This scene is Phyllis’s first shot in the film, so this is how she is presented to the audience.
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Walter Neff’s quip to a bath towel clad Phyllis about her husband’s ‘being fully’ covered and his engaged conversation leaves no doubt about his admiration to Phyllis (Johnson, 1978). The conversations appear to make her more sexually promiscuous, or at least sexy (Fairfax, 2014). As their conversation progresses, it becomes highly obvious that the camera’s lingering focus on Phyllis is to put more emphasis on her sexuality. She is first seen in a bath towel by both Walter Neff and the audience. The sexualizing of Phyllis Dietrichson is highly apparent in Double Indemnity. Pleasure at looking at the passive female by the active male human and the audience can probably be best explained by analysing segments from the film Double Indemnity (1944).Ĭapturing the attention of the male audience? This particular shot looks like it had no other intention. She writes the phrase, “Woman as Image, Man as Bearer of the Look” to explain that films are usually structured in such a way that men are always the spectator and women are represented as an image to be looked at as a form of sexual gratification. She intends to explain in her paper that women are treated as sexual objects who are always intended to be presented as an erotic spectacle. Mulvey attempted to covey in her theories that males are the target audience in films. She calls the psychoanalytic a ‘political weapon’ which demonstrates that the patriarchal society has influenced the structure of the films. Mulvey starts the paper, ‘ Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ by announcing that she intends to use psychoanalysis for her study into the perception of females in a film (Mulvey, 1975). These theories just kept on coming one after another. The endless list included Laura Mulvey with her two essays, one in 1973, “ Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” and the second, “ Afterthoughts on Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in 1981, Mary Ann Doane in 1982, titled “ Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator”, Linda Williams writing “‘ Something Else besides a Mother: “Stella Dallas” and the Maternal Melodrama’” and Teresa de Lauretis’s “ Alice doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema” in 1982 etc. This set off a trend that continued for many years with many different theorists contributing towards the development of feminist film theories. She based her work on Marxist theories and encouraged the use of feminist theorists in films for painting a more accurate image of women for getting rid of stereotypes (Johnston, 1973). She believed both Hawks and Ford represented women in films in their own stereotypical way. She specifically attacked films made by Howard Hawks and John Ford by saying that women exist in their films as signs meaningful only within male fantasy and not as significant in themselves. She argued that films were not a representation of reality but myths engineered by patriarchal ideologies for the desires of men. One of the earliest attempts was done in 1973 by Claire Johnston. In addition to it, they believed that the use of deconstruction, psychoanalysis and semiotics could be used to rectify the way women are misrepresented in films. These critics saw the cinema as the construction of male fantasies and desires that are projected on to females on the screen. Long story short, they sketched theories from other contemporary and literary theories that address the stereotypes women face (Hollinger, 2012). The following essay discusses theories of feminism in films and performs analyses of various segments of Double Indemnity (1944) which has been one of the most popular films to be argued upon whenever it comes to feminism.ĭue to the lack of theories about feminism in relation to films, theorists came up with cinefeminism.
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expose the stereotypes faced by females in films, but all of them had a different path towards how they were going to do it.
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It would be safe to say that most of the theorists had the same intention, i.e. The most popular theorists about film-feminism are Laura Mulvey, Pam Cook, Mary Ann Doane and Claire Johnston. With it, film theorists mindful of female perceptions came up. Many seized the opportunity and female advocates started to become popular. The second wave touched on a variety of subjects like better education, healthcare, more jobs and gender equality (Cochrane, 2013). It was quite a significant movement and has been etched in the pages of history as one of the most important activities involving feminism. The second wave of feminism began during the 1960’s.