Art History Lecture: Mary Ann Doane

Screening the Female Face Avant-garde cinema has often been read by feminist theorists as a negation of classically gendered codes of looking, particularly those of Hollywood films, and as an alternative domain for the representation of sexual difference. This presentation questions one of the central assumptions of that reading, of a fundamental binary between the avant-garde and mass culture, by exploring their parallel uses of the device of the female face as screen. What is at issue here are questions of recognizability, subjectivity, and knowability that are inflected by the growth and spread of technologies of representation in the twentieth century and the consequent intensified mediation of the human face. Prosopagnosia—the pathological inability to recognize faces—becomes the “hysteria” of the 20th century. In an era characterized by the loss or diminishment of the face-to-face encounter that has been traditionally associated with directness and a lack of mediation, the filmic representation of the face has played a crucial role in negotiating and managing the attendant anxieties. This presentation argues that both mainstream cinema and the avant-garde align this crisis with the female face as the site of a crisis of recognition, and that an analytics of ethics and power can emerge from an exploration of the gendered cinematic face as screen. Mary Ann Doane is the George Hazard Crooker University Professor at Brown University. The Art History Lecture Series is sponsored by the Cantor Arts Center Membership Board