Approaches to Film Analysis: Feminists Studying Images of Women

Mar 8, 2011
Valerie Williamson

Feminist Film Theory decodes gendered images and gendered looking - Gisela Giardino @CC

Feminism offers a critical methodology for asking questions about women and representation, and for the rereading of mainstream, especially Hollywood, films

Film is a coded artificial construct and the task of informed film criticism is to decode it. Mainstream film is a primary product of culture, and its role in the representation and the formation of identities, and attitudes, within cultures offers fertile ground for theorists and critics alike.

Approaches to film analysis are guided by the different perspectives of theory and criticism. Feminist theory is a realm of critical theory that has proved very useful in film studies and forms an important component in film college courses.

Analyse Political Aesthetics of Images

E. Ann Kaplan says that studying images of women, from whatever perspectives or within whatever research method, problematizes and raises questions about the relationship of aesthetics to politics and to cultures. Film studies is enhanced by feminist perspectives because the word itself implies a particular stance vis-à-vis women: it implies a concern with gender difference in general, but taking up the perspective of women specifically. It implies identification with women’s concerns, even if, logically, such concerns cannot be dealt with without also considering men.

What Does Feminism Ask About Film?

A feminist perspective should not be confused with the literal gender of the scholar; males can write feminist criticism, and women can write criticism that is not. The feminist film theorist asks, what is the relationship between images on film and the context of their production and consumption? Along the way, other questions must be asked:

What is the relationship between images of women on film (their social and sexual roles) and what scholars can discover about women’s lives in any particular context within which a film is produced?
Why are some groups (i.e. white women) featured more frequently than other groups in Hollywood film?
Is the same predominance of white women found in other national cinemas? Why?

Study of the material conditions of a film’s production may serve to answer questions of gender and race. This is why the role, or lack, of women in production and direction should be examined. Or the scholar may ask how meanings about women are produced on film as these relate to meanings about women produced elsewhere, i.e. socially, politically, and culturally, in different national contexts.

Film studies techniques of analysis are enhanced by semiotics. Humanities disciplines have traditionally focused on questions of how ‘signs’ (the material and symbols used to make any art form) ‘signify’ (convey meanings). Since art is a deliberate construction by someone for an imagined audience or receiver, feminists ask:

What signs have been used to produce meanings about women? Why these signs rather than others?
How have signifiers in relation to women changed over time? How do they differ from one Hollywood genre to another, or one kind of film to another?
What are the relationships between images of women on film and the level of fantasy, desire, unconscious wishes and fears that has both individual and socio-historical formation? How and why?

Film offers a meta-terrain where questions about women, the unconscious, the social imaginary and women’s discursive construction can take on different valences than they may take in either the social or natural sciences, or in medicine. In this way, film pushes feminism to develop new theories, or to challenge accepted male theories of aesthetics and entertainment.

Feminist Film Theory is Historically Integral to Film Studies

In contrast to women-centred literary perspectives, which emerged at the tail end of decades of academic literary studies, feminist approaches to film came about just as Film (or Screen) Studies, as a disciplinary area, was in its foundational stage. In this way, specific female-centered approaches gained a place in Screen Studies more readily and earlier than in other fields.

Kaplan foregrounds the two main movements in feminist film theory, in the US and in Britain, (with mention of the German journal Frauen und Film). Kaplan makes the point that this early 1970s moment was synchronic with the rise of Second Wave Feminism and publication throughout Europe and America of the first feminist journals and books of that movement.

Development of Feminist Approaches to Studying Images of Women

An example of feminist publication in relation to film would be Molly Haskell’s 1973 book, From reverence to rape: the treatment of women in the movies, which raised enough questions about women and film to spark the debate. Out of the U.S. came the journal Women and Film, later called Camera Obscura, while Britain had the journals Screen and Screen Education which brought feminism's debate into a masculinist dominated emerging field of theory.

Film is an important object in feminist practice, since creating art or entertainment with these perspectives may help to change entrenched male stances towards women that can be found in commercial or avant-garde entertainment and art. In doing so, feminist film study changes cultural attitudes towards women, and deepens understanding of meanings women have traditionally borne in patriarchal cultures. Critical analysis through the lens of feminism, feminist study of images of women, is one of a range of useful techniques of film analysis learned in film school.