Freeland, Cynthia A. “Feminist Film Theory.” 3 Oct 1996. 3 April 2008.
http://www.uh.edu/~cfreelan/courses/femfilm.html

    This article discusses feminist theory as it relates to theory. It discusses the foundational contributions of Mulvey, specifically the portrayal of women in cinema as objects to desire and possess, which contrasts with the portrayal of men as key figures in accelerating plot and implementing change. The article notes the influence of psychoanalysis, Marxism and semiotics on the evolution of feminist film theory since its emergence roughly thirty years ago. It also asks what relation feminist film theory has to the broader feminist movement and its goal of social change. Furthermore, Freeland examines the supposed basis for feminist film theory, as noted above, and the validity and applicability of these sources to feminist philosophy. She asks whether feminist film theory should be altered and rooted in a more conscious-raising approach. Such changes would be in line with the experiential trend in feminism and would liberate feminist film theory from the burdensome, typically “bourgeois” aspects of the field, its tendency towards abstraction and jargon. Freeland documents a distinctly different means of approaching film in a feminist manner, by seeking to analyze the depictions of female self, pleasure, and goals. She also identifies another alternative, the view that feminism should contain a number of different strategies of criticism. Freeland notes the potential influence and benefit to feminist film theory from other integrating alternative feminist film theories, including “liberal, socialist, and postmodern feminism.” Freeland suggests that through critically approaching film, individuals can demonstrate the potential for rising above our surroundings and becoming more than what our environment seeks to make us.
    This article is relevant to the research topic because it presents a very theoretical view of feminism as it relates to film theory. By analyzing this topic, the issues concerning Joanna’s actions in the movie and feminism relevance to them becomes a more intricate issue than one might conclude initially. Instead of evaluating the characters motives, this article suggests we should look deeper, at the underlying social currents that create the environments where the conflicts emerge.

Chapter 4. Displaying Connoisseurship, Recognizing Craftmanship.

In this chapter Hills explores how the pleasures of horror are constructed and narrated through fan discourses. He analyzes horror fan discourses on a few different horror internet forums and concludes that connoisseurship is the master trope in fan struggles against "inauthentic" horror consumers (non-fans) and taste-making authorities who marginalize horror. Horror fans position themselves as "authentic" through knowledge of the genre and by privileging this intellectual engagement with horror over any affective, emotional engagement. That is, "nonfans" react to horror emotionally (they express fear), while "fans" are interact in a conscious, "knowing" (and at times "superior") way. Ironically, the ostensive purpose of horror films (to instill "horror") is marginalized in these fan communities to "non-fans"). However, it is also recuperated through personal narratives of first/childhood experiences with horror. These narratives admit the affective aspect of horror as experienced in childhood and this serves as a "discourse of affect." This discourse allows the horror fan to positions themselves as rational and literate ("serious") to gain cultural credibility pushing emotion to the past and turning affect into knowledge.

Hills considers online communities--following Pierre Levy and Henry Jenkins--as a 'cosmopedia.' In horror fan forums, fans establish their subcultural identities through appropriate performances within this collective, interactive, and contested "knowledge space." Horror fans also express connoisseurship through their recognition and celebration of horror "special effects" (SFX). Hills rightfully points out that while horror directors are celebrated as auteurs (George Romero, Dario Argento, etc.), SFX creates a network of author functions. The reading of horror films by "fans" often involves a "double attention" to both the experience of the horrific content and the content as special effect. While some fans may use the attention to SFX as a "masculine" reading strategy to deflect affective (i.e. "feminine) responses, Hills points out that a aignificant portion of the audience does so to generate and sustain a reading of "horror-as-art." These fan discourses, Hills argues, work contra to many theories of horror which privilege cognitive,literary, or psychoanalytic textual aspects as generating the (dis)pleasures of horror. Fans' constructed pleasures of horror revolve more around imagined version of their "generic community" or subculture and its particular distinctions from other cultures.

 

Berenstein analyzes film reviews and marketing ploys during the first cycle of classic Hollywood horror films (1931-1934) concluding that the horror film served as an ideal site for the "performance"of socially prescribed gender roles, behaviors, and heterosexual coupling rituals. Film studios, exhibitors,and reviewers relied upon gender assumptions, but in contradictory ways. Many film reviwers ignored questions of gender all together treating the horror film audience as an "ungendered" mass, while other reviews expressed surprise that horror films would be as popular with women as they were. The marketing and promotion of horror films, however, rarely took women for granted. Many horror films--such as Dracula (1931)--were promoted as frightening thrillers and romances hoping to appeal to both male and female audiences (assuming a gendered split in interest). Horror film promotional gimmicks took a variety of forms, but many revolved around personifying "fear" as feminine. Gender expectations were that women scream and shriek during horror films, while men displayed bravery (or, masked their own fear which was seen as feminine). If studios and exhibitors (and the films themselves) relied on these assumed gender roles, it's likely that audiences both played along with these assumptions (in a "performative" sense) as well as reactedin oppositional and contradictory ways. There are some issues with Berenstein work. She seemst o implicitly criticize 1930s film reviewers for speaking of the "horror fan" instead of the "female" (or "male") horror fan. While acknowledging that issues of gender are important, speaking of the "female" horror fan is itself not without problems. For one, it also assumes (and thereby reinforces) a gendered difference in audience reactions to horror. While this difference may be true (to some degree, in some ways) it is an empirical question. Although Berenstein acknowledges a space for male and female audience members to act and react outside of proscribed gender roles, she does so only grudgingly.

 John Andrew Berton, Jr., writes in this article about the application of older film theories to digital cinema. He argues that theories created when cinema first appeared (in the late 1800s-early 1900s) hold some relevance to the technologies currently emerging. The sense of novelty and the display of technicality over creativity can be found in the emergence of both traditional cinema and digital cinema; because the two technologies have found such common ground here, the same theories about the transparency of the technical achievement of the images can be applied to both eras of cinema. The theories he utilizes focus on moving both “new” technologies’ emphases away from technical achievement and towards a more artistic approach and appreciation. Concepts by Melies, Kuleshov, and a few others – which came about a few years after cinema and first arrived, and once its novelty began to wear off – pointed to the need to add artistry and direction to this new technology. Berton wants to apply these concepts to digital cinema, with the reasoning that “history repeats itself”: the emergence of new technologies (at least media ones) tend to follow this similar pattern of awe with the technical nature of the creation that lasts until prodded to turn towards a more content-driven approach.

    Berton’s ideas here hold a lot of relevance to my paper because he somewhat suggests that old media and new media perhaps faced similar beginnings. Since we’re more or less now still in the beginning of the new media phase, we’ve been able to experience firsthand if Berton is correct. I think that there was a time when digital media was so new and cool, that anything it created was met with awe and glee. This has worn off now, but I believe this has transferred to a certain extent to new media technologies like the iPod and the cell phone. Pretty much anything you put on an iPod (at least to the younger generation) is cool not because of what you’re watching, but because you’re using the technology. We’re still starting to figure out what movies and clips work best on a 2” portable screen; it’s likely we won’t discover a good answer for awhile. In the meantime, we’re in the pre-theory phase. Melies and Kuleshov don’t yet apply to the iPod (but do, perhaps arguably, to the computer, which is an interesting separation). Thus, Berton’s overall concept can be applied to my paper in a unique and unexpected way.

overview and critique of Althusserian/Lacanian tradition of film spectatorship theory

Baird, Robert. "The Startle Effect: Implications for Spectator Cognition and Media Theory." Film Quarterly. 53.3 (Spring 2000): pp. 12-24.

Humans (and animals for that matter) possess a startle reflex. Objects abruptly entering our visual space or loud noises can cause us to recoil. At the most basic level this is likely a hard-wired evolutionary adaptive mechanism which helps protect us from potential dangers in our environment. But this reflex has also benefited filmmakers, stage directors, and other entertainers as it is used to shock and thrill audiences. The "startle effect" has become such an ingrained part of horror and suspense films that we take it for granted. Baird very aptly explores both the formal conventions of the startle effect in film and what implications this may have for theories of spectatorship. Although "startles" have often been dismissed as being juvenile and representing crude sensationalism, Baird shows through formal breakdown of famous "startle" scenes such as in Alien (1979) the skill and craft required to create effective startles.

Noel Carroll is trained as both a philosopher (aesthetics, philosophy of art) and a film scholar. Carroll's book seeks to provide a definition of fictional horror (novels, film, tv shows, etc.) and to explore our emotional and cognitive engagement with horror, or to put it another way, why are we afraid of fictional horror and why do we like it? First, Carroll introduces the term "art-horror" to describe fictional horror and distinguish it from real life horrors. Carroll's definition of "art-horror" is primarily object-based, that a work of art is part of the horror genre if it includes an impure entity which violates cognitive and cultural categories (i.e., a monster) and is threatening. Carroll then explores the "paradox" of the subtitle, which is why are people afraid of fiction? The more general question addressed is how does fiction generate emotions in its audience. This section is the most philosophical as Carroll explores various theories such as the "illusion theory" of fiction and the "pretend theory" of fiction. Carroll also spends considerable time exporing characteristic horror plots and the relation between suspense and horror. The main criticism of the book which many have pointed out is that Carroll's definition of horror is too narrowly circumscribed as it excludes from horror those fictions which present humans as the agents of horror and threat including, for example, a large percentage of the modern horror film (from Psycho to Texas Chainsaw Massacre to Hostel) and also many of the stories by Edgar Allan Poe. This seems wrong both intuitively and categorically. However, I think there are ways to reconcile Carroll's theory with these types of "non-monster" horrors (Carroll even alludes to this possibility himself) and either way Carroll's book is still extremely valuable and useful for anyone studying the horror genre. It is a must read.

Excellent collection of essays on the history of the horror film, the aesthetics of horror, and audience reception of the horror film. Many of the essays presented here can be seen as useful companion pieces to Noel Carroll's seminal book The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart (1990) as they continue to explore the question of horror affect and why people like to be scared by movies. Also of particular interest are two essays which discuss the under-explored silent-era horror film (see below).

"Shadow-Souls and Strange Adventures: Horror and the Supernatural in European Silent Film" by Casper Tybjerg

Tybjerg argues that despite the fact that most histories of the horror film begin their story with the first Hollywood sound horror films, Tod Browning's Dracula and James Whale's Frankenstein (both 1931), while paying only passing attention to such "precursors" as Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), there are a substantial number of European silent films (especially from Germany, but also from Denmark, Sweden and Russia) that should arguably be considered a part of the horror genre proper due to their common features of the supernatural and depictions of nightmarish situations. Tybjerg also usefully explores the relation between "fantastic" literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the development of the horror film in Germany in the 1910s and 1920s which, of course, served as an influence for the "golden age" of the Hollywood sound horror film of the 1930s.

"Before Sound: Universal, Silent Cinema, and the Last of the Horror-Spectaculars" by Ian Conrich.

Conrich performs a service similar to Tybjerg's but this time concentrates on the cycle of "horror-spectaculars" produced by Universal before the advent of sound: The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), The Phantom of the Opera (1925) and The Man Who Laughs (1928). Conrich does not insist that these pre-sound horror films represented a fully developed genre, but rather that the periodization that tends to be inforced using sync sound as the demarcation can efface continuities and create somewhat false divisions. By tracing certain continuities of technical staff, themes, and film style across this divide, he shows that silent and sound horror films have more in common than often asserted.

This edited collection presents twelve essays by film scholars and philosophers exploring the intersection between human emotion and film. The common bond shared by these scholars is that their theoretical approach to film is primarily based in cognitive science and analytic philosophy provding a theoretical alternative to psychoanalytic and poststructural theories of film reception which tend to dominate the field.     

Chapter Seven: "Movie Music as Moving Music: Emotion, Cognition, and the Film Score" by Jeff Smith.

Smith explores the relationship between film music and spectator emotion from a cognitivist perspective relying on recent work in music theory and analytic philosophy (i.e, Peter Kivy and Noel Carroll) and generally pointing to weaknesses in pyschoanalytic accounts of film music which are currently most prominent with the field of film studies (i.e., Claudia Gorbman). His general argument is that spectators engage with film music on a number of different registers which are best explored and explained by cognitivist and emotivist theories of musical affect. The basic structure of the essay is to lay out certain theories of musical affect and then modify them by either adding to or revising them with recent theories of music cognition--polarization and affective congruence--taking a prominent role. The bottom line is that instead of a psychoanalytic account of film music which takes music to be predominantly "inaudible" to the spectator working "subconsciously" to smooth over potential disruptive elemetns of film form and thereby "suturing" spectators into the film's narrative, Smith posits are more active model where film music communicates with spectators evoking or even provoking emotions at various levels from providing narrative cues to representing character's emotional states.