ABSTRACT
It is a founding premise of this book that there is much to be gained from unlearning the ways in which we habitually watch lesbian-themed fi lms. One of the strategies for such unlearning-a strategy imminently suited to thinking about lesbian visualization in cinema-might be to attend to those systems of fi lmic organization that provide the infrastructure for character-or action-driven narratives but are largely ignored by the interpretative forms generated in their vicinity. In the dominant understanding of classical fi lm narration, for instance, cinematic space is conventionally considered subordinate to the plot it nonetheless facilitates. The camera’s formal manipulation of mise-en-scène is what organizes visibility, producing cinematic space as the transparent structure we look through in order to discern the complications of character and theme embedded in the fi lmic narrative that unspools before us. The representation of place, that is, provides the physical and temporal coordinates within which narrative causality unfolds and remains explicable, just as all elements in the mise-en-scène are understood to contextualize and deepen our understanding of character motivation. Andrew Klevan argues that this understanding of Hollywood style, most widely disseminated via the collective and independent work of David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, is, as it were, taken in by the very success of the system it promotes, with the apparent transparency and effectiveness of classical narrational style determining that the interpretative focus remains on the plot events and characterizations that are taken to be its formal rationale.1
