ABSTRACT
Jacqueline Rose has written: "On the one hand, there is (with structurallmaterialist film) the discussion as to types of object represented. This raises, for example, the whole question of the relative potency of images . . . the avoidance of the socially coded objects of fetishism, the refusal to produce and reproduce film images of women and hence the refusal to use images of women or men. With this, the symptomatic duality that this then imposes: against anthropomorphic identification20 through the narrative relations of human figures, which means images of men or women, and, also, the inevitable stressed addition to the general rule, against images of women, specifically, and whether in or out of conventional narrative (the point of Laura Mulvey's emphases in her essay "Visual
pleasure and narrative einerna," that the image of the woman is the best way of stopping narrative flow without trouble, unpleasure). At one level, this position is clear, if pessimistic: the objeets to be subjected to the film proeess should not be the eulturally reeeived objeets of fetishism and censor. The fact that it is the image of the woman that here eauses the split in the theory, foreing the filmmaking activity to think itself on two fronts, foregrounds this very problem of women and representation" (Jaequeline Rose, "Problems in eurrent theory" The Cinematic Apparatus, Maemillan, London, 1981; St Martins Press, New York, 1986, p. 180, reprinted in Rose's Sexuality in the Field of Vision, Verso-NLB, London, 1986). Rose argues further: "A eonfusion at the level of sexuality brings with it a disturbanee of the visual field .... There ean be no work on the image, no challenge to its power of illusion and address, wh ich does not simultaneously ehallenge the fact of sexual differenee .... As if Freud found the aptest analogy for the problem of our identity as human subjects in failures of vision .... Something which ean only eome into foeus now by blurring the field of representation where our normal forms of self-reeognition take plaee ....
