The Woman at the Keyhole: Women's Cinema and Feminist Criticism

Author(s): Judith Mayne

Source: New German Critique , Spring - Summer, 1981, No. 23 (Spring - Summer, 1981),
pp. 27-43
Published by: Duke University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/487935

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 The Woman at the Keyhole:
Women's Cinema and Feminist Criticism

by Judith Mayne

The term "women's cinema" seems, if not necessarily simple to define,

then at least straightforward enough. But the term "women's cinema" has
acquired two different meanings which, to some minds, are diametrically
opposed. It is at the hypothetical intersection of these two meanings,
rather than with the favoring of one over the other, that I begin. First,
women's cinema refers to films made by women. They range from classical
Hollywood directors like Dorothy Arzner and Ida Lupino to their more
recent heirs, like Claudia Weill and Joan Silver; and from directors whom
many feminists would just as soon forget, like Leni Riefenstahl or Lina
Wertmiuller, to other contemporary European directors concerned directly
and consciously with female modes of expression, like Chantal Akerman
and Helke Sander. They range as well from independent documentary
filmmakers like Julia Reichert (co-director of Union Maids) and Connie
Fields (Rosie the Riveter) to more experimental independents attempting
to reconcile feminist politics and avant-garde form, like Michelle Citron
(Daughter Rite) and Sally Potter (Thriller). To attempt to account for the
wide diversity of films represented in even this simple definition of "wo-
men's cinema" is a gigantic task in and of itself.
The term "women's cinema," or more precisely, the "woman's film,"
has acquired another meaning, referring to a Hollywood product designed
to appeal to a specifically female audience. Such films, popular throughout
the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, were usually melodramatic in tone and full of high-
pitched emotion, from which came the pejorative title: "the weepies."
Indeed, Molly Haskell characterizes the "woman's film" as the "most
untouchable of film genres." Here is how Haskell defines the genre: "At
the lowest level, as soap opera, the 'woman's film' fills a masturbatory
need, it is soft-core emotional porn for the frustrated housewife. The
weepies are founded on a mock-Aristotelian and politically conservative
aesthetic whereby women spectators are moved, not by pity and fear but
by self-pity and tears, to accept, rather than reject, their lot. That there

1. This paper is a lecture presented in the Women's Studies Research Colloquia, Ohio
State University, May 1981.

27

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28 Mavne

should be a need and an audience for such an

amount of real misery.""
A typical theme of the "woman's film" is ob
children at the expense of self: At the conclu
Barbara Stanwyck is the female equivalent of a
longingly through the window of an elegant ma
wedding is taking place. Another typical theme
Wyman is stricken blind in Magnificent Obse
back to emotional and physical health by her
very notion of a "woman's film" evolved, of cours
one that has recently been revived. In films l
Point, the format of the woman's film has been
Perhaps ultimately films made by women ha
with Hollywood women's films. The tendency,
rigorous opposition between those Hollywood
female audience, and films by women; between
"authentic" portrayals of female experience. Bu
condemns the facile pathos of the woman's films,
emotional response should be so devalued as to b
genre.3 And in keeping with Haskell's love-hate re
film, I prefer to affirm the ambiguity of the ter
order to understand how women make movies, the
tion of what relationships women have had, tra
as filmmakers and as film consumers, to the medium.
But even with this oscillation between production and consumption,
the term "women's cinema" elides the context in which women have had
the most visibility in the cinema, and that is on screen. Here again, Holly-
wood comes immediately to mind. We know that women function in the
classical cinema as objects of spectacle, a function exemplified by the
extreme: Marilyn Monroe. Remember Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953),
for example: every time Monroe enters a room, be it a restaurant, a hotel
room or a courtroom, the space immediately becomes a stage, and on-
lookers become spectators, consumers of this image of femininity. A
feminist analysis of the phenomenon of Marilyn Monroe seems so simple.
She is a passive object, nothing more than the projection of male fantasies.
But this "ideology of the spectacle," so to speak, is more complex than
even the cliche of Marilyn Monroe would suggest. By identifying women's
presence in the Hollywood cinema through a spectator-spectacle relation-
ship, we are asking the question: How are the relations of seeing, the
relation of a person looking and a person looked at, power bound?4 As

2. From Reverence to Rape (New York: Penguin, 1973), p. 155.

3. Ibid.

4. The issue is explored, in terms relevant to the cinema, in John Berger, Ways of Seeing
(New York: Viking Press, 1972).

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 Women's Cinema and Feminist Criticism 29

film viewers, we have spent more time than we realize watching m

women look at each other, and most emphatically, watching men w
women.

Again there is the temptation to establish a rigoro

women have been "falsely" represented in distorted im
cinema, then women filmmakers will be more likely to
"undistorted," not to mention "positive" images of w
then be eagerly consumed by the film viewer. Perhap
unconvinced that such clear-cut alternatives are possibl
that they are even desirable. Once again, the work of
always needs to be seen against a background, shaped a
ways in which women have been associated with the
It is through the conventions of the traditional cinema
critics and filmmakers included, have learned how to "
The conventions of the traditional cinema: These are, first and foremost,
narrative conventions, the descendants, in some sense, of the narrative
conventions of the novel. Or put another way, cinema combines narrative
and spectacle, story-telling and display. Some of the particular problems
and issues of women's cinema are worth considering against that back-
ground of a narrative tradition which for two centuries before the develop-
ment of moving pictures was dominated by the novel.
Women have been most visible in the cinema as performers, and some-
what less so as spectators. As filmmakers, women have been virtually
invisible. One thinks of the traditional middle-class novel, and of how
novels in the eighteenth century, that period of the "rise of the novel,"
tended to focus upon and problematize female experience.s It has become
a commonplace that women were, especially in the eighteenth century, the
most important audience for the novel. Women wrote novels too, of
course, but the frequent adoption of male pen names necessitated by the
increasing acceptability of the novel as legitimate art form suggests a situa-
tion like that of the woman filmmaker many years later.
The affinities between the middle-class novel and the cinema, above
and beyond the status of women, have been described in a variety of ways.
Some say that the novel is to eighteenth-century British society what the
cinema is to twentieth-century American society; others, that the novel is
an emblematic art form of a developing industrial society, and the cinema
equally emblematic of its later stage of consumerism; and still others, that
the novel provides a model of the connection between art and industry
later expanded by the cinema, an industrialized art form par excellence.
Perhaps most obvious is the narrative connection: As cinema evolved
as a story-telling medium, it was drawn closer and closer to the devices
of the novel.

5. The classic study, of course, is Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1957).

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30 Mayne

The social space within which the novel, and later the ci
oped, was increasingly divided along the lines of private and pub
Public and private: on the one hand, the world of busine
eventually of industrial production, and of the social institution
them; and on the other, the world of the home, of family and
The narratives of middle-class novels began to function as m
the splits between these two spheres of private and public
separation between private and public spheres - sometimes
times imaginary - has particular ramifications for women
gested, for example, by recent feminist theory that examin
have been bound by, and have transcended, the split betwee
and the public.6
Hence narrative becomes a form of negotiation between
and the public. In Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, for example,
opposed notions of the "private sphere" clash. Clarissa wants
love, for a private sphere that functions as a refuge. But fo
marriage functions only as a direct reflection of economic
necessity. This process of negotiations concerns, as well, the
of reading which, for women isolated from the social sphere wi
leisure time, created a form of imaginary participation.7
If the very substance of the traditional novel is so closely alig
changing dimensions of the social and individual lives of wom
obvious question is: What defines the work of the female writer
the female filmmaker? It has always been tempting to def
writers as a subculture, marginal to the dynamics and preo
patriarchal society. While women writers have been marginal to
of writing, there has been an aspect of female writing which is
other than the preoccupations of male novelists, than it is a for
an intensification of that process of negotiation between priv
spheres. Consider, for example, the famous and often-com
opening sentence of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice: "It is a tr
sally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good for
be in want of a wife."" The phrase seems firmly to situate the r
realm of popular wisdom, in a public sphere of "universal
sentence is reminiscent of what Roland Barthes calls the cultural code:
phrases which assume a kind of universal agreement, like "it is well-know

that. . ." or, "everyone is aware that. ... " Barthes calls such utterances
6. See, for example, Ann Foreman, Feminity and Alienation (London: Pluto Press, 1977
Joan Kelly, "The Doubled Vision of Feminist Theory," Feminist Studies, 5 (1979), 216-22
and Sheila Rowbotham, Women's Consciousnes, Man's World (1973; rpt. Baltimore: Pengu
Books, 1974).
7. For a further discussion of the relationship of narrative to private and public existenc
see my "Mediation, the Novelistic, and Film Narrative," in Syndy M. Conger and Janice R
Welsch, eds., Narrative Strategies (Macomb, Ill.: Western Illinois University Press, 1980)
8. Pride and Prejudice (Boston: Houghton & Mifflin, 1956), p. 1.

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 Women's Cinema and Feminist Criticism 31

"implicit proverbs" which state the "law of society."9 But we qu

discover, in Austen's novel, that the popular wisdom evoked, this "la
society," reflects not so much a universal opinion as the peculiariti
Mrs. Bennet's vision of the world as clearly divided between marriag
and unmarriageable men. This fine example of Jane Austen's irony s
equally well as a fine example of a female narrative perspective. For
and Prejudice begins in a hypothetical space between the personal an
social, where the boundary lines are not clear. Indeed, the entire n
becomes an attempt to consolidate two opposing spheres. Thus the ma
of Elizabeth Bennet and Darcy is a fantasy of reconciliation, bet
private and public, middle-class and aristocracy, female and male.
But an enormous distance separates Jane Austen from Hollyw
Women's relationships to the novel-form provide a valuable perspecti
women's cinema, and I will argue that women filmmakers explore, as
those hypothetical spaces and bridges between private and public rea
If Jane Austen gives us a sense of the social and narrative background fr
which female writing emerges, then we might turn, for initial possibilit
of cinematic analogues, to a more contemporary example of female w
in which the cinema emerges with metaphoric significance.
Dorris Lessing's The Golden Notebook explores the relations betw
female identity and artistic production. One such relationship is represen
for Lessing through the cinema, where the woman is the viewer, ma
projectionist, and the whole viewing process a form of control and domin
tion. Writer Anna Wulf describes her vision of events from her past: fil
shown to her by an invisible male projectionist. The films represent
Anna calls her "burden of recreating order out of the chaos that my
had become." 10 Yet Ann is horrified by this vision of cinematic o
"They were all, so I saw now, conventionally, well-made films, as if
had been done in a studio; then I saw the titles: these films, which w
everything I hated most, had been directed by me. The projectionist
running these films very fast, and then pausing on the credits, and I
hear his jeering laugh at Directed by Anna Wulf. Then he would
another few scenes, every scene glossy with untruth, false and stup
Lessing's cinematic metaphor is informed by an insight into the p
archal nature of the relation of projectionist to screen, viewer to im
Put another way, the conditions of film viewing suggest, for Lessing, pa
archal domination.
Cinema is evoked in The Golden Notebook within the context of a
female narrator's relationship to language and experience. The cinem
concretizes what Christa Wolf, in The Quest for Christa T., calls "The

9. S/Z (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976), trans. Richard Miller, p. 100.
10. The Golden Notebook (1962; rpt. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), p. 619.
11. Ibid.

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32 Mayne

difficulty of saying 'I.' "12 Indeed, there are many obstacles

for saying "I." Lessing's designation of the cinema as bound b
domination is not just a literary imagination denigrating the
just in case literature might appear to be utopian, at least rel
ing, one might recall that Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert
analysis of women writers with a query into the equivalence
writer's pen and his penis."3 Yet the equivalence does see
minor compared to the cinema, where the metaphorical sta
camera as eye, gun (shooting a camera and shooting a gun)
made for a long history of sometimes tiresome cinematic fig
it may seem as though aspiring women filmmakers might do be
away from this seemingly monolithic institution. But if cinema
this reified form of domination, then explorations into the p
women's cinema have a kind of strategic importance.
Lessing's cinematic metaphor in The Golden Notebook eme
of the journey of a first-person female narrator attempting
clarify experience. Two cinematic parallels which immediat
mind are Michelle Citron's Daughter Rite (1978), in which a fema
speaks, over home movies shown in slow motion, of dreams a
and Sally Potter's Thriller (1979), in which the Mimi of
Boheme conducts an investigation, of sorts, to discover who was
for her death. But the place of the voice, in cinema, is compl
of the most basic features of film narrative: voyeurism.
Voyeurism has become so institutionalized a feature of the
we tend to take it for granted. Early films are enormously instr
respect, for they often express directly and baldly those figures
tion which, in the course of film history, would become nat
variety of ways. A Search for the Evidence (1903) is one such
simple example of cinematic voyeurism, and it demonstrat
condensed form, some of the crucial implications of voyeurism f
relations to film.
A Search for the Evidence shows us a man and a woman, presumably an
angry wife and a man of the law, as they proceed down a hotel corridor in
search of the "evidence": an adulterous husband. The woman peers into
one room after another. As she does so, the camera imitates her vision,
and we look into a succession of hotel rooms. On the screen the space of
the rooms is framed by a keyhole mask, the visualization of the look. Thus
a simple alternation informs the structure of this brief film, between the
person looking and the object of the look, between the corridor and the
individual room. Now a hotel corridor may not exactly represent a public
sphere, but the movie theater (or university classroom) certainly does.

12. The Quest for Christa T. (1968; English translation New York: Delta, 1970), trans.
Christopher Middleton, p. 170.
13. The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 3.

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 Women's Cinema and Feminist Criticism 33

From this vantage point, we also peek into a whole series of "priv
spheres." Finally there is the payoff. The evidence, a guilty husband enj
ing a romantic toast with his lover, is found. The man in the hall burs
triumphantly into the room, followed by the angry wife. The sense
closure is created by a change in angle: We finally see a room from with
unfettered by the keyhole mask. The inner space of the room has bee
- excuse the expression - penetrated.
This early film has something to tell us about the cinema's lingeri
fascination with the spheres of private and public life, mediated throu
the voyeuristic space proper to the cinema. A Search for the Evidence a
provides an appropriate metaphor for women's relationship to the cinem
On one side of the corridor is a woman who peeks; on the other, t
woman who is on display, as it were. Now there are, of course, men o
both sides of the threshold as well. But with a difference. Before we actuall
enter the room where the evidence is to be found, the woman in the ha
gestures to her companion, and he looks through the keyhole. Thus h
authorizes the penetration of the room.
This history of women's relationship to the cinema, from this side of th
keyhole, has been a series of tentative peeks; that threshold separatin
corridor and hotel room is crossed with difficulty. And then, we mig
recall as well that the roles of women in the early cinema were often
portrayed by men, female impersonators. I am not absolutely cert
whether the woman in the hallway in A Search for the Evidence is in drag.
But there is something entirely appropriate about this ambiguous sex
identity, as if even a timid peek through the keyhole required a cert
transvestism.
That the cinema is a voyeuristic medium has become a commonplace of
film theory and criticism. That cinematic voyeurism should have, for
women, a peculiarly ambiguous status comes as no surprise. Feminist
critics, and Laura Mulvey in particular, have described "visual pleasure" in
the cinema as rooted in a hierarchical system whereby the male is the
"bearer of the look," the woman the "object of the look" - the ideology
of spectacle referred to earlier.14 Hence Mulvey calls for a film practice
that will destroy, in sum, the traditional forms of visual pleasure. 15
But the issue is complicated, it seems to me, when we see that voyeurism
often entails, as it does in A Search for the Evidence, a look into a room -
into a home, one could say, or into a private sphere; in other words, into
that realm which traditionally and historically has been women's space. A
gaze cast into a room, and a gaze cast at a female body: These are not
necessarily contradictory activities, and often the one supposes the other.
But they are clearly not voyeuristic in exactly the same way. Metaphoric
license allows us to use terms like "voyeurism" in ways far more general

14. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Screen, 16, no. 3 (Autumn 1975).
15. Ibid.

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34 Mayne

than their clinical implications. But I wonder just how far suc
us: If women cast a cinematic gaze inside rooms, does t
entail an identification with the entire system of cinematic
Many women filmmakers have turned around the voyeu
order to critique the convention from within, as it were. T
most important definitions of women's cinema that has
"critique of spectacle." An equally important and vital aspe
cinema, it seems to me, concerns the construction of a n
What I mean here, quite literally, is an architecture of co
isolated rooms and passageways, interior and exterior
define this narrative space not so much as a critique of v
woman as spectacle, as an attempt to disengage the voyeur
the space that surrounds it.
Dorothy Arzner was one of the very few women director
successful in Hollywood from the 1920s through the 194
Dance (1940) is often referred to in feminist film critici
model of what the critique of spectacle entails in wom
famous scene in the film shows a woman performer (Maur
stage, who turns to her predominantly male audience, and
she sees them. The effect is stunning, and this "return of
indeed turn the convention against itself."1 In another f
Craig's Wife (1936), "female" connotes not so much the f
terms of performance, but rather a conception of space.
based on a stage play by George Kelley, shows us a woman
concerned with her house that nothing else is of interest
Craig married as ". . .a way towards emancipation . . . . I
independent." If marriage is a business contract, then
capital is her house. Indeed, Harriet's sense of economy is
vengeance. And the men in the film are the victims, explicit o
obsession. It is Harriet's husband who married for love, not
the subplot of the film, a friend of Walter Craig is so obsesse
unfaithfulness that he kills her and then himself.
As an adaptation, Arzner's film is quite faithful to the Kelley play, but
with an important difference. At the conclusion of the film, virtually every-
one has cleared out of Harriet's house. Her niece has left with her fiance,
her servants have either quit or been fired, and Walter has finally packed
up and left in disgust. Harriet, who has actively pursued the separation of
private and public realms, now seems pathetically neurotic and alone. The
widow next door brings Harriet some roses. In Kelley's play, Harriet has
become a mirror image of her neighbor: Both are women alone, to be
pitied. But virtually the same scene is acted out quite differently in Arzner's
film. The neighbor represents Harriet's one last chance for connection with

16. See Claire Johnston, "Dorothy Arzner: Critical Strategies," in Claire Johnston, ed.,
The Work of Dorothy Arzner (London: British Film Institute, 1975), 1-8.

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 Women's Cinema and Feminist Criticism 35

another human being. Thus the figure who, in the original play, is a
echo of Harriet, becomes in the film the suggestion of another iden
There is, then, an effect of commentary in Arzner's film, both on
original dramatic source and on the basic plot of the piece which, i
play, does reek of a certain misogyny.
Harriet's neurosis is, after all, simply an extension of consumer
ideals. Houses and rooms may suggest women's sphere; but they also f
tion, particularly in the Hollywood film industry, as what film hist
Charles Eckert has called "living display windows." Eckert suggests
Hollywood ". .. did as much or more than any other force in capita
culture to smooth the operation of the production-consumption cyc
fetishizing products and putting the libido in libidinally invested adv
ing." 17 Numerous tie-ins between the film industry and other manufact
assured that specific products and brand names - of clothing, of applianc
of virtually every thing imaginable - would be given maximum visib
on the screen.'8 Harriet Craig's living room is, indeed, a "living dis
window." But the products on display, from furniture to clothing to Har
herself, are designated as the symptoms of a neurosis, rather than presen
in a naturalized way as innocent objects in a happy, healthy, consu
society.
Women's relationship to domestic space is problematized in Arzner's
film. If Harriet Craig is the woman on the other side of the keyhole, the
woman looking through the keyhole resolutely refuses to differentiate the
female body (the object of voyeurism) from the space that surrounds it. In
Germaine Dulac's 1922 film The Smiling Madame Beudet (often cited as
the "first feminist film" 19), the situation is reversed. Here, woman is on
the inside, looking through the keyhole to the world outside. The Smiling
Madame Beudet recounts the fantasy life of a woman married to a boorish
merchant in a small provincial French town, yet who dreams, through
music and poetry, of another life. Much of the film is shot from Madame
Beudet's point of view, with abstracted images of water and imaginary
lovers functioning as concrete representations of her fantasy life.
Most of the film takes place inside the Beudet apartment. Occasionally,
however, images of "outside" appear. The film begins with images of a
church, a bridge, a park: These are establishing shots of provincial life.
Images of the town appear again approximately half-way through the film,
showing the town awakening at the same time as Monsieur and Madame
Beudet. These images function, like Madame Beudet's fantasies, as indica-
tions of some kind of alternative to the claustrophobic world of the Beudet

17. Eckert, "The Carole Lombard in Macy's Window," Quarterly Review of Film Studies,
3 (1978), p. 4, p. 21.
18. Ibid., p. 21.
19. See William Van Wert, "Germaine Dulac: First Feminist Filmmaker," in Karyn Kay
and Gerald Peary, eds., Women and the Cinema (New York: Dutton, 1977), 213-223.

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36 Mayne

apartment.20 If private and public spheres are relatively au

each other, this world outside constantly beckons.
Madame Beudet's fantasy life only leads, however, to a fai
to catch her husband at his own "suicide game": He keep
revolver in his desk, and occasionally fires it at his temple to tau
and amuse himself. She loads the gun, an event that occurs "
and is thus just as imaginary as her fantasy life. But for once, h
gun at her and just nearly misses her. He then naively assu
wanted to kill herself. He clings to her, and in the final image o
see the couple in the street, nodding to a passing priest. For the
we see Madame Beudet outdoors. But this realm has lost all of
potential suggested earlier in the film.2 The public sphere ha
a confining, claustrophobic space, as the very composition
indicates: Madame Beudet is framed by her husband on the
by the priest on the other.
We perceive cinematic space through cinematic time. Fre
Claudine Herrmann has suggested that the female experience
time has particular contours: "Masculine system has until n
women to assume material continuity - of daily life and th
while men assume the function of discontinuity, discovery, chan
forms, in essence, the superior, differentiating function."22
delineations of space and time correspond, of course, to the
private and public spheres. The "material continuity" of whi
is comprised by the routines of domesticity. Some women filmm
resolutely insisted upon the representation of real time on th
spirit that chimes with Herrmann's perceptions of female sp
Perhaps Chantal Akerman is the best-known of these filmmaker
Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai de Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is co
around the use of real time, and gives detailed attention to t
gestures of a woman. Akerman has said: ". . . I give space to
were never, almost never, shown in that way, like the daily
woman. They are the lowest in the hierarchy of film images
than the context, it's because of the style. If you choose to show
features so precisely, it's because you love them. In some way yo
those gestures that have always been denied and ignored."2
Put another way, Akerman enlarges the scope of the camer

20. Sandy Flitterman discusses these issues in "Montage/Discourse: Germa

Smiling Madame Beudet, " Wide Angle, 4, no. 3 (1981), 54-59.
21. Sandy Flitterman, ibid., p. 59, says that ". . .the last shot of the film, whi
freedom of description by its focus on the diegetic couple, confirms its legib
space. .
22. Excerpt from Les Voleuses de Langue (Paris: des femmes, 1976
Isabelle de Courtivron, eds., New French Feminisms (Amherst: Univ
Press, 1980), p. 172.
23. Quoted in Stephen Heath, "Difference," Screen, 19, no. 3 (19

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 Women's Cinema and Feminist Criticism 37

cinematic voyeurism by focussing on what has traditionally been margin

One can imagine, perhaps, a Chantal Akerman version of A Search for t
Evidence, in which the triumphant entry into the room where the adultero
husband and his lover share a toast is overshadowed, as it were, by a sce
in the kitchen where the preparation of the tray is shown in great det
All of Marguerite Duras' films are informed by a principle of duratio
In Nathalie Granger (1973), the space of a house inhabited by two wom
is explored and recorded. There is little condensation of time. Gesture
looks, aimless wanderings, household tasks: These are also those "margi
gestures" which form the body - I use the word in a literal sense - of
film. But then there is a climax, of sorts. A travelling salesman enters t
house and tries to convince the two women to buy a washing machine. A
he finally discovers that they already have the washing machine that he
trying to sell. The travelling salesman is one of the few male presences
the film. At the beginning of the film, we hear a radio announcer's bro
cast about two killers loose in the area, and a husband (or, so we presum
leaves. In the traditional cinema, of course, the broadcast and the husban
departure would be the first clues that the women in the house are soon
be murdered. But that plot never thickens. When the salesman enters
house, he is functioning in a traditional sense as a voyeur. But voyeurism is
completely suspended. It's not quite proper to say that the look is returned;
it is, rather, deflated. Duras strips the space of the house of any narrat
intrigue. The female look has crossed the threshold and is inside. B
unlike The Smiling Madame Beudet, the look is not projected outsi
Rather, it explores the space and the rhythms of the interior.
What I have chosen to call duration might be understood, perhaps, as
euphemism for boredom. Boredom is not high on anyone's list of desira
aesthetic responses. But perhaps boredom has an important functi
perhaps its unattractive reputation is somewhat unfair.24 What is bori
about Nathalie Granger stems from the lack of investment of the tw
women characters in the structures of voyeurism. But what of the fil
viewer? Perhaps duration, or boredom, can function in Duras' film as
way of disengaging, in the viewer, the experience of space from the experi
ence of intrigue.
The three films by Arzner, Dulac and Duras that I have describ
explore, in different ways, the interface between a female perspective a
narrative space. These are films which, to return to A Search for the E
dence, stand on the threshold between the hotel corridor and the room
They do so in a variety of ways, foregrounding the relationship betwe
the woman in drag peeking through the keyhole and the woman in t
room. And so, in describing these films by women directors, I am putt
forth at least a tentative definition of what "women's cinema" is and might

24. For a discussion of boredom, see Ronald Rosbottom, "Boredom and Meaning: A
Reading of Laclos's Les Liaisons Dangereuses," Forum, 16, no. 2 (1978), 11-18.

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38 Mayne

be. But there are pitfalls in such definitions. Chantal Akerman puts it
"It's really a hard problem to try to say what differentiates a w
rhythm in film because a man can use these same forms of expre
We speak of 'women's rhythm,' but it isn't necessarily the same
women."25 The danger thus concerns hegemony. We risk charact
women's cinema as a series of consumable products rather th
process which adopts a multitude of forms. Hence, the different
tions of narrative space in Craig's Wife, The Smiling Madame Beu
Nathalie Granger should not be understood as summary expressi
Woman and the Cinema. They are, rather, indications of how fil
women can explore a terrain different from that of the traditional ci
But there is another pitfall, decidedly more problematic, and t
definition of women's cinema that considers only the film director. D
Arzner worked in the studio system of Hollywood, working upwar
her early employment as a film editor. Germaine Dulac had
independence as a filmmaker, and was actively involved in distribu
exhibition as an active promoter of the cine-club movement in F
Marguerite Duras is a writer turned filmmaker, essentially defined wi
French tradition of the avant-garde. To say that the category "woman
maker" somehow transcends the important differences between
directors is patently absurd.
The issue is one of authorship. The concept of authorship has
curious history in the cinema. It wasn't really until the 1950s that
ism" became a fixture of film theory and criticism - auteurism b
view that the film director is the single force responsible for the fina
and that throughout the film of a given auteur a body of theme
preoccupations will be discernable. Such assumptions must seem, p
larly to one versed in literary criticism, so basic as to be unquesti
But the object of inquiry for auteurist critics was first and foremost
wood, and to begin to speak of a "Hitchcock" or a "John For
"Nicholas Ray" film, rather than a "John Wayne" or an "MGM
constituted a genuinely radical enterprise.
Notions of authorship have come under attack in recent years. A
ship presumes, of course, a single presence which produces the te
the metaphors for such production are usually paternalistic. Here
Roland Barthes, for instance, describes the fiction of the author: "
tution, the author is dead, his civil status, his biographical perso
disappeared; dispossessed, they no longer exercise over his w
formidable paternity whose account literary history, teaching, and
opinion had the responsibility of establishing and renewing. .. .",2
Barthes goes on to describe our desires, as readers (one cou
viewers, as well), vis-a-vis this mythical presence: ". .. in the tex

25. Akerman, quoted in Heath, "Difference," p. 101.

26. The Pleasure of the Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), trans. Richard Mil

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 Women's Cinema and Feminist Criticism 39

way, I desire the author: I need his figure (which is neither his represen
tion nor his projection), as he needs mine. .. ."27 I wonder if Barthes' "I
all-inclusive. If the fictions of authorship are controlled by an image
paternity, then are we all fictional sons of the author, in search of an origi
The tendency to fetishize authorship is, of course, overwhelming.
film there is the added factor that, more so than in perhaps any art form,
is a collectively produced medium. In our society, this means produce
according to the division of labor. Rarely have women been able
become film directors, except as independents. For all the recent chatt
about the "new woman" in Hollywood cinema, the proportion of wom
directors in Hollywood remains abysmally low. To insist upon authorsh
as a model for women's cinema, then, is to virtually ignore the major w
in which women have been involved in the cinema: as actresses, as screen-
play writers, as editors and cutters. This does not mean that we should
declare every film in which women have had a part a potential "woman's
film." This would put us in the somewhat embarrassing position of laying
claim to Jaws, for example, (edited by Verna Fields) as a "woman's film."
But I am suggesting that we expand our definition of "production" so as to
include other influences than that of the director.
Consider, for example, the role of the actress. Some actresses seem to
transcend their roles as sex-objects, to comment on the very nature of
spectacle and voyeurism. When Marlene Dietrich puts on a tuxedo and
sings "Who'll buy my apples" to a cabaret crowd in von Sternberg's
Morocco (1930), not to mention that she kisses a woman in the audience,
sexual ambiguity reigns supreme. Silvia Bovenschen writes, ' propos of
Dietrich and others, that "amazingly, it seems that even those images of
femininity constructed by men or by the male art industry, are turning
against their creators in ever-increasing numbers."'2 When Katherine
Hepburn, in George Cukor's Sylvia Scarlett (1935), disguises herself as a
boy ("Sylvester") in order to travel with her father, the sum effect is to
turn the tables,.and make "femininity" look like the disguise. Indeed, once
Sylvia has become a boy, she has a hard time remembering how to act like
a woman.

I initially suggested that, given the nature of cinem

given cinema's position with relation to private and pub
cinema, somewhat like women's writing, is concerne
from public to private space. This context for a dis
cinema also needs to be opened up a bit, to include
perhaps the most important element in the whole pr
It has taken many years for film criticism to addre
spectators not only identify with the screen, but inter

27. Ibid.
28. Silvia Bovenschen, "Is There a Feminine Aesthetic?" New German Critique, 10
(Winter 1977), p. 125.

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40 Mayne

effects of meaning. We know that in order for the looks e

characters on screen to be meaningful, there has to be a vant
the spectator. One wonders if male and female spectators ha
vantage points. If cinematic voyeurism does indeed rest upon a f
tion of active versus passive, male versus female, "bearer o
versus "object of the look," then it would appear that wome
alienated spectators. B. Ruby Rich describes the situation o
viewer in terms that are not quite so monolithic: ". . . for a w
film is a dialectical experience in a way that it never was and
for a man under patriarchy. Brecht once described the exile as t
dialectician in that the exile lives the tension of two different cultures.
That's precisely the sense in which the woman spectator is an equally
inevitable dialectician. [. . .] As a woman going into the movie theater,
you are faced with a context that is coded wholely for your invisibility, and
yet, obviously, you are sitting there and bringing along a certain coding
from life outside the theater. [. . . The cinematic codes have structured our
absence to such an extent that the only choice allowed to us is to identify
either with Marilyn Monroe or with the man behind me hitting the back of
my seat with his knees."19
Central to any definition of women's cinema is recognition of the
complex nature of film viewing, and of the woman viewer as, in Rich's
words, the "ultimate dialectician." Such recognition is particularly impera-
tive for feminist film criticism. Women's cinema and feminist criticism: The
work of the filmmaker and the work of the critic are substantially different,
and "women's" and "feminist" do not mean the same thing, even though
feminism is the attempt to theorize female experience into modes of resis-
tance and action. It is the work of criticism to make connections: between
the different contexts that define film - production, exhibition, reception;
and between cinema and the socio-historical context in which it is produced
and received. And perhaps most important, the task of criticism is to
examine the processes that determine how films evoke responses and how
spectators produce them.
Consider, for example, the backlash mentality which seems to inform
many contemporary American films. The new horror films are an extreme
case in point, but I am thinking more of a film like Kramer Versus Kramer.
I have no basic quarrel with the view that this film essentially asks the spec-
tator to respond to Ted Kramer's success at fatherhood by denigrating
Joanna Kramer's desires for independence. But striking up one more film
for patriarchy doesn't tell us much about the itineraries required to arrive
at such conclusions. I would like to see more critical attention devoted to
the following: Like most people at the movie theater, I was invested in
Kramer Versus Kramer, that is, I was intrigued by the film, moved at the

29. Ruby Rich, in Michelle Citron et al., "Women and Film: A Discussion of Feminist
Aesthetics," New German Critique, 13 (1978). p. 87.

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 Women's Cinema and Feminist Criticism 41

appropriate moments. But by the time the house lights had come on a
film's conclusion, I began to think that I had been had. What interest
is that precise moment when, my nose still runny from that emot
investment, I say: This is appalling. I have just "embraced" a film, a
then there comes the moment of disavowal. I suspect that the "embr
and the "disavowal" are, for many women viewers - feminists includ
more intimately connected than most of us realize.
The woman at the keyhole in A Search for the Evidence stands as
appropriate metaphor for the filmmaker and the viewer. The keyh
represents something both of the vision of the camera and the vision
the screen. The critic is also somewhat like the woman at the keyho
Extending the metaphor a bit, one can imagine the filmmaker behind
camera, and the viewer before the screen. The most appropriate place
the critic would seem to be next to that machine which is intermediar
sorts between the camera and the screen: the projector. In Lessing's
Golden Notebook, we recall, Ann Wulf sees the films of her life show
her by an invisible male projectionist, jeering all the while. Would tha
work of feminist criticism and women's cinema be so simple, that t
"male" could just be replaced by "female," the "invisible" by "visible
Filmmaker Maya Deren suggests, perhaps, some of the same dista
as Lessing from this machine when she describes, in her notebooks, lookin
at a film on a malfunctioning viewer, but rejecting her husband's suggest
that she would be "better off using a projector": "The immediate phy
contact with the film, the nearness of the image, the automatic musc
control of its speed - the fact that as I wound, my impulses and react
towards the film translated themselves into muscular impulses and so to t
film directly, with no machine - buttons, switches, etc. - between
and the film. . . . This physical contact creates a sense of intimacy. It is n
an image independent of me, projected on a wall, of which I am spect
It is immediately, directly, uniquely for my eyes. It comes to life out of
energy of my muscles. Later, of course, I shall use the projecter to
proper speed, etc. But first this ultimate copulation between me and
film must take place, and out of it will be born the independent child wh
will be projected at the Provincetown Playhouse while I sit in a bar a
the street."30
Sign of humiliation and control to Lessing, and a peculiar representatio
of separation from the mother for Deren, the projector suggests technolo
at its most instrumental. The projector marks the distance between s
tator and screen, the distance perhaps necessary to the voyeuristic ple
of cinema. Another view, similar and yet different, comes from the
H.D.:

30. Maya Deren, "From the Notebook of 1947," October, 14 (1980), p. 21.

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42 Mayne

This is his gift;

light,
light
a wave

that sweeps
us

from old fears

and powers
and disenchantments;
this is his gift;
light
bearing us aloft,
enthusiastic,
into realms of magic;
old forms dispersed
take fresh
shapes
out of nothingness;
light
renders us spell-bound
enchants us
and astounds;"

H.D. mythologizes the projector by way of a curious ambivalence: At the

same time that the cinema is demystified, it is reinvested with patriarchal
significance. The projector is not so totally representative of control, as
with Lessing, nor such a sign of separation, as with Deren. H.D. published
her poem in 1927, during a decade when the cinema had certainly become
well-established as a story-telling medium, a cultural institution in its own
right. Yet she writes, nonetheless, at a moment closer to the origins of
cinema than either Lessing or Deren, closer to the period when films like A
Search for the Evidence - made in 1903 - would create little primal
scenes of the cinema. H.D. writes at a moment when the autonomy and
instrumentality of the projector are, perhaps, not so self-evident. We recall
that when the first films were shown in Paris in 1895, their subjects were of
decidedly less importance than the simple fact of their projection, "life
size, on a screen before an entire audience," as the advertisement went.
All feminist inquiry is, in a sense, a reading against the grain of patri-
archal institutions, an unearthing of contradictions and ambivalences at
first invisible to the naked eye. In the cinema, such a reading against the
grain requires a certain memory of how cinematic structures, like voyeurism,
evolved and became naturalized. The projector might well serve, in this

31. H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), "Projector II Chang," Close Up, 4 (October 1927), pp. 37-38.
Anne Friedberg brought to my attention the writings of H.D. on the cinema, in a paper pre-
sented at the Ohio University Conference on Film History, April 1981.

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 Women's Cinema and Feminist Criticism 43

light, as an appropriate figure for the tasks of feminist criticism. Through

projection, individual frames of celluloid are shot through with light
acquire the semblance of continuity. When the woman at the keyhole tu
to cast a gaze at the machine, the projection of voyeuristic structures o
the screen is momentarily interrupted: The gesture is not so much on
destruction, but of a slowing-down of film into a series of celluloid fragmen

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