Feminist Film Theory: An Introduction

This chapter provides an overview of feminist film theory. Feminist film studies, or ‘gendered film studies’, is intended to explore the ways in which women (and men) are represented by visual media, and film in particular. Feminists argue that media representations of gender perpetuate and reinforce the values of patriarchal society. Men tend to be cast in strong, active roles while women are shown as passive and merely ‘pretty’. ‘Woman’ comes to represent not one person of the female sex, but a stereotype, a category defined by men and in opposition to men. Stereotyping is not always negative, but it tends to preserve and perpetuate power relations in society. Even today, women have a relatively small role in constructing public images of ‘womanhood’. The chapter then looks at the contributions of two influential authors whose seminal texts have fostered new understanding of gender representation in the visual media: John Berger and Laura Mulvey.

Unexpected Heroes of Feminist Cinema

This chapter challenges critics' readings of films as ‘sexist’, looking at two illustrative examples: Paul Verhoeven and Spike Lee. Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct (1992) was widely regarded as misogynistic and ‘lesbophobic’. Basic Instinct is a neo-noir film that scandalously refuses to conform to the patriarchal rule of ‘compensating moral values’. Moreover, its visual pleasures are deliberately constructed against the grain of male voyeuristic pleasures and offer women (especially lesbian women) a rare opportunity to dissect and ridicule male sexism, homophobia, and voyeuristic power. Verhoeven's Elle (2016) is a much more subtle and complex critique of how women's self-image is ‘mediated’ by patriarchal culture, and the film makes explicit or oblique references to tabloid journalism, the gaming industry, and religion in the construction of a total culture that presents women as ‘others’ not only to men but also to themselves. Meanwhile, Spike Lee has been a frequent target for the ‘sexist’ label. The chapter argues that this is unfair, given Lee's relatively frequent attempts to make films about female sexual empowerment (or the causes of female sexual disempowerment). The three examples of She's Gotta Have It (1986), She Hate Me (2004), and BlacKkKlansman (2018) suggest that Lee has in various ways attempted to represent females as empowered sexual agents, and to address social double standards erected by men to possess women through the possession of their bodies.

Female Power Uncensored

This chapter presents case studies of the work of four contemporary female directors from world cinema: Kathryn Bigelow, Jane Campion, Claire Denis, and Céline Sciamma. Bigelow's Strange Days (1995) self-consciously interrogates the contradiction by which the voyeuristic consumer of violent and misogynist ‘entertainment’ is taken out of the equation when assigning responsibility for these cultural phenomena. It offers a unique exception to stereotypical gender roles one would expect to find in a Hollywood action film. In The Piano (1993), Campion was able to make a feminist critique of an outdated and patriarchal way of seeing women. Meanwhile, Denis's Beau Travail (1999) is an example of how the female camera can deconstruct and represent the male sex in similar ways to how men have represented women in the past. Finally, Sciamma's Girlhood (2014) is an example of how a female writer-director can construct cinema that breaks gender stereotypes, uses a ‘female gaze’ in its cinematography, and represents women's problems and issues in a complex and compassionate way.

Exploring the ‘Male Gaze’

This chapter discusses the three kinds of cinematic ‘look’ that Laura Mulvey associated with the ‘male gaze’. Mulvey's psychoanalytic examination of the pleasures generated by cinema included scopophilic, voyeuristic, and narcissistic pleasures. She argued that fetishistic scopophilia, unlike voyeurism, emphasises the physical beauty of the object. The object is transformed into something satisfying in itself, set apart from story and character involvement. This is illustrated with reference to Helen Faraday (Marlene Dietrich) in Josef von Sternberg's Blonde Venus (1932). Despite the story being about a woman and her predicament in patriarchal society, viewer identification is exclusively with male characters, and Helen is always an object for male spectators within the film and within the cinema. The chapter then contrasts von Sternberg with Mulvey's other key example, Alfred Hitchcock. Instead of merely presupposing male scopophilia/voyeurism, Hitchcock knowingly comments on these phenomena, making them the subject of his films. Though not mentioned by Mulvey, Psycho (1960) is offered as a case study in how the horror/slasher genre developed conventions that generated scopophilic and narcissistic pleasures for male viewers, perhaps catering to violent male fantasies.

Censorship and Patriarchal Ideology

This chapter begins by examining theoretical models for the study of narrative provided by anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and Tzvetan Todorov. For a period from the early 1930s until the mid-1950s, Hollywood films were subject to regulation by censors who had the power to alter the cause–effect logic of the narrative in order to make it comply with their patriarchal moral ideology. This included the rule of ‘compensating moral values’, which assured that a character who committed an immoral action had to be either punished or redeemed within the narrative. Melodramas position the central female character as a victim, and are narrated from her perspective. The melodrama narrates a female predicament and offers female viewers a lesson in how (or how not) to behave. Meanwhile, films noir are typically narrated from the male perspective and position the male detective/hero as a victim of female manipulation or betrayal. The ‘femme fatale’ is a male construct; she represents male anxieties about women's changing roles in society, especially her sexual and economic independence. Neo-noir films deliberately subvert the rule of ‘compensating moral values’ and offer female viewers a rare opportunity to derive pleasure from narcissistic identification with the femme fatale.