Feminist Film Theory and Cléo from 5 to 7

Hilary Neroni

• Verlag: Bloomsbury Academic
• Jahr: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781501313714
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Thema: Film & Video

The Film Theory in Practice series fills a gaping hole in the world of film theory. By marrying the explanation of a film theory with the interpretation of a film, the volumes provide discrete examples of how film theory can serve as the basis for textual analysis. Feminist Film Theory and Cléo from 5 to 7 offers a concise introduction to feminist film theory in jargon-free language and shows how this theory can be deployed to interpret Agnes Varda's critically acclaimed 1962 film Cléo from 5 to 7. Hilary Neroni employs the methodology of looking for a feminist alternative among female-oriented films. Through three key concepts-identification, framing the woman's body, and the female auteur-Neroni lays bare the debates and approaches within the vibrant history of feminist film theory, providing a point of entry to feminist film theory from its inception to today. Picking up one of the currents in feminist film theory - that of looking for feminist alternatives among female-oriented films - Neroni traces feminist responses to the contradictions inherent in most representations of women in film, and she details how their responses have intervened in changing what we see on the screen.

CHAPTER ONE

Feminist Film Theory

Feminism and identification

There is, of course, neither one type of feminism nor one type of feminist film theory. Most major ideas within feminist film theory inspire various competing positions. Nonetheless, it is this very struggle among feminist film theorists to analyze how cinema interacts with gender that constitutes its vibrancy and urgency. The contradictory ideals of femininity (sex object on the one hand versus mother on the other) inform the vast majority of representations of women throughout the history of film. Feminist film theory works to highlight this contradiction as well as debate its effects. Identification, framing the woman’s body, and the importance of the female auteur are three concepts that have been lightning rods for debate within feminist film theory. Additionally, these three concepts mark the concern in feminist film theory with how the female body has been employed to sell ideology. Feminist film theorists often look to the female filmmakers who similarly grapple with this question and can provide new insight into it.

In Cléo from 5 to 7, as I’ll demonstrate in the following chapter, AgnèsVarda—by privileging spectator engagement over spectator identification and through her unique framing of the woman’s body—reveals the contradictions at the heart of ideal femininity. Namely, she reveals that the image of ideal femininity both creates identity and erases it at the same time. Depicting this conflict prompts spectators to become aware of the disjunction at the core of femininity; it also prompts them to analyze the relationship between being a woman, ideological ideal female beauty, and identity as such. In this way, Varda engages ideal beauty while making the viewer aware of its relationship to nothingness—the fact that there is nothing substantial to it. The following investigations into identification, framing the woman’s body, and the importance of the female auteur identify separate concepts in feminist film theory but also come together to illuminate new modes of feminist thinking.

Feminist film theorists, especially from the 1970s and 1980s, argued that identification—created through camera positioning, editing, and narrative structure—solidified the dominance of the male position. They argued that spectators identified with the male character and that filmmakers built the entire structure of the film around this initial identification. Others, including black feminists, queer feminists, and third wave feminists argued that film’s address to its spectator was much more contradictory, flexible, and multilayered than early feminists had suggested. These critiques revealed the importance of theorizing identity as such, urging it to be both more universal and at the same time more aware of the intersections between the universal and the particular. The ideological contradictions within femininity had particular expressions but also resonated because of their relationship with universal ideas about identity. Feminism takes as its primary task the investigation of these relationships between the particular and the universal of female identity. In this light, the questions of where spectators entered the text, how this occurred, and what effect it had on spectators were essential questions for how film interacts with ideology.

Identification began as a fundamental concept in film theory in general. For this reason, it functions as an umbrella term for several issues, but theories of identification tend to consider the way in which the spectator identifies with the main character. Theories about identification also address how the spectator invests in the filmic process in general. These theories pose such questions as: what is the relationship between the spectator and their enjoyment of the film? Is identification the vehicle for the enjoyment of the spectator and her investment in the trajectory of the film? Feminist film theory intervened in this discussion by arguing that identification was a politically charged process that reinforced gender stereotypes, sustained hierarchies, and in general contributed to the oppression of women. This argument, which will be explained at length here, had a significant impact on film studies itself. It also began a debate, which continues to this day, about how feminist film theory should be defined and whether the very concept of identification is useful for feminist film theory.

There are several key theoretical developments that occur in the twenty years leading up to the moment when feminist film theorists, beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, argued that identification—manipulated through camera positioning, editing, and narrative structure—solidified the dominance of the male position in the social order. One of the key developments were the ideas of French film theorists Christian Metz and Jean-Louis Baudry, who originated what is now known as screen theory.

Screen theory

Published in 1970 in the journal Cinéthique, Jean-Louis Baudry’s “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus” combines the ideas of several prominent theorists to explain the power of cinema. For Baudry, the cinema screen acts as a mirror reflecting not reality but a fantasy of reality back to us. This fantasy is ideology itself. That is, it is the cultural belief system we are steeped in which then reinforces itself. This idea is a combination of both psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s essay on the mirror stage and Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser’s conception of ideology.¹ Lacan theorizes that the mirror stage in a child’s development occurs when she looks into the mirror and identifies with an illusion of bodily control rather than recognizing her actual stage of development. Key to this idea is that it is the initial misrecognition that prompts the development of the ego and the sense of wholeness that accompanies it. Althusser, on the other hand, conceives how concrete individuals became enmeshed in ideology by relating to themselves as subjects. He believes that ideology hails individuals who have no choice but to accept the hail. Even in the act of rejecting the hail, one misrecognizes oneself as its addressee. The source of the power of ideology, for Althusser, is that even under the thrall of ideology individuals still mistakenly feel that they have freedom. Althusser feels that this mistaken idea gave ideology its overriding power to dominate the individual.²

Baudry brings these ideas to bear on two aspects of the cinema: that we are aligned with the camera to feel a sense of mastery over the image and that narrative editing styles work to hide the constructed nature of the film. According to Baudry, this makes cinema a tool of ideology. Baudry argues, “It is an apparatus destined to obtain a precise ideology effect, necessary to the dominant ideology: creating a fantasmatization of the subject, it collaborates with a marked efficacity in the maintenance of idealism.”³ Ideology, according to Baudry, was implicitly harmful because it molded individuals according to its dictates and all the while made them feel as though it was their choice. At the time, Baudry’s conception of how cinema operates was an essential tool for seeing the way ideology functioned, but later its limitations became evident. Nonetheless, this critique was a powerful tool for feminist theorists to explain how culture reinforces women’s oppression.

Christian Metz also had an impact on feminist film theory by providing detailed tools to analyze a film. His project was to understand why film had such a significant impact on the spectator’s imagination. Metz was less interested in ideology than in the film’s structure, including the camera techniques, editing, and story. Metz was, like many in France at the time, interested in structuralism, specifically in relation to linguistics and psychoanalysis.

Metz views the film as the site of an imaginary relationship for the spectator that hides the structure informing that relationship. As a result, he understands the project of the film theorist to be one of making the structure evident. The theorist explains what the film obscures through its emphasis on image. One makes clear to spectators that a film is not just a story without a teller (as it first appears) but a discourse articulated from a specific (tendentious) perspective.

Both Metz and Baudry theorized that the film’s structure affected the spectator’s psyche. They analyzed film as a system of signifiers that interacted with the spectator’s imagination in powerful ways and reinforced social structures. Their approach provided important tools for feminists to begin to make strong arguments about how this system of signifiers defined gender. These were powerful analytic tools that brought culture to the fore, but Metz and Baudry did not talk about gender. Nor did they proffer a theory about how representation or the lack of representation had material consequences on people in society.

Other influences on 1970s feminism: From Beauvoir to the Civil Rights Movement

Feminist film theorists of the 1970s began to address the lack of gender awareness in Screen theory. But this project did not emerge out of thin air. It had its roots in the feminist movement, which was a powerful force in western society throughout the twentieth century and especially in the 1960s and 1970s. The feminist movement took its bearing from practical responses to oppression, but it also relied on the insights of feminist theory.

There were several prominent feminist theorists whose ideas opened up the possibility for feminist film theory. Through the lens of existentialism, French theorist Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) was instrumental in laying out a structural analysis of how women take on their identity. Beauvoir famously argues that women are not born women but rather they become women. In The Second Sex, she sketches out women’s relation to economics, religion, marriage, biology, and their own psyche. She argues that men constitute the center of the social and that women have the status of the other. Beauvoir argues, “History has shown us that men have always held all the concrete powers; from patriarchy’s earliest times they have deemed it useful to keep woman in a state of dependence; their codes were set up against her; and she was thus concretely established as the Other.”⁴ Reproduction does not require that society constructs women in this way, but our specific social order under patriarchy perpetuates it. Beauvoir reveals that society as a whole relies on the idea that man is the subject and woman is his complementary other. This other is his prize, his inspiration, and, at the same time, what he fears. Woman is bound to the man, and her otherness defines his subjectivity. In this sense, according to Beauvoir, women are integral to society and yet necessarily inferior.

For Beauvoir, this social order is inextricably bound up with the imagery of women, which illustrates for women what they are supposed to be modeling themselves on. It is in this sense that she points the way for future feminist film theory. The images of women are powerful and instructive, but they are also confusing. The common images for women, she finds, take two opposed forms—the mother and the sexual object. Women do not have one ideal but rather have a pair of contradictory ideals. One might contend that the princess is a key stepping stone to becoming a wife and then a mother, but the qualities, Beauvoir points out, do not necessarily translate insofar as one lends itself to the other. These representations, therefore, can never be fully realized since by embodying one ideal you necessarily fail in the other.

In response to this oppressive situation, Beauvoir calls for people to recognize each other as subjects and thus for an end to woman’s position as man’s other. Along the same lines, she demands political and economic equality for women. Beauvoir’s ideas are considered the early start to the second wave since they tied the psyche to culture and to economics, which is what the second wave emphasized. While Beauvoir certainly revealed how men played a role in women’s oppression, she also analyzed why women bought into the system as well as how they contributed to it.

US theorist Betty Friedan’s treatise on the situation of women in The Feminine Mystique (1963) played a similarly important role in feminism’s second wave, though her involvement was much more direct. In addition to writing her polemical text, Friedan cofounded the National Organization of Women in the United States in 1966. Friedan’s book attacked the ideals of femininity and womanhood from the 1950s. She felt that women were sliding backwards from the rights they had secured with the first wave of feminism and the passage of 19th Amendment to the US Constitution for women’s suffrage in 1920. While women, for example, were going to college in the 1950s, they often saw it as place to find a husband rather than a place to develop their minds. Along with these statistics, Freidan reports in her book that girls were expected to assume sexual looks earlier and earlier. The expectation of younger sexual expression directly contradicted with the expectations of motherhood. While her critique was impactful, many critiqued Friedan for concentrating solely on upper-class white women. The picture Friedan painted may have been true for white upper-class women, but it certainly wasn’t true for lower-class black and white women, who had been working outside the home their whole lives to support their families. Nonetheless, the prevailing fantasies of femininity during the 1950s, Friedan argues, affected the social order in general and needed to be changed. Her book was as much an exposé as a call to action. It argued that the social order’s image of femininity, perpetuated by the media, was a major contributor to this feminine mystique that was keeping women away from finding careers or working outside of the home at all. This led to many women who were entirely dissatisfied with their lives but didn’t understand why.

From the standpoint of feminist theory, Beauvoir’s concept that the social order constructs women and Friedan’s argument that cultural expectations blinded women allowed for women in the 1970s to begin to theorize their position in society with more sophistication. It also allowed them to imagine how changes to cultural expectations could begin. While first wave feminism fought for rights to vote and attend college, second wave feminism saw the need for culture to change. Identification with cultural expectations and media depictions of femininity became one of the battlegrounds of feminism. Women, according to second wave feminism, identified with expectations that restricted their behavior. Both Beauvoir and Friedan, through vastly different approaches, opened people’s eyes to these nuances of culture. Beauvoir linked this to philosophical questions about existence, while Friedan provided more practical observations—both of which allowed feminists to see their situation in a new way and begin their own analyses.

Another important social, theoretical, and political movement that influenced feminist film theory as well as feminism in the United States was the Civil Rights movement. The Civil Rights movement argued that oppression and representation—in government, laws, popular culture—operated together. The movement made clear that without equal representation African Americans could never have equality in the United States. The Civil Rights movements worked on many fronts, including laws about voting, segregation of public spaces, equal housing, and equal work. As the Civil Rights movement worked on each of these issues, the question of equality within cultural representations also became a pressing issue. Civil Rights workers realized that representation in history, in art, in museums, on television, and in film had a significant impact on swaying public opinion. Women working for the civil rights movement brought these approaches to the feminist movement. In this way, the Civil Rights movement and the feminist movement in the 1970s worked together on the contradictions of identification as well as their effects on the social order. This convergence of theories about the power of cultural expectations reveals the entwined nature of theorizing gender and race. In subsequent decades, sexuality and class were also a key part of this discussion, so that in contemporary theory the problem of identity becomes even more complex. Nevertheless, this does not mitigate the importance of individual theories. It is the particular revelations of, for example, critical race studies, feminist theory, or queer theory that allows for a thorough investigation of the universal questions of identity and the universal questions then shed light on the particular theories.

Additionally, while each of these approaches had been accused at different times of ignoring the concerns of the others, the contemporary theorist can see the concerns in common, and can approach a topic—say, a film or a television show—with an eye toward the contradictions of identity that reside therein. From this point of contradiction, one can interrogate identity. Feminist film theory today can hold onto the concerns that have to do with the representations of gender through its awareness of the inherently contradictory nature of identity. This approach will lead to...