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July 2003, Week 4

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From:
gloria monti <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Film and TV Studies Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Mon, 28 Jul 2003 00:09:28 +0200
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> On Sabato, luglio 26, 2003, at 11:59  PM, Dan Streible wrote:
>
>       Thank you, Dan, for making this article accessible to those who
> cannot walk to to the newsstand in LA and buy the paper.  I am
> particularly grateful that you posted this link first thing in the
> morning, so that I, too, can read it -- from Milano.
>
>> "Take it from a cinema studies grad: Film theory's not for everyone,
>> but there are riches within the jargon."
>> by Manohla Dargis
>
>       Manhola reinvents Doane!  Check this out.
>
> The other clue that what I was learning might not have much to do with
> lived experience occurred while I was reading a feminist study on
> 1940s women's films in which author Mary Ann Doane repeatedly referred
> to "the female spectator." What female spectator, I wondered — a 1940s
> shopgirl? Simone De Beauvoir? Me
>
>       At first, I think that Dargis is engaging in the unmasking of
> essentialistic views of womanhood and taking feminist film theory to
> the next level -- the intersection of gender and race, class, sexual
> orientation, etc.  However, I want to remind her that Doane did all
> that, four short years after the text Dargis quotes, *The Desire to
> Desire.*   Hasn't she read,  “Dark Continents: Epistemologies of
> Racial and Sexual Difference in Psychoanalysis and Cinema” (in *Femmes
> Fatales?*).
>
> For her analysis, Doane draws heavily on Jacques Lacan, whose radical
> reading of Freud through Marx has been a cornerstone of film theory
> since the mid-1970s. Like many feminist film theorists, Doane is
> interested in how movies teach men and women to look at them as male
> viewers and how, through seamless editing and camera placement, among
> other techniques, they coerce us to look at them through what
> theorists (building on Lacan) call "the male gaze." The male gaze is a
> complex idea, used to uncover a complex phenomenon, but it's an
> exceedingly fruitful way to explore how movies are simultaneously
> created by human consciousness and actually construct human
> consciousness.
>
>       This is all true, but Dargis presents it with a major omission.
> Doane was reading Mulvey.  As Doane would say (in her essay),
> "Ontology is out reach, here."
>
>       Gloria Monti
> _____________________________
> Gloria Monti, Ph.D.
> milano, italy
> [log in to unmask]

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