Editors: Heidi Basch-Harod & Molly Lower Vol. 2, No.

12, January 12, 2015

Feminist Films between Theory and Practice

by Rabii el Jawhari

Louis Althussers work on social apparatus and the subject-

object complex relationship makes the marriage between
feminism and Marxism possible. It is the same discourse
adopted by feminists, worldwide, who refer to patriarchal
hegemony as the signifier, and who determine the signified
as embodied in oppressed women, portrayed in various
social media and cultural tools, like cinema. Within this
context, the man actively shapes the object, as he is the
doer of the deliberate action of gazing. Likewise, the
woman passively reflects the image, which is the object of
the gaze.1 Laura Mulvey, in analyzing films, divides the
males gaze into three levels:

There are three different looks associated with

Rabii el Jawhari speaking at the WVN Symposium in Meknes,
Morocco, June 2013.
Feminist film theorists continue to question the minimized
image of women on the screen. They do so by analyzing the
relationship between films, the ideological and dominating
position of men, the audiences perception, and womens
reactions. Although feminism now operates within the
postmodernist era, highlighting the plurality of culture in
general and arts in particular, feminist film theory
continues to adhere to its Marxist and psychoanalytic
roots. In practice, however, today feminist filmmakers
choose the avant-garde method of filmmaking.
Nevertheless, both the ideological background and the
avant-garde alternative are limited in reaching women
consuming films, and thus fail to adequately challenge the
negative representations of women worldwide.
Feminists, who still posit that the tenets of feminism are
rooted in Marxist theory and the psychoanalytic approach,
claim that no other approach yet proves it possible to act
outside of them. Generally summarized, Marxism vis--vis
the feminist project focuses on the conflict between gender
norms imposed by the structured order, and oppressed
women seeking expressive liberty within a given society.
cinema: that of the camera as it records the pro-
filmic event, that of the audience as it watches the
final product, and that of the characters at each
other within the screen illusion.2
The subjectivity, as tackled by feminists, transcends its
context to overlap with the psychoanalytical field,
especially when feminists base their studies on Lacans
notion of the constructed unconscious as a system that
functions like language meaning, being a man or a
woman, for Lacan, is a kind of social construction:
the most controversial and contested area of
Lacanian psychoanalysis: the conceptualization of
feminine sexuality. Lacans provocative slogans,
such as the woman does not exist and there is
no such thing as a sexual relationship, have been
greeted with indignation and outrage as well as
prolonged and passionate defense. Lacans
1Laura Mulvey, Visual pleasure and narrative cinema, Screen 16
(1975), 6-18.
2 Ibid., 18.

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 thinking on feminine sexuality is distinguished by
two main phases: first, he was concerned to
distinguish sexual difference on the basis of the
phallus and here Lacan makes significance on the
basis of the phallus innovation regarding
Freudian thinking. For Freud the question of
sexual difference revolved around castration
complex, that is around whether or not someone
has or does not have a penis. For Lacan, on the
other hand, castration is a symbolic process that
involves the cutting off, not of ones penis, but of
ones jouissance and the recognition of lack. In
order to represent this lack the subject has two
possible alternatives that of having or being
the phallus3
On the bases of Althussers dominant social apparatus and
Lacans instituted subconscious, feminist film theorists
deconstruct the famous classic works that represent
women as submissive and muffled objects of sex. If one
studies feminist criticism, s/he can notice the way it depicts
classic films as reductive since they link power, absolute
truth, wisdom, and knowledge to men, while attributing
weakness, madness, subordination, and perplexity to
beautiful women who should always be feminine to satisfy
the males sexual desire in one way or another. The
feminist criticism here suggests that patriarchy aims to
produce films that represent women as commodities, an
idea that stems from the Marxist notion of cultural
materialism. According to the psychoanalytical lens, the
same films offer these women as tools of satisfaction.
Marxism and psychoanalysis, however, are no longer
considered trends within the postmodernist paradigm. Yet,
feminism, with its aforementioned roots, contributes to the
postmodernist plurality that includes discourse on
3 Sean Homer, Jacque Lacan (New York: Routledge Taylor and
Francis Group, 2005), 95.
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postcolonialism and race.4 The irritation here, marked by
some feminists like Jennifer Hammett, is how
postmodernism tries to alienate itself from ideology while
feminist film theorists are still using the two previously
mentioned ideologies:
Feminist film theorists continue to embrace the
assumption underlying post-structuralist theories
of ideology: they assume that the fact that we
know the world only through our representation
of it necessarily calls our beliefs about the world
into question.5
For Jennifer Hammett, feminists developed two methods
of criticism: the idealistic method, suggesting critical
distance; and the realistic method, referring to lived
experiences.6 Nevertheless, neither reaction is effective
since both deal with one limited aspect of patriarchal
representation; therefore, both suggest a limited feminist
alternative (feminist representation). Hence, a challenging
approach, but not an ideological one, is still required to
establish a solid feminist background.
Laura Mulvey, as a feminist film theorist, is the first to
tackle the issue of patriarchy in films. Her most interesting
analyses address the relationship between the audience
and the screen. For her, classic films make their viewers
practice sexual acts from a distance through voyeurism,
suggesting acts of sexual spying. This exists, for example, in
4 Stuart Hall, Cultural studies: Two paradigms, contemporary
literary criticism, literary cultural studies (New York: Longman,
Third Edition, 1994).
5 Jennifer Hammett, The ideology impediment: Epistemology,
feminism, and film theory, in Film theory and philosophy, edited
by Richard Allen and Murray Smith (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2001), 246.
6 Ibid.
Vol. 2, No. 12| 2
films showing male characters looking through pinholes
and fissures in doors to discover fragmented7 or whole
bodies of women. Achieving sexual pleasure via looking is
what Mulvey refers to as scopophilia, reinforced by films
offering the audience visual erotic objects.8 This is, for
Constance Penley, a reproduction of Duchamps bachelor
machines in 1913:
to recognize how forcefully the idea of cinema
as a technological institutional, and psychical
machine has shaped our current ways of
understanding film. Just as influential, however,
has been the theory of classical film narrative as
itself a machine, and an avowedly bachelor one.9
Voyeurism and scopophilia come together to shape a
patriarchal subject that targets the viewer as the object, but
within this process, this object becomes another subject
who targets the woman depicted on the screen a kind of
transcendent mechanism for Constance Penley:
The act of seeing is itself the primary cinematic
identification, that images themselves, that is
what the images depict (even what filmic
processes they present) do not have that much to
do with the fundamental form of cinematic
identification, the identification that establishes
the spectator as transcendent subject.10
7 Fragmentation is very suggestive within the feminist context as it
reflects the patriarchal representation of womens bodies to
achieve erotic feelings; yet, fragmentation is significant as it shows
the reductive patriarchal stand towards women.
8 Laura Mulvey, Visual pleasure and narrative cinema, Screen 16
(1975), 6-18.
9 Constance Penley, The future of an illusion: Film, feminism, and
psychoanalysis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
Second print, 1990), 58.
10 Ibid., 13.
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Accordingly, Laura Mulvey considers the spectator
to be the male who derives his visual pleasure
from the patriarchal representation of women.
Gaylyn Studlar (1988) opposes this idea and,
instead, argues that since the audience consists
not only of males but also females some of
whom feel sadistic while consuming the reductive
image of women the audiences pleasure is
somewhat masochistic. Mulvey, eventually,
reconsidered her article/manifesto in her
Afterthoughts on Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema11:
I still stand by my visual pleasure argument, but
would now like to pursue the other two lines of
thought. First (the women in the audience
issue), whether the female spectator is carried
along, as it were by the scruff of the text, or
whether her pleasure can be more deep, rooted
and complex.12
This, for me, marks a challenging turning point in feminist
film theory requiring serious academic research that may
go further than the psychoanalytic approach and
transcends the Marxist mode of interpretation. I believe
there is a necessity for multidisciplinary research that
overlaps both different and suitable open theories to create
a clear vision that allows us to talk about a feminist film,
and therefore about a feminist cinema. While feminist film
theorists conducting the majority of the research tackle
audiences perception, other feminists, like Jennifer
Hammett, suggest a focus on how women want to
represent themselves. Of course, women do not share a
mono-cultural, psychological, economic, political,
emotional, intellectual spiritual system. Women live
11Laura Mulvey, Afterthoughts on visual pleasure and narrative
cinema (Afc:_theliterature.com, 2007).
12 Ibid.
Vol. 2, No. 12| 3
different lives and therefore experience different plights,
quests, and pursuits. Consequently, we must take into
account that, Once we recognize that we know the world
only as a series of representations, we are better able to
represent it differently.13 In that vein, the way women
perceive the self can change the audiences perception,
which would naturally challenge patriarchal ideology.
Today, it is clear that the issue is no longer whether we are
able to escape the ideological effects of (patriarchal) texts,
but how.14 Postmodernist feminists begin by not utilizing
Freudian psychoanalysis since they view it to be an
ideological tool used against women. They attack
traditional psychoanalytic ideas about women because of
their phallocentric mode and imposed penis envy theory.
The psychoanalytic approach, as introduced by Freud, can
no longer meet the feminists pursuit since it reinforces the
mainstream and muffles womens voices by imposing
psychoanalytic-ready conclusions fragmenting womens
experiences. I stress here the plural s to indicate the
limited psychoanalytic way of dealing with women with
different experiences and therefore different positions
worldwide.
Unable to identify a distinguished school or trend that can
offer an alternative mode of analysis, a crisis arises in
feminist film practice. With the failure of the paradigm of
structuralism, including psychoanalysis, Laura Mulvey,
along with other feminists, escapes to the avant-garde-ist
ready solution. Since the term avant garde can mean
anything against the traditional Aristotle plot classicism,
structuralism, historicism, positivism, hermeneutics,
anthropology, political mainstream, and the long list of the
13 Jennifer Hammett, The ideology impediment: Epistemology,
feminism, and film theory, in Film theory and philosophy, edited
by Richard Allen and Murray Smith (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2001), 249.
14 Ibid., 245.
(1975), 6.
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traditional paradigm feminists quickly seek refuge under
the avant garde-ist shelter:
The alternative cinema provides a space for a
cinema to be born which is radical in both a
political and an aesthetic sense and challenges the
basic assumptions of the mainstream film. This is
not to reject the latter moralistically, but to
highlight the ways in which its formal
preoccupations reflect the psychical obsessions of
the society which produced it and, further, to
stress that the alternative cinema must start
specifically by reacting against these obsessions
and assumptions. A politically and aesthetically
avant garde cinema is now possible, but it can still
only exist as a counterpoint.15
For me, however, the panacea avant-garde term has been
exhausted. It covers over aesthetic and ideological diversity
theories that at least try to find various definitions:
neorealism, surrealism, absurdism, Dadaism, etc. As far as
the notion of elitism is concerned, the avant-garde
movement opposes the canonized art and culture. These
movements try to open themselves to plurality, which
means a kind of deconstruction of the institutionalized
canon and therefore a way to question the elitism excluding
minorities and masses. Paradoxically, the term avant
garde is used now to describe films which fail to be
popular. The very limited audience consuming these films
is depicted as the special elite who can decipher what the
masses cannot!
Let us examine an example of an uncut, 10-minute-long
shot. Characterized by redundant dialogues, fixed frames,
and stagnant situations, many people find these long shots
to be boring. This tends to be so because these scenes do
not portray the fast life and the amount of information
15Laura Mulvey, Visual pleasure and narrative cinema, Screen 16
Vol. 2, No. 12| 4
people can get in our era within only a few minutes. Of
course, I do not deny that the first absurdist, Dadaist, and
la nouvelle vague filmmakers were successful in using
these scenes because they reflect the same redundant,
absurd, and nonsense existence they want to convey.
However, everybody now imitates this way of filming just
to declare her/his adherence to the avant garde. Though
some critics in international festivals feel bored while
watching pseudo-avant-garde films, they cannot express
their thoughts for fear of being classified as non-elite. This
reminds me of the fairy tale of the naked emperor whose
dressmakers convince him and his people that the clothes
he wears cannot be seen except by the intelligent. Though
the emperor sees himself as naked, he does not dare
mention his nakedness, and when he goes out to meet his
subjects, no one else dares mention it so as not to be
thought stupid. Yet, a small girl speaks up: Wow, the
emperor is naked! And after the girl utters these words,
the others start murmuring about the truth she exposed. As
such, feminists have not yet suggested a practical manifesto
to launch the discussion of feminist cinema.
first level should guarantee an understood technical aspect
applied to scripts; the second level should suggest
unlimited artistic dimensions applied to the ways artists
construct characters psyches, themes, framing, points of
view, etc. Developing the two levels will allow widespread
viewing of these films and at the same time avoid
minimized and superficial representation of women.
Rabii el Jawhari is a Moroccan filmmaker with a
masters in communication in contexts from
Moulay Ismail University in Meknes. He has
directed and produced several films and
documentaries in Arabic, English, French, and
Italian, working with such companies as Al
Jazeera and Casanova Entertainment. Rabii has
served as moderator and judge at multiple film
festivals, and was selected to be part of the U.S.
State Departments highly competitive
International Visitors Program, with a focus on
documentary filmmaking, in 2011.

In tackling the issue of women representation in films, I do

not aim to oppose the feminist approach. Instead, I seek
new, effective, and challenging tools that can allow
practitioners to produce films respecting different images
of women in the world. To reach the masses, films
representing women should neither adopt an elitist
approach nor opt for a mundane, superficial, and banal16
way of conveying themes. If feminist film theorists want to
operate interactively within societies, they should abandon
the ideological perspective since the masses in the world do
not have the same ideological, cultural, or religious
backgrounds. The filmic discourse could then reach
pluralities. This can be done by working on two levels: the

16 Meaghan Morris, Banality in cultural studies, in

Contemporary literary criticism: Literary and cultural studies,

edited by Robert Con Davis and Roland Schleifer, third edition
(New York: Longman, 1994).

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