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<strong>Proceedings</strong> <strong>of</strong> <strong>National</strong> <strong>Seminar</strong> on Postmodern Literary Theory and Literature , Jan. 27-28, 2012, Nanded FEMINIST FILM THEORY IN HOLLYWOOD CINEMA : AN INTRODUCTION --Shuddhodhan P. Kamble, Dr.Babasaheb Ambedkar Mahavidyalaya, Amravati (M.S.) Abstract: Feminism is a social movement which has had an enormous impact on film theory and criticism. Cinema is taken by feminists to be a cultural practice representing myths about women and femininity, as well as about men and masculinity. Issues <strong>of</strong> representation and spectatorship are central to feminist film theory and criticism. Early feminist criticism was directed at stereotypes <strong>of</strong> women, mostly in Hollywood films (Haskell 1973/1987, Rosen 1973). Such fixed and endlessly repeated images <strong>of</strong> women were considered to be objectionable distortions which would have a negative impact on the female spectator. Hence, the call for positive images <strong>of</strong> women in cinema. Soon, however, the insight dawned that positive images were not enough to change underlying structures in film. Feminist critics tried to understand the all-pervasive power <strong>of</strong> patriarchal imagery with the help <strong>of</strong> structuralist theoretical frameworks such as semiotics and psychoanalysis. These theoretical discourses have proved very productive in analysing the ways in which sexual difference is encoded in classical narrative. For over a decade psychoanalysis was to be the dominant paradigm in feminist film theory. More recently there has been a move away from a binary understanding <strong>of</strong> sexual difference to multiple perspectives, identities and possible spectatorships. This opening up has resulted in an increasing concern with questions <strong>of</strong> ethnicity, masculinity and hybrid sexualities. Introduction: Feminist film theory has emerged in the past 20 years to become a large and flourishing field. Its dominant approach, exemplified by such journals as Screen and Camera Obscura, involves a theoretical combination <strong>of</strong> semiotics, Althusserian Marxism, and Lacanian psychoanalysis. On this view, human subjects are formed through complex significatory processes, including cinema; traditional Hollywood cinema's "classic realist texts" are purveyors <strong>of</strong> bourgeois ideology. Added to this theory by Laura Mulvey's now-classic essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" [Mulvey, 1975], was the feminist claim that men and women are differentially positioned by cinema: men as subjects identifying with agents who drive the film's narrative forward, women as objects for masculine desire and fetishistic gazing. Mulvey's essay is heavily invested in theory. It is cited as "the founding document <strong>of</strong> feminist film theory" [Modleski 1989], as providing "the theoretical grounds for the rejection <strong>of</strong> Hollywood and its pleasures" [Penley 1988], and even as setting out feminist film theory's "axioms" [Silverman, quoted in Byars 1991]. Mulvey assumed a general picture <strong>of</strong> cinema as a symbolic medium which, like other aspects <strong>of</strong> mass culture, forms spectators as bourgeois subjects. She used Lacanian psychoanalysis to ground her account <strong>of</strong> gendered subjecivity, desire, and visual pleasure. Mulvey allowed little possibility <strong>of</strong> resistance or critical spectatorship, and recognized no variations in structure or effect <strong>of</strong> realist cinema. Unsurprisingly, her view has been much criticized and further refined, as writers (including Mulvey herself) have noted issues raised by differences among women, phenomena like male masochism, or genres that function in distinctive ways, such as comedy, melodrama, and horror. Still, writers in feminist film theory commonly assume Mulvey's basic parameters and take some version <strong>of</strong> psychoanalytic theory as a desideratum. Key issues are <strong>of</strong>ten seen only in terms <strong>of</strong> some refinement or qualification <strong>of</strong> psychoanalytic theory. Thus Barbara Creed's book The Monstrous-Feminine argues that the fact that women in horror films are <strong>of</strong>ten not victims but monsters "necessitates a rereading <strong>of</strong> key aspects <strong>of</strong> Freudian theory, particularly his theory <strong>of</strong> the Oedipus complex and castration crisis." [Creed 1993] Creed turns instead to Kristeva's theory <strong>of</strong> the abject and the maternal. Far less <strong>of</strong>ten, Mulvey's critics have adopted more sharply different theoretical bases such as cultural studies, identity politics, deconstruction, or the philosophy <strong>of</strong> Foucault. Feminist Film Theory: 546 PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1
<strong>Proceedings</strong> <strong>of</strong> <strong>National</strong> <strong>Seminar</strong> on Postmodern Literary Theory and Literature , Jan. 27-28, 2012, Nanded Early film theory arose in the silent era and was mostly concerned with defining the crucial elements <strong>of</strong> the medium. It largely evolved from the works <strong>of</strong> directors like Germaine Dulac, Louis Delluc, Jean Epstein, Sergei Eisenstein, Lev Kuleshov, and Dziga Vertov and film theorists like Rudolf Arnheim, Béla Balázs and Siegfried Kracauer. These individuals emphasized how film differed from reality and how it might be considered a valid art form. In the years after World War II, the French film critic and theorist André Bazin reacted against this approach to the cinema, arguing that film's essence lay in its ability to mechanically reproduce reality, not in its difference from reality. In the 1960s and 1970s, film theory took up residence in academia importing concepts from established disciplines like psychoanalysis, gender studies, anthropology, literary theory, semiotics and linguistics. However, not until the late 1980s or early 1990s did film theory per se achieve much prominence in American universities by displacing the prevailing humanistic, auteur theory that had dominated cinema studies and which had been focused on the practical elements <strong>of</strong> film writing, production, editing and criticism. American scholar David Bordwell has spoken against many prominent developments film theory since the 1970s, i.e., he uses the humorously derogatory term "SLAB theory" to refer to film studies based on the ideas <strong>of</strong> Saussure, Lacan, Althusser, and/or Barthes. Instead, Bordwell promotes what he describes as "ne<strong>of</strong>ormalism." During the 1990s the digital revolution in image technologies has had an impact on film theory in various ways. There has been a refocus onto celluloid film's ability to capture an "indexical" image <strong>of</strong> a moment in time by theorists like Mary Ann Doane, Philip Rosen and Laura Mulvey who was informed by psychoanalysis. From a psychoanalytical perspective, after the Lacanian notion <strong>of</strong> "the Real", Slavoj Žižek <strong>of</strong>fered new aspects <strong>of</strong> "the gaze" extensively used in contemporary film analysis. There has also been a historical revisiting <strong>of</strong> early cinema screenings, practices and spectatorship modes by writers Tom Gunning, Miriam Hansen and Yuri Tsivian. Television writer/producer David Weddle suggests that film theory as practiced in the early 2000s is a form <strong>of</strong> bait and switch, taking advantage <strong>of</strong> young, would-be filmmakers: anyone in Hollywood filmmaking who used film theory terms like "fabula" and "syuzhet" would be "laughed <strong>of</strong>f the lot." Weddle also quotes Roger Ebert's opinion that "Film theory has nothing to do with film" and is an obscuricantist "cult;" and quotes silent film historian Kevin Brownlow's alarm that academic film theorists are typically "quite aggressively Marxist." In 2008, German filmmaker Werner Herzog suggested that "Theoretical film studies has become really awful. That’s not how you should study film. Abolish these courses and do something else which makes much more sense." The female Spectator <strong>of</strong> Hollywood Cinema: In considering the way that films are put together, many feminist film critics have pointed to the "male gaze" that predominates in classical Hollywood filmmaking. Budd Boetticher summarises the view thus: "What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance." Whilst Laura Mulvey's paper has a particular place in the feminist film theory, it is also important to note that her ideas regarding ways <strong>of</strong> watching the cinema (from the voyeuristic element to the feelings <strong>of</strong> identification) have been very important in terms <strong>of</strong> defining spectatorship from the psychoanalytical view point. Mulvey identifies three "looks" or perspectives that occur in film which serve to sexually objectify women. The first is the perspective <strong>of</strong> the male character on screen and how he perceives the female character. The second is the perspective <strong>of</strong> the spectator as they see the female character on screen. The third 547 PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1
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