Feminism in Vertigo by Alfred Hitchcock - Essay Example

Feminist Film 2009 As defined by feminist critics, the genre of Feminist Films is an advanced practice of film-making, liberating the face of the camera into its time and space and the face of the spectators into ‘dialectics and passionate detachment' (Mulvey 1989: 26). They also consider that such a cinema would smash the stereotyped and clichéd images of women that offensively misrepresent women and have a damaging impact on the female spectator. Such films would wane the classical film narrative (where women are cynically shown as 'not-man' and the 'woman-as woman' theme is absent from the film) leaving only a 'sentimental regret' (Mulvey, 1989, Johnston, 1991). Feminist theorists have asked not only what the image of 'woman' implies and how it is made, but what the expression alludes to women regarding womanliness—an issue that forces staying away from indexing the 'correct' or 'positive' images supposedly expressing woman's 'reality', for such lists not only push the idea that such last words could be said about women, but also pinpoint the female to a ser of beliefs that defy every other struggles of a woman. Instead, feminist theorists have stressed on the right variety of definitions latent within the images of sexual difference, without those fixed groups and sharply divided sexual distinctions, thus shaping the female viewer in a subtle poise between the familiar tones of femininity and the contrasting distinctions of her own history (Gillian Swanson, Book Review). Feminist scholars began applying the new theories in the early 1970’s centering on the role of women characters as a reflection of a society's view of women. American feminist critics of the 1970’s harped on the degree of screen time given to women (Erens, 1990). Film researchers in West generally focused on "the production of meaning in a film text, the way a text constructs a viewing subject, and the ways in which the very mechanisms of cinematic production affect the representation of women and reinforce sexism" (Erens, 1990). In the article "From the Imaginary Signifier: Identification, Mirror," Christian Metz contended that film can be seen only possible through scopophilia (voyeuristic pleasure), as best confirmed in silent film (Braudy and Cohen, 2004). Researchers also increasingly took international viewpoints, departing from the older Eurocentric approaches. According to, many feminist film critics, the "male gaze" preponderates in classical Hollywood film making as Budd Boetticher says: "What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance." (as cited in Erens, 1990) Mulvey thinks that women shown in such narratives are at once watched and exhibited, with their looks hinted for strong visual and erotic effect and as a result in such a film a woman is the "bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning” (as cited in McHugh, and Sobchack, “Introduction). Mulvey detects three "looks" or sides that take place in film that reduce a woman as a sexual object. The first is the viewpoint of the film’s male character and how he views the female character. The second is the approach of the viewer towards the female character. The third "look" that unites joins the first two looks is the male audience’s viewpoint of the male character, a position permitting the male audience to treat the female character as to belonging to his own sex object as he can connect himself, through his views to the male character in the film (Hooks, 2003). Censuring Vertigo (1958), by Alfred Hitcock, conventional feminists repeatedly stress that "the spectator constructed by the film is clearly male" (Wood, 1982). Tania Modleski, in her article Femininity By Design (1989) attempts to show that” this male spectator” is as much "deconstructed" as “constructed” by the film, showing an attraction for womanliness that puts manliness into doubt, making room for the “female spectator” of the film and making a more complex relation to existing film criticism. Moleskin thinks that the questions relating to viewership and identification have often been very simple, like Mulvey's argument that Vertigo is "cut to the measure of male desire" because it is made from the male: standpoint. As she says, "In Vertigo, subjective camera predominates. Apart from one flashback from Judy's point of view, the narrative is woven around what Scottie sees or fails to see." (Mulvey, 1975) Modleski considers that what Mulvey thinks to be a deviation proves to be an exception to general and prevailing rule of Hollywood seen by at least one critic fairly truly, in the flashback making "a spectator position painfully split between Scotty and Judy for the rest of the film" (as cited in Abel, 1984-85). According to Modleski, it equals to what Robin Wood thinks to be, "severely disturbed, made problematic" (Modleski, Femininity By Design). Vertigo shows the Freudian idea of the mysterious. The film revolves round a woman's seeming return from the dead to ultimately become a murder plot. By the technique of doubling and the return of the subdued, Vertigo shows the "arousing gruesome fear" of the known to turn into being terrifying as Freud puts it. In Vertigo, Scottie Ferguson (played by James Stewart) follows Madeline (played by Kim Novak), his friend, Gavin Elster’s (played by Tom Helmore), wife. Madeleine seems to be “possessed” by a desperate ancestor's specter, and commits suicide by jumping from a tower. Scottie, after being captivated by Madeleine’s beauty, becomes very sad by her death until he comes across another girl, Judy Barton (also Kim Novak), who looks remarkably similar to Madeleine. Soon, Scottie comes to know that Judy was Elster's mistress and partner in crime of killing the true Madeleine Elster, whom Judy had feigned to be so that Scottie could bear witness to Madeleine's ostensible suicide. Upon being faced with Scottie's shock, Judy's guilt overpowers her forcing her to commit suicide (Screwy, tripod.com) Unlike Rear Window by Hitchcock, where the hero repeatedly ridicules the womanly world of fashion, this almost is not the case with Vertigo's hero, Scottie. While trying to reconstruct Judy as Madeleine, Scottie shows the most little details of women's clothing, to the point that the saleswoman twice comments on how well the man knows what he wants. Rather the female character, Madeleine/Judy, is like a living doll that the hero undresses and changes and alters to match his desired image. In fact, the film is obsessively involved with female clothing to the point of touching on the wicked. Nobody takes it very seriously that the heroine works as a designer in the female "underwear business", perhaps because it is undeserving of the film's great theme of love and death, equaling it with the myth of Tristan and Isolde. In the early scene in the heroine Midge's apartment we see her sketching a brassiere while Scottie is trying to keep upright a cane in his palm, and feeling disgusted when it falls he exclaims: "It's this darned corset--it binds." Midge answers back, "No three-way stretch? How very unchic." From the beginning, then, showing his failure to act according to the rules, Scottie is ranked in the position of femininity that is related with unfreedom : "Midge," Scottie asks immediately, "do you suppose many men wear corsets?" He is overjoyed as tomorrow is "the big day" when "the corset comes off" making him a "free man" (Modleski, Femininity By Design) Shortly later Scottie notices the brassiere, wanders what is it and Midge answers, "It's a brassiere; you know about such things, you're a big boy now." And then she goes on explaining its newness that it was designed by an aircraft engineer who made it on the "principle of the cantilever bridge." Since we have felt that the film's mise-en-scene stresses on high places and we can link these places with Scottie's vertigo, it is apparent that the film is jokily connecting Scottie’s condition to womanliness, a connection that the film will treat later on with extreme importance. A link between femininity and Vertigo is also observed in North by Northwest (1959), the hero (Cary Grant) asserting that the heroine (Eva Marie Saint) uses sex "like some people use a flyswatter," and all through the film we see him executing a human fly act, , scaling walls, and clasping, as he tries to gain control of the woman, mistress to the villain. The early moment in Vertigo, the film amusingly hints that femininity in our culture is mainly a male paradigm, a male "design," and that this womanliness is made of characterless external accessories, of roles and pretense an idea that the film will later incite with horror. For if the woman, conceived as one a man must know and have to ensure his identity, does not exist, then in some sense the man does not exist either (Modleski, Femininity By Design). Loosely derived from Herman Melville's novella Billy Budd, Beau travail , the 1999 French movie directed by feminist film maker Claire Denis is a kind of follow up film , nearly forty years later, to Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Petit Soldat (The Little Soldier, 1960), these two French films entering into a dialogue with each other through the common link of Bruno Forestier the hero of Godard’s film, the returning character, even played by the same actor, Michel Subor (Leslie Dunlap, 2000) In the strict sense, Beau travail is not a war movie. Rather, it is a report of the erotic emotional rivalry between three French legionnaires in Djibouti, on the East African peninsula. The narrator, the platoon's windswept Chief Master Sergeant (Denis Lavant), nurtures an obsessive despise for a fresh recruit (Gregoire Colin) as he is being taken care by mysterious commanding officer (Michel Subor), Bruno Forestier, the cynical young renegade of Godard’s Le Petit Soldat, who, albeit does not have any profound political beliefs, kills an Algerian supporter he is instructed to by the involved in the French nationalist movement (FNM) enduring torture when detained. Simultaneously, he falls in love with a woman (Anna Karina) who he for the other side. Le Petit Soldat, which showed torture during Algeria’s independence movement, was initially prevented from screening in France. Denis, in Beau Travail, imaginatively depicts the French Army men not at war, with no (outward) enemy, no blasts, no scene of carnage --only drill exercise, daily chores, and slow-flowing fury. WE find here, nude male, half-dressed or men in military attires, bald men, tattooed men, men at work and at rest, men among men, even when accompanied with women, and men fighting against men. Beau travail eroticizes men among men so passionately that one critic rated it among his much loved "gay" films. Denis, here, turns the drill training into a slow dance, a poem of the male body, showing fatherly power both as hurting and scrumptious. Military Honor here, means terse bed sheets, military hang-up reflecting domestic unbalance. The Military, as the sergeant say, "unfits" a soldier for civilian life? Could there be a better feminist statement (Dunlap, 2000)? Beau Travail starts, where Le Petit Soldat ends. In the last scene of Petit Soldat, we see Bruno Forestier moving from an escalator onto a busy street, commenting: “One thing I’ve learned is not to be bitter. I was just glad to have so much time left.” What does Bruno do with “so much time” left to himself? Claire Denis imagines that he joins the French Foreign Legion, now an old man, commanding a platoon of Legionnaires in Djibouti, a desert base, where Sergeant Galoup, the protagonist (Denis Lavant), a tense man, an ardent believer military discipline trains the new recruits where he feels estranged from Forestier and his soldiers and has a virtually direct despise for the young and popular Gilles Sentain (Gregoire Colin). Galoup is up to ruining him, subdued homosexuality increasing Galoup’s fixated hatred for Gilles, although he also makes a romantic liaison with a gorgeous Djibouti woman, Rahel (Marta Tafesse Kassa). Forestier notes the rising tensions between Galoup and Gilles, but, does not get in the way on Gilles’ behalf. In an intended attempt to ruin Gilles, Galoup forces Gilles to attack him, abandoning the youth in the desert as a penalty, hoping Gilles to die. Gilles’ absence raises suspicion and Galoup eventually admits his crime to Forestier, who gets ready to throw Galoup out of the Legion. In the meantime, African natives save Gilles, cruelly parched and hardly alive.The ending shows Rahel on a bus with the almost dying and dried out Gilles, implying that Rahel’s destiny is knotted with Gilles’, possibly as equal “victims” of Galoup. Yet it’s difficult to think the unemotional and rarely active Rahel as a victim, she being the only native character in the film who has a name, or an identity. Rahel neither requires nor really craves what European culture has to give. Here unlike many other film maker out feminist Denis does not settle the complicated topics of history by centering on the martyrdom of one woman and telling us, “She didn’t mind, after all”; Denis does not do so, probably because of her feminist records , opens up more vistas , more indecisions to depict Rahel as a headstrong, free survivor of oppression. Denis implies that Rahel’s love for Galoup may be honest: she clubs together the shorter, simpler Lavant with tall, young actors, too charming to be Legionnaires. They all appear like male models, , particularly Gilles, probably intensifying Galoup’s sexual nervousness: he is uncomfortable everywhere to detect his concealed, illicit desire (Vicari, Colonial fictions). Rahel, almost silently points out that male tragedy, she being one more “thing” that Galoup has lost.Eventually we find, Galoup setting down on his bed with his service revolver, implying that commit suicide rather than confronting disgraceful release. But then, bizarrely, Galoup is seen dancing recklessly in civilian clothes at a discotheque all by himself. Denis intentionally gives him an urban homosexual look, complete with body-hugging black shiny shirt, tight black chinos and dangling pink cigarette. Has Galoup found his identity at last? Bruno Forestier is a Bruno Forestier is a secondary character, even he is to some extent the moral hub of the film. Denis remains faithful to Godard’s Forestier as a man suffering for his values. “A rumor dogged him after the Algerian war,” we are reported in Beau Travail, a line that pithily runs on the viewer’s memory of Le Petit Soldat . However, he is still trying to evade his painful values in a depraved world, remaining stealthily idealistic under his apparently detached and rather hard look, reaching more t genuinely to the men in his platoon c than Galoup. Only Forestier has the sense of human justice, that we don’t find the macho world of rigid army discipline that ultimately leads Galoup for his heinous crime (Vicari, Colonial fictions). Works Cited Mulvey, Laura, 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' (1975), In Visual And Other Pleasures. London: Macmillan, 1989: 14-26. Johnston, Claire, 'Women's Cinema as Counter-Cinema', in Notes on Women's Cinema, 1973 SEFT, Glasgow: Screen Reprint, 1991: 24-31. Swanson, Gillian, Book Review, 'Building the feminine: feminist film theory and female spectatorship', Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film of the 1940s, Macmillan Press, 1987; Deirdre Pribram (ed.), Female Spectators: Looking at Film and Television, London and New York, Verso, 1988., retrieved from http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/ReadingRoom/4.2/Swanson.html Erens, Patricia. “Introduction” Issues in Feminist Film Criticism. Patricia Erens, ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. pp. xvi Braudy and Cohen, Film Theory and Criticism, Sixth Edition, Oxford University Press, 2004, page 827 McHugh, Kathleen and Sobchack, Vivian “Introduction: Recent Approaches to Film Feminisms.” Signs 30(1):1205-1207 Hooks, bell. “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators.” The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader. Amelia Jones, ed. London: Routledge, 2003, pp. 94-105. Wood, Robin, "Fear of Spying," American Film , November 1982, 35. Mulvey, Laura, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 16. Abel, Richard "Stage Fright: The Knowing Performance," Film Criticism 9, no. 2 (1984-85): 50n Screwy, http://rachelcrane.tripod.com/txt/vertigo.html Modleski, Tania, Femininity By Design, Chapter Six ,The Women Who Knew Too Much, New York: Routledge, 1989: 87-100 Dunlap, Leslie , Hard Corps, 2000, retrieved from http://www.citypages.com/2000-08-30/movies/hard-corps/ Justin Vicari, Colonial fictions, Le Petit Soldat and its revisionist sequel, Beau Travail , Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media Jump Cut, No. 50, spring 2008 ,retrieved from http://www.ejumpcut.org/currentissue/PetitSoldatDenis/text.html Read More