Women In Film Research Articles

Pornochanchada do avesso: o caso das mulheres monstruosas em filmes de horror da Boca do Lixo

Este artigo discute uma série de pornochanchadas de horror realizadas no Brasil entre o final dos anos 1970 e o começo dos 1980 que foram protagonizadas por mulheres monstruosas e tiveram homens como suas vítimas principais, invertendo uma das estruturas básicas do filme erótico brasileiro, que consistia na representação dos homens sempre mais fortes e ameaçadores do que as mulheres. O objetivo é demonstrar que o cinema praticado nos estertores da pornochanchada trazia alguma discussão sobre a condição feminina no cinema e na sociedade, mostrando capacidade de reflexão e de auto-crítica que nem sempre é considerada na análise dessa cinematografia.

‘From grade B thrillers to deluxe chillers’: prestige horror, female audiences, and allegories of spectatorship in The Spiral Staircase (1946)

This paper examines the prestige ‘shocker’ The Spiral Staircase (1946), suggesting that it challenges the perception of the decline in quality in the horror genre in the 1940s, as well as assumptions in scholarship that the genre has historically been addressed to a male audience. Whilst the film is usually discussed as a woman's film, on release it was centred as part of a distinct shift in the horror genre from ‘grade B thrillers to deluxe chillers’. The reclassification of films like The Spiral Staircase as woman's films could be seen as an attempt to make text fit established theory – the film is addressed to a female audience and thus cannot be a horror film. Through an analysis of textual and extra-textual discourses, including reception and publicity materials, this paper will challenge the pervasive theories that suggest female pleasure or identification is unattainable in horror spectatorship. Whilst the theory is that women refuse to look at horror, averting their eyes or turning away, in 1946 The Spiral Staircase asked a predominantly female audience to take a closer look and question the very act of looking at the cinema screen.

‘Thrills and chills’: horror, the woman's film, and the origins of film noir

This paper examines the use of the terms ‘horror film’ and ‘thriller’ in the film reviews of the 1940s and demonstrates that they were not seen as two distinct generic categories but, on the contrary, while these terms were not precisely equivalent, they were often used interchangeably. As a result, many films commonly understood as horror films today were identified as thrillers at the time and many films that are identified as thrillers today were clearly described as horror films. Furthermore, the term ‘thriller’ was not primarily associated with action or suspense, but rather with the shivers and chills often associated with certain forms of horror. The point here is not to claim that particular films or groups of films ‘really’ belong to one category or another but rather to explore the ways in which generic categories operated within the 1940s and, in the process, to demonstrate that in the 1940s the films commonly categorized today as examples of the paranoid woman's film and film noir were often seen as part of a larger cycle of horror films within the period.

The Gendered Score: Music in 1940s Melodrama and the Woman's Film. By Heather Laing.

Film-music studies and gender studies have come a long way in musicology. Each has established productive lines of enquiry, and each boasts important monographs whose influence extends well beyond the specific field. To take two famous examples, Susan McClary's Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis, 1991) and Claudia Gorbman's Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington, Ind., 1987) have become iconic in their respective area and spurred imaginative research across topical borders. Somewhat surprisingly, investigation of film music in terms of gender is only in its infancy. Heather Laing attempts to fill the gap through her study of gender and film music in 1940s films. The book is only partly successful in its ambitious goal, but at its best has a great deal to contribute. A pathbreaking study, it promises to jump-start further work on gender and film music. Laing's premiss is simple. In 1940s films in which a woman has a key role, specifically melodrama and the so-called woman's film, non-diegetic music crafts women's emotional make-up, while diegetic music is reserved for men, especially as performers and composers. This divide echoes long-standing ideological binaries between women's tie with emotions and men's connection with the mind and, by extension, artistic creativity and control. The core of the study consists of four interpretative chapters (2–5) on key repertory linked with certain functions of women's appearance in the films. Chapter 2 takes up the Hollywood tear-jerker Now, Voyager (1942) with respect to women and dialogue, which Laing confusedly refers to as ‘voice’, which can mean something quite different from spoken words. The next chapter explores the female listener in relation to the male performer in Max Ophuls's Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), an American film that is unfortunately unavailable at present in video format. Chapter 4 concerns the female musician—woman as musical agent—in the British war-time film Love Story (1944). Finally, chapter 5 addresses the male musician in another British war-time film, Dangerous Moonlight (1941). Laing justifies the inclusion of a masculine focus by arguing that this is needed to highlight the differences with the treatment of women, the stated focus of the book.

Questions for a Women's Cinema: Fact, Fiction and Memory in the Films of Naomi Kawase

This article discusses the formal aspects and thematic concerns of the award-winning Japanese filmmaker Naomi Kawase's fiction films, especially Mourning Forest [2007; Mogari no mori], the blurring of fiction and non-fiction in her work, and her autobiographical impulses, as a case study in the contemporary explorations of gender and generational relations in Japan.

North Country's Hero and Her Cinematic Lawyer: Can “Lawyer Films” and “Women's Films” Merge to Launch a New Feminist Sub-Genre?

North Country is a powerful Hollywood depiction of one woman's painful yet triumphant struggle to establish sexual harassment in the workplace as “class action” and to compel a workplace to stop its harassing practices. The article compares the cinematic version to the historical event on which it relies but focuses on reading the film in the context of two prolific and popular, yet very distinct, Hollywood genres: “the woman's film” (including the woman's/maternal melodrama, battered wives films, sexual victims films, blue collar activist women films) and “the law and lawyers film.” Reading North Country along this complex cinematic context reveals how, by implementing unconventional references to familiar Hollywood formulas, the film opens up an innovative possibility, constructing a blue collar woman who, through her war on sexual harassment in the workplace, becomes a social activist and a community leader and prevails on all fronts: in her legal suit, in transforming her community's values, and in regaining her family. By subverting traditional cinematic expectations, the film conveys some very “radical” feminist arguments, including that rape, domestic violence, and sexual harassment in the workplace are means of patriarchal domination and oppression of women and that a woman suffering abuse is not necessarily either a victim or an agent: she can be both. The article poses the question whether the film's intriguing new statement, which yielded some box office success, will turn its formula into a Hollywood “sub-genre.”

Tearing Speech to Pieces : Voice technologies of the 1940s

The Voder and the Sonovox were voice technologies that had a significant impact on radio and film production during the 1940s. In this essay, I examine the cultural life of these mid-century talking machines, with a focus on the use of the Sonovox in radio advertising and the Hollywood 'women's films' Possessed (1947) and Letter to Three Wives (1949). An examination of these devices, the discourses that surrounded them, and their use in media texts can add to our understanding of the cultural history of sound recording and vocal performance, the use of sound in film melodrama, and overlaps between radio and film sound production in the 1940s. Because of its ability to make recorded sounds take on the qualities of human speech, the Sonovox found success in the relatively new area of radio spot advertising, where it could make consumer products 'speak' to a largely female audience. In Hollywood films, the Sonovox made objects speak the unconscious thoughts and anxieties of female characters. Operated by women, with the goal of speaking to a female audience, gender was thus a determining factor in shaping the cultural life of voice technologies of the 1940s. Acknowledging the female operators behind these voice technologies helps us to understand some of the factors that shaped their use in media production, and also represents a small gesture towards redressing the larger erasure of female labour in the cultural industries.

The Women's Film History Project and Women and the Silent Screen

In the beginning, there was the 1978 Brighton conference. This was the catalyst for a renewed scholarly interest in cinema's early years and the installation of film theory within film history. About a decade after the turn to the ‘new historicism’ in mainstream film studies, groundbreaking publications in women's film history began to emerge. Kay Sloan focused on a number of women directors in The Loud Silents: Origins of the Social Problem Film,1 and in Unheimlichkeit des Blicks2 Heide Schlupmann analyzed early cinema in Wilhelmian Germany, highlighting a potential for oppositional women's perceptions.3 Miriam Hansen's Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film4 offered an expanded view of the historicity of women in the silent screen era, and the first book-length study of a single woman director from the silent era came with Giuliana Bruno's Streetwalking on a Ruined Map,5 a seminal work that synthesized theories of feminine subjectivity and representation with film history and production. Cultural studies opened new vistas, decentring the filmic text to ‘make way for a more open, dispersed and non-linear field of research in which film is studied as an intersection of a range of discourses that circulate through a culture, a shift which leads to investigations of representation, reception and production through intertextual, intermedial, and contextual perspectives’.6 Shelley Stamp's Movie Struck Girls7 took up Hansen's baton along with cultural studies methodologies, and the book's title became a catchphrase in studies of spectatorship in the silent era. The camera obscura special issue on early women stars edited by Diane Negra8 was followed by A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema,9 a giant tome that presents the groundswell of US scholarship on early cinema.10 Kino International and Milestone concurrently released videos of silent films by women directors, and independent documentaries about early women filmmakers appeared in profusion, for example, The Lost Garden: the Life and Cinema of Alice Guy Blache (NFB, 1995) and Reel Models: the Women of Early Film (American Movie Classic, 2000). A new movement in feminist film scholarship and production was underway with a generation of women scholars who had been trained in film studies and were bent on making a mark on the discipline.

Lesbian minor cinema

This essay reframes the question of the relative paucity of lesbian feature films by looking at works that deploy a certain ‘poverty’ – in terms of means of production or aesthetic approach – in order to deflect audience demand for familiar stories, happy endings, repeatable pleasures, identity assurances. Although such practices do not and should not circumscribe the field of audiovisual work by and about lesbians, they enact the intersection of authorship and audience, form and subject matter, and desire and identification in crucial ways. Chantal Akerman's Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the 60s in Brussels (1994) and Sadie Benning's Flat Is Beautiful (1998), in their length, mode, spare formal language and thematic concern with the liminal sexual and gender identities of their young female protagonists, actively engage the process of exclusion by the mainstream and suggest the appellation ‘minor cinema’. The concept of lesbian minor cinema draws on Deleuze and Guattari's notion of minor literature and Alison Butler's modification of their work in the context of women's cinema. Exemplifying the ‘collective enunciation’, relative poverty of means, and political potential that characterizes the minor, lesbian work that deals with girlhood also addresses the ‘minor’ as a subject of sexuality.

The “New Man” in Cuba: Culture and Identity in the Revolution

For scholars who grew up considering the Cuban Revolution to be a beacon for the world, it is a challenge to engage in serious criticism of Cuba after 1959, as if it may somehow be a betrayal of their own utopian ideals. Ana Serra notes that she certainly felt that personal conflict in examining the subjectivity that informs several novels of the Cuban Revolution, a subjectivity made all the more complicated and poignant because it operates within the institutional discourse rather than at the margins of exclusion. One of Serra’s most effective images, which also sets the unifying theme for the book, is of the socialist “new man” accompanied in the novels by his shadows, the Others whom the bureaucrats of culture excluded from the utopian project, either because of perceived weaknesses or faulty attitudes or conduct or because ambiguity in the arts translated automatically as ambivalence and doubt in an age of doctrinal certainty.Serra presents this struggle within each literary text through an abundant analysis of representations of the utopian paradigms in official discourse (speeches, articles, posters, film), skillfully integrating a dazzling range of critical scholarship and original interviews into the conceptual matrix, and referencing the central problematic of each chapter to the most pertinent theoretical works. The strategies vary, from tracing the intellectual genealogy of the material (for example, Sartre and Camus for Edmundo Desnoes’s Memorias del subdesarrollo) to framing the discussion of Daura Olema García’s Maestra voluntaria (about the 1961 literacy campaign) with the benefit of chronological distance and hindsight on the first empirical experiences, using J. Elspeth Stuckey’s 1991 Violence of Literacy as a crucial source.Serra combines historical, political, and literary-cultural elements effectively in her chapter on Miguel Cossío Woodward’s Sacchario, the novel of the 1970 zafra, the failed megaharvest that resulted in a public acknowledgment of failure by the political leadership. What the late Ambrosio Fornet celebrated as a definitive novel about the “epic vanguard” in which the protagonist merges with the collectivity, Serra sees as a novel in which “the narrator as craftsman takes centre stage,” prevented by “the pleasure of the text” from “disappearing behind the unity of the nation he has created.”Manuel Cofiño’s La última mujer y el próximo combate is deconstructed as a novel where female identities remain trapped largely in traditional functions. For this chapter Serra draws largely on Laura Mulvey’s work on women in cinema, and she explores the intersection of race and gender in the mulata character through history as a symbolic representation of the nation.The chapter on Pablo Armando Fernández’s Los niños se despiden opens with a refutation of Martínez Estrada’s notion that the Cuba of the revolution was Thomas More’s dream come to fruition. By untangling the novel’s enmeshed chronologies, Serra arrives at an alternative reading: the retrospective on the demographic movements before the revolution can become a metaphor for the post-1959 migrations, and the children’s departure for the countryside is a remnant of hope for the utopian project beyond the institutionalized revolution. Nonetheless, Serra also supports the view that this novel is an important key to the understanding of Cuban identity, in which family, home, nation, and history are inseparable.Finally, Serra turns to Leonardo Padura Fuentes’s tetralogy and its protagonist, Lieutenant Mario Conde, who emerges in the 1980s as a unique expression of the current of discontent with corruption and political opportunism. Serra calls these novels “a tribute to the withering away of revolutionary ideology and the current search for alternate ideologies or narratives in Cuba” (p. 170), yet in response one might argue that Conde, in his relentless struggle to unmask and combat the corruption of the utopian project, is in fact the representation of the new man, albeit an increasingly isolated one. As a questioner and an observer of events and cultural shifts he acts fundamentally as a true revolutionary, along the lines proposed by Che Guevara and by the young Marx before him.The introduction is a delicately balanced survey of the critical literature and of the central issues facing Cuban intellectuals between 1959 and the 1980s. The entire monograph is rich in resources and interdisciplinary linkage; critical concepts are freed from strict disciplinary constraints and arcane jargon, and the cultural history of the Cuban Revolution is elucidated through its ambiguities and contradictions. It is an intelligent exponent of the value of cultural studies and makes Cuban studies accessible to a wider scholarly community.

A Hollywood Fairytale: Renoir's Diary of a Chambermaid

jean renoir's Hollywood adaptation of Octave Mirbeau's turn-of-thecentury novel baffled critics on both sides of the Atlantic. The French critics generally panned it as a Hollywood sellout, and the Americans dubbed it too French for homegrown audiences.2 While it is reminiscent of themes of Renoir's great realist films of the 1930s in which issues of class and gender predominate, it treats those themes in an entirely new manner. A story that makes for a perfect naturalist film is turned on its head to become a bizarre clash of farce and tragedy, both a romp and a dark exploration of human greed and manipulation. It is this odd combination that makes the film resistant to easy categorizations, but also what renders it a fascinating mix of old and new in Renoir's cinema. It re-engages with earlier themes through new forms of representation, and does so from the refreshing perspective of a questing heroine. Celestine's journey from chambermaid to wife of a wealthy man is certainly the stuff of fairytales, but it is also a product of Hollywood's dream factory, and the film takes an interesting detour through 1940s gothic romance and the women's film in its heyday. Viewed from this angle, Diary of a Chambermaid is less a case of what the critics saw as a failed realism than a fairytale in realist garb, and one refracted through Hollywood melodrama of the war years. Mirbeau's novel, in diary form, focuses on the ubiquitous corruption, egotism, cruelty, and perversion of the ruling classes as observed by Celestine throughout her life as a chambermaid in aristocratic and bourgeois households. With subtle psychological detail, it also bears witness to the corruption of Celestine herself as she succumbs to the seductions of Joseph, the valet to the Lanlaires, who not only shares the anti-republican, Catholic, and anti-Semitic values of his masters, but is probably a murderer as well. Mirbeau's vitriolic social critique presents a France in the grips of a right-wing militaristic and xenophobic patriotism espoused with grim determination by the lower classes. Joseph and Celestine end up married owners of a bar in Cherbourg where just such elements are welcome. © South Central Review 25.2 (Summer 2008): 45-62.

The gendered score: music in 1940s melodrama and the women's film

The gendered score: music in 1940s melodrama and the women's film

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Teaching the Middle Ages on Film: Visual Narrative and the Historical Record

A comparatively new medium, film can be used for a range of discussions about the ways in which history is recorded, edited, shaped, and remembered; it is also useful for teaching contemporary interpretation of older literatures. Like historical fiction – or works of art more generally – movies with historical themes are most productively studied in their broader contexts, alongside, and in conjunction with, written sources. The classroom provides a perfect venue for such study. While reading and analyzing older texts, students can also be taught to read films for their authenticity, their accuracy or inaccuracy of detail in portraying the past, and for effective (or ineffective) use of purposeful or intentional anachronism, among other approaches. Film enhances the study of texts; careful reading of texts may, in turn, lead to more critical evaluation of film.

Spectrality in Indigenous Women's Cinema: Tracey Moffatt and Beck Cole

This paper addresses two recent Aboriginal ghost stories produced by Aboriginal film-makers Tracey Moffatt ( beDevil) and Beck Cole ( Plains Empty), in order to examine the relationship of these films to a type of spectral rewriting of the Australian nation state. This paper examines the role of spectrality as a revisionist process that exorcizes, but also celebrates, the ghosts that underpin and/or undermine narratives of belonging and place and investigates the dynamic potential of Indigenous film, not so much as a device that eradicates colonial encounters and their postcolonial legacy, but as texts that unsettle and contest, that empower and initiate debate by way of dismantling, or at least diminishing, dominant representations of Indigenous identities.

FROM WOMEN'S WORK TO THE UMBILICAL LENS: MARY KELLY'S EARLY FILMS

This essay presents a historical and theoretical account of Mary Kelly's formative involvement in experimental filmmaking in Britain during the early‐ to mid‐1970s. The argument develops by tracing the complex interconnections between Kelly's political engagement with Marxist‐feminism and her theoretical involvement with psychoanalysis and film theory. After discussing Kelly's participation in the Berwick Street Film Collective's Night Cleaners (1975) and the London Women's Film Group's Women of the Rhondda (1973), I present a sustained close reading of the artist's first solo work, the film loop installation Antepartum (1974). I argue that Antepartum interpellates the spectator into a feminine subject position. This reading of the film draws upon recent post‐Lacanian feminist scholarship in philosophical ethics that focuses on the intrauterine relation. Antepartum offers a politically informed aesthetic experiment that prefigures some of these insights.

‘WE WILL INVENT OURSELVES, THE AGE OF THE NEW IMAGE IS AT HAND’

We became very evangelistic trying to tell as many women as possible about this thing that we had discovered, and in those circumstances we began making a film to use for propaganda purposes. (Anon...

The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity

mary ann doane is George Hazard Crooker Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. She is the author of The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Harvard University Press, 2002), Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 1991), and The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film of the 1940s (Indiana University Press, 1987). Currently, she is researching the use of the close-up in film practice and theory and the way in which screen size and its corresponding scale have figured in the negotiation of the human body's relation to space in modernity.

Indexicality: Trace and Sign: Introduction

mary ann doane is George Hazard Crooker Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. She is the author of The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Harvard University Press, 2002), Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 1991), and The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film of the 1940s (Indiana University Press, 1987). Currently, she is researching the use of the close-up in film practice and theory and the way in which screen size and its corresponding scale have figured in the negotiation of the human body's relation to space in modernity.

Reframing Women in 1920s British Cinema: the Case of Violet Hopson and Dinah Shurey

The last decade of film history has seen a concerted effort by international feminist scholars to reinsert questions of women’s participation in the emergence and development of cinema, a movement now gathering a head of steam with the establishment in America of a international ‘Women Film Pioneers Project’ based at Duke University which is developing an impressive distribution and publishing programme, supported by biennial conferences on ‘Women and the Silent Screen’. Equally, recent cultural histories of cinema’s emergence in a range of different countries emphasise its interaction with changing ideas and practices of gender and sexuality.1 Until recently, little of this work had surfaced in Britain, although the admirable annual Silent British Cinema events at Nottingham Broad way have thrown up significant contributions from a number of silent cinema historians.2 However, the recent NFT event, ‘Women and Silent Britain’, witnessed a surge of activity bent on filling this gap and hopefully there will be a strong British presence at the next ‘Women and Silent Screen’ event scheduled for Stockholm in 2008. This renewed interest in women’s film history prompted me to return to my recent attempt in Reframing British Cinema, 1918-1920 to construct a socially and historically situated ‘cultural poetics’ of British film making. There I argued that British cinema’s habit of treating shots like pictures, performances as play-acting, and storytelling as the repetition of well-known tales makes it a site for the circulation and intersection of images and practices functioning like social signs or ‘documents’. Such images participate in cultural negotiations and change, played out in fantasies woven from the interplay of traditional and new pictures and stories. This suggests a cinema that, while conservatively constrained, is also open to struggles around changing gender and sexual identities both within the home culture and pressing in from European, and especially American, imports. In this essay, then, I revisit the shifting

The Wings of The Dove: An Unproduced Film Script (1949)

This article examines an unpublished film script for The Wings of the Dove, written by Robert Stevenson and commissioned by David O. Selznick in 1949. The article discusses how James's text was deliberately reshaped as a vehicle for one of Selznick's contract actresses–Ingrid Bergman, Jennifer Jones–and subsequently discusses how Stevenson incorporated elements commonly found in women's films of the '40s. It will also show how the novel is rewritten so that the main focus of attention centers on the romantic triangle of Milly, Kate and Densher–a characteristic convention of many women's films of the period.