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IDENTIFYING A FEMINIST ADDRESS IN EARLY CINEMA
By Alison McMahan
April 2002
In the 70s and 80s, the difference between male and female (and later, queer and straight)
artists was still hotly contested. We used to wonder whether it was empowering or essentialist to
perceive and celebrate how women artists had different creative strategies from men. ... [Such]
speculum gazing is out of fashion now …. Women directors are no longer restricted, as pioneer
Dorothy Arzner was, to directing the kind of films that are loosely described as ‘women’s pictures’ or,
in the current argot, ‘chick flicks’…. Perhaps we should re-open a space for thinking about how
women might construct stories, frame shots and express ideas differently from men.
The above quotation is from a Sight & Sound editorial in an issue devoted to “chickflicks”.
The analogy between “male and female” and “queer and straight” in the first sentence stands
out: the implication is that gender coding and sexual preference are somehow connected.
Also implied is the idea that the similarities and differences between them can be isolated
within a filmic text. The idea of re-opening “a space for thinking about how women might
construct stories, frame shots and express ideas differently from men” led me
When I first began to research early cinema in 1990, my goal as a filmmaker was to
apply early cinema practices to the development of a contemporary feminist film aesthetic.
In fact, what I came to realize, rather belatedly, perhaps, is that if we define a feminist
aesthetic as a “normative theory of … artistic form that can be derived from a feminist
politics,” then, a feminist aesthetic is impossible, and our perpetual search for one, as
literary critic Rita Felski has pointed out, “has tended to hinder any adequate assessment of
both the value and limitations of contemporary feminist [art] by measuring it against an
abstract conception of a “feminine” [artistic] practice.”
Though a feminist aesthetic is a chimera, feminist artistic practice, of course, is not.
Feminist art is both a product of existing social conditions and a form of critical opposition
to them. Feminist art is explicitly aimed at a class of people that is self-identified as
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oppressed, and in the case of media, mis-represented. Feminist cinema, then, is often
explicitly focused on “gender-specific concerns centered around the problem of female
identity.” This can make an analysis of early feminist cinema problematic. First of all, how
can we know if an early film was meant to be feminist? It can be very difficult to determine
the social function of a particular film made before 1913, as information about reception is
incredibly difficult to come by. A feminist film critic working in early cinema is often
working with a minimum of historical information. If she’s lucky she will have access to
the film itself. This was the problem that faced me as I did my research on Alice Guy
Blaché, the first woman filmmaker. After ten years of research I had quite a bit of
information on her personal life and on her business dealings . I had first hand reports from
people who knew her that attested to her feminism. But I still had minimal information
about how her films were received, and most of that information was in the form of one-
line reviews in trade journals like Moving Picture World, hardly the ideal place to look for
information on female audiences.
Linda Williams has suggested that films designed to engage their female audience
do so by appealing to our multiple psychological and social roles in patriarchy - as wives,
mothers, daughters, housekeepers, and caretakers . The female spectator is able, and
expected to, “alternate between a number of conflicting points of view, none of which can
be satisfactorily reconciled. Williams’ theory follows from Teresa de Lauretis’ theory of
“Oedipus Interruptus”, which argues that films made by women can foreground woman’s
double-desiring subjectivity, whose duplicity need never be resolved . De Lauretis further
argued that the ‘female-gendered subject [is] one that is at once inside and outside the
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ideology of gender’ . The implication is that a feminist mode of address, if not a feminist
aesthetic, can be identified in the sum of, and the contradictions between, the multiple layers
of discourse of a film (or other text) in which it is present.
My paper will show that the connection between the diegetic and extra-diegetic
discourses in Alice Guy’s films is a feminist mode of address. I’ll start by quoting Mieke
Bal, who said:
Address, the ways in which a viewer is invited to participate in the representation, is
perhaps the most relevant aspect of a semiotics of subjectivity. … However much
autonomy a particular viewer may have (or assume to have) in front of a painting, …
subjectivity is always produced at least by the interaction between the “I” of the
work and the “you” this “I” addresses.”
The “you” that the “I” of the painting addresses is a constructed you. Narratologists writing
about the circuit of narrative communication refer to this constructed “you” as the
“narratee,”,the person the story is being told to. So the mode of address of a painting or a
film is inextricably bound up with the construction of the narratee, a mask that the viewer or
spectator is forced to wear, or at least, has to negotiate with.
In other words, it isn’t necessary to construct films for women in a completely new
or different cinematic language in order to address women as spectators. It is enough to
include a feminist mode of address at at least one level of narration. For example, the
character gaze could be female, and that of the camera male. This occurs often, especially in
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"women's films" though productive looking or reading against the grain is often required for
feminist enjoyment.
The character gaze and the camera gaze could be female. This is quite difficult,
since -- as Mulvey noted -- in our culture the image of the female itself connotes a male
gazer. Some filmmakers have dealt with this by adding a female voice-over, as Marleen
Gorliss did in Antonia's Line. Susan Seidelman's film Smithereens rocked the critics because
the camera was placed in the woman's position instead of the man's, as did Amy Heckerling
in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. What does the man see in a love scene? The woman's
face. What does the woman see? The ceiling. Putting the camera in the woman’s position,
instead of in the more common male position, calls the viewer’s attention to one way in
which the camera gaze is subject to convention.
Others have created a female camera gaze and male character gaze. For example,
Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982, dir. Amy Heckerling, based on the book by Cameron
Crowe) and Thelma and Louise (1991, dir. Ridley Scott with a script by Callie Khouri) are
both examples of female camera gazes and mixed character gaze. Say Anything (1989,
written and directed by Cameron Crowe) has a male character and camera gaze, but there is
a powerful sequence in the middle where the girl that the John Cusack character is trying to
win watches him as other teens at a party make him the guardian of their car keys.
It is relevant to note that the most obvious contemporary examples of female
character gaze occur in teen films. Perhaps it is easier to achieve a camera identification
with a female among teens, where social hierarchy is still roughly level. Further
possibilities of varying the socially constructed positions from which the camera’s gaze
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originates also exist, whether we define the constructed position in terms of gender, class, or
race. This is another pointer to the importance of modes of address at each level of
narration: the extra-diegetic (the advertising campaign, which constructs cinema viewers as
live audience members – akin to the direct-adress-to-the-audience of early cinema), the non-
diegetic (such as uses of the fourth look which addresses the cinematic spectator directly),
the diegetic, such as the examples of teen films just listed, which in turn can be subdivided
into levels of external and internal focalization and which put mechanisms of character
identification such as alignment and engagement into play.
In other words, at each level of narration the narratee is constructed differently. For
many years critics have focused on the narration side of the narrative circuit, and in recent
years much attention has been paid to reception, to how spectators and fans actually react,
especially to film and television. Very little attention has been paid to how the spectator is
constructed at the various levels of address in a given medium, which is a key step in the
circle of communication between narration and reception. In this sense, cinema studies has
much to gain from the discoveries of advertising theorists. In order to make my point
clearer, let’s look at a couple of films.
I’m going to show two comedies of cross-dressing produced and directed by Alice
Guy Blaché at Solax in 1911 and 1912, the period when she had almost complete control, in
other words, these are films for which we can clearly point to her as historical author.
The choice of films is dictated by the following criteria: 1) recognisable address to
female spectators in the diegesis; 2) recognisable female address outside of the film’s
diegesis; and 3) a “dialogue” or “counterpoint discourse” between the film’s discourses and
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between the discourses of the film and cultural discourses outside of the film to which the
film refers (insofar as these can be determined through historical research); 4) and finally,
the accessibility of these discourses to present-day audiences.
What stands out in Guy’s comedies of cross-dressing, unlike films featuring cross-
dressing made by other filmmakers, is that they are addressed primarily to women and that
all of them, beginning with her very first films, require “productive looking”. In other
words, her films require a constant and conscious reworking of the terms under which we
look at objects that make up our visual landscape. Guy’s films encourage this “productive
look” through the use of transvestism, cross-dressing and even transbodiment and role-
reversal.
CROSS DRESSING AND GENDER IDENTITY
Crossdressing was a staple of the cinema in Guy's day, although no other single film
producer seems to have used it as consistently, and to such effect, as she did. A standard
drama in literature as well as film was the young woman who dons a soldier's uniform and
identity in order to a) rescue her lover b) be with her lover c) do a job her lover cannot do
because of a wound or cowardice or d) all of the above. In these films (almost always
dramas) for the woman to don a man's clothing and identity is seen as proof of great love:
for a woman to behave in a masculine way is seen as a great sacrifice, performed
temporarily under duress, and finished with as quickly as possible.
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In The House with the Closed Shutters (Biograph 1910), D.W. Griffith carries this
plot a little further, as the girl and her soldier brother trade places. The reviewer in The
Moving Picture World commented on her action thus:
With noble self-forgetfulness, the spirit to bear up against misfortune and an almost
superhuman power to dare, to achieve and to suffer, she dons her brother's uniform
and rides forth to do his duty. She delivers the dispatches and becomes involved in a
fierce battle. At times she falters, the scene is a horrible one, women do not love
destruction, but she dashes in, the iron is in her blood, she attempts to save the flag
and falls mortally wounded facing the enemy. Her brother's name is listed among
the honored dead. Her brother really lives behind closed doors and shutters. A
drunken decadent, he lives on and on through weary years. It is given out that he
bravely died and his sister, with disordered mind, overturned by his supposed death,
is behind those shutters. Year after year the faithful suitors leave their tributes of
affection at the door of the old Southern house. The family honor is preserved,
while somewhere in the unmarked trenches are the bones of the Southern rose.
In western culture identity is essentially gendered. Clothes embody gender-specific
meanings, but they are as changeable as any semiotic convention. In other words, it’s very
easy to undress, and very easy for men and women to trade clothes with each other, to
cross-dress. If the markers of our gender identity are so easily changeable, what does that
say about identity itself? If males and females can trade clothes, then maybe what is male
and what is female is not so unalterably fixed.
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SHOW RESTAURANT CLIP WITH MASHER HERE
This pattern is evident in Officer Henderson (Solax 1911): Henderson and his
partner, Williams, are police officers. They are told to dress like women so they can catch
pickpockets who prey on lady shoppers. Henderson takes great pleasure in donning the
disguise and showing that he "has it on Venus coming and going." We see Williams go
shopping in a lace shop and promptly catch a pickpocket, but Henderson stops at a fancy
bistro to eat lunch, where he is accosted by a masher. Henderson plays along from behind
his veil while two real women (dainty ladies at lunch) watch with horror as Henderson
invites the masher over to his table and flirts with him. This scene aptly illustrates Mary
Anne Doane's statement:
At some level of the cultural ordering of the psychical, the horror or threat of
that precariousness (of both sexuality and the visible) is attenuated by
attributing it to the woman, over and against the purported stability and
identity of the male. The veil is a mark of that precariousness.
However, in Guy's universe, it is a man who wears a veil and illustrates that
precariousness, and another man who is willingly duped. All the while in the background
we see two real women (no need of veils) whose reactions, shown in a point-of-view
sequence, inform ours, the spectators'.
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Henderson goes back to the police station where he re-enacts his exploits for his
fellow officers (he tricked one of them into helping him cross a muddy street) and invites
them all to the bistro the next day to watch him continue his flirtation with the masher.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Henderson, who has been visiting her mother, comes home early
and finds Henderson's disguise hanging in the closet. She assumes he is having an affair and
that the dress belongs to the other woman. She packs the whole thing up and runs back to
Mother, who advises her to put on the dress, approach Henderson, "and when he embraces
you don't be afraid to use your knuckles." Once dressed, Mrs. Henderson decides to stop in
at the bistro; the masher sees her and, thinking she is Henderson, starts caressing her. She
jumps up and whips him soundly with her purse, while Henderson's fellow officers watch
through the window, laughing hysterically. Mrs. Henderson runs out to the street, where she
sees her husband, in his policeman's uniform, telling his partner, who is in his dress/disguise,
that his women's clothes have disappeared. Assuming Williams is the other woman, Mrs.
Henderson starts beating him about the head with her purse, so Henderson, not recognizing
her, hauls her off to the police station, where all is revealed and the couple is reconciled.
It is interesting to note the double disguise here: the identity of the fictional Other
Woman travels from Henderson, to Mrs. Henderson, to Henderson's partner, illuminating the
process of projection: each character projects his or her fears and fantasies on this Other
Woman figure, who is contained somehow in the clothes, and with the clothes passes from
one character to the next as if she were playing musical chairs. But in the end, everything is
restored to order under the watchful eye of the Chief of Police.
Cupid and the Comet ( Solax, 1911) has some stylistic similarities to What
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Happened to Officer Henderson, which was made just a few months later. Together, the
two films together clearly demonstrate the sophisticated nature of Guy’s productive look.
SHOW CUPID CLIP HERE – SHE’S TRYING TO PULL CLOTHES FROM UNDER HIS
PILLOW
The story starts with a father who has read about Haley’s comet that is soon to
appear and invites some of his friends over for a "comet party." When he finally gets his
telescope focused through the window, he sees not the comet but his daughter in the arms of
a "strange young man," as the plot summary describes him, sitting on a garden wall and
silhouetted by moonlight. Father's reaction, after checking the telescope to see if its
working, is to run out to the garden, grab the unfortunate young man, and literally toss him
out with several well-aimed kicks to the derriere. Then he pulls his struggling daughter out
of the garden by her hair and locks her in her room. However, her lover, undaunted, appears
beneath her window and convinces her to elope. Dad catches her climbing out the window
and kicks the suitor away again; this time he spanks his daughter before locking her up
again, and to make doubly sure she cannot go anywhere this time, he takes her clothes.
Since one can never be too sure about these things he tucks her clothes into bed with him.
When her lover appears beneath her window a second time, she sneaks into her (now
sleeping) father's room, but decides that pulling her clothes out of his bed is more than she
can handle. So she takes his clothes and puts them on. She takes the added precaution of
locking his closet and taking the key, which tells us that Father has a closet full of clothes,
but she has only one set. Father wakes up and sees her climbing out the window, but this
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time he's delayed by the fact that his clothes are gone and his closet is locked. So, there's
nothing to do but to put on her clothes. Meanwhile, back at the preacher's place, the young
couple find the very effeminate minister unwilling to marry two young men to each other, at
least until the bride's true identity is revealed -- by the simple removal of her hat. The three
of them, the "real" man, the woman dressed as a man, and the effeminate preacher, are
watched closely by two "real women" reminiscent of the two women observers in Officer
Henderson. Dad comes running in, dressed in his daughter's clothes, but it is too late, and
he gets a lecture from the minister for both his anger and his odd habits of dress.
In Cupid and the Comet, Guy is deliberately using crossdressing as a source of
comedy. In Officer Henderson, the way the narrative is resolved ultimately reinforces the
fixity of sexual difference and the social/sexual hierarchies erected upon it. Cupid and the
Comet, made earlier, is a little more daring. The young woman in this film adopts male
clothes -- and with them, apparently, the gumption to climb out a second story window and
run off with her lover -- in order to escape her father, who is not only domineering and
abusive, but presumably incestuous as well. The final tableau presents us with a "visionary
multiplicity" of gender, an androgynous subversion of gender fixity. And even though the
plot has a traditional resolution, with the two young people tied in a heterosexual marriage
knot, the fact that they are both dressed as men during the marriage ceremony, that the
minister is so glaringly effeminate, and that the hulking and hirsute father arrives wearing
his daughter's clothes undercuts even this narrative closure. What Guy ‘s cross-dressing
films focus on is not so much the conventions of femininity (which she problematized in her
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films of female transvestite behavior such as Algie the Minerand Burstop Holmes’ Murder
Case) but on gender conventions, gender as social more, social law.
Judith Butler has pointed out that “Woman” can be taken as a category, as a signifier,
as a site of new articulation. This is exactly what happens in Guy’s films of cross-dressing:
Woman as a social construction is opened up as a site of political contest, by showing female
characters cross-dressing as males in order to achieve the degree of agency to which they are
entitled, but to which the way is blocked (usually by a patriarchal figure). The contestation
also occurs in Guy’s films where male characters cross dress as females. In other words,
whether men are cross dressing as women, or women as men, the cross dressing in these
films points to a theme of resistance to the gender conventions as applied to Woman, and not
to Man. This is achieved by having both sets of stories told from the perspective of a female
character: by Winnie in Cupid and the Comet and by Mrs. Henderson in Officer Henderson.
Even though Mrs. Henderson is introduced late in the film, the important duplicity of the
disguise is the one worked on her; in her absence other female characters (the dissaproving
women at the restaurant where Henderson flirts with the masher) focalize in her place.
If we were to judge Guy by her cross-dressing films alone, it would be easy to say
that she was a feminist in the modern sense of the term, as she avowed later in her life.
What stands out in her films of crossdressing, as with almost all of her films, is the
preoccupation with female agency, the connection between agency and gender construction,
and the obstacles facing the development of female agency in a patriarchal society. She was
highly aware of the suffrage movement (the tender wife who is trying to assertively reign in
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her husband’s gambling problem in Burstop Holmes’ Murder Case is dressed in the white
blouse, thin tie, and plain skirt of the suffragists) though she herself, as a French citizen,
could not vote until after the end of the Second World War.. She was quite conscious of the
fact that she herself had achieved an unprecedented degree of self-realization through her
career of film producer and director; almost all of her films are addressed directly to women
with the message “you too can do more – here’s how”. The “how” usually involved creative
thinking, daring action, and a sense of humor: all three qualities required by the tomboyish
girls, usually played by Vinnie Burns, that star in her action films and by cross-dressers.
It seems quite clear from all of Alice Guy’s films, and especially her comedies of
cross-dressing, that Guy was a feminist. However, her feminist filmmaking did not take the
form of a cinematic language that was radically different from that of the other filmmakers
that surrounded the Solax Studio at Fort Lee. Rather, her feminist aesthetic takes the form
of multiple levels of address, all aimed primarily at female spectators. She accomplished
this by telling her stories most often from the perspective of female characters; but even
when this was not the case, a feminine narration (even if is not always feminist) is always in
evidence. The address of these two levels is often reinforced or contradicted for humorous
effect by the extra-diegetic narration, the details that call the spectator’s attention from
outside the story, such as indirect references to suffrage or communist revolution.
Finally, there is the complex figure of Alice Guy herself, the implied author who
maintained a front of feminity and diffidence towards the press, either as a result of her
French convent training, as a device for preserving her marriage, her business, or all three.
At the same time she encouraged other women by public exhortation and through her films,
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to follow her example, assert themselves in choice of marriage partner, in their relationships,
and last but not least, in their choice of career.
Thank you.
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