“Film, Feminism and the Avant-Garde” by Laura Mulvey: Summary and Critique

Introduction: “Film, Feminism and the Avant-Garde” by Laura Mulvey

“Film, Feminism and the Avant-Garde” by Laura Mulvey first appeared in 1978 as a lecture for the “Women and Literature” series organized by the Oxford Women’s Studies Committee and was published in the anthology Women Writing and Writing About Women, edited by Mary Jacobus. The piece reflects on the intersection of feminism and cinema, tracing the development of feminist film criticism and its engagement with avant-garde traditions. Mulvey argues that the Women’s Movement prompted a political consciousness that allowed for a critical feminist analysis of cinema, challenging both the representation of women and the aesthetics of patriarchal culture. Her essay underscores the importance of questioning traditional aesthetics and representation, proposing that feminist film practice must disrupt dominant cinematic forms and forge new modes of expression. This work is significant in both literature and film theory, as it laid foundational ideas for feminist film criticism and the role of women in reshaping cinematic language.

Summary of “Film, Feminism and the Avant-Garde” by Laura Mulvey

Literary Terms/Concepts in “Film, Feminism and the Avant-Garde” by Laura Mulvey

Literary Term/Concept	Definition/Explanation
Feminist Film Criticism	An analysis of cinema that critiques its portrayal of women and its reinforcement of patriarchal values, emphasizing the need for women’s representation and feminist ideologies in film.
Patriarchal Aesthetics	The aesthetic and artistic standards that are shaped by male-dominated perspectives, often reinforcing male superiority and marginalizing women’s contributions.
Avant-Garde	A radical art movement that challenges traditional forms of representation, often experimenting with new techniques to disrupt conventional narratives and aesthetics.
Sexual Objectification	The portrayal of women as passive objects for male sexual desire, particularly in cinema, reducing them to their physical appearance rather than active agents.
Cinema-verité	A documentary style of filmmaking that aims to capture reality as it is, often critiqued by Mulvey for its uncritical reproduction of patriarchal structures.
Counter-Cinema	A form of cinema that seeks to resist and subvert the norms of mainstream (commercial) cinema, often aligned with feminist and avant-garde efforts to challenge narrative conventions.
Psychoanalysis	A theoretical framework that analyzes how unconscious desires and fears influence visual representation, particularly in relation to gender and sexual difference.
Semiotics	The study of signs and symbols, particularly in language and communication, used by Mulvey to explore how cinema conveys meaning through visual codes.
Visual Pleasure	A term used by Mulvey to describe the male gaze in cinema, where women are depicted for the visual enjoyment of the male spectator, often reinforcing gendered power dynamics.
Cinematic Language	The structure and system of meaning through which films communicate ideas, emotions, and narratives, which Mulvey argues must be transformed for feminist purposes.

Contribution of “Film, Feminism and the Avant-Garde” by Laura Mulvey to Literary Theory/Theories

• Development of Feminist Film Theory
  Mulvey’s essay significantly shaped feminist literary theory, particularly in cinema studies. She identifies the importance of understanding how “woman and film” and “woman in film” became critical concepts (Mulvey, 1978). This established a feminist framework for analyzing not just the portrayal of women in cinema, but also how cinema as an institution contributes to their marginalization.
• Challenge to Patriarchal Representation
  Mulvey’s work underscores a radical critique of patriarchal aesthetics, asserting that feminist art and criticism must actively confront and oppose traditional forms of male-dominated representation. She explains how feminism brought “a new urgency to the politics of culture” and gave rise to critiques of “women’s exclusion from the creation of dominant art and literature” (Mulvey, 1978).
• Intersection with Avant-Garde Theory
  Mulvey draws parallels between feminist film practice and the avant-garde, suggesting that the “avant-garde poses certain questions which consciously confront traditional practice” (Mulvey, 1978). This aligns feminist film theory with avant-garde aesthetics, emphasizing the need to break away from established forms of representation and explore new modes of expression, contributing to broader avant-garde theory.
• Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema
  One of Mulvey’s most influential contributions is her exploration of “visual pleasure” in cinema. She explains that mainstream cinema’s narrative structure reinforces “male erotic privilege” by organizing cinematic experience around the male gaze (Mulvey, 1978). This idea plays a crucial role in psychoanalytic feminist theory, particularly in understanding how film functions as a medium of patriarchal ideology.
• Introduction of Counter-Cinema Concept
  Mulvey introduces the idea of counter-cinema, a form of feminist cinema that disrupts traditional cinematic codes and offers a new language of representation. She explains how feminist film must “probe dislocation between cinematic form and represented material” and how avant-garde techniques can help in “splitting open the closed space between screen and spectator” (Mulvey, 1978). This concept influenced feminist and Marxist critical theories of culture.
• Application of Psychoanalysis to Cinema
  In applying psychoanalytic theory, Mulvey explores how cinema operates through unconscious desires and fantasies, especially in its portrayal of women. Her analysis, rooted in Freudian psychoanalysis, reveals how patriarchal ideology structures cinematic language and narrative. She states that “psychoanalysis dissolves the veneer of surface meanings” and highlights the “split nature of the sign” in cinematic representation (Mulvey, 1978).
• Semiotics and Meaning Production in Cinema
  Mulvey contributes to the application of semiotics in literary theory by focusing on the “mechanisms by which meaning is produced in film” (Mulvey, 1978). She emphasizes the importance of analyzing how cinematic signs, including visual and narrative codes, reproduce patriarchal ideology. This aligns feminist theory with broader semiotic theory and Marxist critiques of representation.

Examples of Critiques Through “Film, Feminism and the Avant-Garde” by Laura Mulvey

Work	Critique Through Mulvey’s Framework
1. Wonder Woman 1984 (2020)	Using Mulvey’s analysis of visual pleasure and the male gaze, Wonder Woman 1984 can be critiqued for its portrayal of Wonder Woman as a powerful female character still subjected to the male gaze. Despite her independence, there are moments where her representation aligns with traditional gendered expectations, reducing her power to a spectacle for male viewers.
2. Promising Young Woman (2020)	This film can be examined through Mulvey’s concept of counter-cinema. Promising Young Woman disrupts traditional cinematic narratives by portraying a female protagonist who rejects victimization and challenges male dominance. The film subverts typical revenge-thriller tropes by focusing on the emotional and psychological aspects of female trauma, aligning with feminist critiques.
3. The Assistant (2020)	Through Mulvey’s critique of patriarchal aesthetics, The Assistant can be seen as a feminist counter to traditional film narratives that center male power. The film’s minimalist approach and lack of traditional plot arc expose the insidiousness of everyday sexism in the workplace. It aligns with Mulvey’s emphasis on resisting conventional representation of women in cinema.
4. Nomadland (2020)	Mulvey’s theory on women’s absence from dominant art can be applied to Nomadland. The film gives visibility to women who have been marginalized by society, focusing on their lived experiences. However, it can be critiqued for not fully exploring feminist political dimensions, as it emphasizes individual resilience over systemic critique, which Mulvey argues is crucial in feminist art.

Criticism Against “Film, Feminism and the Avant-Garde” by Laura Mulvey

• Overemphasis on the Male Gaze
  Critics argue that Mulvey’s concept of the male gaze simplifies the complex ways women engage with cinema. It often positions women primarily as passive objects of visual pleasure, overlooking how female spectators can actively resist or reinterpret these representations.
• Lack of Intersectionality
  Mulvey’s work has been criticized for focusing mainly on gender, while ignoring the intersections of race, class, and sexuality. Feminist critics have pointed out that her theory does not adequately address the experiences of women of color or LGBTQ+ communities, whose representation in cinema is shaped by multiple axes of oppression.
• Binary Opposition of Male and Female Roles
  Mulvey’s theory is often critiqued for its reliance on rigid binary gender roles (male = active, female = passive). Some argue that this framework reinforces gender stereotypes rather than dismantling them, limiting a more nuanced understanding of gender identities and expressions.
• Neglect of Female Desire and Pleasure
  Mulvey’s focus on visual pleasure and male spectatorship is seen as neglecting the potential for female desire and female spectatorship. Critics argue that women also experience pleasure in cinema and can find empowerment in representations that Mulvey dismisses as patriarchal.
• Dismissal of Mainstream Cinema
  Mulvey advocates for a feminist counter-cinema, but some scholars argue that this dismisses the potential for feminist critique within mainstream cinema. Critics believe that transformation can happen within popular film genres, and that change does not have to come exclusively from avant-garde or alternative cinema.

Representative Quotations from “Film, Feminism and the Avant-Garde” by Laura Mulvey with Explanation

Quotation	Explanation with Context and Theoretical Perspective
“The heterogeneity of the cinema as an institution is reflected in its first encounter with feminism.”	This quotation highlights the diverse nature of cinema and the challenges it presents when feminist theory first engages with it. Mulvey points out that cinema is a complex, multi-faceted medium, and feminism must confront this diversity while addressing sexism in representation and production. It reflects feminist film theory’s early stages of confronting patriarchal structures in cinema.
“Woman and film and woman in film have only existed as critical concepts for roughly a decade.”	Mulvey notes that the feminist critique of cinema was still relatively new at the time, emphasizing how recent the critical analysis of women’s roles in cinema had been. This marks the growing academic discourse around feminist film theory, which seeks to deconstruct how women are represented both as filmmakers and as subjects in film.
“The collision between feminism and film is part of a wider explosive meeting between feminism and patriarchal culture.”	This quotation contextualizes feminist film criticism within the broader feminist movement’s challenge to patriarchal culture. Mulvey stresses that cinema is one of many cultural sites where feminist theory is working to dismantle male-dominated power structures, placing film within the larger sociopolitical context of women’s oppression.
“Patriarchal ideology is made up of assumptions, ‘truths’ about the meaning of sexual difference.”	Mulvey critiques how patriarchal ideology shapes not only societal norms but also visual representation in cinema. She points to how films reflect deep-seated assumptions about gender, particularly around sexual difference. This highlights her engagement with psychoanalytic theory in understanding how unconscious biases influence cinematic representation.
“It is important to know where to locate ideology and patriarchy within the mode of representation in order to intervene and transform society.”	Here, Mulvey emphasizes the need for feminist theory to analyze where patriarchal ideology operates within film. She suggests that by identifying these ideological underpinnings, feminist filmmakers and critics can create cinema that challenges and transforms these structures. This reflects her argument for a counter-cinema that intervenes in dominant visual narratives.
“For the first time ever, films were being made exclusively by women, about women and feminist politics, for other women.”	This statement refers to the emergence of feminist film-making in the 1970s, as part of the broader Women’s Movement. Mulvey highlights how films by women, for women, were beginning to change the landscape of cinema, aligning with feminist goals of creating new spaces for women’s voices and experiences, breaking from patriarchal filmmaking traditions.
“Visual pleasure is built into the way she is to be looked at in the spectacle itself.”	Mulvey’s famous concept of visual pleasure and the male gaze is encapsulated in this quote. She critiques how cinema objectifies women by structuring their representation for male pleasure, reinforcing passive roles for women in film. This is a key part of her feminist critique of narrative cinema, rooted in psychoanalysis and feminist film theory.
“The dominant cinema has privileged content, whether in fiction or documentary, to subordinate the formal cinematic process itself.”	Mulvey argues that mainstream cinema focuses on content (stories, characters) while suppressing the formal elements of filmmaking, such as editing and cinematography. This serves to reinforce patriarchal narratives, as the audience is absorbed into the content without questioning the structures behind it. She calls for a new cinematic language that foregrounds form to disrupt this passivity.
“The search for a practice that challenges the spectator’s place in cinema.”	This reflects Mulvey’s call for a feminist counter-cinema that actively disrupts the viewer’s passive role in traditional cinema. She advocates for films that question the relationship between the audience and the film, moving away from conventional narrative cinema toward more experimental forms that challenge both representation and consumption of films.
“Feminism gave a new urgency to the politics of culture and focused attention on connections between oppression and command of language.”	This quote addresses the broader role of feminism in redefining cultural politics. Mulvey argues that feminist theory helped reveal the link between women’s oppression and the control of cultural and artistic production, including cinema. She emphasizes that feminist critique must also address language, form, and expression to dismantle the structures that sustain gender inequality.

Suggested Readings: “Film, Feminism and the Avant-Garde” by Laura Mulvey

1. Barzman, Karen-edis. Woman’s Art Journal, vol. 12, no. 1, 1991, pp. 36–41. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1358188. Accessed 15 Oct. 2024.
2. Rosenblatt, Nina. Film Quarterly, vol. 43, no. 4, 1990, pp. 59–60. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1212751. Accessed 15 Oct. 2024.
3. van den Oever, Annie. “Conversation with Laura Mulvey.” Ostrannenie: On “Strangeness” and the Moving Image. The History, Reception, and Relevance of a Concept, edited by Annie van den Oever, Amsterdam University Press, 2010, pp. 185–204. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt45kcq9.17. Accessed 15 Oct. 2024.
4. Manlove, Clifford T. “Visual ‘Drive’ and Cinematic Narrative: Reading Gaze Theory in Lacan, Hitchcock, and Mulvey.” Cinema Journal, vol. 46, no. 3, 2007, pp. 83–108. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/30130530. Accessed 15 Oct. 2024.
5. Suter, Jacquelyn, et al. “Textual Riddles: Woman as Enigma or Site of Social Meanings ? An Interview with Laura Mulvey.” Discourse, vol. 1, 1979, pp. 86–127. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41389047. Accessed 15 Oct. 2024.