Gaslight 1944 essay9/6/2023 ![]() Williams pays close attention to many classic horror films (in particular, PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, Rupert Julian, 1925) where the film permits the woman to look and she sees a monster, a distortion of her own image. "When the Woman Looks" by Linda Williams offers an analysis of the horror film which makes use of Mary Ann Doane's idea that "the woman's exercise of an active investigating gaze can only be simultaneous with her own victimization." Using examples from the silent period, Williams describes what it has meant in the cinema for women to be blind, to refuse to look, or, most importantly, to dare to return the male gaze. The connection between the ideas in this essay and the historical place of women in the family in the 1940s should make an important contribution to feminist film criticism. This essay appears in Doane's The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film of the 1940s (Indiana U. Those "obsessions" include the films' setting in the domestic sphere and that sphere's association with the uncanny the medical discourse in the films, which is engaged in the control of the female body and feminine masochistic fantasies, their relationship to sexuality (one of replacement), and the problematic of this address to the female spectator. ![]() ![]() Doane is interested in female subjectivity and three types of "obsessions" she finds in these films. CARROLLS, 1947, among many others) in terms of sharing an address to the female spectator rather than sharing the features of a single genre. Mary Ann Doane's essay, "The 'Woman's Film': Possession and Address," deals with a group of films (DARK VICTORY, 1939 NOW VOYAGER, 1942 SUSPICION, REBECCA, and GASLIGHT, 1944 POSSESSED and THE TWO MRS. The editors, Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp and Linda Williams introduce the volume with an historical overview of feminist film criticism.Īs the introduction indicates, the papers from the conference are strongly influenced by psychoanalytic and discourse theory (Michel Foucault figures prominently here) and aim to "provide a number of different entries and suggestions for breaking the hold of a monolithic construction of sexual difference." I shall begin by describing the four papers from "Cinema Histories, Cinema Practices." Other articles had originally appeared in journals (one each from JUMP CUT, New German Critique and Quarterly Review of Film Studies). This volume of feminist film criticism contains four articles originally presented at the "Cinema Histories, Cinema Practices I" Conference (sponsored by the University of Southern California's Center for the Humanities and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's Center for Twentieth Century Studies in 1981). "As women, we have our work cut out for us." - Adrienne Rich ![]() American Film Institute Monograph Series, Volume 3. Edited by Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp and Linda Williams (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1984). Re-Vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism. ![]() Re-vision: the limits of psychoanalysis by Ellen Seiter JUMP CUTĬopyright Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 1988, 2006 ![]()
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