DIALECTICS OF THE BODY – FEMINIZATION OF THE FILM LANGUAGE

Text topic: Studies

Text author: Лидија Цветић

Film as a language system, selecting and crossing certain elements, uses special connotations and forms its own meanings. Female body on the film, however, can be viewed and studied as a specific platform within the cinematic language through which new and different meanings can be read and also communicated as relationships between them. For decades have art theorists speculated about a possible feminist film language, as a new cinematic language that would open and set free а space for the representation of the female subject outside the socially coded form. Is such a discursive space in the area of film as a media possible, and what has the art of cinema offered to date these are the questions answered in this study. A particular research challenge is the issue of the inability of the feminist representation of the subject in the movie as a stereotyped signifying system. The autonomy of art as a practice framed in terms of ideological discourse production is reorganized and transformed thanks to the influence of materialist approach to semiotics – a concept which involves erasing established social differences and transformation of signifying structures in language. Post-structuralist theories of the twentieth century, including “Semiotics” by Julia Kristeva, launched a revision of the study and interpretation of the film, with a special contribution to the feminist studies of images, linking semiotic with the female, trying to reach out to the language independent symbolic structures and oppressive, eroticized view of the female body. What both these theoretical streams are trying to signify is a field in which a woman appears as a signifier of the female subject, regardless of the dominant masculine discourse in the visual field of communication: the one that constructs the view, the subject and the object and the language itself. Such examples can be found among the directors of primarily surrealist, experimental and feminist films, such as Men Rey, Cocteau, Maya Deren, Lora Malvi, or contemporary ones like David Lynch, Lars von Trier and Wim Wenders, whose poetics examine the limits of operation of such a language using a variety of art approaches and technologies, giving priority to the extension of the semiotics into a symbolically established reality.