Title: (PDF) Feminist Film Theory | Anneke Smelik - Academia.edu
Headings: Feminist Film Theory
Feminist Film Theory
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Feminist Film Theory

Content: Because the structures of Hollywood cinema are analysed as fundamentally patriar- chal, early feminists declared that a woman's film should shun traditional narrative and cinematic techniques and engage in experimental practice: thus, women's cinema should be a counter-cinema. ■ A feminist counter-cinema What should a feminist counter-cinema look like? For Mulvey, feminist cinema was to be an avant-garde film practice that would 'free the look of the camera into its materiality in time and space and the look of the audience into dialectics and pas- sionate detachment' (Mulvey, 1989, p. 26). That such a counter-cinema would destroy the visual pleasure of the spec- tator was no problem for women; according to Mulvey, they would view the decline of classic film narrative with nothing more than 'sentimental regret' (Mulvey, 1989, p. 26). Feminist counter-cinema took its inspiration from the avant- garde in cinema and theatre, such as the montage techniques of Sergei Eisenstein, the notion of Verfremdung (distanciation) of Bertolt Brecht and the modernist aesthetic of Jean-Luc Godard. As such, it was very much part of 1970s political film-making. FEMINIST FILM THEORY 493 The privileged examples of feminist counter-cinema are Chan- talAkerman'sJeanne Dielman 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles  (1975), Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen's Riddles o/the Sphinx