Ex-Changing the Gaze: Re-Visioning Feminist Film Theory

Abstract

Social movements of the 20th century, from the Russian Revolution through the proletarian mass movements of the 1920s up to the student movement and new women's movement have declared a particular interest in the cinema, motivated by the appearance of film as a mass phenomenon. Carlo Mierendorff, a German expressionist writer who became a leading social democrat in cultural politics and the resistance against Hitler, gives the following description of the cinema's audience in a programmatic essay of 1920: are the class of those who live without books. Those with a vocabulary of sixty words. (...) Those never reached by a literary author, perhaps by a newspaper, perhaps by a flyer, perhaps by a five-minute speech during an electoral campaign before they re-emerge into anonymity. They belong to the cinema: where they feel free to come and go, as a matter of course; where they do not have to mistrust but may experience enthusiasm, pain, pleasure, enrapture (absorption?). An audience of millions which comes and lives and goes, which has no name and yet exists, which moving as an enormous mass is the shaping force of everything and which therefore we must get hold of. There is no other means but the cinema. (...) Whoever has the cinema has a lever for subverting the world.' The politically motivated interest in the cinema as mass phenomenon, however, is inseparable from insights into the quality of cinematic fascination, insights that go beyond the mere statistical juggling with capacity figures of movie theaters. For anyone seriously involved with cinematic fascination, an investigation into the aesthetics of cinema became inevitable. Thus B6la Balizs writes in 1924: I feel like the