The Maternal Imagination of Film and Film Theory

This book challenges common sense understandings of the unconscious effects of cinema and visual culture. It explores the castrating power of the early modern witch and the historical belief that pregnant women could manipulate and distort body image as figurative analogies for feminist theories of objectification and the male gaze. Through developing this history as an impure but lively analogy, this book serves as a provocation against the dominant imagining of objectification.

It offers innovative analyses of a wide-ranging selection of films and topics including Joyce Wieland’s Water Sark (1964) and its resonance with the works of John Cage and Stan Brakhage; the documentary Histoires d’A (History of Abortion, 1973), which contributed to the successful legalisation of abortion in France; the Hong Kong horror film Dumplings (Jiaozi, 餃子 2004), where foetal cannibalism serves up an image of censorship; and the dual productions The Book of Mary (Le livre de Marie) and Hail Mary (Je vous salue, Marie, 1985) by Anne-Marie Miéville and Jean-Luc Godard that figure a self-reproducing virgin who hears herself while remaining a virgin, unseen.

“Lauren Bliss’ The Maternal Imagination of Film and Film Theory is a work of formidable originality and daring. Going well beyond an old-fashioned media studies sociology of ‘screen depictions of pregnancy’, the book delves deeply into the vexed history of our ambivalent responses to cross-media imagery: fascination, but also demonization. Offering a careful critique of aspects of feminist theory from within a fully feminist perspective, Bliss opens a new terrain of figural analysis of film, digital media, and life itself.” (Prof. Adrian Martin, Monash University, author of Mysteries of Cinema)

“This work most successfully challenges – in highly original and distinctly transferable ways – the commonly held academic ideas that cinematic representations of women are either objectifying or alienating. Its adaptation of Nicole Brenez’s approaches and insights serve as a compelling point of departure for what is a mature, original, valuable and completely absorbing work.” (Professor Catherine Grant, Department of Digital Media and Screen Studies, Birkbeck, University of London)

“Lauren Bliss unfolds a deep-time gendered layer within the film apparatus: the power long ascribed to women’s bodies to alter vision and human bodies, especially their fetuses. In the phallogocentric worldview that decimated women as witches, female matrices (womb as brain) were fantasized to have technical faculties akin to those of a film camera. Bliss assays how, tangibly, cinema might be said to be the brainchild of gynophobia. Redirecting psychoanalytical and affect-centered approaches of media theory towards occulted histories of psychosexual embodiment and birth, the book contributes to film theory a radical critique of emancipative care.” (Professor Christophe Wall-Romana, University of Minnesota)

Lauren Bliss is a lecturer and tutor in screen studies and media and communication at the University of Melbourne, Australia.