Lecture 5: Classic White Women

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Lecture 5Classic White Women
Blonde Venus (1932) Directed by Josef Von
Sternberg

• Professor Michael Green

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Previous Lecture

• The Good Neighbor Policy and Hollywood Censorship
• Hollywoods Imagined Latin America
• Dolores del Rio and Racialized Sexuality
• Writing about Film Lesson 3

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This Lecture

• Feminist Film Theories
• Is the Gaze Male?
• Race and the Female Star in the 1930s
• Writing about Film The Thesis

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Feminist Film Theories
Gone with the Wind (1939) Directed by Victor
Fleming

• Lecture 5 Part I

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Feminist Film Criticism

• Feminist film criticism, rather than responding
  to established theories, emerged from the daily
  ongoing concerns of women re-evaluating the
  culture in which they had been socialized and
  educated.
• In other words, feminist film criticism did not
  evolve on a purely intellectual level, but grew
  out of the female desire for social and cultural
  change.

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A Sociological Approach

• Feminist criticism began by taking a sociological
  approach, in which critics assessed texts
  according to how well roles for women represented
  them as autonomous and independent.

Stella Dallas (1937) Directed by King Vidor
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Analyzing Signs

• Feminist theorists moved from a sociological
  approach to analyzing film form using semiotics,
  or the study of signs.
• Signs are made up of signifiers the form which
  the sign takes and signified the concepts
  they represent.
• Semiotics studies how meaning is constructed,
  interpreted and understood through signs we
  create, including cinematic words and images.

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Psychoanalysis

• The next wave of feminist criticism, influenced
  by psychoanalysis, studied how meaning is
  produced in films, rather than just analyzing the
  content.
• These critics argued that Oedipal processes were
  central to how cinematic texts are produced.

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Definition Psychoanalysis

• A theory of the psychology of human behavior, a
  method of research and a system of psychotherapy,
  originally developed by Sigmund Freud, which
  concentrates on how the unconscious affects human
  motivation.

Sigmund Freud
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Definition Oedipus Complex

• In Oedipus Rex, the Aeschylus play, Oedipus
  unknowingly kills his father and sleeps with his
  mother. Freud believes that this dramatizes a
  primal human desire because the process of a
  childs socialization revolves around the
  development of an unconscious libidinal
  attachment to the mother, alongside a jealous
  rivalry with the father.
• Aidan Arrowsmith, Critical concepts

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Psychoanalytical Theory

• Psychoanalytical theory has had a huge impact
  upon literary and film studies as a mode of
  interpretation, a theory about the formation of
  the subject (a theory of identity and language),
  an apparatus through which to understand the
  workings of ideology in society and culture.
• Important theorists include Jacques Lacan and
  Laura Mulvey.

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Theory of the Gaze

• The gaze is a technical term which was
  originally used in film theory in the 1970s but
  which is now more broadly used by media theorists
  to refer both to the ways in which viewers look
  at images of people in any visual medium and to
  the gaze of those depicted in visual texts. The
  term 'the male gaze' has become something of a
  feminist cliché for referring to the voyeuristic
  way in which men look at women.
• Daniel Chandler, Notes on the Gaze

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Origin of The Gaze

• The concept of The Gaze derives from an article
  called Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema
  (1975) by Laura Mulvey, a feminist film theorist.
  
• It is one of the most widely cited and
  anthologized articles in film theory.

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Visual Pleasure in the Narrative Cinema

• Feminist critic Laura Mulveys theory revolves
  around the pleasure involved in looking at other
  peoples bodies as (particularly, erotic)
  objects. In the darkness of the cinema auditorium
  we may look without being seen either by those on
  screen or by other members of the audience.

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Visual Pleasure (continued)

• Drawing on psychoanalytical theory, Mulvey argues
  that cinema facilitates for the viewer both the
  voyeuristic process of objectification of female
  characters and also the narcissistic process of
  identification with an ideal ego seen on the
  screen.
• She declares that in patriarchal society
  pleasure in looking has been split between
  active/male and passive/female.

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A Few More Points

• The gaze implies a psychological relationship of
  power, in which the gazer is superior to the
  object of the gaze.
• Mulvey argues that in order to 'suspend one's
  disbelief' and to become drawn into a
  conventional narrative when watching a film one
  must accept the viewpoint of the camera as though
  it were ones own.

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Is the Gaze Male?
Im no Angel (1933) Directed by Wesley Ruggles

• Lecture 5 Part II

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Using the Theory

• In Is the Gaze Male? E. Ann Kaplan using
  psychoanalysis, traditionally a male domain, and
  Mulveys Gaze theory to make arguments about
  women in film.
• She uses the theories to understand the way in
  which women have been socialized in patriarchy.
• She sees this as a jumping off point for changing
  the way women are represented in film and
  changing their lives in society.

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Patriarchal Ideology

• Psychoanalysis is a crucial tool for
  explaining the needs, desires and male-female
  positioning that are reflected in film. The
  signs in the Hollywood film convey the
  patriarchal ideology that underlies our social
  structures and that constructs women in very
  specific ways - ways that reflect patriarchal
  needs, the patriarchal unconscious.
• E. Ann Kaplan, Is the Gaze Male?

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The Function of Melodrama

• One of the ways in which women have been
  socialized into patriarchy is their
  representation in film.
• Kaplan argues that melodrama functions to expose
  the constraints and limitations that the family
  places on women and at the same time gets women
  to accept those constraints as normal and
  inevitable.

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Genre Exclusion

• Historically, melodrama tends to be the only
  genre in which women are central.
• Women are generally excluded from the central
  roles in Hollywood genres.
• Oedipal issues drive melodrama which features
  such themes as Illicit love relationships,
  mother/child relationships and husband/wife
  relationships.
• Pause the lecture and watch the clip from Stella
  Dallas.

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Gender Roles in Society

• Our culture is deeply committed to myths of
  demarcated sex differences, called masculine
  and feminine, which revolve first on a complex
  gaze apparatus and second on dominance-submission
  patterns. This positioning of the two sex
  genders in representation clearly privileges the
  male however, women have recently been permitted
  to step into the masculine role as long as the
  man steps into her position.
• E. Ann Kaplan, Is the Gaze Male?

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Role Reversal
Tomb Raider (2001) Directed by Simon West
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Conclusion

• Ultimately Kaplan uses psychoanalytic theory to
  argue how
• women take pleasure from the objectification of
  the gaze
• how they have been positioned as silent, absent
  and marginal.
• She concludes that it is this very exclusion from
  male culture and language that has left them room
  to affect change both in representation and
  society.

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Race and the Female Star of the 1930s
Blonde Venus (1932) Directed by Josef von
Sternberg

• Lecture 5 Part III

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Subversive Feminism

• James Snead argues that 1930s female stars such
  as Shirley Temple and Mae West pursued an agenda
  within their films of outwitting the
  male-dominated world, thereby trying to somewhat
  equalize the gender power balance at least in
  terms of cinematic representation.
• He argues that they accomplish this within the
  preferred patriarchal roles of women as both
  child-like and sexual beings.

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Sex and Race

• Snead argues that Mae West achieves much of her
  sex-goddess stature her mythification with
  the complicity, and even encouragement, of black
  women.
• He claims that the filmmakers represent black
  women as swarthy and elemental, then compare them
  with Wests white and ethereal beauty in order to
  elevate it.
• Scenes of black maids dressing white women often
  served to set up this contrast.

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Black Maids/White Women

• The scenes of the maids adorning West with
  various articles of clothing . . . are classical
• instances of the black maids dressing or
  grooming white woman sequences, which reach
  their pinnacle six years later in the famous
  dressing scene between Vivien Leigh and Hattie
  McDaniel in Gone with the Wind.
• James Snead, Angel, Venus, Jezebel Race and
  the Female Star in Three Thirties Films
• Pause the lecture and watch the clip from Gone
  with the Wind.

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A Degree of Racial Solidarity

• Snead points out that though blacks do not
  ultimately share in the benefits of the
  mythification, they still share a sense of female
  solidarity that crosses racial lines.
• He says that Wests films are about consolidating
  womens power in spite of a limited social
  context,
• These films dont seen women black or white
  as inferior to men, and are thus revolutionary.

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Blonde Venus

• In Blonde Venus, Marlene Dietrichs character
  represents a normal white housewife and mother,
  who is accidentally propelled by purest accident
  into a life of extreme degradation and extreme
  elevation.
• Her journey will both subvert and confirm
  established 1930s codes of properly
  representing race and gender.

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Beauty and Whiteness

• Snead argues that films visual style represents
  Dietrich as a blonde goddess who who is able to
  transcend the concerns of ordinary men and women.
• He says that even the title emphasizes the
  connection between beauty (Venus) and whiteness
  (blonde).

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Overcoming Darkness

• Even though Helen enters realms of metaphorical
  and actual darkness, her blonde beauty becomes
  the sign of internal heroism that allows her to
  overcome darkness.

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Unifying Racial and Sexual Opposites

• Yet this heroism, as we shall see, comes from
  her ability to integrate into her female
  blondness the categories of blackness and
  maleness. She becomes an Odyssean hero whose
  range of experience extends to the widest
  possible extremes in this case, the heroine can
  even unify domains of racial and sexual
  opposites.
• James Snead, Angel, Venus, Jezebel Race and
  the Female Star in Three Thirties Films

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Hot Voodoo Number

• One extreme is dramatized in the Hot Voodoo
  number.
• Helen reveals her feminine whiteness from within
  a gorillas suit.
• She breaks taboos and threatens patriarchy and
  whiteness by absorbing blackness.
• Snead argues that this figure of the Africanized
  Blonde becomes the main symbol for the fallen
  Helen.
• Pause the lecture and watch clip 1 from Blonde
  Venus.

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Blonde Venus and Black Maids

• Dietrichs character in the movie also follows
  the 1930s trend of the white woman having black
  maids.
• The maids are desexualized and provide symbolic
  contrast to the white woman.
• One maid is played by Hattie McDaniel, who Snead
  says often played dual movie roles as aesthetic
  foil and maternal surrogate for the mythified
  white woman.
• Pause the lecture and watch clip 2 from Blonde
  Venus.

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Disguised Inequalities

• As in Im No Angel, the black and the white women
  work together to undermine the structure of male
  laws and punishments.
• Their solidarity, however, disguises the real
  inequalities between the women and the black
  sidekicks disappear once Helen completes her
  symbolic journey through blackness and
  squalor, and arrives on top again at the Paris
  club.

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Usurping Masculinity

• In the Paris club the Blonde Venus has now
  usurped, not merely black vigor, but male
  privilege. Here, mythification elevates Dietrich
  over white men as well as black women, while
  borrowing crucial characteristics of each. Her
  masculinized appearance stands out from a
  background consisting solely of elegantly
  feminine dancers.
• James Snead, Angel, Venus, Jezebel Race and
  the Female Star in Three Thirties Films

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Blonde Venus as Goddess

• Dietrich has, in fact, come full circle. In the
  course of becoming well-rounded, she has
  assimilated and overcome the realms of white
  motherhood, black womanhood, black manhood (by
  adopting the tall, dark, primitive trappings of
  the gorilla), and white manhood. Truly only a
  goddess could exhibit such ubiquity and potency
  with such apparent ease.
• James Snead, Angel, Venus, Jezebel Race and
  the Female Star in Three Thirties Films

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Conflicting Ideological Agenda

• Despite her subversive adventures, Helen goes
  home in the end, re-establishing the convention
  of the nuclear family and the normal role of
  the white woman.
• The social misbehavior and usurping of blackness
  and masculinity is put into the context of an
  undesirable nightmare.
• The Blonde Venus disappears as do the threats to
  whiteness and patriarchy.
• Pause the lecture and watch clip 3 from Blonde
  Venus.

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Writing About Film The Thesis
Pandoras Box (1929) Directed by G.W. Pabst
Lecture 5 Part IV
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Summary of Interpretive Writing

• An interpretive claim presents an argument about
  a films meaning and significance.
• These kind of claims address a films themes and
  abstract ideas, its social relevance, its
  historical context, and its influence, among
  other topics.
• But they do more than identify themes they go
  further, making an argument about what a film
  does with those themes.

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The Thesis Statement

• A thesis statement is the central claim of your
  paper - an assertion or argument that you try to
  prove through evidence. You must support the
  thesis statement in every paragraph and section
  of your paper.

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Developing a Thesis

• In developing a thesis, start by asking yourself
  questions, such as
• How is the film intriguing or disturbing?
• What makes the film noteworthy?
• Does the film use filmmaking techniques in an
  original or pronounced way?
• How is the film situated historically?
• What is the films affect on specific audiences?
• Such questions will help you come up with your
  thesis.

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Purpose of Your Thesis

• Though the thesis is technically your opinion, it
  is not evaluative the way a film review is.
• In a critical essay, your thesis is designed to
  help others understand
• how the film functions
• how meaning is constructed and perpetuated
• How the film produces social and cultural effects
• The films relationship to the film industry
• How the film is historical

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Thesis Example 1

• In this paper, I argue that Blonde Venus (1932)
  presents a traditional representation of gender
  roles, using narrative and visual elements to
  perpetuate an ideology of patriarchy and
  naturalize the idea of women as dependent mothers
  and homemakers.

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Thesis Example 2

• Despite the fact that Blonde Venus represents
  traditional gender stereotypes, the movie is both
  progressive and subversive in representing women.
  In this paper, I will argue that Blonde Venus,
  through narrative and visual style, challenges
  patriarchy by criticizing the traditional social
  roles of women as mothers and homemakers.

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Supporting your Thesis

• Once you have your thesis laid out, you need to
  start thinking about how you are going to support
  it using evidence - both from the movie or movies
  you are analyzing and from outside sources.
• You can sum up the structure of an argumentative
  essay with the acronym TREE Thesis supported by
  Reasons, which rest upon Evidence and Examples.

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End of Lecture 5

• Next Lecture Ethnic Assimilation Hollywood-Style