ABSTRACT
Classical Hollywood cinema has contributed to the formation and development of Feminist Film Theory (FFT) more than any other filmic form or movement. In the 1970s and the 1980s, feminist scholars dissected the semiotic and psychoanalytic paradigms of Hollywood cinema in order to uncover the “patriarchal and capitalist ways of seeing” women, and to show “the reasons why women occupy the place they do in the world of the film” (Kaplan 1976: 7). In the process, they established FFT as an approach for studying filmic images and texts, as well as the relation between cinema and female spectators. If we wanted to encapsulate in a single concept the aims of FFT, perhaps we could say that its main aspiration was to study the mise-en-sce`ne of female desire and how this in turn triggered for women in the audience a process of identification with the film’s psychic scenarios. In other words, FFT devised a set of paradigms for studying how subjectivity is “constituted in the relation of narrative, meaning, and desire; so that the very work of narration is the engagement of the subject in certain positionalities of meaning and desire” (de Lauretis 1984: 106). But beyond this common scope, feminists engaged with classical cinema in different ways, offering competing interpretations of its representation of women and gender relations. As is well known, in her seminal essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975)
Laura Mulvey argued that Hollywood cinema followed a` la lettre patriarchal standards, and that female desire and sexuality could only be expressed in terms of passivity-what Freud had termed “normal femininity.” But in those same years, Claire Johnston and Pam Cook offered a quite different perspective on American cinema. In their view, the classical text was more “open” than Mulvey would allow, since Hollywood was not totally complicit with patriarchy. Johnston and Cook investigated the possibility of a counter-cinema within Hollywood in relation to sexual/gender politics by refashioning the theory of the “progressive text” (Johnston 1979). While “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” has long been considered the founding episode of FFT, it is important to recall that in the 1970s and the 1980s the notion of progressive text was as important and influential as Mulvey’s intervention. In fact, most feminist readings of Hollywood were, in one way or another, “progressive,” as scholars tried to uncover the instances of female agency.
