Popular Culture Review Vol. 2, No. 2, July 1991 | Page 31

Lessons From Hollywood:
Feminist Film Theory and the
Commercial Theatre
My purpose in this paper is to explore the relationship of
feminist criticism written about the live theatre, with the more
established feminist scholarship that has analyzed mainstream,
Hollywood film. I want to suggest that contemporary feminist film
theory, with its interest in the mainstream sector of the art form of
film, can offer a great deal of help to those critics who are committed
to the attempt to forge a more populist live theatre. This would seem
to be useful as it is generally accepted that the legitimate theatre
has progressively become an increasingly elitist institution, largely
irrelevant to the public in general and to the working-class in
particular, while mainstream film and television enjoy a prominent
position in the cultural fabric of contemporary American society.
In short, I want to determine whether the critique of film
scholars—which has progressed from merely denying that the
Hollywood cinema had any populist impact, to a revisiting of the
possibility for female dialogue within its patriarchal constraintscould be used as a model for encouraging the response of reluctant
theatre scholars to the commercial, live theatre. The result might be
a challenging of elitism and the promotion of theatre that will be
important in the lives of a mass audience.
Feminist film theory should be of great interest to the
theatrical populist. Unlike broadly similar work within the live
theatre, it has often focused on a well-known and easily definable
"dominant" text (the commercial, Hollywood cinema), meaning that
the work has looked at film that attracts wide, popular audiences.
Feminist film theorists have attempted to understand exactly how
the audience for a dramatic work interacts with the artwork in
question, and how that relationship affects the production of
meaning. Equally importantly, many feminist critics—including
Annette Kuhn, Maria La Place and Judith Mayne—have
acknowledged the complexity of this performance/audience
relationship and they have tried to explain why the popular taste
(especially, of course, that of women) takes the shape it does, a