set up in 1976 by those previously working on Women and Film, Camera Obscura: journal for feminism and film theory illustrated the dynamics and urgency of the feminist engagement with film. Wanting to quickly move beyond the initial concerns – critiques of sexist ideologies and the recovery of a lost women’s filmmaking history, the editors made known in the first issue their intention to offer a radical platform for the feminist film debate. The mission statement written by the editorial collective recognised that ‘women are oppressed not only economically and politically but also in the very forms of reasoning, signifying and symbolical exchange of our culture’ (Camera Obscura 1976: 3). The editors went further to propose that this oppression should be documented and analysed through textual analysis (to understand how meaning is produced by the film text) and the use of psychoanalysis (to make known the unconscious processes involved in constituting meaning). What these publications made possible was an intellectual space where feminist film analysis and criticism could take place.

Understanding the text

What distinguished British feminist film criticism from the sociological-based accounts was in part its emphasis on theory. Such an intervention was made possible by the adoption of theories and methods already being applied elsewhere within film studies to help unlock the specific operations that functioned within the film text to create meaning. Areas of existing film theory drawn upon by the feminist film critics at this time were informed by the advent of contemporary continental philosophies including semiotics (Saussurian structural linguistics/Barthesian semiotic theory) and poststructuralism (the structural-Marxist work of Althusser and post-1968 Cahiers du cinéma film criticism and genre theory). These theories not only made the feminist intervention possible by giving it a language with which to speak, but also legitimised the feminist theoretical position because of its standing within current academic thinking.

The appropriation of poststructuralism and semiotics meant that the primary focus of feminist inquiry was in the first instance on analysing the film text. Each methodological approach was predicated on an assumption that meaning, far from being imposed from the outside onto the film, was produced in and through the internal operations of the text itself. Neo-Marxist film criticism developed in Screen, for example, identified the ‘classic realist text’ as a model for understanding the ideology at work in Hollywood narrative cinema (MacCabe 1974). The classic realist/narrative text describes how bourgeois ideology is reproduced in the process of implicating the spectator within a representational world that is coherent and highly structured despite numerous voices vying for attention. Socio-cultural tensions remain hidden and are eventually eliminated as the dominant discourse overrules all other possible interpretations. Text-based criticism, shaped by pre-existing methodologies, demanded that critics make known how ideology produced knowledge about itself from within its own textual system.

To help feminists understand how to analyse the ideological operations at work in the text they turned to criticisms related to ideology, politics and cinema recently initiated by the influential French film journal, Cahiers du cinéma. Guided by recent developments in French poststructuralist thought, and intellectually shaped by the political events of May 1968, this newly developed politicised film criticism aimed to understand the text as a construct structured by ideology. The new theory identified the work of ideology as about seeking to conceal its own operations in the process of signifying meaning, as well as how those mechanisms could independently impact upon the production of meaning. Ideological analysis (as it was termed) emerged as a critical tool allowing critics to deconstruct the text: ‘an ideological reading of a text is then a reconstruction of it in which what was previously hidden is now brought to light’ (Kuhn 1985: 77).

Textual analysis aimed to break down the text into individual segments to allow for a reading of the underlying ideological operations at work in meaning production:

Textual analysis … is founded on an understanding of texts as constructs, as structured by the work of ideology, while at the same time naturalising that work – embodying, in other words, denial or effacement of the operation of ideology. (Kuhn 1985: 84)

The usefulness of ideological analysis for feminist film theory is easy to see. Critics appropriating it could at least start to begin interrogating the repressive textual operations of patriarchal ideology that define woman as Other. Just as Roland Barthes (1973) noted that an effect of ideology is to make its signs appear part of the natural order, feminists pointed to how dominant filmmaking practices transmitted the ideological codes of patriarchy to construct an image of woman as somehow fixed. Poststructuralism and semiotics opened the way for feminists to conduct a more theoretically rigorous analysis of how a film’s ideological operations constructed the idea of woman within its textual practices.

Feminist critics trained considerable attention on reading classical Hollywood films to uncover what dominant ideology concealed in the process of producing patriarchal knowledge. Their analyses place emphasis on the relationship between cinema, ideology and politics initiated by Cahiers editors Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni (1971). Originally published in 1970, their arguments were reprinted in Screen a year later in translation, coinciding with the first attempts made by feminists to think through the relations between ideology and the construction of woman as object. These writers argue that a system of ideology informs each film. Yet ideology does not always function in the same way within the text. To elaborate further, they devise a five-point inventory of how ideology operates in film, varying from films unequivocally endorsing dominant ideology to those openly subverting it. One category in particular piqued the interest of feminists; namely, those films that seem on the surface to adhere to the dominant ideology but, on further inspection, turn out to be far more complicated.² Those films appearing to open up and lay bare the operations of ideology intrigued feminists most. Taking their clue from Cahiers and their reading of Young Mr Lincoln (John Ford, 1939),³ feminist textual analyses focused on ruptured texts to look for signs of ideological and formal contestation in relation to dominant film representations of women.

Feminists adopted Cahiers methods of ideological analysis – breaking the text down into smaller units, the detailed analysis of the hidden (unconscious) textual operations at work in each segment as well as across the whole film text – in its bid for legitimacy. The appropriation of (post)structuralist and semiological criticism reveals the need for feminist film theory to establish a coherent theoretical foundation on which to build a body of knowledge that could interrogate how the mechanisms of dominant ideology worked to produce particular representations of women. By aligning itself to such groundbreaking theoretical work, feminist film theory enhanced its credibility and strengthened its own critical authority to speak by invoking discourses (political philosophy, semiotics, psychoanalysis) whose intellectual importance went unquestioned.

Woman as textual sign

Claire Johnston (2000a) was one of the first feminist film critics to identify the film text as a semiotic sign system. Her intervention into existing male theoretical debates was, in the words of E. Ann Kaplan, a ‘heady mix of Lacan, Althusser, Barthes and Foucault’ (Kaplan 2000: 19). Indeed the density of ideas packed into her response articulates an urgency felt by feminists at this time to speak about how a sexist ideology positioned women in mainstream cinema.

Her investigation into the myth of woman in classical Hollywood films defines the woman as a structure in the film text. Indebted to Barthes’ semiotic understanding of how myth works as a signifier of ideology,⁴ she argues that myth invades film representation in much the same way as it does other cultural artefacts. She contends that, ‘myth transmits and transforms that ideology of sexism and renders its invisible’ (2000a: 24), stripping the sign ‘woman’ of its primary (denotative) meaning and substituting it with a symbolic (connotative) one. Hollywood cinema is governed by the same ideological operations in and through which the woman is constructed as a fixed sign:

Iconography as a specific kind of sign or cluster of signs based on certain conventions within the Hollywood genres has been partly responsible for the stereotyping of women within the commercial cinema in general, but the fact that there is a far greater differentiation of men’s roles than of women’s roles in the history of the cinema relates to sexist ideology itself, and the basic opposition which places man inside history, and woman as ahistoric and eternal. (2000a: 23)

Adapting Barthesian semiotics allows Johnston to analyse the woman as a textual creation subject to the laws of verisimilitude (an impression of the real) involved in the making of film representation. Such a methodological approach helps her expose the unseen processes at work in how the affiliations of the classic realist text compel it to produce an image of the woman as myth, as a fixed signifier, responsible ‘for the celebration of her non-existence’ (2000a: 25).

Johnston applies her semiotic approach to discerning the internal operations of ideology in the classical Hollywood text, a semiotic sign system that represses or displaces the idea of woman. In spite of ‘the enormous emphasis placed on women as spectacle in the cinema’, she contends, ‘woman as woman is largely absent’ (ibid.). Yet by ‘viewing the woman as sign within the sexist ideology’, it is possible to see how the woman operates as a projection of male fantasies and fears. To clarify her point, she turns to films directed by Howard Hawks and John Ford, to examine the uneasy textual position of women. For example, woman operates as ‘a traumatic presence that must be negated’ (2000a: 27) in the Hawksian text. In the exclusive all-male universe, she endangers the coherence and future survival of the male group. While the woman is a source of anxiety that must somehow be disavowed within Hawks’ signifying practices, she becomes an important if not ambivalent symbol of culture and home in Ford’s. The female character emerges as a key convention in Ford films, essential to an internal tension revolving around the desire to roam and the desire to settle, the idea of the untamed wilderness and the idea of the cultivated garden. Embodying the idea of home, and with it the promise of domestication and culture, is the figure of the woman. Despite viewing Ford’s textual system as potentially more progressive than Hawk’s, she contends that the woman exists only as a sign that has meaning for men; in relation to herself she means nothing.

Even while acknowledging the inherent sexism in Hollywood’s reliance on stereotypes, Johnston also notes that its products may display internal contradictions. Turning to Comolli and Narboni’s typology, she advances the notion that studio films can function to critique dominant discourse if they produce enough internal contradictions. She modifies the internally self-critical text for feminist film theory into what she calls the ‘“progressive” classic film text’ (2000b: 142):

This internal criticism facilitates a process of de-naturalisation: behind the film’s apparent coherence there exists an ‘internal tension’ so that the ideology no longer has an independent existence but is ‘presented’ by the film. The pressure of this tension cracks open the surface of the film; instead of its ideology being simply assumed and therefore virtually invisible, it is revealed and made explicit. (Ibid.)

Adapting Comolli and Narboni’s category of films that internally break open to reveal the contradictory operations of dominant ideology at work permits her to describe the dislocations operating in the films of Dorothy Arzner, Nelly Kaplan and Ida Lupino. Why Johnston is particularly interested in Arzner is because she was virtually the only woman directing films during the heyday of the Hollywood studio system. Arzner’s films are read by Johnston as working against the prevailing patriarchal culture through strategies of disruption and contradiction, ‘between the discourses which the film text comprises and that of the ideology of patriarchal culture within which the film is placed’ (ibid.). Put simply, Arzner’s films are seen in some sense to rupture the ideological coherence of the classical Hollywood text.

‘In general’, Johnston continues, ‘the woman in Arzner’s films determines her own identity through transgression and desire in a search for an independent existence beyond and outside the discourse of the male’ (ibid.). Internal textual tensions in her films are created between a classical Hollywood patriarchal narrative that never finds in favour of the woman and the ‘discourse of the woman, or rather her attempt to locate it and make it heard’ (ibid.). Johnston contends that juxtaposing male and female discourses gives Arzner’s textual system its structural coherence. Privileging the female discourse as a structuring principle renders the male universe strange, disjointed and Other:

In Arzner’s films it is the universe of the male which invites scrutiny, which is rendered strange. In this way, the discourse of the male can no longer function as the dominant one … It is only the discourse of the woman, and her desire for transgression, which provides the principle of coherence and generates knowledge, and it is in woman that Arzner locates the possibility of truth within the text. (2000b: 145)

For example, the discourse of woman in Christopher Strong (1933) cracks open the internal operations of dominant ideology to reveal contradiction, as Cynthia Darrington (Katharine Hepburn) transgresses patriarchal sexual-socio codes and conventions in her attempt to become a world champion aviatrix as well as find love with a married man. The ending – in which the unmarried heroine, pregnant by Strong, makes her bid for glory – reveals the central and un-resolvable narrative conflict between career and love. No longer able to tolerate the ‘impossible contradictions’ of her life, she removes her oxygen mask: she dies at the very moment she breaks the aviation record. ‘Making strange’ (borrowing from the Russian Formalist Shklovsky’s use of the term ‘ostranenie’) the very stereotypes Hollywood produces to call into question patriarchal ideology engages Arzner in ‘a process of rewriting’ (2000b: 148). Her work, whilst not considered by Johnston to create a radical new cinema, nonetheless ‘opens up an area of contradiction in the text’ (2000b: 147). By posing questions and offering a solution (of sorts) in the rewriting process, Arzner contributes to what Johnston sees as ‘the develop...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Woman is not Born but Becomes a Woman
• 1. Structuring a Language of Theory
• 2. Textual Negotiations: Female Spectatorship and Cultural Studies
• 3. Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonialism/Modernism
• 4. Conceiving Subjectivity, Sexual Difference and Fantasy Differently: Psychoanalysis Revisited and Queering Theory
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography