The Field of Language in Film

The three films which Laura Mulvey and I have made together (Penthesilea, 1974; Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977; AMY!, 1980) all attack a single set of problems which are at the same time political, psychoanalytic, and semiotic. According to the Lacanian schema, each of us is subjected to the symbolic order, the superimposition of social law and regulation on the needs and instincts of nature. This symbolic order, this law, is authorized in the name of the father, the third term which intervenes to break up the dyad of mother and child at the joint moment of entry into the Oedipus complex and acquisition of language. Thus the symbolic shatters the imaginary plenitude of the mother-child relationship and restructures the course of our identifications. We must find our places, as men or women, within that symbolic order, an order which is constituted through verbal language and on the alienation of sign from object. The patriarchal character of this symbolic order necessarily makes it problematic for women and a fortiori for feminists. In our films we have tried to investigate the limits of a validation of the imaginary (the myth of the Amazons, the dyadic mother-child relationship, the exemplary heroine) as a form of resistance to patriarchy and the possibility and implications of transforming the symbolic order to one which is nonpatriarchal. Since the symbolic order is tied to the acquisition of language, this has involved paying particular attention to the place of verbal language within our films, which in many respects are interrogations of language itself, symbolic quests in search of the place from which women could utter the repressed counter-meanings of patriarchal discourse. One possible strategy, which we have always rejected, would be to avoid verbal language altogether and produce a kind of film which, lacking the explicit presence of words, was made only of icons and indices, images and traces. From the beginning of cinema, again and again, we can find an impulse on the part of filmmakers to banish language and reduce film to the status of a pure visual art. Not only was the advent of sound resisted (seen as tributary to verbal language) but there was a campaign, within silent cinema, against the written intertitle, both in commercial and avant-garde film. Up to this day, many avant-garde filmmakers persist in refusing verbal language or reducing it to a minimal and epiphe-