Feminist Film Theory
by Anneke Smelik
Introduction
by Anneke Smelik
Introduction
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 of representation and spectatorship are central to feminist film theory and criticism. Early feminist criticism was directed at stereotypes of women, mostly in Hollywood films (Haskell 1973/1987, Rosen 1973). Such fixed and endlessly repeated images of women were considered to be objectionable distortions which would have a negative impact on the female spectator. Hence, the call for positive images of 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 of patriarchal imagery with the help of 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 recenty there has been a move away from a binary understanding of sexual difference to multiple perspectives, identities and possible spectatorships. This opening up has resulted in an increasing concern with questions of ethnicity, masculinity and hybrid sexualities.
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Gertrud Koch (1980) is one of the few feminists who early on recognized that women could also enjoy the image of female beauty on the screen. Especially the vamp, an image exported from Europe and integrated into Hollywood cinema, provides the female spectator with a positive image of autonomous femininity. [...] Moreover, the sexual ambivalence of the vamp, of for example Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich, allows for a female homo-erotic pleasure which is not exclusively negotiated through the eyes of men. In Koch's view the vamp is a phallic woman rather than a fetishized woman, as she offers contradictory images of femininity. The vamp's ambiguity can be a source of visual pleasure for the female spectator. The disappearance of the vamp in cinema, therefore, means a great loss of possible identifications and visual pleasure for the female audience.
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Gertrud Koch (1980) is one of the few feminists who early on recognized that women could also enjoy the image of female beauty on the screen. Especially the vamp, an image exported from Europe and integrated into Hollywood cinema, provides the female spectator with a positive image of autonomous femininity. [...] Moreover, the sexual ambivalence of the vamp, of for example Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich, allows for a female homo-erotic pleasure which is not exclusively negotiated through the eyes of men. In Koch's view the vamp is a phallic woman rather than a fetishized woman, as she offers contradictory images of femininity. The vamp's ambiguity can be a source of visual pleasure for the female spectator. The disappearance of the vamp in cinema, therefore, means a great loss of possible identifications and visual pleasure for the female audience.
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