The Crisis of Political Modernism: Criticism and Ideology in Contemporary Film Criticism

The Crisis of Political Modernism

D. N. RODOWICK

The Crisis of Political Modernism

Criticism and Ideology in Contemporary Film Theory

University of California Press Berkeley Los Angeles London

For Edward Brian Lowry

Publication of this work was supported in part by a grant from the

Andrew W Mellon Foundation.

First published in 1988 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

First paperback edition © 1994 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rodowick, David Norman.

The crisis of political modernism: criticism and ideology in contemporary film theory / D. N. Rodowick. — 1st pbk. ed.

p. cm.

Originally published: Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-520-08771-2

1. Film criticism. 2. Motion pictures—Political aspects.

I. Title.

PN1995.R618 1994

791.43'09—dc20

94-25112

CIP

Printed in the United States of America

123456789

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984 @

Contents

Contents

Preface to the Second Edition

Acknowledgments

ONE The Discourse of Political Modernism

TWO Modernism and Semiology

THREE Ideology and Criticism

FOUR Formalism and Deconstruction

FIVE Anti-Narrative, or the Ascetic Ideal

SIX Language, Narrative, Subject (1): The Critique of Ontological Modernism

SEVEN Language, Narrative, Subject (2): Narration and Negativity

EIGHT Sexual Difference

NINE The Crisis of Political Modernism

Index

Preface to the Second Edition

Today I find that the 1970s, or what I call the era of political modernism, is often treated with an equal mixture of pride and embarrassment. Pride in a decade in which theoretical work in film studies defined the cutting edge of research in the humanities and in which the field itself became increasingly accepted and recognized as an academic discipline. A certain embarrassment in that the era of political modernism now seems a bit passé, especially with respect to its formalism and extravagant political claims. Text-centered semiology, psychoanalytic accounts of the subject, and Althusserian Marxism appear in 1994 as relics of a near past that are now surpassed by a variety of approaches: for example, the renewed emphasis on historical research, the theoretical questions raised by the debates on postmodernism, and the increasing dominance of television and video studies.

The historical dilemma widens. To maintain its place in relation to the debates on cultural studies and postmodernism, film studies today tends retroactively both to pose and to deny its historical continuities with the 1970s. But was the era of political modernism the last phase of a structuralist and modernist thought now surpassed by a postmodern and poststructural cultural studies? The deeper question is whether film studies as a university discipline might be disappearing into media studies and cultural studies. With the increasing dominance of electronic and digital technologies, it is now possible to envision the obsolescence of film as a mechanical and celluloidbased medium. Just when it seemed to have a place as a discipline in its own right, film studies may now have been displaced by cultural studies. The centrality of film as an object of study is disappearing no less than is the question of the subject, which is unraveling into an ever-widening series of differences defined by complex approaches to gender, post- coloniality, racial and ethnic identifications, and queer theory.

All of which brings me to The Crisis of Political Modernism. That is, both to the question of the book you have in your hands in a second edition, thanks to the University of California Press, and to the crisis this book still wishes to address. In introducing a new edition, the writers goal is always to convince you, the reader, that the book still has relevance beyond historical curiosity. I find myself in a paradoxical position in this respect. On one hand, I want to argue that film studies is indeed disappearing into media and cultural studies and that this is a good thing. But I also want to argue that the era of political modernism is still with us in many ways. The questions posed and the problems confronted during that period have not disappeared in the last twenty-five years. In my view, cultural studies does not in any way define a transcendent moment, a historical overcoming of unresolved problems in film studies. Rather, the discourse of political modernism may have been displaced in a variety of ways by more contemporary arguments about culture and identity, as well as the role of a contestatory criticism and art, but the questions it asked and the problems it raised have been neither fully addressed nor completely worked through.

So what exactly is political modernism, and what is the crisis it portends? The Crisis of Political Modernism is not about experimental or independent film, nor even really about theories of independent cinema, although I began my research with this in mind. For me the book took shape when I realized that political modernism was the defining idea, what Foucault might call the historical a priori, of 70s film theory. This is true regardless of whether commercial, independent, or third-world cinemas are addressed. Moreover, in spite of the range and vigor of debates that emerged in a number of important international journals—Cahiers du cinéma, Ciné- thique, Screen, Afterimage, Women and Film, Jumpcut, m/f, Camera Obscura, and many others—I began to see that there were more commonalities than differences in the concepts, definitions, and questions addressed. In short, the debate occurred because a diverse group of intellectuals and filmmakers were drawn, in their own divergent and contradictory ways, to a common concern—the relation between film and ideology.

These commonalities can and should be examined through intellectual history. There is a fascinating story to be told, I think, beginning with an editorial history of the journal Tel Quel, including the writers it brought together (Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Philippe Sollers, Jean-Louis Baudry, Marcelin Pleynet), and the theory of literary modernism it forged from semiology, deconstruction, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Althusserian Marxism. The complex political allegiances of the journal are also important, including its alliance, then falling out, with the French Communist Party and its brief flirtation with Maoism after 1971. I argue here that Tel Quel’s particular linking and remapping of these diverse theoretical lines profoundly influenced the editorial positions of French film journals such as Cahiers du cinéma and Cinéthique throughout the late 60s and early 70s. Equally important are the intellectual links between Britain and France, where Cambridge students like Stephen Heath and Colin MacCabe, who later became influential on the editorial board of Screen, came to study. The most important Parisian institutions for the formation of British intellectuals were the École Pratique des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, where Barthes taught until his appointment to the Collège de France, and the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, which was home to the seminars of Louis Althusser, Derrida, and, for a certain period, Jacques Lacan.

The theoretical lineage of political modernism should be traced through these interesting institutional links and alliances. Its history should also be seen against the complex political and cultural history of the 60s and 70s, whose key event for many was the national uprising of French students, and then workers, in May and June of 1968. The political turbulence of this era is important no doubt for the historical crisis that political modernism felt it had to confront, often expressed as the desire to return to zero, to make a complete break with the cinema and the theory of the past. Although I sketch out some of this history for the reader, for better or worse, it is not the main concern of this book. Instead, by focusing on the discourse of political modernism, I have restricted myself to a critical history of debates in film theory over the relation between film and ideology between 1968 and 1984.

What this book offers, then, is a critical account of the recent history of film theory. Although I do refer to many independent filmmakers—including Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Marie Straub and Danielle Huillet, Peter Wollen and Laura Mulvey, Peter Gidal, Yvonne Rainer, and Sally Potter, to name a few— readers will find little film analysis here. I do not, however, focus only on theoretical essays. In those instances where films are addressed, they are treated as theoretical documents. This emphasis is strategic. While I focus resolutely on problems of film theory, my wider project is to enlarge our sense of what theory is, especially with respect to how it informs practices of reading no less than aesthetic practice itself.

This leads to the question of what I call discourse. Theoretical arguments are certainly discursive, whether in the form of essays, books, verbal presentations, or even informal classroom discussion. Moreover, semiological analyses have encouraged us to think of films—for example, Gorin and Godards Vent d’est—as discursive as well. Peter Wollen treats Vent d’est as such in his seminal essay, which is discussed in the second chapter of this book. Like all films, Vent d’est is a complexly structured system of signs; like all forms of discourse it is organized through deixis or enunciation, that is, the spatial articulation of point of view so as to mark out positions of address and the preferred place of the spectator. This link between forms of filmic signification and forms of spectatorship is perhaps the most important theme of political modernism. Lastly, I argue that the act of reading is itself discursive. The various and shifting contents that govern the reception of films and other texts (what Tony Bennett calls reading formations) can be examined as intertextual spaces that enable or constrain the kinds of readings that may occur.

Therefore, the discourse of political modernism includes artists’ statements, statements of editorial position, exhibition catalogs, and scholarly essays as well as films. What might seem perplexing about The Crisis of Political Modernism, however, is that I refuse to treat either films or film theory as autonomous or self-sufficient acts. Rather, I consider them as part of what Michel Foucault calls a discursive practice. None of these kinds of statements has priority over the others. Together they form a complex space where the idea of political modernism is defined, debated, and worked through in contradictory ways. Faced with a difficult film like Vent d’est, one removed in time from their own experience, students today may want to know: where do I find its meaning? One might be tempted simply to give them Peter Wollen s essay on countercinema as an example of the intended or preferred meaning of the film. But my argument here is that meaning resides neither in the film nor in Wollens essay, nor even in the spectator watching the film. Meaning is constructed in a space that includes all three of these points as well as the series of intertextual references woven through the film, through Wollen s argument, and through the experience of the spectator. Neither Wollens essay nor Godard and Gorins film are static and self-sufficient objects. Their intelligibility changes through time; their potential meanings are comprised and recomprised according to the different discursive series in which they are taken up. Indeed, Wollens argument potentially changes what the film means (both today and in 1972) by embedding it in a discursive series of which the filmmakers may have been wholly or partially unaware. Similarly, by bringing together student, film, and essay in a given institutional context, the teacher has, consciously or not, performed two striking acts. On one hand, an implied history of meaning has been invoked; on the other, an institutional context has been forged in which the intelligibility of the film may be constructed anew. That Wollen or my hypothetical teacher may be creating a reading unintended by the filmmakers is in no way a liability. In fact, as I argue throughout The Crisis of Political Modernism, this may be one of the most powerful ways to define criticism as a political act. One of the things that intellectuals and teachers do is to create new positions or perspectives of reading.

Another consequence of this idea is that there is no singular theory of political modernism whose system or structure can be reconstructed, critiqued, and transcended. Despite its myriad contradictions and internal debates, political modernism is better characterized as, again in Foucault s terms, a common enunciative modality. More simply put, despite the variety of their ideas and positions, the writers and filmmakers I examine share a mode of expression complexly derived from linked institutional contexts, ways of formulating concepts and questions, and kinds of rhetorical strategies. This does not mean that there was, or is, some larger unity or consensus that writers and filmmakers are striving to reach in this period. Rather, in tracing out the pattern of recurring themes, concepts, and rhetorical strategies of political modernism, I map the geography of the conceptual borders wherein political modernism said all that was possible for it to say. Within this theoretical horizon, political modernism was fantastically challenging and productive of new ideas. At the same time, intransigent blindspots were created around questions of ideology, cultural identity, and spectatorship that are still with us today. While I hope to introduce readers to some of the more provocative and difficult ideas of 70s film theory, the larger goal of this book is to understand what limits were reached in the discourse of political modernism, and how those limits might still challenge us, although in new ways, today.

Political modernism is often characterized as asking the question: what constitutes a political film? Jean Narboni and JeanLouis Comolli’s insistence that all films are political films is even more informative. To the extent that the cinema serves to define the values, opinions, and beliefs of a given collectivity, no matter how large or small, films are expressive of an ideology or even several ideologies in conflict. One of the accomplishments of political modernism was to broaden how the problem of ideology was addressed. Ideology was no longer simply considered as the message or content of films; equally important was asking how the spectator was addressed through strategies of filmic signification. What forms of looking and hearing are constructed by the technology of recording and projecting images? What biases in perception and identification are organized in the construction of cinematic images through devices of perspective, framing, editing, point of view, the relation of sound to image, and so on? Ideological constructions of subjectivity were (and remain) the central problem for the study of film and ideology. But again, the content of films was secondary to questions of identification and spectatorship. The issue of how forms of signification in film might determine the possible forms of spectatorship, directing the spectators vision and desire, was deemed more important.

Political modernism is also usually thought of as a theory of countercinema—an independent and avant-garde cinema motivated by political concerns—but this is not precisely the case. The deeper theme involves, in Annette Michelsons concise phrase, the critique of illusionism. Comolli and Narboni s 1969 essay on Cinema/ideology/criticism and Wollen’s 1972 essay on Vent d’est are especially informative in this respect. Both essays are concerned with film form; both wish to divide and rank films according to the relation between form and ideology. The task of criticism thus divides into two separate but related paths. First is the critique of commercial, narrative film as illusionistic. By offering a narrative based on principles of unity, continuity, and closure, the argument goes, Hollywood films efface the materiality of the film medium and through this transparency of form promote an identification with, and unquestioning acceptance of, the fictional world offered by the film. Secondly, Wollen’s work is especially important in its recasting of film s place in the history and theory of modernism in the arts and literature. The task here is to recover forms that resist or contest this transparency and illusionism. Wollen favors Brechtian strategies, which include reflexive constructions that foreground the materiality of the film medium as well as episodic and open-ended narrative structures that erode identification with the image as real, thus promoting a critical awareness in the spectator. In this way, political modernism insisted firstly on a politics of representation in the assumption that foregrounding the process of signification would draw the spectators attention to the materiality of the image through the disruption of the unity and transparency of film form. By identifying forms of signification and spectatorship in Hollywood films as ideologically complicit with a dominant way of seeing and understanding, political modernism also promoted an experimental and avant-garde filmmaking that required a deconstruction of the ideology of film form before political content could be addressed.

These two projects—the critique of realist form in Hollywood cinema as illusionistic, and the promotion of the semiotic counterstrategies of modernism—are inseparable in the discourse of political modernism. In this context, the basic task of film theory was quite clear: the critique of ideology. The aim throughout the 1970s was to produce a set of concepts that defined the relation between film form and ideology, and in reversing or negating that form, to produce a materialist and nonideological countercinema. Althussers distinction between ideological and theoretical practices was crucial, if often misunderstood and misappropriated. However, it is the regularity and recurrence of this willful misreading, which in fact creates a new and interesting set of ideas, that concerns me here. Many writers argued that countercinema could produce a position of genuine knowledge in opposition to the illusionism of commercial films. More often than not, theoretical practice referred to the aesthetic strategies of countercinema rather than to a reconceptualizing of film theory through semiological and psychoanalytic methods of analysis. Althussers efforts to redefine philosophy with respect to its objects was transformed as a way of describing aspects of film form that might deconstruct the spectator’s relation to ideology. Political modernism thereby reduced the problem of meaning to film form alone. With the exception of Comolli and Narboni, this reductive movement had the paradoxical effect of obscuring any analysis of the potential of film criticism and theory for actively constructing meaning in relation to film and for creating new positions of reading. In what was perhaps the most productive decade in the history of film the ory, the political force of theory was occluded by a formalism that identified spectatorship only with the internal dynamics of the text.

Despite all the great advances made for film theory in this period, as well as the important films that appeared in this context, this paradox brings us face to face with the most intransigent impasse in the discourse of political modernism. For both filmmakers and film theorists, political modernism introduces two sets of problems: that of film form and ideology on one hand, and the relation between forms of spectatorship and film form on the other. The linchpin for these two areas of investigation is the concept of identification. Althusser had, by 1970, already pointed out the interest of psychoanalysis for the definition and study of ideology. Concepts of the unconscious, the imaginary, and negation were all useful in comprehending how individuals could hold contradictory beliefs and be encouraged, without obvious coercion, to maintain a social and economic status quo against their own interests. By the time Screen published its translations of Christian Metz’s The Imaginary Signifier (1975) and its dossier on suture (1977/78), Lacanian psychoanalysis had become dominant in Anglo-American thinking on film form, ideology, and spectatorship.

The impasse of political modernism, however, derives neither from its adoption of psychoanalysis, semiology, Marxism, and deconstruction, as its more conservative critics would like to believe, nor from its promotion of the centrality of identification for the study of film and ideology. Rather, the problem is how the question of identification was addressed and conceptualized. For political modernism the principal question was: which aspects of film form promote identification (ideological practice), and which break identification (theoretical practice) and thus promote a critical awareness in the spectator? The idea of the epistemological break, so expressive of the apocalyptic desire to return to zero, is the central rhetorical feature of political modernism. From this point of orientation, two other important features of the logic of political modernism can be identified. First was the tendency to organize concepts as sets of binary oppositions, or pairs of terms in conflict. Second is how these dualisms, often portrayed as a dialectic, actually obscured the importance of theory in the study and critique of ideology by excluding all but formal relations.

I have already described how political modernism constructed two broad regimes of irreconcilably opposed forms, Hollywood and countercinema, where the latter was defined as the negation or critique of the former. Conceptually, the superintending opposition here was really that of realism versus modernism. In its engagement with and negation of the semiotic codes of image and narrative in Hollywood film, countercinema was to promote a critique of illusionism by founding a theoretical or epistemological cinema. In this manner, the forms of countercinema were generated from within the overarching binary of realism versus modernism: transparency/ reflexivity, illusionism or idealism/materialism, and code/de- construction. The idea of code here is allied with all those stylistic devices of Hollywood films that present an illusionistic impression of reality as opposed to the reflexive devices of countercinema that criticize or deconstruct this illusion by promoting a critical awareness of the materiality of the film medium: flatness of picture plane instead of depth illusion; elimination of continuity to stress the formal integrity of each shot; nonlinear exposition to undercut narrative coherence; and the rejection of verisimilitude to burst the illusion of a believable fictional world, complete in itself.

In this context, thinking about the problem of spectatorship as separate from the internal, formal system of given films was impossible. To the extent that countercinema was defined as deconstructive of the codes of representation and narrative, so too did it formally deconstruct the spectators relationship with the film. The opposition of code to deconstruction is particularly illuminating because it opened a debate on narrative within the discourse of political modernism. For example, Noël Burch argues that the history of cinema is marked by its aesthetic subordination to codes of representation and narrative— depth illusion, verisimilitude, narrative linearity and continuity. For Burch, these codes are ideological in two senses. Not only are they illusionist in suppressing awareness of the mate riality of cinematic expression, they also promulgate the worldview of a class-specific audience, the bourgeoisie. What dialectic means for Burch is the systematic deconstruction of these codes of realism through a systematic process of aesthetic negation and subversion of narrative norms. In freeing itself from an essentially literary and theatrical narrative form, the modernist film becomes an autonomous and self-enclosed object, referring only to itself and its materials of expression, rather than expressing an imaginary or fictional world as real. For Burch, this dialectically structured form restores an active and cognitive relation between film and its spectators.

Burch should by no means be taken as entirely representative of political modernism; the range of arguments concerning representation and narrative in relation to film form were not at all unified. What is most interesting here is how the terms of debate were established. More often than not, the divisions between positions revealed more similarities than differences. For example, until 1975, especially in Britain, there was a loose consensus between those like Peter Gidal or Malcolm LeGrice (representing the Coop movement of experimental and abstract filmmakers) who insisted absolutely on a nonnarrative and nonrepresentational film, and those like Wollen who favored the post-Brechtian cinema of Godard and Straub.

This consensus broke up around 1976 with the publication of Wollen’s ‘Ontology’ and ‘Materialism’ in Film and Stephen Heath’s essay Narrative Space in Screen. The point of divergence involves what best characterizes the negation necessary for a deconstructive film practice. Gidal argues for strategies of semiotic reduction; Wollen and Heath for a kind of semiotic modernism. Both arguments are concerned with establishing an awareness of a gap or distance between referent and sign in the image, between what the image represents and how it represents it, and in the relation between film and spectator. In both his writing and filmmaking, Gidal insists on strategies of semiotic reduction that systematically eliminate any elements of signification that do not belong to specifically cinematic materials of expression. This is not so much a pure abstraction as an interest in testing the representational limits of the cinematic image. Gidal wants to obstruct strategically the spectators conditioned desire to attribute reference and meaning to the image by insisting on its material opacity. In Gidal s films the photographed image must be read in real time through the material opaqueness of the image in the form of graininess, emulsion density relative to exposure, and the instability of framing and focus. By turning perception back on to the material substrate of the cinematic image, Gidal argues, all reference returns to the limits imposed by the frame, the materiality of film stock, and of duration measured by the passing of the film through the projector.

For Gidal, narrative and representation are unavoidably compromised as ideological forms; negation means refusing representation and forging an absolute break with film s history as a narrative form. While Wollen and Heath are sympathetic to Gidal and other structural/materialist filmmakers, both writers insist nonetheless on the importance of narrative for countercinema. Against Gidal’s asceticism, Wollen and Heath argue for the representation of politics as well ¿is a politics of representation. The difference between the two positions lies in their definitions of cinematic specificity and what it means for a theory of spectatorship. For Gidal, specificity means the photochemical and mechanical processes of camera, lens, filmstock, and projection. Alternatively, Wollen and Heath define the materiality of cinema by asking: how it is organized as a language, in particular, a narrative language? Heath argues that narrative is not a structure external to the specificity of film. Rather, the history of film is marked by its incorporation of different forms of representation—narrative, spatial, figural—which define the possibilities, both realized and unrealized, of cinematic discourse. Heath insists on moving away from an object-oriented film theory focused only on problems of film form, style, or structure, toward the study of processes that engage and direct the vision and desire of the spectator through figures of framing and point of view. Following Althusser, Heath understands the function of ideology as constructing and perpetuating definitions and positions of subjectivity. For Heath the critique of ideology means understanding how film contributes to the cultural production of subjectivity by either perpetuating or challenging relations of seeing and knowing in relation to the image. Since narrative is central to the problem of how films construct point of view as positions of subjectivity, one cannot define an independent countercinema without working through problems of representation and narrative.

This is the main point of Heaths arguments in Narrative Space. Rather than negation, the rejection or abolishment of narrative and representation, Heath s theory of political modernism emphasizes the force of negativity in cinematic discourse. Here narrative and space are two terms of a dialectic in which the former represents how a unified position of subjectivity is organized in language, and the latter embodies the disuniting force of movement in film. For Heath, what fascinates in film is the constant mobility of actions in the frame, of the frame itself, and of the passage from one frame to the next, which he associates with the Freudian theory of the drives and the mobility of desire. The appeal of film as a narrative form is based on attracting and holding the spectators gaze against the instability of this constant movement. Space narrates by negating space for place, that is, by continually constructing a stable point of orientation in relation to a constantly shifting frame. Identification is sustained through a process wherein the activity and desire of looking are woven into the space of the film by establishing perspectival centers, consistent framings, and rules for linking images in continuity. Therefore, all of Hollywood’s formal devices for assuring continuity are designed to build a clear, stable, and unified vision against the erosions of this constantly moving space.

There can be no continuity in Hollywood films, nor unity and coherence to the spectators vision, without the appeal to a fundamental discontinuity and disunity which is overcome in the course of the narrative. This process of passing from figural movement to narrative discourse is one way of defining what Heath calls negativity. The concept of negativity is the keystone of Heath s arguments concerning narrative pleasure in Hollywood films, as well as his theory of political modernism. Pleasure in narrative looking is based on balancing clarity and illegibility in the image, stability and instability in the frame, as well as continuity and discontinuity in the linking of images. If the goal of narrative film as an ideological apparatus is to center and fix ways of looking in an imaginary position of security and unity, then a politically consequent narrative modernism might be defined by unleashing this negativity as a force of disunity and contradiction. Therefore, a critical modernism works through the binding of narrative and space in a way that disturbs and cannot be contained, restoring to the spectators vision a sense of process and change. For Heath, filmmakers like Oshima and Godard recognize this ideological work as suppressed by the continuity system of editing and attempt to turn it inside out. Discontinuities inherent in the movement within and between shots can be emphasized rather than suppressed, calling the spectators attention to the work of film form and its construction of norms of realism, coherence, and continuity. More importantly, in its efforts to overcome the reification of the subject in Hollywood films, perhaps a narrative political modernism can imagine new forms of subjectivity, of desire and looking, that are otherwise suppressed or occluded in the current society.

This last point may mark the most significant common ground between the discourse of political modernism and more contemporary developments in film theory and cultural studies. Both are concerned with addressing the aspirations of subjects and kinds of identification—postcolonial, queer, racial and/or ethnic—that are marginalized in the society and media of both developed and developing countries. How should cultural theory address and redress this marginalization? What kinds of alternative cinemas can be imagined, or better, have been produced, that can give representation to these identities and desires? In film theory, Heath was a key figure in shifting the terms of political modernism from a theory of the text to a theory of the spectator. This shift opened another debate, however, whose influence subtends a large portion of both film and cultural studies today.

From 1968 to 1975 one must look hard to find the influence of feminist theory in the discourse of political modernism. This is ironic considering the importance of feminist criticism and politics throughout the 70s, especially in relation to film. After 1975, however, feminist theory was rapidly incorporated into political modernism as one of its most essential concerns. Indeed, it became the central concern of psychoanalytic film theory. The watershed article was unquestionably Laura Mulveys Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, published in Screen in 1975.

There are many reasons why Mulveys argument had so much impact. First, she clearly established the relevance for film studies of various theorists attempting a rapprochement between psychoanalysis and feminist theory. In this respect Mulvey should be read in the context of the work by Juliet Mitchell, Julia Kristeva, Michèle Montrelay, Luce Irigaray, and other important thinkers, all of whom had published pathbreaking texts by the mid-70s. All of these writers, including Mulvey, introduced another important element. The psychoanalytic study of sexual difference was aimed not only at a critique of patriarchal culture; the reigning ideas of film and cultural theory were equally open to critique for how they represented (or forgot to represent) the concerns of feminism. Thus the critique of patriarchal domination and representation took place not only in relation to film but also in relation to film theory as well as psychoanalytic theory itself. Mulveys essay marks the emergence of feminist theory as a key concern of political modernism, above all with respect to how it raised the question of spectatorship and sexual difference. The emergence of a psychoanalytic, feminist film theory also exemplified a new and important critical reflexivity in ways of thinking about film theory, no less than in thinking about and analyzing the language of film.

Mulveys essay is not often read as a polemic for an avantgarde feminist film practice. Nonetheless, I argue that it is a key text of political modernism. Mulvey herself asserts that she means to oppose dominant cinema by preparing the way theoretically for a politically and aesthetically avant-garde cinema. In this respect, she reorients Heath s concept of negativity in an important direction. First, she points out that the unity and coherence of spectatorship maintained by narrative cinema, indeed how it poses the very activity of a desiring look, is fundamentally masculine. In general, narrative films offer the masculine protagonist as the subject of an active looking, with the female characters posed as the passive, eroticized objects of the look. This logic not only devalues the imaging of women on the screen; by extension it occludes women in the audience from any position of desire and identification that is not already mediated by a masculine point of view. Like Heath, however, Mulvey argues that this structure of looking and the gendered relations of power it implies contain the elements of their own deconstruction and critique. The forms of masculine identification offered by narrative cinema are a defense against an unconscious castration anxiety. The masculine ego represents and contains its fears of disunity and incoherence by projecting them onto an imaginary presentation of the female body on the screen. This anxiety, continually projected onto images of women, motivates the semiotic strategies that support a fantasy of unity and continuity in the cinema. Voyeurism, which wants to investigate and punish the female protagonist, allies itself with the linearity of narrative and a logic of conflict and suspense; fetishism momentarily freezes the look by building up the image of the woman into an erotic spectacle, satisfying in itself. Alternatively, Mulvey argues that a feminist countercinema can be created by redirecting this negativity in a way that undermines masculine pleasure in looking. Thus the threat or negativity that the imaging of femininity portends also becomes the source of antiillusionist counterstrategies that undermine identification and produce new cinematic forms.

Following the new French feminisms of Montrelay, Irigaray, Kristeva, and others, the goal of a feminist political modernism was to define a feminine écriture, or what Mary Ann Doane has called an autonomous language of desire, in the cinema. In the 1970s, Mulvey argued strongly that the history of feminist culture had always been strongly allied with avant-garde filmmaking. Therefore, feminist political modernism set about uncovering a feminine poetic syntax and positions of looking and desire that derive from the imaging of the female body in ways that confound the linearity and continuity of patriarchal discourse as well as the masculine identifications of narrative cinema. In this way, theories of feminine écriture opened the discourse of political modernism to three important issues:

how the sexed body is imagined and symbolized under patriarchy and how it can be represented otherwise; how identification and spectatorship in film is organized by sexual difference; and finally,