Mary Ann Doane
PhD, University of Iowa, Class of 1937 Professor of Film & Media

Bio

Mary Ann Doane teaches courses on film theory, psychoanalytic theory, technology and media, cultural theory, feminist theory, the avant-garde, and film and modernity. Before coming to Berkeley, Doane was George Hazard Crooker Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, where she taught for more than three decades and served as Department Chair from 1996 to 1997, 1998 to 2000 and 2010 to 2011. Doane also served on the Executive Board of the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women. She has held visiting teaching positions at New York University and the University of Iowa. In 1994 she was Frederic Ives Carpenter Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago, and in Spring 2005 she delivered the Christian Gauss Seminar Lectures at Princeton University. Doane was also a member of the Executive Council for The Society for Cinema Studies from 1986 to 1989 and served on the Film Division of the Modern Language Association from 1993 to 1997. She is a member of the editorial board of Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies and an advisory editor for Camera Obscura and Parallax. In 1990–91, she was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Doane works in the areas of film theory, feminist film studies, cultural theory, and semiotics, and has also written on photography, television, and digital media. She is currently completing a book on the use of the close-up in film practice and theory, and the way in which screen size and its corresponding scale have figured in the negotiation of the human body’s relation to space in modernity.

Books

The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. Spanish translation (Murcia Cultural, forthcoming 2009).

Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 1991. Italian translation, Nuova Pratiche Editrice, 1996.

The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Also published in London by the Macmillan Press Ltd., 1988, in the series “Language, Discourse, Society” (General Editors: Stephen Heath, Colin MacCabe, Denise Riley). Japanese translation, Tokyo: Keiso Shobo, 1991.

Edited Volumes

Editor, differences 18:1 (Spring 2007), Special Issue: “Indexicality: Trace and Sign.”

Co-editor, Re-vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism. Frederick, MD: University Publications of America and The American Film Institute, 1984.

Co-editor, Camera Obscura 20-21 (May-September 1989), Special Issue: “The Spectatrix.” Swedish translation of introduction, Modern film teori 2, ed. Lars Gustaf Andersson and Erik Hedling (Lund: Studentlitteratur, 1995).

Selected Book Chapters

“Screening the Avant-Garde Face,” In Terms of Gender, ed. Elizabeth Weed and Judith Butler (Bloomington: Indiana UP, forthcoming, 2010).

“Scale and the negotiation of “real” and “unreal” space in the cinema,” Realism and the Audiovisual Media, ed. Lucia Nagib and Cecilia Antakly de Mello (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

“The Location of the Image: Cinematic Projection and Scale in Modernity,” The Art of Projection, ed. Stan Douglas and Christopher Eamon (Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz, 2009).

“Indexicality and the Concept of Medium Specificity,” The Meaning of Photography, ed. Robin Kelsey and Blake Stimson (Yale University Press, 2008).

“In the Ruins of the Image: The Work of Leslie Thornton,” Women’s Experimental Cinema, ed. Robin Blaetz (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007).

“Real Time: Instantaneity and the Photographic Imaginary,” Stillness and Time: Photography and the Moving Image, ed. David Green (Brighton, England: Photoworks/Photoforum Press, 2006), pp. 23-38.

“(De)Realizing Cinematic Time,” Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film, ed. Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press and Alphabet City Media,
Inc., 2004), pp. 259-284.

“The Shadow of Her Gaze,” reprinted in Language, Discourse, Society Reader, ed. Stephen Heath, Colin MacCabe, and Denise Riley (London: Palgrave Macmillan Ltd., 2004).

“Screening Time,” Language Machines: Technologies of Literary and Cultural Production, ed. Jeffrey Masten, Peter Stallybrass, Nancy J. Wickers (Routledge, 1997).

“Technophilia: Technology, Representation and the Feminine,” Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science, ed. Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller, Sally Shuttleworth (New York: Routledge, 1990); in Cybersexualities: A Reader on Feminist Theory, Cyborgs and Cyberspace, ed. Jenny Wolmark (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999); and in Liquid Metal: The Science Fiction Film Reader, ed. Sean Redmond (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2004).

“Information, Crisis, Catastrophe,” Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism, ed. Patricia Mellencamp (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990). Reprinted in The Historical Film: History and Memory in Media, ed. Marcia Landy (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2001): 269-285; and translated into German in Philosophie des Fernsehens, ed. Oliver Fahle and Lorenz Engell (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2006); and with new postscript in New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, ed. Wendy Hui Kyong Chung and Thomas Keenan (New York: Routledge, 2006): 251- 264.

“The Erotic Barter: Pandora’s Box,” The Films of G.W. Pabst: Extraterritorial Cinema, ed. Eric Rentschler (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990).

“Veiling Over Desire: Close-ups of the Woman,” Feminism and Psychoanalysis, ed. Richard Feldstein and Judith Roof (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989): 105-141.

“The ‘Woman’s Film:’ Possession and Address,” Re-vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. M. Doane, P. Mellencamp, L. Williams (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America and the American Film Institute, 1984): 67-82. Also anthologized in Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: British Film Institute, 1987): 283-298.

“The Film’s Time and the Spectator’s `Space’,” Cinema and Language, ed. Stephen Heath and Patricia Mellencamp (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America and The American Film Institute, 1983): 35-49.

“Ideology and the Practices of Sound Editing and Mixing,” The Cinematic Apparatus, ed. Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath (London and New York: Macmillan and St. Martins Press, 1980): 47-56; Film Sound: Theory and Practice, ed. John Belton and Elisabeth Weis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985): 54-62.

Selected Journal Articles

“Imaging Contingency: An Interview with Mary Ann Doane,” parallax, no. 45, October-December 2007.“Aesthetics and Politics,” Film Feminisms, special issue of Signs, vol. 30, no. 1 (Autumn 2004) ed. Vivian Sobchak and Kathleen McHugh.

“Pathos and Pathology: The Cinema of Todd Haynes,” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, no. 57 (2004), pp. 1-22.

“The Close-up: Scale and Detail in the Cinema,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, vol. 14, no. 3 (Fall 2003).

“Technology and Sexual Difference: Apocalyptic Scenarios at Two ‘Fins-de-siècle’,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, vol. 9, no. 2 (1997): 1-24.

“Temporality, Storage, Legibility: Freud, Marey and the Cinema,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 22, no. 2 (Winter 1996).

“Technology’s Body: Cinematic Vision in Modernity,” differences, vol. 5, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 1-23.

“Melodrama, Temporality, Recognition: American and Russian Silent Cinema,” East-West Film Journal 4.2 (June 1990). Danish translation, MedieKultur 14 (1990): 106- 128.

“Masquerade Reconsidered: Further Thoughts on the Female Spectator,” Discourse 11.1 (Fall-Winter 1988-89): 42-54.

“The Abstraction of a Lady: La Signora di Tutti,” Cinema Journal 28.1 (Fall 1988): 65-84.

“The Retreat of Signs and the Failure of Words: Leslie Thornton’s Adynata,” Millenium Film Journal 16/17/18 (Fall/Winter 1986-87): 151-157.

“The Economy of Desire: Commodity Tie-Ins,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 11.1 (May 1989): 23-33.

“Remembering Women: Psychical and Historical Constructions in Film Theory,” Continuum, vol. 1.2 (1988): 3-14.

“The Clinical Eye: Medical Discourses in the ‘Woman’s Film’ of the 1940s,” Poetics Today, Special Issue: “The Female Body in Western Culture: Semiotic Perspectives,” ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman, 6.1-2 (1985): 205-227.

“‘…When the Direction of the Force Acting on the Body is Changed:’ The Moving Image,” Wide Angle, vol. 7.1-2 (Spring 1985): 42-57.

“Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator,” Screen 23.3-4 (September/October 1982): 74-87. Italian translation, Immagini allo schermo: La spettatrice e il cinema, ed. Giuliana Bruno and Maria Nadotti (Torino: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1991). German translation, Frauen und Film 38 (May 1985): 4-19. Reprinted in Weiblichkeit als Maskerade, ed. Liliane Weissber (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1994).

“Gilda: Striptease as Epistemology,” Camera Obscura 11 (Fall 1983): 7-27. French translation, special issue of CinémaAction, no. 67, 20 ans de théories féministes sur le cinéma, 1993.

“Caught and Rebecca: The Inscription of Femininity as Absence,” Enclitic 5.2/6.1 (Fall/Spring 1982) 75-89.

“Woman’s Stake: Filming the Female Body,” October 17 (Summer 1981): 23-36.

“The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space,” Yale French Studies 60 (Fall 1980): 33-50.

“Misrecognition and Identity: The Concept of Identification in Film Theory,” Cine-Tracts: A Journal of Film and Cultural Studies 3.3 (Fall 1980): 25-32.

“Desire in Sunrise,” Film Reader 2 (January 1977): 71-77.