Écriture Féminine in the New German Cinema: Ulrike Ottinger's Portrait of a Woman Drinker

Ecriture Féminine in the New German Cinema: Ulrike Ottinger's Portrait of a Woman Drinker Renate Fischetti The question of whether or not there is a specifically feminine aesthetic remains an open question and the subject of much debate among feminists in the U.S. and in Europe. In film criticism, this debate was stirred up in the early and mid-seventies by Claire Johnston and Laura Mulvey, two British film critics, and has continued in the leading journals ever since.! Beginning in the early eighties, the first books appeared on the subject, among them Annette Kuhn's Women's Pictures: Feminism and Cinema, and E. Ann Kaplan's Women and Film:_Both Sides of the Camera. Both authors analyze films by women using the tools of psychoanalytic neostructuralism and displaying varying degrees of orthodoxy . 2 Re-Vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism offers a collection of analyses by prominent feminist critics, while Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics,_Cinema by Teresa de Lauretis situates feminist criticism among the avant-garde of film theory. The best summary of the questions raised by feminist criticism is found in the article "Aesthetic and Feminist Theory: Rethinking Women's Cinema," also by Teresa de Lauretis, in the winter 1985 issue of New German Critique. Lauretis admits that posing the question of what constitutes a feminine aesthetic implies remaining trapped "in the master's house."3 in other words, using the tools of patriarchal discourse, which for so long has subjected women to non-presence, feminist theorists would endorse that very system, and "legitimate the hidden agendas of a culture we badly need to change" (158). Lauretis highlights the very point in question: should feminist critics spend their efforts deconstructing patriarchal discourse, to unmask the mechanisms of power sustaining an ideology long recognized by feminists as alien to the needs of women? Or should there be an attempt to reread the texts by women, of which there have appeared a considerable number, to discover whether they differ from texts by men, or, more precisely, to ask what sets feminist texts off from non-feminist texts, and whether 47 there is such a thing as a feminine discourse. Finally, how can the feminist critic offer such a reading without falling into the traps of the dominant discourse? These very questions have been asked by the French feminist theorists, most notably by Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, and Luce Irigaray, all of the poststructural school, with varying backgrounds. French feminists began to articulate a "feminine discourse" as early as the late sixties, reading the texts of dominant discourse against the grain and discovering instances of écriture féminine, or feminine writing, throughout the history of civilization, in cases where dominant discourse was subverted or rendered meaningless.4 Of particular interest is the approach of Luce Irigaray, a linguist and philosopher as well as a practicing psychoanalyst , who seems to offer the most revealing insights into the psycho-sexual position of women, their nonlanguage , and the options for finding a discourse of their own, which she prefers to call "feminine discourse " or "feminine syntax." In Speculum of the Other Woman, Irigaray undertakes a deconstruction of Freud's theory of female sexuality as well as a rereading of classical philosophy, finding, in most instances, a total lack of representation of women, who have been defined as outside of the dominant discourse. Her collection of essays This Sex Which Is Not One offers further views on the position of women in the dominant discourse, which Irigaray sees psychoanalytically, i.e., established through Freud's theory on infant sexuality, and through Lacan's rereading of Freud in linguistic terms. Both Freud and Lacan had defined sexuality through the phallus. In Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis , the phallic principle is responsible for the articulation of desire, and ultimately for all symbolic representation. This leads Irigaray to see the laws of phallic discourse as ultimately "hom(m)osexual" (This Sex, 129) , meaning there is only one sexuality which it admits, one identity on which it is built. Women, who lack the phallus, are the other, and are excluded from the processes which involve the establishment of symbolic systems. Therefore Irigaray, in her...