ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a brief history of the concept of the gaze as it has been developed in psychoanalytic and feminist film theory, and then discusses three further developments of the theory that have emerged in recent decades. It discusses the relationship between the gaze as structured by the “classic realist text” and the gaze and scanning in the context of recent digital technologies of filmmaking. The discussion of cultures of oculocentrism incorporates both a feminist approach to cinematic sound and new research on the primacy of tactile, haptic, and other sensorial registers as cultures of embodied knowledge. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the documentary filmAmy (The Girl Behind the Name) (Asif Kapadia, 2015) exploring how psychoanalytic theory can be used to analyze films that derive from new media. The first wave of writing on gender and cinema, such as theNew Yorker film critic Pauline
Kael’s book Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (1968) and screenwriter/critic Marjorie Rosen’s Popcorn Venus: Women, Movies and the American Dream (1973) initiated a critical discipline which informed many scholarly and cultural practices. It was possible for film criticism to explore many innovative conceptual tools, possibly because cinema did not, until recently, enter the canon of academic respectability. As a product of industry, commerce, and new massmedia technologies, film was a deeply ambiguous object for academic study, and as such was regarded with ambivalence. It was, arguably, this “liminal” (Turner 1969), or edgy, status that enabled us to deploy interesting new methods of analysis to answer questions about sexuality, gender, narrative structure, and iconography. Hierarchies of high and low culture, of difference and indifference, were inverted as the feminist critical paradigm engaged with cultures and methods beyond the academy. It is the discourse of film analysis, and especially the critical reflections on identity, sex, and gender, that have proven to bemethodologically groundbreaking.
