The female gaze in narrative cinema and autobiographical documentary films

Since Laura Mulvey's essay on visual pleasure, feminist scholars have questioned the representation of women in narrative film. Mulvey asserted that women were entrapped within the male gaze of the protagonist, the camera (generally male) and the male spectators to whom cinematic conventions appealed. Recent work by Mulvey suggests that women might control the gaze if they engaged the drive of curiosity to dissemble the fetish of their representation.;This dissertation engages the issue of an active female gaze and the possible narrative alternatives such a practice might evoke. I examine several films which have a protagonist whose curiosity drives her to both seek knowledge and act based upon that knowledge. The narrative films I discuss are: Alfred Hitchcock's Stage Fright (1950), Irvin Kershner's The Eyes of Laura Mars (1978), Marleen Gorris's Antonia's Line (1995) and Kasi Lemmons's Eve's Bayou (1997).;To dissemble the fetish is to engage with questions of woman's identity. Thus I also examine self-representation by women autobiographical film and videomakers who explore gendered identity within the crucible of the self. The paradigm of the curious woman leads to a reassessment of women's fetishism. My discussion of curiosity and fetishism starts with the psychoanalytic framework centered on male castration anxiety, but expands the definition to include the ways in which fetishism is practiced by both men and women. This analysis is based on ideas proposed by Louise Kaplan, Lorraine Gamman, Merja Makinen, Henry Krips and Teresa de Lauretis. I briefly examine films by Rea Tajiri, Janice Tanaka, Lynne Hershman, and Vanalyne Green. Films by Ruth Ozeki Lounsbury, Su Friedrich, Ngozi Onwurah and Odette Springer constitute the focus of my in depth analysis on women's autobiographical films.;Cognizant of the cultural stakes for the cinematic Woman who dares to look, this dissertation seeks to recuperate a strategy for her by which she can appropriate the gaze and disengage from the stranglehold of fixed binary gender stereotypes in visual representations.