I
Representations
BORN IN FLAMES (LIZZIE BORDEN, 1983, USA)
Chapter 1
Rethinking Womenâs Cinema
When Silvia Bovenschen in 1976 posed the question âIs there a feminine aesthetic?â the only answer she could give was, yes and no: âCertainly there is, if one is talking about aesthetic awareness and modes of sensory perception. Certainly not, if one is talking about an unusual variant of artistic production or about a painstakingly constructed theory of art.â1 If this contradiction seems familiar to anyone even vaguely acquainted with the development of feminist thought over the past fifteen years, it is because it echoes a contradiction specific to, and perhaps even constitutive of, the womenâs movement itself: a twofold pressure, a simultaneous pull in opposite directions, a tension toward the positivity of politics, or affirmative action in behalf of women as social subjects, on one front, and the negativity inherent in the radical critique of patriarchal, bourgeois culture, on the other. It is also the contradiction of women in language, as we attempt to speak as subjects of discourses which negate or objectify us through their representations. As Bovenschen put it, âWe are in a terrible bind. How do we speak? In what categories do we think? Is even logic a bit of virile trickery? . . . Are our desires and notions of happiness so far removed from cultural traditions and models?â (119).
Not surprisingly, therefore, a similar contradiction was also central to the debate on womenâs cinema, its politics and its language, as it was articulated within Anglo-American film theory in the early 1970s in relation to feminist politics and the womenâs movement, on the one hand, and to artistic avant-garde practices and womenâs filmmaking, on the other. There, too, the accounts of feminist film culture produced in the mid- to late seventies tended to emphasize a dichotomy between two concerns of the womenâs movement and two types of film work that seemed to be at odds with each other: one called for immediate documentation for purposes of political activism, consciousness raising, self-expression, or the search for âpositive imagesâ of woman; the other insisted on rigorous, formal work on the mediumâor, better, the cinematic apparatus, understood as a social technologyâin order to analyze and disengage the ideological codes embedded in representation.
Thus, as Bovenschen deplores the âopposition between feminist demands and artistic productionâ (131), the tug of war in which women artists were caught between the movementâs demands that womenâs art portray womenâs activities, document demonstrations, etc., and the formal demands of âartistic activity and its concrete work with material and mediaâ; so does Laura Mulvey set out two successive moments of feminist film culture. First, she states, there was a period marked by the effort to change the content of cinematic representation (to present realistic images of women, to record women talking about their real-life experiences), a period âcharacterized by a mixture of consciousness-raising and propaganda.â2 It was followed by a second moment, in which the concern with the language of representation as such became predominant, and the âfascination with the cinematic processâ led filmmakers and critics to the âuse of and interest in the aesthetic principles and terms of reference provided by the avant-garde traditionâ (7).
In this latter period, the common interest of both avant-garde cinema and feminism in the politics of images, or the political dimension of aesthetic expression, made them turn to the theoretical debates on language and imaging that were going on outside of cinema, in semiotics, psychoanalysis, critical theory, and the theory of ideology. Thus, it was argued that, in order to counter the aesthetic of realism, which was hopelessly compromised with bourgeois ideology, as well as Hollywood cinema, avant-garde and feminist filmmakers must take an oppositional stance against narrative âillusionismâ and in favor of formalism. The assumption was that âforegrounding the process itself, privileging the signifier, necessarily disrupts aesthetic unity and forces the spectatorâs attention on the means of production of meaningâ (7).
While Bovenschen and Mulvey would not relinquish the political commitment of the movement and the need to construct other representations of woman, the way in which they posed the question of expression (a âfeminine aesthetic,â a ânew language of desireâ) was couched in the terms of a traditional notion of art, specifically the one propounded by modernist aesthetics. Bovenschenâs insight that what is being expressed in the decoration of the household and the body, or in letters and other private forms of writing, is in fact womenâs aesthetic needs and impulses, is a crucial one. But the importance of that insight is undercut by the very terms that define it: the âpre-aesthetic realms.â After quoting a passage from Sylvia Plathâs The Bell Jar, Bovenschen comments:
Just as Plath laments that Mrs. Willardâs beautiful home-braided rug is not hung on the wall but put to the use for which it was made, and thus quickly spoiled of its beauty, so would Bovenschen have âthe objectâ of artistic creation leave its context of production and use value in order to enter the âartistic realmâ and so to âinitiate communicationâ; that is to say, to enter the museum, the art gallery, the market. In other words, art is what is enjoyed publicly rather than privately, has an exchange value rather than a use value, and that value is conferred by socially established aesthetic canons.
Mulvey, too, in proposing the destruction of narrative and visual pleasure as the foremost objective of womenâs cinema, hails an established tradition, albeit a radical one: the historic left avant-garde tradition that goes back to Eisenstein and Vertov (if not MĂ©liĂšs) and through Brecht reaches its peak of influence in Godard, and on the other side of the Atlantic, the tradition of American avant-garde cinema.
But much as Mulvey and other avant-garde filmmakers insisted that womenâs cinema ought to avoid a politics of emotions and seek to problematize the female spectatorâs identification with the on-screen image of woman, the response to her theoretical writings, like the reception of her films (codirected with Peter Wollen), showed no consensus. Feminist critics, spectators, and filmmakers remained doubtful. For example, Ruby Rich:
The questions of identification, self-definition, the modes or the very possibility of envisaging oneself as subjectâwhich the male avant-garde artists and theorists have also been asking, on their part, for almost one hundred years, even as they work to subvert the dominant representations or to challenge their hegemonyâare fundamental questions for feminism. If identification is ânot simply one psychical mechanism among others, but the operation itself whereby the human subject is constituted,â as Laplanche and Pontalis describe it, then it must be all the more important, theoretically and politically, for women who have never before represented ourselves as subjects, and whose images and subjectivitiesâuntil very recently, if at allâhave not been ours to shape, to portray, or to create.5
There is indeed reason to question the theoretical paradigm of a subject-object dialectic, whether Hegelian or Lacanian, that subtends both the aesthetic and the scientific discourses of Western culture; for what that paradigm contains, what those discourses rest on, is the unacknowledged assumption of sexual difference: that the human subject, Man, is the male. As in the originary distinction of classical myth reaching us through the Platonic tradition, human creation and all that is humanâmind, spirit, history, language, art, or symbolic capacityâis defined in contradistinction to formless chaos, phusis or nature, to something that is female, matrix and matter; and on this primary binary opposition, all the others are modeled. As Lea Melandri states,
That this proposition remains true when tested on the aesthetic of modernism or the major trends in avant-garde cinema from visionary to structural-materialist film, on the films of Stan Brakhage, Michael Snow, or Jean-Luc Godard, but is not true of the films of Yvonne Rainer, Valie Export, Chantal Akerman, or Marguerite Duras, for example; that it remains valid for the films of Fassbinder but not those of Ottinger, the films of Pasolini and Bertolucci but not Cavaniâs, and so on, suggests to me that it is perhaps time to shift the terms of the question altogether.
To ask of these womenâs films: What formal, stylistic, or thematic markers point to a female presence behind the camera? and hence to generalize and universalize, to say: This is the look and sound of womenâs cinema, this is its languageâfinally only means complying, accepting a certain definition of art, cinema, and culture, and obligingly showing how women can and do âcontribute,â pay their tribute, to âsociety.â Put another way, to ask whether there is a feminine or female aesthetic, or a specific language of womenâs cinema, is to remain caught in the masterâs house and there, as Audre Lordeâs suggestive metaphor warns us, to legitimate the hidden agendas of a culture we badly need to change. Cosmetic changes, she is telling us, wonât be enough for the majority of womenâwomen of color, black women, and white women as well; or, in her own words, âassimilation within a solely western-european herstory is not acceptable.â7
It is time we listened. Which is not to say that we should dispense with rigorous analysis and experimentation on the formal processes of meaning production, including the production of narrative, visual pleasure, and subject positions, but rather that feminist theory should now engage precisely in the redefinition of aesthetic and formal knowledges, much as womenâs cinema has been engaged in the transformation of vision.
Take Akermanâs Jeanne Dielman (1975), a film about the routine daily activities of a Belgian middle-class and middle-aged housewife, and a film where the pre-aesthetic is already fully aesthetic. That is not so, however, because of the beauty of its images, the balanced composition of its frames, the absence of the reverse shot, or the perfectly calculated editing of its still-camera shots into a continuous, logical, and obsessive narrative space; it is so because it is a womanâs actions, gestures, body, and look that define the space of our vision, the temporality and rhythms of perception, the horizon of meaning available to the spectator. So that narrative suspense is not built on the expectation of a âsignificant event,â a socially momentous act (which actually occurs, though unexpectedly and almost incidentally, one feels, toward the end of the film), but is produced by the tiny slips in Jeanneâs routine, the small forgettings, the hesitations between real-time gestures as common and âinsignificantâ as peeling potatoes, washing dishes, or making coffeeâand then not drinking it. What the film constructsâformally and artfully, to be sureâis a picture of female experience, of duration, perception, events, relationships, and silences, which feels immediately and unquestionably true. And in this sense the âpre-aestheticâ is aesthetic rather than aestheticized, as it is in films such as Godardâs Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967), Polanskiâs Repulsion (1965), or Antonioniâs Eclipse (1962). To say the same thing in another way, Akermanâs film addresses the spectator as female.
The effort, on the part of the filmmaker, to render a presence in the feeling of a gesture, to convey the sense of an experience that is subjective yet socially coded (and therefore recognizable), and to do so formally, working through her conceptual (one could say, theoretical) knowledge of film form, is averred by Chantal Akerman in an interview on the making of Jeanne Dielman:
This lucid statement of poetics resonates with my own response as a viewer and gives me something of an explanation as to why I recognize in those unusual film images, in those movements, those silences, and those looks, the ways of an experience all but unrepresented, previously unseen in film, though lucidly and unmistakably apprehended here. And so the statement cannot be dismissed with commonplaces such as authorial intention or intentional fallacy. As another critic and spectator points out, there are âtwo logicsâ at work in this film, âtwo modes of ...