Research...

To look separately at the role of women in the fields of film, video and television in Britain is to recognise that the experiences of women in these areas are somehow different to those of men. The work by women in moving image production both reflects and informs the position of women within British society since the 1920s.

In the silent period, Mary Field and sisters Marion and Ruby Grierson took advantage of the camaraderie and pioneering spirit of the time by joining the British documentary movement, where they made opportunities for themselves and other women to enter the system of film production. Their influence and impact on the movement was significant: Field is noted for her work on the Secrets of Nature series (1922-33) and for her inauguration, in 1944, of the children's entertainment division of British Instructional Films.

Feminists Theory...
Feminist film theory has emerged in the past 20 years to become a large and flourishing field. Its dominant approach, exemplifed by such journals as Screen and Camera Obscura, involves a theoretical combination of semiotics, Althusserian Marxism, and Lacanian psychoanalysis. On this view, human subjects are formed through complex significatory processes,including cinema; traditional Hollywood cinema's "classic realist texts" are purveyors of bourgeois ideology. Added to this theory by Laura Mulvey's now-classic essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" [Mulvey, 1975], was the feminist claim that men and women are differentially positioned by cinema: men as subjects identifying with agents who drive the film's narrative forward, women as objects for masculine desire and fetishistic gazing. Mulvey's essay is heavily invested in theory. It is cited as "the founding document of feminist film theory" [Modleski 1989], as providing "the theoretical grounds for the rejection of Hollywood and its pleasures" [Penley 1988], and even as setting out feminist film theory's "axioms" [Silverman, quoted in Byars 1991].

Laura Malvey...
In considering the way that films are put together, many feminist film critics have pointed to the "male gaze" that predominates in classical Hollywood filmmaking. Laura Mulvey's essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" gave one of the most widely influential versions of this argument. From an explicitly psychoanalytic viewpoint, Mulvey argues that that cinema provides visual pleasure through scopophilia and identification with the on-screen male actor. Mulvey argues that Freud's psychoanalytic theory is the key to understanding why film creates a space where women are viewed as sexual objects by men. She says that it is the combination of the patriarchal order of society and looking as a pleasurable act (voyeurism) that create film as an outlet for female sexual exploitation. An important observation that she makes is that the dominance that men embody is only so because women exist.