Female Readers and the Film Text

Abstract

If the audience draws on their own experience to make sense of the text and, at the same time, draws on the text in evaluating their own experience, forming expectations or images of themselves, it is of particular interest in a consideration of the special activities of female audience members to consider filmic representations of experiences which are specific to women. In perusing, as it were, such representations in all the films we have been discussing from the twenty-year period following the Second World War we have two distinct concerns. One is the nature and frequency of representations of particular aspects of female experience, that is to say how many mothers are represented, or how often are we presented with a depiction of an authoritative woman possessing important knowledge, or how many representations are there of significant friendships between women, and so on. The second concern is with the usefulness of the various theoretical models outlined in the previous two sections on reading and the audience, in illuminating the ways in which any particular representation might be understood by its female audiences. Thus the first concern is straightforward, though nonetheless interesting, while the second is speculative and necessarily schematic.