Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

Feminist film theory is a theoretical film criticism derived from feminist politics and feminist theory. Feminists have many approaches to cinema analysis, regarding the film elements analyzed and their theoretical underpinnings.

The development of feminist film theory was influenced by second wave feminism and women's studies in the 1960s and 1970s. Initial attempts in the United States in the early 1970s were generally based on sociological theory and focused on the function of female characters in film narratives or genres. Early theories analyzed stereotypes and how they reflect society's view of women. Feminist film theory works, such as Marjorie Rosen’s Popcorn Venus: Women, Movies, and the American Dream (1973) and Molly Haskell’s From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in Movies (1974) analyze the way women are portrayed in film and how this relates to the broader historical context. They also examine common stereotypes depicted in film, the extent to which the women were shown as active or passive, and the amount of screen time given to women.

In contrast, film theoreticians in England integrated perspectives based on critical theory, psychoanalysis, semiotics, and Marxism. Eventually, these ideas gained hold within the American scholarly community in the later 1970s and 1980s. Analysis generally focused on the meaning within a film's text and the way in which the text constructs a viewing subject. It also examined how the process of cinematic production affects how women are represented and reinforces sexism.

Modern feminist film theory has been heavily influenced by British feminist film theorist, Laura Mulvey, who is best known for her essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, written in 1973 and published in 1975 in the influential British film theory journal, Screen. The essay later appeared in a collection of her essays entitled Visual and Other Pleasures, as well as in numerous anthologies. Her article, which was influenced by the theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, is one of the first major essays that helped shift the orientation of film theory towards a psychoanalytic framework. Prior to Mulvey, film theorists such as Jean-Louis Baudry and Christian Metz used psychoanalytic ideas in their theoretical accounts of cinema. Mulvey's contribution, however, initiated the intersection of film theory, psychoanalysis and feminism.

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