Film and Female Consciousness: Irigaray, Cinema and Thinking Women

by Lucy Bolton

Film and Female Consciousness looks at a group of films which offer new and original representations of women's interiority and In the Cut (2003), Lost in Translation (2003), and Morvern Callar (2002). Lucy Bolton compares these films with those which offer more standard — albeit provocative and interesting — treatments of female Klute (1971), The Seven Year Itch (1955), and Marnie (1964). Considering each of the older, well-known films alongside the recent, experimental films illustrates how contemporary filmmaking techniques and critical practices can work together to create complex and provocative depictions of on-screen female consciousness. Drawing on the philosophy of Luce Irigaray in relation to women's cultivation of self-knowledge, this book examines each female character as she goes through a process of transition or transformation. This approach demonstrates how participating in the encounter between Luce Irigaray and cinema can yield greater understanding of both fields.

Genres: Film, Feminism

243 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[Blake · Rating 5 out of 5]

Film and Female Consciousness is abundant - a generous and challenging book about feminism and the philosophy of film. Bolton draws on the many and varied conceptual and literary resources of Luce Irigaray and features close readings of several contemporary films in order to illuminate a problem. And it’s in these readings and the sensually plentiful theoretical background of Irigarayan textual practices that the strengths of the book are clarified.

Beginning with concise and careful history of feminist interest in filmic texts, the author considers ways in which women have found representation in film not just in terms of economic numbers, but in the filmic representation of women. Having got textual support from Irigaray's notorious and elegant criticisms of Freud and Lacan, Bolton proceeds with the illumination: women have found representation in film historically as the cinematic object - a frozen showcase. Far from men and women being a sexual other to one another, that is, a genuine sexual complementary, women have been seen as lesser men. The consequences of this view are many and problematic: women are without a symbolic and imaginary, are without even a female lineage. The problem for film, then, is how do we represent women as more than the object of the male subject when this has seeped into our very enculturation processes? The answer, she suspects, is in finding space for a plurality of female voices and subjectivities. With this in mind, Film and Female Consciousness begins its close readings of a number of recent films (In The Cut, Lost In Translation, Morvern Callar) that feature unique representations of thinking women on journeys of self-knowledge and becoming.

The chapters on Lost In Translation and Morvern Callar move along comfortably and offer speculation and insight on how Coppola and Ramsey play with spectatorship and sensuality to represent interiority. Lost In Translation, we might say, does something quietly subversive. In its opening shot, a barely clothed Charlotte (played by Scarlett Johansson), shown from the waist down, shifts restlessly on a bed. We then proceed to an introduction of Bob (Bill Murray) that seems to place him as the film’s protagonist. The film looks very much like continuing the use of female bodies as filmic objects, but as the film progresses we find instead that even this introduction has been a method of representing female interiority. And, far from being reduced by the introduction of Murray, the film represents men and women with equal attention and ends on a warm note of the possibility of Charlotte’s becoming. Morvern Callar offers an edgier representation of interiority by focusing on a woman engaging in behaviour that is tradtionally problematic: a woman who, after disposing of her boyfriend’s body and taking over his literary identity (he killed himself), continues a communion with her dead lover through the music he left her. Drawing comparisons with Hitchcock’s Marnie and the traditional psychoanalytic readings of that film, Bolton draws on the intriguing history of the mirror and its subversive uses to construe Morvern as a woman stepping through the looking glass into a sensory wonderland of uncertain duration. A representation given power by the final scene and that gorgeous music from the Mamas and the Papas.

These rich close readings aside (and they are excellent), I think it’s in Bolton’s insights on In The Cut that an Irigarayan reading of filmic texts begins to speak for itself. Of all of Campion’s films, this seems to be the most controversial. The confusion in critical sources, Bolton suggests, is due to how the film rehearses the masochistic traditions of slasher and noir films. However, this is a point of contention: if, as Irigaray suggests, women can resubmit themselves to traditional discourses only to subvert them, then Campion’s method here, and the very different kind of female consciousness that Frannie Avery (played by Meg Ryan) represents against those that have inhabited this tradition in the past, show that the film is something very different from what tradition has taught us to see.

I think what speaks best to Bolton’s close reading of In The Cut in particular and an Irigarayan approach generally, though, is that these films seem to be made for such readings. Contra the penetrative gaze of traditional cinema, there is almost no force exerted whatsoever in this new kind of looking. In Bolton’s words: “As In The Cut, Lost In Translation, and Morvern Callar demonstrate, the traditional ‘object’ is now speaking, with a visual, sensorial, and aural cinematic voice.”

[Vivien · Rating 4 out of 5]

As someone who is new to Irigaray's theories, Bolton's work introduced me to ideas within feminist film theory that I haven't considered or even heard of yet! One of the main ideas of this text, which I particularly enjoyed, is that sensory experience and desire are needed in order to constitute female subjectivity (Irigaray) and the aural and haptic instead of the scopic can function effectively in this regard (Ramanathan). Bolton writes that "touch requires closeness or nearness while vision is distancing, so that all relations that privilege sight privilege distance between subject and object; therefore true connection is impossible in a system that privileges vision. A system based on female sexuality might counter vision with touch, privileging multiplicity and plurality, blurring subject/object boundaries and therefore ownership."

Almost 10 years have passed since its publication and if I look at the films I have recently seen at the cinema, I would say that not much has changed since then. However, I am pleased that Ramsay's "Die My Love" has gotten immense recognition at the film festival in Cannes this year and the depiction of its female protagonist (played by Jennifer Lawrence) might just take part in the female subjectivity as described by Lucy Bolton's work.

[Kaylene Simmering · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reflections on how to portray a woman's experience through the art of film directing. Lot of analysis on female leads within the chosen comparative case studies.

[Martin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted it to be better somehow. Maybe because I liked many of the films, maybe because Irigaray was new to me and seemed a bit on the potentially-crazy side. But I think Bolton might've been too ambitious here and trying to say too much she watered down whatever poignancy might've been had. It doesn't read so much as film criticism (which I think is unfortunate for Bolton has keen insights) but more as a defense of Irigaray, a theorist fading from the critical landscape (and really with ideas like "The Camera as Irigarayan Speculum" maybe it's just as well). But who says feminism doesn't have a sense of humor?