ABSTRACT
The women's picture has played a major role in the development of feminist film criticism over the last fifteen years or so — partly in response to a certain tendency in some 1970s feminist film theory to prioritize 'the male spectator', and partly as a strategic move to reassess a critically devalued and neglected genre. This debate, which has centred on questions of female spectatoria! pleasure and address, has produced some remarkable textual analyses and trenchant critiques of the ways in which classical Hollywood cinema both represents and positions women, opening up issues such as narrative structure, masochism and consumerism. Despite the revisionist impulse motivating much of this work, it has tended to locate itself within a more general critique, inherited from 1970s film theory, which perceives classical Hollywood as inherently bourgeois and patriarchal, and therefore inimical to feminist interests. My own article, 'Melodrama and the women's picture', written in 1983, while attempting to account for the genre's popular appeal, betrays a deep suspicion of the whole idea of the women's picture.
One question insists: why does the women's picture exist? There is no such thing as 'the men's picture', specifically addressed to men; there is only 'cinema', and 'the women's picture', a sub-group or category specially for women, excluding men; a separate, private space designed for more than half the population, relegating them to the margins of cinema proper. The existence of the women's picture both recognises the importance of women, and marginalises them. By constructing this different space for women (Haskell's 'wet, wasted afternoons'), it performs a vital function in society's ordering of sexual difference. 1
