1. What is Cinema? Feminism

2. Rear Window (Hitchcock, 1954)

3. Lisa’s look upsets the binary structure of male looking and female 'to-be-looked-at-ness' identified by Mulvey in classical Hollywood film.

4. ‘[Rear Window] increasingly stresses a dual point of view […]. Through [Lisa], we can ask if it is true that the female spectator simply acquiesces in the male’s view or, if, on the contrary, her relationship to the spectacle and the narrative is different from his?’ (Tania Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (New York; London: Methuen, 1988), p. 80).

5. Lecture structure 1. Early feminist film theory 2. Recap: Mulvey’s critique of classic film narrative 3. Is a feminist cinema possible? 4. The female spectator: how women look

6. 1. Early feminist film theory Context: feminist film theory emerges in parallel with ‘second wave’ feminism in the 1960s and 1970s.

7. ‘Stereotype analysis’ (eg Majorie Rosen’s Popcorn Venus (1973) and Molly Haskell’s From Reverence to Rape (1973)) ‘We overplay. Overdress. A floozy dress or tight pants tell the whole story. Or a platinum wig. Or spectacles or cleavage. Our women slide into easy character niches (tomboy Debbie, volatile Liz, kooky Liza)’ (Rosen, p. 352).

8. Stereotype analysis - criticised for excessive focus on characterisation and on the degree of faithfulness of images of women to real models, at the expense of consideration of film form.

9. Semiotic-psychoanalytic feminist approaches ask instead: what is the ideological meaning of the sign ‘woman’ in the cinema? How is vision gendered? How has the patriarchal unconscious structured film form?

10. 2. Recap: Mulvey’s critique of classic film narrative Broad implications of Mulvey’s 1975 article: there’s no such thing as a female spectator; there’s no such thing as a male spectacle; The only way to liberate spectatorship from patriarchal ideology is to develop a film practice in opposition to classical narrative cinema.

11. 3. Is a feminist cinema possible? Late 1960s and 70s: emergence of non- commercial amateur and independent feminist ‘campaign’ films and a feminist ‘counter-cinema’ (eg Chantal Akerman, Sally Potter, Marguerite Duras, Mulvey and Peter Wollen) Self-reflexivity was a key feature of this counter-cinema, which aimed to denaturalise the (patriarchal) conventions of classic narrative film

12. Stills from Jeanne Dielman 23, Quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975), and Thriller (Sally Potter, 1979)

13. Réponse de femmes (Women’s Reply; Agnès Varda, 1975); feminist self-reflexive documentary ‘ciné-tract’

14. Feminism Goes to Hollywood? 1993: Hollywood declares ‘Year of the Woman’ after Callie Khouri wins Best Original Screenplay for Thelma & Louise in 1992; Jane Campion lifts the same award in 1994.

16. Phallic Women

17. The Desiring Female Gaze

18. 4. The female spectator: how women look Mulvey’s revised argument (1981): the female spectator may either identify with a passive, victimised female character (a masochistic identification) or gain pleasure from briefly ‘borrowing’ the male gaze (trans-sex identification).

19. Doane (1982) argues that ‘the masquerade, in flaunting femininity, holds it at a distance. … [It] generates a problematic within which the image is manipulable, producible and readable by the woman’.

20. ‘Same person, no difference at all. Just a different sex.’ Orlando (Sally Potter, 1993)

21. ‘This [newborn baby], then, is the vocal position which the female subject is called upon to occupy whenever (in film or theory) she is identified with noise, babble, or the cry.’ (Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror, p. 78)