["A male view?" Texts on feminism film theory]

The author traces the course taken by psychoanalytically oriented feminist film theory from its beginnings in the late seventies. She situates its origins in the Anglo-American debate about the exclusion of female subjectivity from the cinema and the new awareness of the problem of the cinematic mise-en-scène of the gaze, of "visual pleasure". First, massive criticism was levelled at the exclusively male/patriarchal gaze of the viewer, then emphasis centred around the specifically female gaze as a category in aesthetic theory. Ultimately, psychoanalytic feminist film theory has turned its attention to films for women, melodrams and early movies in an attempt to capture the respective historical forms of female subjectivity that they reflect.