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    11 views14 pages

    Doanne Film Masquerade

    Uploaded by

    Alejandra Quintero

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    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF or read online from Scribd
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    of 14
    | The Feminism and | Visual Culture Reader Second edition Edited | Amelia Jones 4) Routledge R 2 perations ints have a Heathected, and feeding experience ip with the tse which ss (both on the y. For itis only {this historical we are calling, this fourth type of meaning: ily formulated stions absolute femininity and work attempts tical approach, ead connecting MARY ANN DOANE FILM AND THE MASQUERADE Theorizing the female spectator Source: Mary Ann Doane, “Film and the Masquerade: Theoris the Female Spectator,” Screen 23, nos. 3-4 (September-October, 1982), 14-87, I Heads in hieroglyphic bonnets N HIS LECTURE ON “FEMININUTY,™ Freud forcefully inscribes the absence Gfthe female spectator of theory in his notorious statement, “to those of you who are fiomen ths will not apply-—you are yourselves the problem.” Simultaneous with this exclusion Bprrted upon the female members of his audience, he invokes, as a rather strange prop, a fem by Heine, Introduced by Freud's claim concerning the importance and clusiveness of Bistopic—* Throughout history people have knocked their heads against the ridlle of the nature femininity” —are four lines off Heine’s poem Heads in hieroglyphic bonnets, Heads in turbans and black biretias, 11 thousand! other “he eflects of the appeal to this poem are subject to the work of overdetermination Freud Uplate in the text of the dream. The sheer prolileration of heads and hats (and hence, through, Gmetonymic slippage, minds), which are presumed to have confronted this intimidati Dele Freud, confers on his discourse the weight of an intellectual history, of a tradition of jnterogation. Furthermore, the image of hicroglyphics strengthens the association made Dre mininity and the enigmatie, the undecipherable, shat which fer.” And yet Freud adces a slight deception here, concealing what is elided by removing the lines from thei Biter, carting, av it were, the tana. For the question over which Heine's heads brood Bao the same as Trews it is not "What is Woman,” but instead, “What signifies Man” Retr. The fll tana, presented ay the words ofa young man, / His breast fl Bees fll of dub,” reads as Follows: O solve me the riddle of life The teasingly time-old riddle Over which many heads already have brooded, Heads in hats of hicroglyphies, Turbaned heads and heads in black skull-caps, 74 MARY ANN DOANE Heads in perrukes and a thousand other lofsexual specifications. Anc leasure in terms of that q Poor, per Tell me, what signifies Man? Whence does he come? Whither does he go? iting human heads in Freud’s text is thus a diyguise and a displacement of that other question, wi The questid in the pre-text is both humanistic and theological. ‘The claim to investigate an otherness pretense, haunted by the mirror-efleet by means of which the question of the woman rel al doubts. Yet what interests me most in this intertex lle of femininity is initiated from the beginning in Freud’ only th misrepresentation is that the r 2s a question in masquerade, But I will return to the issue of masquerade later More pertinently, as far as the cinema is concerned, itis not accidental that Freud P : of the female spectator/auditor is copresent with the invocation of a hieroglyphic la The woman, the enigma, the hieroglyphic, the picture, the image—the metonymic chain with another: the cinema, the theater of pictures, a writing in images of the woman butf jor her. For she is the problem. ‘The semantic valence attributed 10 a hieroglyphic langus in which the term is inhabited by a contradiction two-edged. In fact, there is a sens. ediniensional space wh BP) Kr instance, «sng acter from ugly spinss the one hand, the hier ined, particularly when it merges with a disa yphic is sume connote an indecipherable langu system which deni fon the woman, wn function by failing to signify anything to the uninitiated, to those who do not hol key. ln this sense, the hieroglyphic, like the woman, harbors a mystery, an inaccessible th Ieseable otheress. On the other hand, the hieroglyphic is the most readable of lng43g¢MFTRS yadiad shadow b immediacy, its aecesbility are functions oft stats asa pictorial language, a writing 0 IMR menyn ar For the image is theorized in terms of a certain closes, te lack of a distance oF gp beget quite dist sign and referent. Given its iconic characteristics, the relationship between signifier ard sigiimgaages a Tris abt jtrary in imagistic systems of representation than in language “prof eee most recent © Seen ? ro plastique pertinent to th : on Hrneti language, And it isthe absence ofthis erucal distance or gap which alo, silanol) O7 8 jes anew cifically cinematic aspect nilied in the iconic sign negates the distance which dell specifies both the hieroglyphic and the female. This is precisely why Freud evieted the wa eee ver on ety Too clon we rf, entangled inher own nips, lll ot step back, could not achieve the necessary distance of a second look Beg ee Bernent ¢ “have” the cinema is, in s Thus, while the hieroglyphic is an indecipherable or at least enigmatic lanj and at the same time potentially the most universally understandable, -jerker,” in oth nce. What, then status of lang fon to this process of it sarchbliey cf tha conte fommon with Freud's ae mene tedly about her (the cis again. appropriable of signs.® And the woman shares this contradictory status. But itis here th analogy slips. For hieroglyphic languages are nor perfectly iconic. They would not achil i “alyp P xes if they were —slue to what Todorov and Duerot refer to as a certain Now it is the impossibility of generalizing this principle Egyptian, and Sumerian, the phonographic principle, We might also conclude thi P P phic princip ' every logography (the graphic system of language notation) (includ ff a generalized iconic representation; proper nouns and a inflections) are then the ones that will be noted phonetically The iconic system of representation is inherently deficient—it cannot disengage itself real,” from the concrete; it lacks the gap necessary for generalizability (lor Saussure Femains locked within th on, which wn reflects tertextual u's text n but not tion, On denies its hold the se though signified) “proper ch defines taneously, , itis also chensible, re that the whieve the FILM AND THE MASQUERADE 75 the ea tat which are arbitrary realize better than others the ideal of the semiotic foes). The woman, to0, is defined by such an insufficiency. My insistence upon the congru: fem between certain theories of the image and theories of femininity is an attempt to dissect Mh epitene which assigns to the woman a special place in cinematic representation while Henying her access to that system. ‘he cinematic apparatus inherits a theory of the image which is not conceived outside {sexual specifications, And historically, there has always been a certain imbrication of the cinematic fag andthe representation of the woman. ‘The woman's relation to the camera and the scopic egmeisquite different from that ofthe male. As Noél Burch points out, the early silent cinema, bough is insistent inscription of scenarios of voyeurism, conceives of its spectator’s viewing Glesrein terms of that of the Pecping Tom, behind the sercen, reduplicating the spectator's Poston in relation to the woman as screen,” Spectatoral desire, in contemporary film theory, isgenerlly delineated as either voyeurism or fetishism, as precisely a pleasure in seeing what is Botte in relation vo the female body. ‘The image orchestrates gaze, a limit, and its pleasurabl fangresion, The woman's beauty, her very desirability, becomes. function of certain practice ldimaging—framing, lighting, camera movement, angle. She is thus, as Laura Mulvey has pointed out, more closely associated with the surface ofthe image than its illusory depths, its constructed ibie-dimensional space which the man is destined to inhabit and hence eontrol.* In Now Foyag (0922), for instance, a single image signals the momentous transformation of the Bette Davis Hfarater from ugly spinster aunt to glamorous single woman, Charles Allron describes the Specially cinematic aspect of this operation asa “stroke of genius" The radical shadow bisecting the face in white/dark/white strata creates a visual phenomenon quite distinct from the makeup transformation of lipstick and plucked febrows. . .. This shot docs not reveal what we commonly call acting, especially alier the most recent exhibition of that activity, but the sense of face belongs to plbstique pertinent to the camera, The viewer is allowed a different perceptual refer first sequence and to use his fit, a chance to come down from the nerve-jarring, A plastique pertinent to the camera” constitutes the woman not only as the image of Ghsire but as the desirous image—one which the devoted cinéphile can cherish and embrace Tothare® the cinema is, in some sense, to “have” the woman, But Now Voyager is, in Alron’s farms, a “tear-jerker,” in others, a *woman’s picture,” i.e, a film purportedly produced for a female audience. What, then, of the female spectator? What can one say about her desire in IRbtion to this process g? It would seem that what the cinematic institution has li common with Freud’s gesture is the eviction of the female spectator from a discourse rportedly about her (the cinema, psychoanalysis)~—one which, in fact, narrativizes her again ted agin, Ml Alass but not a lack Theories of female spectatorship are thus rare, and when they are produced, seem inevitably fooonfront certain blockages in conceptualization, ‘The difficulties in thinking lemale spectatorship Gbmand consideration, Aiter all,"even if itis admitted that the woman is frequently the Hltke voyeuristic or fetishistic gare in the cinema, what is there to prevent her from reversing ide retion and appropriating the gaze for her own pleasure? Precisely the fact that the reversal elf remains locked within the same The male striptease, the gigolo—both inevitably 76 MARY ANN DOANE signify the mechanism of reversal its kn With the other that is so near the case of female madness c they suffer it directly in their | from the body in the constru Bs lacking. In the words of H Success, toward sublimation This theme of the over, Sarah Kofinan and Michéle M film and the spectator most be maintained, even measured, One need only think of NiMMMimmmscenatio Hereby fees the dominant system of aligning sexual difference with ‘Vobject dichotomy. And an essential attribute of that dominant system is the matchi ti male subjetivity with the agency of the lol ? E " Tuis in this sense that the very logg While the stance between he supportive binary opposition at work here is not only that utilized by Laura Mulvey between proximity and distance in relation to the im and signified (or even refe-ent) is theorized as minimal, if not non-existent, that bets Byith a passage from the sen: ging for different posti eivilization measured by the » Awhile the male has the possi Female must become that obj the image)—a point in space from which the filmic discourse is most accessible between proximity and distanoeh : ind of social hicrard nained in Christian Met's analysis of voyeuristic desire in terms of a OF the senses: “It is no accident that the main socially acceptable arts are based on the sets the py which she has to occupy, repressed, in order to be or him the very distance between desire and its object, In this sense, voyeurism is theori ecu ns bod) as.a type of meta-desir Wit i tue of all deste thot it depends om the infinite pursuit of its absent object, FARE body so close, so excess Man's in relation to signifying that lack so essential for the n dg Female specificity is thus Yet even this sats as metadesive does not filly characterize the cinema for it 2 FslBgeneg” tp the body asp voyeuristic desire, along with certain forms of sadism, is the only desire whose principle of distance symbolically andl spatially evokes this fundamental rent."° 1a, ete,). Metz thus adds another reinscript Je whl shared by other arts as well (p nting, theater & temporal distance in the + Freud’s analysis of the construc Mihere is a knowledge of sexual to see") and yet haunted by the absence of those very objects which are there to be saillmmmumne edge of sexual Absence is an absolute and irrecoverable distance. In other words, . ma isa further reduplication of the of this necessary distance, What specilies the cin prompts desire, ‘The cinema is characterized by an illusory sensory plenitude (there is * on the visibility « | Burch is quite "Giving are simultancous—th ing spectatorial desire with a certain spatial configuration. ‘The viewer ust DOUBBAedences of the Avatomic the walfpon seeing the penis for the fi lose the image of his desire fhas seen it and knows that she is Ic is precisely this opposition between proximity and distance, control of the image feud repeats this gester, a ates the possibilities of spectatorship within the problematic of sexual dilfereme gies St either too close or too far from the sercen, ‘The result of both would be the same its loss, which lo ance and, it must be For the female spectator there is a certain overpresence of the image—she is the imag ee the closeness of this relationship, the female spectator's desire can be described only i tHe first sees the woman's genit a kind {t thus appears to negate the Y8§ nothing or disowns what | lista f cof gap specified by Metz and Burch as the essential precondition for voyeurism. ¥fge Bringing i inte line vets this perspective, it important to note the constant recurrence of the mot of proxinijegeyaty to promt» recadn ries (especially those lbeled “new French feminisms”) which purport to L

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