On the Edges of the Authorial Voice: Liv Ullmann’s Faithless, Gendered Authorship, and Ingmar Bergman

Abstract

The social and political upheavals of the 1970s transformed, if not radicalised, film culture in the United States and Western Europe. Such a context of social change allowed a rethinking of gender politics in the cinema, in part giving rise to feminist film theory and criticism as the discourse with which to analyse, question, critique, and challenge the cinematic apparatus and the ideological underpinnings leading to mainstream, or Hollywood, representations of women. With reference to American cinema, the near collapse of the studio system in the 1970s gave rise to two phenomena: (1) the rise of the American New Wave and (2) the emergence of a liberal feminist sensibility in mainstream films, what Annette Kuhn (1986) calls ‘the new women’s cinema.’ Examples of these films would include Kramer vs Kramer (Robert Benton, 1979), a divorce and custody drama starring Meryl Streep; Cagney and Lacey (Ted Post, 1981), a film about two female police officers that could only have been inspired by feminist activism; Nine to Five (Colin Higgins, 1980), a comic exploration of workplace sexual harassment; and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (Martin Scorsese, 1974), a film that charts a single mother’s trajectory after the death of her husband.KeywordsSexual PoliticsExtramarital AffairFemale PoliceEpisodic FormAmerican CinemaThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.