At the Frontier of the Female Gaze: Eccentric Subjects Within Hollywood Silent Films
(2018) Film-Philosophy Conference — Location: Goteborg University (3.July.2018)
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- Abstract
- This paper aims to investigate the problematic female point of view within Hollywood silent films. Its goal is not really to enlighten the well known paradox which makes an actress, as a woman, an image constantly seen and still unrepresented or unrepresentable, but more to explore the consequences of such a paradox on the status of female gaze within filmic images. Through an analysis of Teresa de Lauretis’ “Eccentric Subjects”, we would like to tackle the emergence - within the silent films - of marginality as privileged place of female gaze. For this purpose, we will examine more specifically two silent films: The Battle of Elderbush Gush by D.W. Griffith (1913) and The Wind by V. Sjöström (1928). Framing the Hollywood silent films period, these two films share at least two things: their action take place in the Wild West – at the Frontier – and each have as their main character a woman. Mae Marsh and Lilian Gish both arrive in the West when everything is already settled. Yet, as we will demonstrate, these women are depicted as a strange kind of pioneers. Indeed, if houses are already built, the home is still absent. Confined to a problematic domestic place, the two heroines experiment the impossibility of a thick border between the inside and the outside, between the wilderness and what they have to call a “home”. Like M. B. Pratt’s autobiographical narrative, which De Lauretis analysed, these two films are indeed driven by a tension between « being home » and « not being home ». Suffering from a self-displacement, these women reinvent self-disentification as a specific identification. What we would like to prove eventually is that, forced to occupy the Frontier - this “inframince” space as Duchamp would say – these women open the female gaze to undecidability.
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Pfeiffer, N. (2018). At the Frontier of the Female Gaze: Eccentric Subjects Within Hollywood Silent Films. Film-Philosophy Conference, Goteborg University. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/173524