ABSTRACT
Friendship's associative play with signification is matched by his new political allegiances, which rapidly move from the radical American intelligentsia to a newly gained identification with the oppressed women, Third World peoples, and the entire helot class of machines to which he belongs. Having accomplished a fairly explicit transference to humankind, Friendship claims human rights for future generations of 'smart machines' who will come to duplicate their masters in every aspect except their intended instrumentality. If the feminist film theory of the 1970s had a single purpose, it was to break the circuit of fetishism and the cinema which Villiers's 'great electrician' is seen to perfect. Where Thomas Alva Edison fashions his loving android 'to stop time' at the 'ideal instant' of romance - 'to fix it, define it' — Laura Mulvey urged film-makers to 'free the look of the camera into its materiality in time and space'.
