Film and the Visible - deLauretis
in How do I look?
background info:
- introduces the visible as itself a construction of cultural history and as a question about its conditions
- was among the first to claim that feminist cinema should not destroy narrative and visual pleasure, but rather should be 'narrative and Oedipal with a vengeance'
- calls for the development of autonomous representations of lesbian sexuality that go beyond binary male-female gender categories
- emphasizes that subjectivity is not a fixed entity but a constant process of self-production
- feminine identification with the image // masculine, active identification with the gaze
- 'Woman' is fundamentally unrepresentable as subject of desire; she can only be represented as representation
- Desire in narrative is intimately bound up with violence against women and the techniques of cinematic narration both reflect and sustain social forms of oppression of women
- the self-conscious experience of being both 'woman' and 'women' is the productive contradiction of feminism
How do I look
1) conditions of visibility - narcissistic, how i appear
2) active verb as in how one actively looks, what are the terms of vision for me?
3) active but not transitive, as in looking ON
⁃ - the problem of lesbian self representation
⁃ - challenge is bigger than attempting to alter vision
⁃ - redefining the conditions of vision and modes of representing
⁃ - argues "that films that portray or are about lesbian and gay subjects may provide sympathetic accounts, "positive images," of those subjects without necessarily producing new ways of seeing or a new inscription of the social subject in representation" (224)
⁃ - and "articulate how a film's work with and against narrative codes and conventional forms of enunciation and address may produce modes of representing that effectively alter the standard frame of reference and visibility, the conditions of the visible, what CAN be seen and represented" (224)
⁃ posing a question of lesbian representation and spectatorship in "She Must Be Seeing Things"
⁃ lesbians - inhabiting a lesbian subject position together (coupled)
⁃ "must" refers to construction of vision
⁃ "constructs for both the spectators and filmmakers a new position of seeing in the movies, a new place of the look: the place of a woman who desires another woman" (227)
⁃ we see their look and their desire
⁃ this sustains spectatorial pleasure
⁃ function of voyeurism?
⁃ "lesbian subject position" (228)
⁃ address diff from audience
⁃ inscribing desire through "the system of the look" (229)
⁃ identification with the hero - suspension of disbelief to its breaking pt
⁃ "play-within-the-film" or film within the film (230) - uses this as a device to talk about the diff effects in spectatorship derived from the particular specification "of characters who mediate our spectatorial id, and their capacity to act as figures of spectatorial desire" (230)
⁃ origin of fantasy as auto-eroticism - link bw fantasy and desire
⁃ fantasy is not object of desire but the setting
⁃ shooting, directing and editing as part of the fantasy creation, actors as subject of fantasy and sharing it together
⁃ implies that "it takes two women, not one, to make a lesbian" (232)
⁃ def of auto-eroticism - moment of disjunction bw pacification of need and fulfillment of desire
⁃ loosing the distinction between subject and object (discourse no longer addressed to anyone)
⁃ active, passive and unconscious; the female spectator takes up both the active and passive positions of desire; desire for the other, and desire to be desired by the other' This double identification may yield a surplus of pleasure, but it is also the very operation by which a narrative solicits the spectators' consent and seduces women into femininity.
⁃ extending the analogy bw subject of fantasy and subject in spectatorship - participation in subjectivized manner - beating fantasies (3 diff perviews / forms)
⁃ "the film would constitute the spectator as subject of its fantasy in its diff levels and forms, would provide at once the fantasy and the means of access to it, would make a place for the spectator as subject in its fantasy, by the solicitation of her "primordial" autoerotic and scopophilic instinct in its reflexive form" (236)
⁃ autoeroticism as the origin of sexuality and subject processes in fantasy
⁃ making fantasy accessible for self-reoresentation
⁃ first pt: film within the film as tool for actor-mediated (to spectator)
⁃ distance bw viewer and screen as distance from fantasy but access to it?
⁃ second pt: situates lesbian sexuality as not altogether outside oedipal fantasy structure
⁃ female sexuality as fluid, diffuse, poly perv, etc., "and applicable to lesbian sexuality only if the above qualifiers are not, as they usually are, taken to be equivalent to bisexual" (237)
⁃ 3 original fantasies - primal scene (individual), seduction (sexuality), castration(diff bw sexes)
"heterosexuality inevitably informs our conception of sexuality" (242) (our being dykes)
⁃ butch-femme and masquerade - not id w/ real people but rather movie stars, masked desires, strategy and part of characters,
to be continued....
Links:
http://www.let.uu.nl/womens_studies/anneke/filmtheory.html