Assignment: You will sign up to present a Film Analysis of two films to the class. Your presentation should allow for a brief discussion. Your presentation should

• analyze the gender assumptions in the film
• make use of feminist and other theories from class readings to illuminate the way in which gender is understood and used in your examples.

Purpose: Analyzing film will help you put theory to work in the world around us.

Method: Choose 2 films: one post 1970s and one pre 1970s. Each film must have a woman as one of the principle film makers: script writer, director, producer.

Your presentation should briefly summarize the film story and the female characters  Most of your time should be devoted to a feminist analysis, either of the story itself, or of the presentation of the story (e.g., what are the assumptions made about women by the writer, how are women erased or foregrounded in the account, etc.), or both.

Assessment: Your Film Analysis presentation will be graded on the complexity and thoroughness of your analysis, your incorporation of course readings and theories into that analysis, clarity of presentation , and adherence to time limit.  

Feminist film theory is a major scholarly field. Consider:

Using Early Cinema in Reassessing Feminist Theory by Ingrid Hoofd, Utrecht, 1996.

"Feminist Film Theory" Draft for the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics by Cynthia A. Freeland

Added to this theory by Laura Mulvey's now-classic essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,"  was the feminist claim that men and women are differentially positioned by cinema: men as subjects identifying with agents who drive the film's narrative forward, women as objects for masculine desire and fetishistic gazing.... Mulvey assumed a general picture of cinema as a symbolic medium which, like other aspects of mass culture, forms spectators as bourgeois subjects. She used Lacanian psychoanalysis to ground her account of gendered subjecivity, desire, and visual pleasure. Mulvey allowed little possibility of resistance or critical spectatorship, and recognized no variations in structure or effect of realist cinema.

 Unsurprisingly, her view has been much criticized and further refined, as writers (including Mulvey herself) have noted issues raised by differences among women, phenomena like male masochism, or genres that function in distinctive ways, such as comedy, melodrama, and horror.

An alternative approach would ask how films depict the self and pleasure, or whether viewers can find gaps and ruptures in a depictions. Feminist philosophers present alternative views about the construction of women as subjects of knowledge, vision, or pleasure.

Significant alternative feminist theories might also inform feminist film theory. Liberal, socialist, and postmodern feminism all suggest new questions and frameworks. Liberal feminism has emphasized traditionally female attributes in constructing alternatives to standard ethics, such as maternal ethics, the ethics of care, or lesbian ethics. These models may romanticize women, but they offer more complex accounts of the social nature of the self than the Althusserian-Lacanian ones, since the self is essentially configured in relation to others (mothers, children, sisters, friends, lovers). Alternatively, work by socialist feminists or feminists in cultural studies foregrounds the linked oppressions of gender, ethnicity, race, and class. A film may rely on a stereotyped representation of the older, divorced woman, romanticize the working class, and oversimplify the nature of class divisions.

Postmodern feminists also present alternatives to a Lacanian-Althusserian of the self or subject, since they question standard notions of human identity based on categories of bodily integrity, race, ethnicity, class standpoint, or even gender. Identity is fractured by complex intersecting social technologies. The postmodern approach to contemporary fractured identities takes filmic signifiers to be recirculated and utilized in a larger system of mass media and popular culture. This sort of approach is used by Tania Modleski in her essay "Three Men and Baby M" to link a popular film with contemporary social and legal issues. Modleski criticizes the allegedly comical inability of the three male adoptive parents in Three Men and a Baby to deal with infantile bodily functions. This comedy climaxes in a scene she describes as shockingly voyeuristic, a close and lingering examination of the (female) infant's genitalia. But Modleski does not link this sort of voyeurism to an individual viewer's castration anxiety or threat to subjectivity. Instead, she criticizes the heroic, simplistic resolution as revealing a current social anxiety about changing gender roles.

Alternatives to psychoanalytic  raise new questions about the representation of women in films because of their different accounts of the self, agency, identity, and the cultural surroundings of the subject. They reflect more textured and nuanced views about the self's complexity and emphasize the" film viewer's potential to construct critical readings. In so doing, they offer more scope for feminist social change than a view which maintains we are, in effect, products of the texts around us.