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Over the past thirty years feminist film theory, pacing up with feminist theory as a whole, has been going through some spectacular developments. One of the most recent concerns of feminist film theory is the interest it is taking in early cinema theories and analyses. This concern is certainly not just coincidental; the past decade already various voices have been risen in order to overthrow some misconceptions and ideas that were very useful at first but proved to be too one-sided over the years of traditional feminist film criticism.
After this I will try to make clear, using various case studies on early cinema, how the latter can be used to challenge some preconceptions of the former. And finally, I want to intersect this paper with giving some of my own personal reflections on these recent developments.
Claire Johnston or ‘woman’ as mere sign
In her article "Women’s Cinema as Counter Cinema" Claire Johnston gives a semiotic analysis of classical Hollywood cinema, using semiotics as worked out by Roland Barthes. In these classical Hollywood films, she argues, the female character functions as a pure sign; and this sign is merely the representation that the ideological concept of ‘woman’ has for men. In fact, woman is ‘not-man’ in classical Hollywood cinema, says Johnston. This ideological representation of woman as not-man is being disguised by Hollywood cinema by using conventions of realism. Thus, the female character is only a sign bearing the negative meaning of what is considered male, and moreover, this ‘woman’ has no meaning in it’s own right and thus takes no subject-position.
This theorizing of ‘woman as not-man’ in the 70's was a useful concept for showing how patriarchal ideology worked and was introduced by feminists like Simone De Beauvoir and Kate Millett . In trying to explain the pleasure and fascination of film more deeply, Laura Mulvey uses this very concept to the extreme in her psychoanalytic analysis of classical Hollywood cinema.
Using Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis Mulvey, in her article "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" , conceives of dominant cinema as being a tool aiming primarily on male desire. Film fascinates as it appeals to scopophilia which is in Freudian psychoanalitic theory the ‘desire to see and to objectify’. This scopophilia is stimulated by traditional film as it has structures of voyeurism and narcisism built in, both inherent to scopophilia.
Voyeuristic pleasure derives from objectifying a character and narcisistic pleasure from identification with a character in film.
Now Mulvey shows how in dominant Hollywood cinema these pleasures are based on sexual difference. Voyeurism is conceived as exclusively male: the viewer takes a male position as he looks from a male point of view through the ‘phallic’ camera and through the eyes of the male character in the film, thus objectifying the female character in the film. Therefore the female character becomes a spectacle; Mulvey calls this the female character’s ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’. The narcisism involved with classical cinema she derives from the Lacanian psychoanalysis; in short Lacan said that the child forms it’s ego on a (ideal and thus false) image of itself, and consequently the male viewer of the Hollywood film identifies himself with the ideal and perfect male character, the hero of the movie. Mulvey also explains the worshipping of the female star with Freudian theory. Freud said that a little boy, as soon as he sees that a girl or woman ‘lacks’ the penis (pardon me?!) he is overwhelmed by ‘feelings of superiority and fear of castration’ (?!?!) In order to overcome this fear the boy can fetishize a woman or bodily parts of her; this fetish is then a substitute for the (missing) phallus. (However, it must immediately be noted here that Freud contradicts himself as he said earlier that there could be no direct connection between seeing and knowing; this connection is always mediated. Thus the question rises were this mediation comes from...)
At first feminist film historians noted that there were very few women filmmakers to be found in conventional film history. As they thought correctly that this could hardly be representable for the effort in filmmaking done by both men and women, feminist film historians began their big search in order to put these forgotten women back into film history . In doing so these historians however took the way in which conventional film history was written for granted; they didn’t question it.
Conventional film historiography can be seen as an effort to construct ‘the’ story about ‘the’ highlights in filmmaking. Consequently this story has a teleological (that is, a story with a start, goal and plot) form; it is about ‘master pieces’ and the authors are ‘geniuses’ and ‘artists’. Above this the selective criteria are not made explicit; films are just valued as containing a ‘great’ story, dealing with ‘the’ big problems in life or having a ‘remarkable’ style .
Now the consequence of just trying to place women back into this conventional film history was that only a few women fitted into this ‘History’ as they didn’t harmonize with the ‘genius’-concept of ‘the’ filmmaker partly due to the often capricious ‘careers’ women had in the film industry. And the few women who were written about in the 70's therefore became exceptions standing on their own; in other words, no connection whatsoever was made between these various women. Thus they still got marginalized as isolated heroines.
Another way in which was written about female filmmakers was due to the traditional ideas of womanhood that were used in writing about her; in this case women were depicted as mere victims of the male-centeredness of film industry and no agency nor any desire to make films or participate in filmmaking was conceptualized.
Therefore, as the problem of the gap between historical and theoretical approaches towards film, filmmakers and filmindustries is still very alive today I will hope to show how researching early cinema can be a step towards overcoming the binary of film theory versus film history.
A major problem with the ‘traditional’ feminist film theory was of course that it based it’s theories on dominant Hollywood cinema and then more or less imposed these theories on other film genres. The lucid analyses made by Mulvey and Johnston are indeed often recognizable in a lot of Hollywood films and of course it is typical, if not rather logical, that this Hollywood genre is indeed the dominant genre in film industry up to this very day. I personally think that this says enough about our patriarchal society today and the force in Mulvey’s theory is this exposure.
However, conventional Hollywood cinema hasn’t always been the dominant genre; before 1912 there was no such thing as standard Hollywood cinema. This is one reason why looking at early cinema can be a potential break away from the preconceptions of traditional feminist film theory talked about in the previous chapters. In the next paragraphs I will try to deal with some case studies regarding this early cinema.
Recent research mainly done by Alison McMahan makes clear how the preconceptions of traditional film historiography was partly the cause for the first women filmmaker, Alice Guy, to appear in none of the big filmhistorical works of the past decades. Guy made about 22 features from 1896 to 1912 and her la Fée aux Choux is by some feminist historians claimed to be the first fiction film. However, as historiography on filmmakers before 1914 was almost exclusively about inventors and given the fact that Guy was a director (as we would call her efforts nowadays, but back then there was no word for it) rather than a inventor, she was hardly been written about. The latter notion thus is already a criticism of the norms with which traditional film historiography in- or excludes certain filmmakers.
Furthermore, a lot of crossdressing appears in various Guy films. This crossdressing nicely challenges traditional gender conventions as the gap between (biological) sexual difference and socially constructed gender (here then made explicit by clothing) is made visible. One could easily make some homosexual readings out of some Guy films; this in spite of the narrative closure which often re-established traditional gender conventions and heterosexual plot structure. Chris Straayer very interestingly explores this in her book "Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies" how cross-dressing as ‘temporary transvestite play’ continually vacillates between the support and collapse of both heterosexuality and traditional gender roles.
The 'victimizing' and 'heroising' of female filmmakers discussed in the chapter on traditional feminist film historiography can be avoided by carefully placing the filmmaker into the historical, social, filmindustrial and political context of that time. An example is the research done by Guiliana Bruno on Elvira Notari. Bruno shows how carefully situating Notari within a family film production company and within Italian film distribution as a whole shows how Notari did have influence in the making of film production. Here female agency again exists due to familial and industrial structures.
Another interesting thing is going on in Bruno's writing about Notari. The problem of where to put the feminist political desire in this feminist historiography traditionally has been put within the filmtext or the life of the filmmaker. This however raises questions of the 'true aims and goals' of the female filmmaker which can never be completely answered as the filmmaker has already passed away. Now Bruno cleverly avoids this problem by situating the feminist desire for the female author at the researcher herself. In other words: the female or feminist researcher constructs herself as an author through the very construction of authorship of the (passed-away) female filmmaker. This concept, I think, gives a totally new input to feminist film historiography as well as to film historiography on the big scale.
Förster herself shows in her thorough research to the work of early Canadian filmmaker Nell Shipman that the axioms in traditional feminist film theory of ‘the female character being the object of the male gaze’ and of ‘the female character having no agency nor subjectivity in the plot structure of the film’ must be questioned for their universalistic applicabilities. In a lot of Shipman films the leading actress who often even seems to overlap the person of the biographical/historical figure of ‘Shipman’ herself (as can be seen for instance in her short film Something New), speaks to us viewers in a ‘voice-over’ projected on the screen.
Now, Kaja Silverman has already argued that a way in order to give the female character some form of subjectivity is to displace the dominant patriarchal male discourse and dissynchronize the narrative by means of a female authorial voice-over. This disconnecting of the female character’s body which is in dominant cinema the object of the male gaze would put her thus beyond the control of this male gaze. Also, it would point out the gap between patriarchal discourse on women and her own female desires who thus can be made explicit.
Bernstorff’s research concerns all early cinema that deals with the suffragette; both films from this movement itself and antisuffrage films. This cutting through all kinds of cinema that deals with the suffragette gives a nice overview of how the suffragette was being stereotyped or used as a projection screen for some social anxieties; in those times big fear was felt about the suffragettes breaking up the traditional family.
Bernstorff thus places these films in their particular historical and political context of that time. Furthermore, she tries to look at various intertextual relations to other films of those days; in the suffrage films there are some intertextual pointers towards the so called ‘Serial Queen’ drama’s. These films oscillated between both ‘victorian’ and more ‘autonomous’ images of women. Particularly interesting is that this contextualizing and intertextualizing shows how gender is in fact a historical construction; the ideas of womanhood back then are different from what we consider ‘female’ nowadays. Consequently, the idea of what is considered being feminist changes through time too. The nowadays very clear racism and classism in the suffrage movement (‘when even a black man or a lower class worker may vote, certainly women then should have the vote too!’) has been under loads of critique afterwards.
The historical research done by Schlüpmann shows that early cinema until 1915 in Germany wasn't consisting of the opposition 'Hollywood versus cult cinema' that we have nowadays. Before 1920 there was no such thing as dominant mass media and Schlüpmann states that early German cinema gave pleasure to all kinds of groups in German society. 'The male gaze' analyzed by Mulvey therefore doesn't apply to this early cinema mode.
Some short films shown by Schlüpmann in class show that it's also a sort of 'female gaze' that is being thematized; in one shot the viewer for instance looks together with the female character through a looking glass towards a waterfall. There is defenitely no male voyeurism at play here. Schlüpmann says that the in those days very common mix of the 'Naturschön' and 'Liebeskultur' genre activated the gaze of a female audience and that the more scientific 'Naturforschung' genre activated a male audience, but personally I must say I think this a rather essentialistic 'thinking-in-gender-as-sexual-difference' analysis made by Schlüpmann here... Nevertheless, at least she tries to combine a real-life historical women's audience with the kind of films and genres that existed back then, thus trying to give an active role to the female audience.
She more lucidly claims an active role for the actresses of some films. As the notion of a 'director' didn't exist in early German cinema, it was often the actresses or actors who used the camera as their own tool. This gives more agency to the story of, for instance, Asta Nielsen who in those times wasn't an actress as we take this word nowadays (a passive woman merely performing to the directors wishes) but must have had a lot of influence in the making of the films she starred in.
Furthermore, a lot of German early films had a lot of humor in it based on both the grotesque and the carnivalesque ; as we can read in an article by Mary Russo, the grotesque body is 'open, protruding, extended; the body of becoming, of process' and this body is opposed to the 'classical body, which is monumental, static, closed, corresponding to the aspirations of bourgeois individualism'. The grotesque body therefore attacks classical male notions of subjectivity as static, closed and rational and therefore deconstructs traditional subject versus object binaries in this early German cinema.
How gender intersects with multiple other political and cultural concerns can also be very much noted in the research work done by Sargant on early Russian cinema. Again, notions of womanhood change through time and place; for instance, the ideal ‘new soviet woman’ should be both mothering ánd heroic, hardworking (thus to have a paying job) and energetic.
Sargant puts a lucid historical context by showing that in those days filmindustrial Russia was more or less divided in two groups of filmmakers, namely people who wanted to celebrate Russia (‘the Motherland’) and people who wanted to follow the European story of a girl coming to town and being demoralized and corrupted by the city. This division was due to the binary of the city (evil, bourgeois) versus countryside (romantic, feudal) idea in Russia in that particular timespan. And this urges us nowadays to watch out with contributing to the female leading character in a lot of those Russian films with too much agency, as the cultural context made her actions, which we would without knowing the context consider coming out of her own desires, mainly due to the decadence and corrupting capabilities of the city . For instance, in a film like Third Meshchanskaia Street we see the leading female character today as a typical femme fatale, but with putting the political background one could analyse that the poeple in the decadent city had made her do these awful things.
The previously talked about feminist case studies show how research done to early cinema can challenge ‘traditional’ feminist film criticism. On the issue of theory it is clear that, in spite of Mulvey’s and Johnston’s analyses who may be applicable to some Hollywood film genres (but immediately one can even question this presupposed monolithicism of Hollywood cinema), women can have agency, desire, subjectivity and even a sort of ‘gaze’ in film although these differ from classical (male) notions of agency and subjectivity. Gender and ideas of womanhood can be shown to be variable in different social, political and cultural contexts and I think this notion can empower the feminist political aim within film studies.
Also, careful contextualizing and historisizing makes various things possible. Firstly, it is useful for avoiding the ‘heroising’ or ‘victimizing’ of the female filmmaker and credit some agency to her. Secondly, in this way we can create rather several ‘micro-histories’ rather than one dominant film-‘History’, thus challenging the in- and exclusive mechanism with which this ‘History’ is constructed. And thirdly, it enables us to show that feminist textual analysis changes with putting a historical, political and contextual background. Moreover, this latter concept is also very important as it can, I think, be helpful to overcome the classical dichotomy between feminist film historiography and film theory.
Introduction
The aim of this paper therefore will be to outline the theories with which traditional feminist film theory is working, to discuss the disadvantages that come with it and - most importantly - to show how thinking about early cinema can challenge these very preconceptions of traditional feminist film criticism. I will start giving an overview of the groundbreaking feminist film theories of the 70's, namely those of Laura Mulvey and Claire Johnston. Also I will look at the working methods of feminist film historiography in those days and the seemingly partly unbridgable gap between feminist film theory and feminist film history.
‘Traditional’ feminist film theory: criticizing dominant cinema
Laura Mulvey: scopophilia and the (male) gaze
This playing together of male voyeurism and narcisism Mulvey calls ‘the (male) gaze’; this gaze, she says, has an inherent sadistic side to it as the desire risen by the male viewer in his voyeuristic play with the female character is negatively placed at her in the shape of guilt which results in punishing her by means of death, rape or marriage (which means the end of her desires or psychological death).
Reading both Johnston and Mulvey we can conclude that they stay within an almost essentialistic and universalistic dichotomy very common for feminist theory at the mid-70's, namely the binary Woman as not-Man which results in film theory as Man (both the male character and the male viewer) as the subject who thus has agency and desire, and Woman as object who lacks all this and can’t signify herself. Of course the questions rise if then there is any female subjectivity, what to think about female desire and agency and about a female gaze? In the early 80's several feminist theorists wanted to get out of this binary . Also, the idea in the 70's was that gender was the same as sexual difference; no gap was being theorized between these two. In the next chapter in will try to show how the postmodernistic approach to early cinema can be a help in feminist film theory in overcoming these patriarchal preconceptions.
‘Traditional’ feminist film historiography: the female author as hero or victim
Furthermore, no historical research was being done to gender issues regarding male and/or female audiences and differences in reception. As I have shortly mentioned in the ‘traditional feminist film theory’ chapter, film analyses done within this epistemological framework dealt with the filmtext in a purely textual approach, taking total disregard in the historical context. Because of this the author appears in traditional feminist film theory as a theoretical construction constituted through the mere filmtext while biographical, historical and contextual data are totally left out of this construction.
Early Cinema: some feminist case studies
Alice Blaché: female desire and crossdressing
Apart from this moving away from traditional film history, also traditional feminist film theory cannot stay put as we watch some Guy films. Madame a des Envies for instance is a film that floats mainly on specific female desire and agency; the female character desires food and drink and this is also mostly what builds the plot.
Annette Förster: female authorial agency
Madeleine Bernstorff: gender as a historical construction
Heide Schlüpmann: the non-voyeuristic camera and active role of female audience
Amy Sargant: relativizing the notion of agency
Some short conclusions
Bibliography
Dutch translation: "Visueel genot in de film". In: Spaink, Karin (ed.): Pornografie bekijk ‘t maar. Een politiek-feministische visie op sexualiteit, Amsterdam, Van Gennep, 1982.
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