Take One (Jul 1978)

_THE REGULARS Grants and Fellowships Do you want to make a film? Invaluable information on grants for films in ‘‘Lights, Camera, Funding’’ by Lionel Rolfe and Michele Kort, in the Grantsmanship Center News Ill (Oct.-Dec., 1974). Important new publications on Grants: Comesearch Printout on ‘‘Films, Documentaries, Media and Audio-Visuals,’’ from the Foundation Center, 888 Seventh Ave., New York, NY 10019. Academic Research Information System’s Funding Messenger—Creative Arts and Humanities Report (9 times a year), from ARIS, 2330 Clay St., Suite 205, San Francisco, CA 94115. The Washington International Arts Letter, a guide to funding sources in the arts and humanities. This organization also publishes a National Directory of Grants and Aid to Individuals in the Arts. Write: Washington International Arts Letter, P.O. Box 9005, Washington, DC 20003. If you are an ex-Woodrow Wilson Fellowship recipient you are eligible for a $4,000 faculty development competition for those teachers wishing to extend their knowledge to areas outside their academic specialization. A natural for teachers in traditional disciplines going into film studies. Write: Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, Box 642, Princeton, NJ 08540. Call for Papers The film history section of the MLA Film Division invites submission of papers on the subject ‘Studio Systems.’’ Send proposals to Inez Hedges, Dept. of Romance Languages, Duke University, Durham, NC 27706. Paper requested for the 3rd Annual Colloquium on Modern Literature to be held at West Virginia University. Subject— The Art of the Film. Contact: Armand E. Singer, Colloquium Director, Dept. of Foreign Languages, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV 26505. Jobs Department of Visual Arts at University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093 1s looking for a film historian / critic of ‘‘high distinction.’’ Write Professor Standish Lawder at the Dept. of Visual Atts. UCLA is advertising for a lecturer in theory and criticism of film with a specialty in European Film. Write: John W. Young, UCLA, 405 Hilgard Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90024. Film divison of the Dept. of Radio, TV, and Film at Northeastern University wants an Assistant Professor to teach courses in film criticism and theory. Of Special Interest The Telluride Film Festival needs help. The most stimulating of the major film festivals and one of the most useful to film educators, Telluride would welcome donations of any amount to help them continue to operate. Write: Stella Pence, Telluride Film Festival, 110 North Oak Street, Telluride, CO 81435. Model Courses The next column of Celluloid Classroom will be on ‘‘Model Courses’’ in Film and— history, literature, philosophy, anthropology, etc. Send your model course to me, Dr. Stuart Samuels, Dept. of History, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19174. Stuart Samuels is a lecturer in Film History at the University of Pennsylvania, and 1s a co-director of the Walnut Street Theatre Film and Video Center. The following column is the conclusion of Kay Armatage’s examination of feminist film criticism, begun in the November, 1977 issue of Take One. A giant step towards a feminist film criticism was taken at the Psychoanalysis and Cinema conference at the Edinburgh Festival (1976), where many of the participants and leaders were the same women who had organized the Edinburgh Women’s Event in 1972. Just as important is the theoretical work being done by the folks at Screen magazine and others: most of their continually developing theory has significant implications for feminist criticism, and some of it is centrally involved with the representation of women. This work is seen by its progenitors as making ‘‘an Intervention into Film Culture.’’ In ‘‘Film Culture’ and in the culture at large (particularly those parts of the culture with university training in criticism), we’ve all been stewed to a fine mush in notions of critical objectivity. With New Criticism, we chucked out history / biography in order to taste only the pure brew, the words on the page alone. The work existed complete in itself; all was there and available to us at all times, as long as we could eliminate the foul additive of subjectivity. But at some point, women realized that it 36 didn’t smell right. For one thing, those notions of genderless universality and critical objectivity did not address the question of women’s work in any terms other than those of a minority interest. In the attempt to resurrect our own history and traditions, we also began to formulate our demands as women readers, to reclaim sex-specific and subjective interest of the reader as part of the critical process. The first step, naturally enough, was the search for meaningful women characters with whom we could identify. And so we slipped innocently on the banana-peel of Realism, an ideological criticism which lives by the illusion of transparency of the text (the ‘‘window on reality’’ effect) and is counterposed (by predominantly American feminist critics) to the nasty formalism which had for so long denied the claims of class, race, and sex. ‘‘Feminist Realism’’ developed as a more or less sociological criticism, and thus we landed splat in the waiting mud-puddle of sisterhood, consciousness-faising, and woman-conscious do-gooding. We've splashed around for five years or so, and now we're being offered a hand out through the theoretical work being done predominantly at Screen and Camera Obscura magazines. The theory advanced by some Screen writers and the Camera Obscura collective begins by obliterating assumptions of the passive consumer so that we can find our place in the structure of relationships inscribed in the text. We have been used to thinking of art of almost any kind as something created, produced, finished by the artist, with ourselves as readers the passive consumers: work vs. leisure. The first premise of this new theory is that we learn to see both ‘‘work’’ and ‘‘reading’’ as equal moments in the process of production of meaning. (Not to suggest that readers ever really were simply passive receptacles consuming the work, but that this is the position which the classical narrative text inscribes for the reader, the space which the reader is invited to occupy in relation to the text. And perhaps one of the reasons that feminist critics have advanced this theory so vigorously is that we had already come to see this position for women duplicated in the structures of social institutions—law, family, health-care, etc.; and thus when we came to examine cultural structures, we were acutely aware of the (de)formative nature of such a passive position.) The second premise is that this production of meaning is effected in an historical / ideological context (in cinema, specifically modern patriarchal capitalism) and that the structure of the work itself reflects those dominant structures. Further,