The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film of The 1940s

Davidson, Roberta; Doane, Mary Ann

doi:10.2307/463943

Cited by 93 publications

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“…They were also taken up within feminist film studies to similar effect. Writers on melodrama and the 'woman's film' found in Kristeva's essay an explanation of the cyclical structure of these narratives, with their repetitions, hysterical female protagonists and lack of narrative progression (Doane, 1987;Modleski, 1987). 2 At the same time, however, Kristeva's essentialising of these structures proved 'suffocating' (Doane, 1987: 193) for any attempt to theorise both female desire and a cinematic narrative that does not place that desire outside history and the real.…”

Section: 'Women's Time'mentioning

confidence: 99%

Women's time and the cinema of Marleen Gorris

Thornham

2022

Feminist Theory

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This article examines the cinema of Dutch feminist filmmaker Marleen Gorris in the light of Julia Kristeva's concept of ‘Women's Time’ and of more recent attempts to conceptualise a temporality that is lived ‘in the feminine’ but is not, as Kristeva's is, either outside historical time – as cyclic and/or monumental – or aligned to the repetitive drudgery of domestic labour. Drawing on Lisa Baraitser's concept of ‘unbecoming time’, a time that ‘will not unfold’ but is lived as endurance, as ‘staying beside others’, and as care, it argues that Gorris's films seek to depict such a temporality. The article first explores the shifting engagements of feminist theory with concepts of time and the relationship of these to ideas of subjectivity and narrative, in particular cinematic narrative. It then examines the cinema of Marleen Gorris in the light of these concepts, focusing on three of her films that span a twenty-five-year period: her second film, Broken Mirrors (1984) ; Antonia’s Line (1995) , her fourth film and winner of the 1996 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film; and her most recent and possibly last film, Within the Whirlwind (2009). It gives most attention to Within the Whirlwind. In many ways, Gorris's most ambitious film, it is also her least discussed, and of her films, the one that focuses most directly on historical time.

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Section: 'Women's Time'mentioning

confidence: 99%

Women's time and the cinema of Marleen Gorris

Thornham

2022

Feminist Theory

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The Mind‐Game Film

Elsaesser

2008

Puzzle Films

103

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The Three Faces of Eve: The Post-war Housewife, Melodrama, and Home 1

Lloyd

Johnson

2003

Feminist Media Studies

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Griffith Research Online https://research-repository.griffith.edu.au Family and home in these films offer a space of realisation for female identity outside the world of work. In the Hollywood films that we study, the domestic embodies the place at which modern life c o u l d b e " b r o u g h t h o me , " r e p r e s e n t i n g t h e f r a g i l e l o c u s o f a n e w wo r l d t h a t h a d b e e n p r o mi s e d b e f o r e the war. In a comparison between the films Mildred Pierce and The Three Faces of Eve (made in1945 and 1957, respectively), we examine two stages in the constructions of the figure of the housewife and home in Hollywood cinema. Both films rework the position of home set up in the masculine narrative of modernity-as a place to leave behind-and articulate a different relationship to domestic space. We sugg e s t t h a t s i g n i f i c a n t t r a n s f o r ma t i o n s i n t h e f i g u r e o f t h e " h o u s e wi f e " o c c u r r e d d u r i n g t h i s p e r i o d. These films demonstrate an important shift in representations of housework, from a form of gendered labour to housewifery as an inflexibly gendered identity. Homework and housework Representations of women at home in Hollywood films of the 1940s and 1950s suggest that the identity of the housewife was under pressure during the postwar period from competing discourses that each defined femininity in quite different ways. Characters often debate the cultural and economic value of wo me n ' s w o r k b o t h i n s i d e a n d o u t s i d e t h e h o me , a n d t h e p l o t s o f " w o me n ' s f i l ms " o f t e n d e a l w i t h conflicts between different roles and expectations of women: mother, wife, worker, consumer, and so on. Studied over time, films aimed at female audiences particularly demonstrate contemporary changes in views about the agency of the housewife. In the 1940s, feminine identity was economically defined a s " i n v i s i b l e , " a s wo me n ' s w o r k w a s u n p a i d, voluntary or temporary (although, of course, many working and middle-class women did work outside the home). Yet culturally, femininity was mobilised as a site of the shaping of new consumer identities. Further adding to the complexity of the figure of the modern woman in cultural texts of the postwar period, femininity was an identity constituted and interrupted by discourses of class, race, and nation, yet the housewife was predominantly a white, middle-class construction. 2 In postwar Hollywood film, t h e e me r g e n c e o f t h e " mo d e r n wo ma n " r e p r e s e n t s a t e n s i o n b e t w e e n t h e gendered identities of working woman and housewife. An alternative experience of modernity is e x p l o r e d f o r w o me n , c o n s t r u c t e d t h r o u g h a n i d e o l o g y o f " s e p a r a t e s p h e r e s " t h a t Na n c y Ar ms t rong (1 9 8 7) h a s i d e n t i f i e d i n h e r s t u d y o f wo me n ' s w r i t i n g s o f t h e e i g h t e e n t h a n d n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u r i e s. T h i s gendered m...

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The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film of The 1940s

Cited by 93 publications

References 0 publications

Women's time and the cinema of Marleen Gorris

Women's time and the cinema of Marleen Gorris

The Mind‐Game Film

The Three Faces of Eve: The Post-war Housewife, Melodrama, and Home 1

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