ABSTRACT
While the previous chapter discussed the ethical import of the technical, formal and aesthetic decisions made by a documentary filmmaker, and grappled with the implications of the Enlightenment history of thinking on ethics and aesthetics for a consideration of filmic production, this chapter turns to the vexed issue of positive representations in narrative filmmaking. It therefore looks at a particular intersection of the political and the ethical in film. It analyzes in detail how the relationship between content and form works in the creation of representations of female and gay characters, and discusses the problems inherent in the terms ‘positive/negative representation’ for a nuanced ethical understanding. Unlike Kupfer, in his Visions of Virtue (discussed in the Introduction), I am
not interested in comparing the fictional film characters discussed according to a hierarchy of absolute virtues. Instead, I explore how what we have been calling ethico-political meaning resides not only in what a director chooses to show characters doing, or what moral characteristics those fictional personages are meant to represent, but also in how the image is framed and shot, and which generic conventions it engages, distorts or challenges. Following on from the analyses in the previous chapter, we shall see that narrative film too
constructs meaning via form as much as via content, and that sometimes ethical meanings and political intentions are undercut rather than enhanced by filmmaking practices and the ideological conditions within which they take place. The concept of ‘positive representation’ derives from debates in early feminist
film criticism of the 1970s in the sociologically informed so-called ‘images of women’ tradition, and later in identity-politics-driven gay and lesbian studies. The former strand of scholarship is exemplified by Molly Haskell’s From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies (1973) and by a work that appeared in the same year, Marjorie Rosen’s Popcorn Venus: Women, Movies and the American Dream. Both undertake a catalogue of stereotypes and functions of the woman in Hollywood film, focusing particularly in Haskell’s book on how women on screen are often no more than thinly veiled stereotypes (vamp, virgin, hooker, femme fatale, gold digger), and in Rosen’s on how Hollywood worked to ‘squash feminine self determination’ in the motivations and endings it offered women in film. According to Rosen, Hollywood heroines aspire to ‘“winning the love of another” above any other aim such as cultivating their work or “an independent future”’.1 Both books are primarily descriptive and politically idealistic, rather than advancing a theoretical position, and they do not problematize the relationship between political reality and cinematic representation very thoroughly.2
