Gender and Film

HND Film Studies

 Early feminist position

• Classic Hollywood period

• Femininity – spectacle
• Masculinity – sign and performance

• Complexity in contemporary film

 Women in Film
• Lillian Gish
• Mary Pickford

• Alice Guy Blaché – 1896

• 26 women directors before 1930 (Hollywood)
• Frances Marion – screenwriter
• Between 1911 – 1925 half of all copyrighted
films written by women compared to 21% in
2001
 Lois Weber

• Directed over 75 films

 ‘The Talkies’
• Indirectly led to the demise of jobs for
women in the industry

Christopher Strong (1933)

Dorothy Arzner

Dance Girl Dance (1940)

Only Dorothy Arzner survived
 Women in UK Film -
• Alma Reville – worked with Hitchcock
• Documentary movement in UK
• - Ruby Grierson – Housing Problems (1940)

• UK Fiction feature directors – Muriel Box – The

Seventh Veil (1945)
• Wendy Toye – Raising A Riot (1957)
• - We Joined The Navy (1962) Dirk Bogarde,
Kenneth More
Muriel Box
 Wendy Toye
• Raising A Riot

•Raising A Riot (1957)

We Joined The Navy (1962)

 Commercial Success was rare
• Before 1970, with the exception of Box
and Arzner – it was rare for women to
work in technical areas such as sound or
camera, though female art directors and
film editors not so unusual;

• Ann V. Coates edited Muriel Box’s The

Truth About Women (1958) and David
Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
 1960’s and rise of feminism
• By 90’s more women were working in
previously male dominated areas of film;

• Camera – Dianne Tammes, Sue Gibson,

Belinda Parsons

• Sound – Diana Ruston, Moya Burns

 Women Directors
• Sally Potter – The Gold Diggers (1982), Orlando (1993), The
Man Who Cried (2000)
• Gurinder Chada – Bhaji On The Beach (1993), Bend It Like
Beckham (2002)
• Sharon Maguire – Bridget Jones’ Diary (2001)
• Nicola Holfcener – Lovely and Amazing (2001)
• Lisa Choldenko – Laurel Canyon (2002)
• Jane Campion – The Piano (1993)
• Kathryn Bigelow – The Hurt Locker (2008)
 Case Study
• Morvern Callar (2002) directed by Lynne
Ramsay

• How does this film contradict mainstream

cinema in representing female characters?

• How does Ramsay promote an alternative

view to a patriarchal model?
 Feminist Texts?
• Thelma and Louise (1991)
• Charlie’s Angels (2001)
• Baise-moi (2000) – French Film written
and directed by Virginie Despontes and
Coralie Trinh Thi
 The Feminist Revolution
• Betty Friedan – book - The Feminine
Mystique (1963)
• Stereotyped representations of women

• Feminism challenges a patriarchal society

• Expansion of feminism coincided with a
flourishing avant - garde cinema, alternative
cinema and independent cinema –
encouraged workshops in UK
 LWFG - 1972
• London Women’s Film Group
• Housing estates, Trades Unions, factories

• Documentary was favoured form

• Linda Dove – ‘we tended to reject
commercial films as the ideological
products of capitalist, sexist, racist
society…’
 Film as ‘window on the world’
• This notion was challenged by feminist
film makers in the 1970’s such as
• Laura Mulvey
• Sally Potter
• Mulvey along with Claire Johnston were
the early source of of feminist film theory
 Claire Johnston
• ‘Women’s Cinema as Counter Cinema’
(1973) woman is seen as an extension of
a male vision in mainstream cinema;
stereotyped narrowly.
 Pleasure, looking and gender
• Psychoanalytic theory (Freud, Lacan) was
influential on development of feminist film
theory

• Laura Mulvey – ‘Visual Pleasure and

Narrative Cinema’ (1975) – ‘the look’
(male gaze) – scopophilia – Freudian
term; sexual pleasure gained from looking
 Scopophilia
• In Freudian theory woman represents ‘desire’ but also
‘fear’ of castration (difference represents threat)
• Two elements of scopophilia according to Mulvey;

• Voyeurism – scopohilic pleasure gained from sexual

attraction
• Narcissistic Identification

• Woman as ‘erotic object’ for both audience and

characters in the narrative
 How can the mainstream be
rejected?
• This could alienate audiences

• Ann Kaplan suggested that feminist

directors work within the mainstream to
manipulate the forms and conventions

• Annette Kuhn argues that viewers should

be active
 Mulvey
• Mulvey updated her ideas in 1981 to focus
on response (in female viewers) rather
than representation (of women on screen)
• Debt to Lacan who emphasised the
‘fictional, constructed nature of masculinity
and femininity’
• Woman as ‘other’
 Other Feminist Critics
• Terry Lovell – refuted Lacan’s focus on the
individual
• Tania Modleski – in Hitchcock’s folms both
men and women can become objects of
‘the look’ (Marnie 1964, North By
Northwest 1959)
• Jackie Byars – argues for female
spectatorship and argues that the’gaze’ is
strongly female