Close-up: Patricia White

You’re very prominent in queer and feminist film theory. How did you find your interest there?

I usually say it’s because I love movies and women! The movies have always been about gender and sexuality. They have emphasized women on camera, and historically, most industries have realized that women were eager consumers of mass culture. Images of women may contrast with inequality off-screen, of course, and those images were often very glamorous or objectified. But there was almost an elevation of women’s power and role in the world of movies — and to a certain extent, television — more than in other parts of the public sphere, like government, places where there is “true power.”

What inspired your latest book, Rebecca?

Rebecca is part of a series of books from the British Film Institute called BFI Classics, and I had always wanted to write one on Rebecca (1940). It was a film I had written about in my first book. I’ve loved the movie since I was a teenager and watched it on TV with my mom, and read Daphne Du Maurier’s novel and saw various television versions.

So [the book] came from something that I really enjoyed and something that was intellectually interesting, because the film had attracted a lot of really interesting criticism, as Hitchcock’s preeminent “women’s picture,” which was the category that Hollywood used to talk about films made for female audiences. So Rebecca historically had popularity and influence, and already a reputation in film studies for being a place that could test out arguments about who is really responsible for the meaning in film. Is it the director, the original novelist, the audience?

There’s another version of Rebecca (2020) on Netflix now. What are your thoughts on the rise of streaming services?

The streamers are making interesting work, and giving people — some people — enough money to realize their creative vision in ways that have been increasingly hard to do in independent cinema, just because there are a lot of good films out there and not so much screen space, and certainly COVID killed what there was. The numbers of women behind the camera have not been great, but because the streamers are newer companies, they’ve been better about gender representation behind the camera and are also interested in global audiences.

What’s your favorite movie of the year?

It would probably be The Power of the Dog (2021). I had the good fortune of going to see its U.S. premiere at the Telluride Film Festival. (A former Swarthmore student, Mara Fortes ’03, is a programmer there. See pg. 31). I think it’s really smart about the history of the [Western] genre and a very interesting female take on masculinity.

You’ve been here since 1994, and helped found the Film & Media Studies program in 1999, which became a department in 2013. What do you enjoy about teaching at Swarthmore?

It’s such a pleasure to teach film and media at a liberal arts college, because people aren’t just about the tech; they want to actually have ideas to put in their movies. We’ve also always had lots of women in the classes — even in the production classes — and lots of kids of color in the major. That feels like one of the initial things that attracted me to the movies: it is populist, and everybody has a stake in it.