Showing papers on "Film genre published in 1981"

The Woman at the Keyhole: Women's Cinema and Feminist Criticism

Abstract: The term "women's cinema" seems, if not necessarily simple to define, then at least straightforward enough. But the term "women's cinema" has acquired two different meanings which, to some minds, are diametrically opposed. It is at the hypothetical intersection of these two meanings, rather than with the favoring of one over the other, that I begin. First, women's cinema refers to films made by women. They range from classical Hollywood directors like Dorothy Arzner and Ida Lupino to their more recent heirs, like Claudia Weill and Joan Silver; and from directors whom many feminists would just as soon forget, like Leni Riefenstahl or Lina Wertmiuller, to other contemporary European directors concerned directly and consciously with female modes of expression, like Chantal Akerman and Helke Sander. They range as well from independent documentary filmmakers like Julia Reichert (co-director of Union Maids) and Connie Fields (Rosie the Riveter) to more experimental independents attempting to reconcile feminist politics and avant-garde form, like Michelle Citron (Daughter Rite) and Sally Potter (Thriller). To attempt to account for the wide diversity of films represented in even this simple definition of "women's cinema" is a gigantic task in and of itself. The term "women's cinema," or more precisely, the "woman's film," has acquired another meaning, referring to a Hollywood product designed to appeal to a specifically female audience. Such films, popular throughout the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, were usually melodramatic in tone and full of highpitched emotion, from which came the pejorative title: "the weepies." Indeed, Molly Haskell characterizes the "woman's film" as the "most untouchable of film genres." Here is how Haskell defines the genre: "At the lowest level, as soap opera, the 'woman's film' fills a masturbatory need, it is soft-core emotional porn for the frustrated housewife. The weepies are founded on a mock-Aristotelian and politically conservative aesthetic whereby women spectators are moved, not by pity and fear but by self-pity and tears, to accept, rather than reject, their lot. That there

Film, System, Narrative

Abstract: ‘Every film shows us the cinema, and is also its death.’ Here is that singularity of a textual system on which Metz has laid so much stress. Operation, displacement (if merely by virtue of the inevitable shifting of codes into action), a film — any film — goes along with the cinema that it continually and simultaneously recasts. If ‘the study of a singular filmic system is never the study of cinematic specificity’ (and this is the very reason of Langage et cinema, Metz’s attempt rigorously to define and separate the terms of the filmic and the cinematic), it is indeed that the film is on the side of the heterogeneous, that its work cannot be grasped by a simple listing of codes, that it poses for analysis new tasks, a new object: ‘the only principle of pertinence capable now of defining the semiology of film — other than its application to the filmic rather than to the cinematic fact — is the will to treat films as texts, as units of discourse, thus putting oneself under the obligation of looking for the different systems (whether or not they be codes) which inform and are implicated in them.’1

Through the Narrator with Word and Camera.

Abstract: To SEE ANYONE ENJOY A NOVEL OR FILM, classic or popular, is a good and welcome thing. Better yet is the chance to talk about the experience, and through the talking to learn anew the marvels of literary ways. Over the past several years, however, classroom discussions of printed fiction have become so diluted with the commercial jargon and jingles of media promotion that student critiques are beginning to sound like blurbs from Madison Avenue. With all its recording in fiction of scenes from the actual world, the visual media has helped blur the distinction in the student's critical eye between the ways of imagination and those of the perceived world outside.