Elizabeth Cowie is Professor Emeritus Film Studies at the University of Kent.<\/b><\/p>\n
After graduating with a degree in history, politics and sociology I worked in publishing, and was editorial assistant for the journal Screen<\/i> from 1972 to 1976 at a time when it was transforming debates about cinema and culture through its often controversial introduction of new French approaches to film, including semiotic and psychoanalytic theories. My involvement in these debates led to my change in career, and I began a post-graduate degree at the Slade School of Art, while I edited the 1978 catalogue of films funded by the British Film Institute Production Board, involving avant-garde and independent short and feature length films, and as well as teaching film at a number of institutions and universities in London.<\/p>\n
At the same time I was also involved in feminism, and working\u00a0 on issues of women and film, and founded the feminist theory journal, m\/f<\/i>, with Parveen Adams and Rosalind Coward, and we were later joined by Beverley Brown.\u00a0 The journal, which published 12 issues between 1978-1986, was committed to developing theoretical work on the social and psychical organisation of sexual difference,\u00a0 drawing on the work of Michel Foucault and of Jacques Lacan in his \u2018return to Freud\u2019.\u00a0 A collection from the journal was published as The Woman in Question, <\/i>edited by Parveen Adams and Elizabeth Cowie, by MIT Press in 1990.<\/p>\n
I came to the University of\u00a0 Kent in 1981 to teach on its new programme in Film Studies and the department has since grown to become one of the UK\u2019s foremost university centres for undergraduate and postgraduate study of\u00a0 film, television, and film practice.<\/p>\n
Research<\/b><\/p>\n
The central focus for my research and writing was to understand how representation works to produce meanings and identities in relation to political and cultural questions of gender and sexual difference.\u00a0 I published several key essays in m\/f<\/i>, in particular, \u00a0 \u2018Woman as Sign\u2019, \u2018The Popular Film as Progressive Text – a discussion of Coma<\/i>\u2019,<\/i> and \u2018Fantasia\u2019. These have appeared in a number of anthologies, most recently in 2000 and 2009, as well as appearing in revised form in my book, Representing the Woman: Psychoanalysis and Feminism <\/i>(1997), in which I undertook a critical reassessment of the ways in which cinema has been described as an apparatus for fetishistic and voyeuristic masculine pleasure.\u00a0 I develop\u00a0 an account of identification understood through psychoanalysis and film theory which recognises feminine pleasure and identification as a complex psychical and cultural affair in the cinema.\u00a0 For both men and women,\u00a0 fantasy and fetishism in cinema are audio-visual settings or mises en sc\u00e8ne,<\/i> in which sexual difference is constructed, confronted, and disavowed. The audio-viewing spectator is an active partner in the passivity and activity of these pleasures.<\/p>\n
These conceptual concerns have continued in my recent work in publications on the horror of the horror film, where I consider the spectator as an ethical subject within the audio-viewing experience, and the horror or horror through examining Eyes Without a Face <\/i>(Georges Franju, 1959), and the psychoanalysis of anxiety.\u00a0 In my discussion of Ingmar Bergman\u2019s Wild Strawberries (<\/i>1957) my focus is dreams and film, and I explore ways in which cinema\u2019s ready-made dreams engage us in a further \u2018dream-work\u2019 of our own.\u00a0 And on trauma and mourning in Egoyan\u2019s Exotica (<\/i>1994) <\/i>in \u2018Documentary, memory and trauma are the focus of my work in relation to fiction film and Alain Resnais\u2019s Hiroshima mon amour<\/i> ( \u2018Traumatic Memories of Remembering and Forgetting\u2019, 2000), and in documentary video-art and photography, in\u00a0 the work of Serbian artist Milica Tomi\u0107, on paranoia and video art (2006) and in relation to my colleagues and film-makers Clio Barnard\u2019s Dark Glass <\/i>(differences <\/i>2010), and Sarah Turner\u2019s Perestroika<\/i><\/p>\n
The focus of my recent research is the documentary film and its spectator, and documentary video art. This work has two strands, one which is concerned to develop an historical understanding of the genre of documentary in film and video both as a project of recording the real and as a cinematic form and to relate this to contemporary broadcast and video documentary.\u00a0 A second strand of this research is the interrelationship of pleasure and knowledge which characterises documentary.\u00a0 Here I consider the ways we are moved to feel for the social actors we see and hear, and the ways in which, as a result, we are brought to understand them and their worlds. \u00a0 This interrelation of specular pleasure (or, voyeurism) and identification is central to my recent publications on reality tv, video art and traditional documentary\u00a0 in my monograph Recording Reality, Desiring the Real<\/i> (2011), and my essay\u00a0 \u2018Specters of the Real: Documentary Time and Art, <\/i>in differences<\/i> (2007). Across both these strands, the politics and art of documentary are central, and I address the work of theorists including Jacques Lacan, Slavoj \u017di\u017eek, Jacques Ranci\u00e8re, and Michel Foucault.<\/p>\n