In Search of The Female Gaze

It’s no coincidence that Midge wears glasses. In Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), Barbara Bel Geddes’ character is a woman who knows too much—and, therefore, a woman who can never capture the romantic interest of the hero, Scottie (James Stewart). That falls to Kim Novak’s Madeleine, the sphinx in a grey suit. If men in classical Hollywood, to paraphrase Marilyn Monroe in How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), “aren’t attentive to girls who wear glasses,” this has less to do with any deleterious effect corrective lenses have on a woman’s physical appearance than more with the character attributes they are made to signify. The bespectacled woman is curious and desexualized; she takes a step towards being an active subject of vision and knowledge, away from her typical place as the object of the male gaze. Glasses are the sign that she trespasses on his terrain, however tentatively. Midge’s diligent efforts to care for Scottie and heal his past trauma echo the way he relates to Madeleine, casting him in the feminine role. He wears a therapeutic corset; she is there to catch him when he faints.

But poor motherly Midge is determined to win his attention nonetheless. To this end, she paints a self-portrait in which she is dressed as Carlotta Valdes, an ancestor of Madeleine’s who died by her own hand. No matter how many times I watch Vertigo, the sight of this painting never ceases to shock me. It is a copy of the artwork before which Madeleine sat mesmerized while Scottie watched from a distance, gripped by her glacial beauty and resemblance to the dead woman—a copy gone wrong. The head does not seem to belong to the body and the lips are curled in a strange smirk. Worst of all are the glasses Midge wears within it, an utter mismatch with her 19th-century gown

The trope of a woman removing her glasses to suddenly reveal her great beauty is as familiar as it is eye-roll-inducing. She never looks that different, but her status as an erotic object changes immediately and immensely. A classic example is Dorothy Malone as a bookstore clerk in The Big Sleep (1946), but more recently there is Rachel Leigh Cook descending the stairs to the saccharine sounds of “Kiss Me” in She’s All That (1999). Give up your active gaze, this convention seems to say, and you will be alluring. In her self-portrait, Midge’s glasses defiantly and anachronistically stay on, framing eyes that stare out to meet the viewer. Is the painting a gag? Perhaps, but it is most certainly a stab at getting Scottie to see her as he sees Madeleine—that is, through the prism of desire. The unsettling canvas is evidence of Midge’s doomed effort to occupy a second position in the field of vision without giving up the first. Upon seeing it, Scottie abruptly leaves the apartment. Midge defaces her creation, pulling at her hair, exclaiming, “Stupid, stupid, stupid!” as the scene fades to black. A woman’s attempt to be both subject and object of the gaze has backfired. According to the logic of classical Hollywood, it must.

Vertigo is, among other things, a film about the relay of looks as a play of gender, power, and pleasure. Put differently, it is a film about the cinema itself, laying bare the circuits of vision Laura Mulvey describes in her watershed 1975 article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” As is well known, Mulvey proposed that the representational system of classical Hollywood abides by a strictly patriarchal logic: the female star is a corporeal spectacle, connoting “to-be-looked-at-ness,” while the male protagonist is the “bearer of the look,” tasked with advancing the narrative. “In a world ordered by sexual imbalance,” Mulvey writes, “pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure which is styled accordingly.”

Except when it isn’t, when it doesn’t, and when it’s not. The force of Mulvey’s polemic rests on her strategic generalization, yet fissures in and refusals of the system are everywhere to be found. Vertigo is a textbook example of her argument; indeed, her article refers to it. But what about Midge? She throws a wrench in the active/male and passive/female binary. She may be left rejected and hurt after her failed remonstrance to the patriarchal scopic regime, but this does not negate the fact that she has mounted a challenge to it. As Mary Ann Doane has written, “Western culture has a quite specific notion of what it is to be a woman and what it is to be a woman looking. When a woman looks, the verb ‘looks’ is generally intransitive (she looks beautiful)—generally, but not always.” Instances of the “not always,” whether brief or sustained, have been of special interest to feminist film critics and theorists for decades. From the early days of motion pictures, to the four-hankie weepies of ’40s melodrama, throughout the feminist avant-garde, in Third Cinema, and even in Hitchcock, the cinema is replete with other ways of seeing. If the system Mulvey describes gets called the “male gaze,” does that mean that all these aberrant instances, all these alternatives, make up something called the “female gaze”?

I ask because this term has begun to circulate widely as of late, often in connection with burgeoning efforts to confront the historical and ongoing problems of representation that women face behind and in front of the camera. There is, however, a great deal of confusion as to precisely what it means. Sometimes, as in Alicia Malone’s 2018 book The Female Gaze: Essential Movies Made by Women, it names the work of women directors. It has long been used to refer to the female spectator, whether this is understood as a subject position imagined by the film, as in Doane’s classic 1987 volume The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s, or as an empirical audience member, as in the recently published edited collection She Found it at the Movies: Women Writers on Sex, Desire and Cinema, where it is the title of a section comprising six essays, five of which are grounded in first-person expression and anchored to memories of the authors’ formative years. In 2016, Transparent showrunner Jill Soloway gave a lecture at TIFF in which they said—jokingly, I hope—that they wished to become known as the inventor of the term. Over the course of the talk, Soloway proposed an array of definitions: some were straightforward (the female gaze means avoiding the objectification of women’s bodies), others less so (“the female gaze is the green stuff you find in the brain of your lobster”).

Into these muddy waters comes Iris Brey’s Le regard féminin: une révolution à l’écran (The Female Gaze: A Revolution on the Screen), published this past February in France by Éditions de l’Olivier’s Les Feux imprint to considerable media attention. Brey, an academic and a critic for publications such as Marie Claire and Les Inrockuptibles, has written an accessible and impassioned book that aspires to define the female gaze for a wide audience in a country where Roman Polanski’s J’accuse (2019) was met with protests and 12 César nominations. (In North America and the UK, it is thus far unreleased.) Affirming that “there exists a female gaze, a gaze that makes us feel the experience of a female body on screen,” Brey lays out six conditions a film must fulfill to belong to the category:

At the level of the narrative, it is necessary that

The main character identifies as a woman;

The story is told from her point of view;

Her story calls into question the patriarchal order.

Formally, it is necessary that

The film is constructed in a manner that allows the spectator to feel the female experience;

If bodies are eroticized, it must be a conscious gesture (Laura Mulvey reminds us that the male gaze is a matter of the patriarchal unconscious);

The pleasure of spectators does not stem from the scopic drive (from taking pleasure in objectifying a person through the gaze, like a voyeur).

Defined as such, the “female gaze”—a term Brey often renders in English—describes a filmic paradigm no longer governed by voyeurism and objectification, devoted to representing women’s experiences (including those of trans women) in ways that foreground their position as subjects of desire. Like the Bechdel test, films can “pass” or “fail”; unlike the Bechdel test, this checklist has the merit of considering form.

Brey also spells out what the female gaze is not. She smartly avoids using the concept to refer to all works made by women filmmakers, for this would fall into the essentialist trap of assuming that a director’s gender is some kind of guarantee that her film will depart from dominant ways of seeing: men can make female gaze films, too, and women don’t always. Her use of the term does not refer to the look of the female spectator, nor is it synonymous with the perspective of a female character, because if bodies are taken as objects of erotic fascination, even if it is a woman ogling a man—think of Joe Manganiello in the gas station in Magic Mike XXL (2015) or John Garfield with his violin in Humoresque (1946)—sorry, but c’est un film male gaze.

Whereas in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Mulvey gave a descriptive account of the historically specific mode of production that was classical Hollywood, Brey takes a forcefully prescriptive stance, roaming across decades and styles to separate the good from the bad. Le regard féminin puts its definition to the test using a corpus that is in some ways eclectic and in others anything but. It moves freely from Alice Guy-Blaché’s Madame a des envies (1906) to TV series such as The Handmaid’s Tale, pulling examples almost exclusively from France and the US. Although Brey insists that the female gaze has a long history, she mostly sticks to texts of a recent vintage. Ida Lupino, Barbara Loden, and Agnès Varda make predictable appearances, while Chantal Akerman and Barbara Hammer are just about the lone representatives of practices not predicated on narrative absorption. Like me, Brey is a big fan of Paul Verhoeven’s Elle (2016), and rightly points out that those who see the film as an endorsement of rape culture are not adequately taking its formal choices into account.

One film returns again and again as an object of praise, a film that, like Vertigo, uses painting to thematize the vicissitudes of the gaze, albeit to very different ends: Céline Sciamma’s Portrait de la jeune fille en feu (2019). This lesbian historical drama is largely set within the fleeting utopia of a few days when the two protagonists are left unsupervised, thus lifting the weight of not only compulsory heterosexuality but also class difference. For Brey, it depicts a sexual relationship based in a principle of equality and does so through a cinematic language grounded in the same. Women accede to the status of embodied subjects: the look of the camera—and by extension, the look of the spectator—ceases to traffic in control and mastery and instead becomes associated with intimacy, reciprocity, and respect. Portrait epitomizes the qualities Brey searches for: a feeling of access to the inner lives of the protagonists, a visual style that evades the fragmentation of bodies and conventional forms of sexualization, and a commitment to representing aspects of women’s experience that are marginalized within patriarchal culture. It seems tailor-made for her rubric.

Problems emerge when Le regard féminin confronts thornier examples, films in which the violence and inequality that women experience are represented in complex ways. In French, the six-point framework is called a grille de lecture, an evocative term that makes me imagine a set of metal bars through which films are to be squeezed. Fleabag slides through without a bruise, but Brey writes off the devastating ending of King Vidor’s Stella Dallas (1937), along with the whole genre of the woman’s film, tarring them with the brush of the male gaze even though scholars such as Doane have shown that the issue is a great deal more complicated. Yes to the “radical gesture” of Wonder Woman (2017) but no to Claire Denis, fearless purveyor of a corporeal cinema without equal, since too few of her films have female protagonists. Catherine Breillat is a troublesome case, only partially making the grade: of the scene in À ma soeur! (2001) in which the elder sister is pressured into losing her virginity while her younger sibling watches, Brey writes, “the film leaves one with a confused feeling, since one does not really know who looks or how”—the implication being that it would be better if we did. Bresson’s Mouchette (1967) is thrown on the same heap as Game of Thrones because for a moment in which the wretched child wraps her arms around her rapist’s back “with tenderness, as if beginning to consent.”

Brey’s decision to codify the female gaze has the virtue of clarity. The grille no doubt aims to be a helpful diagnostic that readers can use to evaluate their own examples. I would not be surprised if Brey knew the bluntness of her tool and nonetheless thought it worth using owing to its ability to make a forceful argument and draw together films and series that might otherwise not be mentioned in the same breath. Yet when a concept designed to advance an expansive feminist approach to the cinema serves to exclude some of the most significant contributions to that tradition and produces reductive analyses of complex objects, the ends do not justify the means, at least for this reader. Films are often ideologically inconsistent, sometimes in progressive and productive ways. Criticism should remain attuned to these internal contradictions and ambiguities, not seek to diminish them.

Most of the examples endorsed in Le regard féminin are situated far from the experimental counter-cinema of “passionate detachment” that Mulvey called for. “Quality” television series feature prominently, and the Cannes film festival and box-office numbers are taken as meaningful barometers of success. “Who remembers the surrealist films The Smiling Madame Beudet (1923) by Germaine Dulac or Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) by Maya Deren?” Brey asks, before reassuring the reader that progress is being made. Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women (2016) and Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace (2018) show that the female gaze is leaving the margins behind, but “what perhaps gives the most hope is the enormous commercial success of Wonder Woman (2017) and Captain Marvel (2019), two ‘superheroine’ films that topped the box office when released.”

Change in the mainstream does matter, and I understand why, particularly in a book of this kind, an author might gravitate towards the best-known examples. This choice does, however, have implications that go beyond matters of personal taste: it risks reiterating existing forms of marginalization. Even though experimental and documentary cinemas have been immeasurably more hospitable to women and far more likely to depart from the conventions associated with the male gaze, Brey’s emphasis on empathetic identification with characters reveals how firmly she assumes fiction as a default. Meanwhile, the striking absence of filmmakers of colour and/or working outside France and the US, for whom feminism is inextricable from anti-capitalist, anti-racist, and/or decolonial commitments, speaks to the book’s restricted conception of feminism and film culture. Where are Peggy Ahwesh, Lizzie Borden, Assia Djebar, Valie Export, Sara Gómez, Safi Faye, Sarah Maldoror, Alanis Obomsawin, Helke Sander, Heiny Srour, Chick Strand, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and so many others? Certainly, one can only do so much in 240 pages, yet as Brey acknowledges when she argues that Marie-Claude Treilhou’s wonderful Simone Barbès ou la vertu (1980) deserves be better known, too many important films are at risk of being forgotten; criticism can be a site of advocacy for them. If only there were more of that here.

A second issue arises from the emphasis on popular entertainment, concerning the final point of the grille, which holds that in female gaze films “the pleasure of spectators does not stem from the scopic drive (from taking pleasure in objectifying a person through the gaze, like a voyeur).” This means rejecting point-of-view constructions of the sort found in Brian De Palma’s Body Double (1984), where Craig Wasson watches Melanie Griffith through a telescope as she dances, or Baby Face (1933), where the camera films Barbara Stanwyck from feet to face in an upward pan, mimicking a man’s lecherous gaze. Fair enough, but like it or not, voyeurism is the very ground of cinematic fascination and cannot be escaped that easily, at least not without venturing much farther into the wilds of the avant-garde than Brey is willing to do, well beyond Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s “Brechtian” address to the camera in Fleabag. Adopting an ostensibly phenomenological methodology, as she does, does not change the fact that Portrait de la jeune fille en feu, like most of the examples discussed across the book, remains a film before which we are all perverts at the keyhole, looking in on a private world that does not acknowledge our existence, enjoying what Mulvey called “the satisfaction, pleasure, and privilege of the ‘invisible guest.’” And that’s fine with me—but I’m not the one putting forward an argument against voyeurism. Nor would I ever: as Bette Gordon’s Variety (1983) shows with such nuance, it is an integral part of psychic life, a terrain of struggle far too important for feminism to vacate. Gordon’s depiction of a woman’s fascination with pornography drives home a few things that go missing in Le regard féminin’s outright pathologization of voyeurism and objectification: it recognizes that there can be power and pleasure in being an object, that the field of the gaze will always be marked by dynamic asymmetries, and that women are scopophiles, too.

Le regard féminin stands out as the first book-length effort to systematically define the female gaze, something that neither Mulvey nor the many who followed in her wake ever tried. This might be because the endeavour presents a true hazard: any definition of the female gaze as a transhistorical paradigm—as a type of film—will necessarily rest on the troubling idea that women share certain fundamental characteristics and that these characteristics are consistently made manifest through particular formal techniques across the history of cinema. Reflecting on the mid-’70s, Mulvey recently said, “I do not believe that, even then, there was a ‘feminist language of cinema’ as such.” For Brey, proximity, empathy, tactility, and an aversion to objectification are attributes of a “common visual language” that somehow counts as female, even when it is deployed by men. Accepting this means buying into some dubious stereotypes about female sexuality—assumptions that might better be contested, and which have been by filmmakers like Gordon. I wonder if a recognition of this problem is part of what leads Soloway to proliferate multiple definitions, even to the point of nonsense, in their TIFF talk. Ultimately, this would-be inventor of the concept concedes that “there is no such thing, not yet.” Why not give up on searching for the female gaze and persist instead in the call for another gaze, to borrow the name of the London-based feminist film journal? And yet another and another? It would leave open an intersectional space of invention and difference; it would remain sensitive to historical specificity; and it would welcome a plurality unconstrained by a binary opposition to maleness—something hardly possible in a rule-based approach that designates particular qualities as inherently feminine and others not.

Popular talk of the female gaze is a symptom of enthusiasm. It speaks to a collective excitement for gains that are gradually being made, for new practices that are emerging, for abundant histories to explore, and for the work that remains to be done. It is a matter of curiosity and contestation, of loving Midge and wishing her a different fate. These are feelings to hold on to. As for the term itself, I’m less sure.

In Search of the Female Gaze. By Erika Balsom. Cinema Scope, summer 2020.

Diversifier les plaisirs : « Le Regard féminin » d'Iris Brey.  Point Culture,  March 5, 2020. 

Conversation Avec Iris Brey.  By Chloé Rolland.  Fiches du Cinéma ,  July 1, 2020

Paris-based company Totem Films has launched a new documentary label in a move that will see the company embark on its first in-house production with the adaptation of Franco-American writer and critic Iris Brey’s hard-hitting work The Female Gaze.

The new label bannered Totem Docs will follow the same founding editorial line as its parent company, which has achieved sales success with breakout Cannes Directors Fortnight title And Then We Danced, Luxor and Land Of Ashes since its creation in late 2018.

“We want to pursue the work we started on fiction with documentaries that are a strong mirror of today’s battles for new perspectives and representation,” said Totem Films co-chiefs Bérénice Vincent, Agathe Valentin and Laure Parleani.

“We are looking for documentaries on the cutting edge that are also adapted to different kinds of release models,” they added.

The new label will get its first outing at the upcoming Marché du Film online, running June 22-26, where it will present an inaugural four-title line-up.

Alongside the upcoming adaptation of The Female Gaze, the line-up includes Heather Kessinger’s completed feature The Most Fearless, which follows 21-year-old Bangladeshi Nasima Akhter [pictured] on her quest to become a high-level competitive surfer against a backdrop of poverty and prejudice.

The other two projects, both in post-production, are Aude Pépin’s A La Vie (working title), which follows militant-feminist midwife Chantal Birman as she does rounds in Paris suburbs, and Alice Diop’s WE, which uses Paris’ RER B suburban train line as way to explore the cultural diversity of French society.

“All these films are inspirational. They confront stereotypes and depict people we think should be our new heroes of today,” said the Totem team.

The adaptation of The Female Gaze marks Totem’s first foray into production and is a major development for the company.

The original work sparked controversy in France for the way it explores how women have been objectified on the big screen throughout the history of cinema and how this perspective can be shifted to a female gaze.

Brey will write and direct the adaptation, bringing together clips, archival material and testimony from contemporary filmmakers to create a new history of cinema through the female gaze.

She is a well-known and respected voice within the wider gender equality debate. Her other written works include Sex And The Series, which looked at perspectives offered by series such as Girls, Transparent and Fleabag and was adapted into a documentary series.

Brey has also been a major voice in the anti-sexual harassment movement in France, and came out strongly in favour of the Césars awards walk-out this year led by actress Adèle Haenel.

Totem co-chief Vincent met Brey when she co-founded Le Deuxième Regard in 2013, a collective group aimed at increasing gender equality in the French film business, which eventually became the powerful Collectif 50/50. “We have nurtured each other since then, questioning and trying to shake things up,” said Vincent.

The Totem team added: “Iris’ ideas don’t point to censorship or condemnation of history or the past, but instead look to the future. The fact that a significant part of the French press forcefully dismissed Iris and this debate only helped convince us further that we should support it.”

The in-house development and production of The Female Gaze will be undertaken under the banner of Totem Atelier, the company’s subsidiary creative arm aimed at exploring new stories around gender norms and identity.

Fiction titles on Totem’s Marché du Film Online slate include Cannes 2020 label title Gagarine and Compartment No. 6, the new film by Juho Kuosmanen, which is currently in post-production and follows his 2016 Un Certain Regard winner The Happiest Day In The Life Of Olli Mâki.

Totem Films launches doc label with four female-driven projects (exclusive). By  Melanie Goodfellow. Screen Daily   , June 17, 2020,

Film and television makers have never been shy about the female form. Hollywood always valiantly ensures audiences know what its leading ladies look like in underwear, and often without, while television heaves with the bosoms of pretty ingénues in period drama. Alas, anyone with a brain will know these portrayals are far from representative of how women look and act in real life. Tired of the disconnect? Good news: today’s hottest screen hits are proving that you can discuss women’s bodies honestly, and without sexualising them, too.

Take Portrait of a Lady on Fire, the scorching period drama from the French film-maker Céline Sciamma released on 21 February. Having already generated a buzz, and plenty of awards, in France, adoring reviews suggest that it’s set to do the same here. Sciamma won praise for her depiction of young women’s sexuality in 2014’s Girlhood – a punchy snapshot of teenage life in the Parisian banlieues. Now she has turned her hand to a tale of lesbian passion in 18th-century Brittany.

The film follows a painter, Marianne (Noémie Merlant), who must complete a portrait of a young noblewoman, Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), in secret: Héloïse has previously refused to pose for portraits in an act of rebellion against her forthcoming arranged marriage.

The “female gaze” is a term used in recent years to describe art that subverts the ubiquitous male perspective. Like many buzzwords, it is often misapplied – but not so in the case of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which is unmistakably made from a female vantage point and with a feminist sensibility. Indeed, its plot is a meta commentary on that fact: in order to paint Héloïse secretly, Marianne has to memorise her features while posing as her walking companion – cue a slew of scenes involving a woman looking at another woman. Crucially, Héloïse soon returns Marianne’s glances.

Their relationship provides a blueprint for what the female gaze should do in film-making, says Ginette Vincendeau, a professor of film studies at King’s College London. While warning that it’s simplistic to assume films by women will automatically be feminist, she says that Sciamma’s picture contains a good example of “the reciprocity of the female gaze” – or how it can counter the imbalance that is thought to corrupt the male gaze. “There’s more of an equal power relation between the person depicted and the person depicting, which is to me a feminist gesture,” she says.

Héloïse and Marianne eventually work together on the portrait, a collaboration that Sciamma has said mirrors the film’s creative process. She and Haenel were until recently a couple; in an interview last week she insisted that the fictional dialogue between artist and subject reflects their “intellectual relationship” in real life.

So the film’s subject matter means it’s inevitably concerned with appearances. But it also offers a welcome study of the less superficial aspects of women’s bodies. At one point, Marianne wakes up in the night with agonising period pain. Meanwhile, a subplot involves Héloïse’s maid, Sophie, who is pregnant but does not want to be. In one of the film’s most transfixing scenes, a local woman reaches up between Sophie’s legs to perform an abortion. As Vincendeau points out, these are heavily aestheticised portrayals rather than strictly “honest” ones, but nonetheless it’s refreshing to see women’s health (hardly a Hollywood trope) discussed on the big screen.

Of course – spoiler alert – there’s Héloïse and Marianne’s love-making, too. The film manages to capture their red-hot desire without requiring, say, the controversial full-frontal sex scene that takes up an outsized portion of Blue Is the Warmest Colour, Abdellatif Kechiche’s 2013 film about a tempestuous lesbian romance. In focussing on the emotional build-up rather than the sex itself, Sciamma eroticises the character’s feelings rather than her actors’ bodies.

Sciamma has said this approach perplexed her home country. “In France, they don’t find the film hot,” she told the Guardian. “[They think] it lacks flesh, it’s not erotic … They don’t even know that ‘male gaze’ exists. You can tell it’s a country where there’s a lot of sexism, and a strong culture of patriarchy.” Nevertheless, the film’s 10 nominations for the Césars, the French equivalent of the Oscars, suggest its subtlety isn’t lost on everyone.

Speaking of awards, Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag also earned gongs for a TV show that offered a spiky, poignant take on women’s physical experiences. One of its most talked-about sequences came when Fleabag’s sister miscarries in a restaurant toilet cubicle. Back at the table, her relatives are sniping their way through an engagement dinner. Waller-Bridge shows a private moment of pain escalating into a public episode of family warfare (it somehow ends in a punch-up). If it’s rare to see baby loss on screen, it’s practically unheard of to see such an idiosyncratic, blackly comic depiction.

It may be on stage rather than screen, but Lucy Kirkwood’s The Welkin, currently running at the National Theatre, also applies mordant humour to the anguishes and indignities of reproductive life. It’s a grim tale at first glance: a young woman, Sally Poppy, will hang for murder unless she can convince a 12-strong jury of women that she’s pregnant. But it grants the women deciding her fate a temporary liberty of sorts: in the courthouse, they’re untethered from both domestic chores and male authority. Soon, they’re cracking jokes about hot flushes and bad sex.

Writing about the play for The Stage, the critic Kate Maltby observed that “throughout, we hear more about the sticky details of women’s bodies than I’ve ever heard on a major theatre stage”.

Like Portrait of a Woman on Fire, while the play hinges on women’s bodies, it doesn’t show too much of them. “Thank God The Welkin avoids the trap of offering [Ria] Zmitrowicz up for our gaze,” continues Maltby, before calling for more plays “about the ways women talk about our bodies; not how men observe them”.

And this is precisely the power of the female gaze. At its best, it portrays the full gamut of women’s lives rather than focusing on the 0.001% of the time when this involves being sexy and naked. Of course, this doesn’t mean it can’t depict sex at all. Just look at Sex Education, Laurie Nunn’s exuberant drama about teenage relationships. The first series included a funny sequence about the joy of female masturbation; this year a plotline showed a young woman having a brilliant time in bed regardless of being saddled with vaginismus, a condition that makes penetrative sex painful.

After all, the best depictions of women’s bodies are not really about bodies at all, but the experiences and emotions attached to them. To put it another way, they paint women as they are: thinking humans who are as capable of scrutinising the world as the world is of scrutinising them. Portrait of a Lady on Fire’s Héloïse knows the score. “If you look at me, who do I look at?” she asks Marianne during a sitting, in a sly question that’s really more of a statement.

The film-making old guard are happy to show the female form, but less keen on acknowledging the life that comes with it. Thank goodness for the new wave of creatives making such ignorance impossible.

Like a natural woman: how the female gaze is finally bringing real life to the screen. By Gwendolyn Smith. The Guardian, February 22, 2020.  

What happens when women tell stories? Diverse and wonderful things, according to BBC Culture’s survey of film experts. It asked 368 journalists, critics, film programmers and academics to name their favourite films from female directors, and the results made fascinating reading. Jane Campion’s Oscar-winner The Piano made it to the top spot, shortly followed by Cléo from 5 to 7, the real-time drama from the late great Agnès Varda. Also featured were cult filmmaker Chantal Akerman, controversial French director Claire Denis – who’s known for her defiantly individualistic, often explicitly erotic work – British working-class heroine Andrea Arnold and Hollywood greats Sofia Coppola and Kathryn Bigelow.

The most popular genre was drama, with romance – an area women are stereotypically relegated to – falling far behind. This is about films that have resonated with critics, rather than topping the box office – there’s no Wonder Woman (Patty Jenkins), Twilight (Catherine Hardwicke) or What Women Want (Nancy Meyers). The closest thing to a superhero movie is the Iranian film A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (Ana Lily Amirpour), in which a female vampire preys on exploitative men. The highest rating comedy is not a rom-com, but the farcical, surreal Toni Erdmann, directed by Maren Ade.

The top 10 is populated by misfits, outcast and women – occasionally men – who are struggling to communicate and connect, just as their creators are trying to. The wider 100 includes slum children (Salaam Bombay!, Capernaum), a female vagrant (Vagabond) and a travelling hustler (Desperately Seeking Susan). It’s small wonder that these disenfranchised characters appeal to female filmmakers in a patriarchal society. And then there are the women whose apparently ‘normal’ daily lives are rendered utterly fascinating, partly because they are so rarely shown on screen. Two of these are filmed more or less in real time: Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7 and Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.

“Jeanne Dielman is famously long, and famously concerned with the minute details of an ordinary housewife’s life,” says Adam Roberts, who founded with Joanna Hogg the collective A Nos Amours (dedicated to programming over-looked cinema) and curated a complete retrospective of Chantal Akerman’s films. “She peels potatoes in real time! But this is no mere treading of some aestheticised treadmill; this is, by degrees, to become involved in the pattern of a life, to come to recognise the inventiveness needed to cope with dreadful confinement. The creativity needed to hold the centre, amid such isolation and dehumanised life, is so very moving. A crisis looms of course, as the patterns fall apart, but by now we are hopelessly implicated in this vivid life: her life is our life, her crisis our crisis.”

In turn, Cléo reveals another viewpoint. “Varda’s point of view feels like that of a wise outsider because she was a photographer first. Her identity developed in a very male space,” says Mia Bays, who screens female-led films around the UK as part of the Birds Eye View ‘Reclaim The Frame’ programme and firmly believes in a ‘female gaze’. “It is the lodestar of the work of Birds’ Eye View. For us, it means who decides what goes in the frame, so that means who writes, directs or wrote the underlying story. Those have to be the work of female creatives or it’s not the female gaze.”

Bays thinks this is particularly relevant to the coming-of-age film. “The female experience, especially individuation and coming of age, is often so much more resonant when told by a conscious enlightened female gaze.” You only have to look at the many examples in the top 100 to see her point. Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank and American Honey; Céline Sciamma’s Girlhood, Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird – all demonstrate a seductive depth of understanding of burgeoning female sexuality and identity. Meanwhile, with Winter’s Bone and Leave No Trace, Debra Granik concerns herself with young girls who’ve had responsibility thrust upon them, and Lynne Ramsay embraces the complexities of traumatised working-class women in Morvern Callar, as Andrea Arnold does with Red Road – something Bays also applauds.

“I love Ramsay and Andrea Arnold,” she says. “I admire their visual ambition; their leaning into art (usually not allowed for the working class – we’re supposed to be ‘entertainers’); and their unpredictable choices.” Film critic Pamela Hutchinson agrees. “Working-class representation in the film industry is so painfully low at the moment, that it’s so important to see women from less privileged background out there working, and also doing really great, exciting work.”

The number of non-white directors in the top 100 is also relatively low, with Iranian Forough Farrokhzad (The House is Black) and African-American Ava DuVernay (Selma, 13th) represented at numbers 24 and 26/55 respectively. Unsurprisingly, these women offer a fascinating perspective on race and culture, as does Mira Nair with the more comical Monsoon Wedding (number 29).

The concept of the ‘female gaze’ could be seen as a response to feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey’s term, the ‘male gaze’, which represents the gaze of a heterosexual male viewer along with the male character and the male creator of the film. According to Time Out’s global film editor, Phil de Semlyen: “I find the female gaze easier to define in terms of what it isn’t than what it is: it’s not about objectifying the female form or replacing fully-realised female characters with loose avatars for male sexual fantasy; it’s not framing sex scenes with tropes common to pornography aimed at men; it’s not about automatically relinquishing power and control to men in storytelling.”

He goes on to mention the rape revenge genre, represented at number 91 by Julia Ducournau’s horror Raw. “The female gaze is a mighty tool for subverting genres that have traditionally been male-driven – thrillers, in particular – in really interesting ways. So we’re seeing revenge thrillers like Revenge and The Nightingale. You could also compare and contrast the Clint Eastwood and Sofia Coppola versions of The Beguiled for a case study in how a female and male filmmaker take the same source material and do radically different things with it – with Coppola finding far more resonance and topicality by retelling the story from females’ perspectives.”

Women tackling masculinity is a theme we frequently find ourselves discussing on my podcast Girls On Film, and the BBC Culture top 100 contains numerous examples, including Claire Denis’ Beau Travail. There are several from Kathryn Bigelow, still the only woman to have won the best director Oscar for The Hurt Locker, which comes in at number 7. “Hollywood loves its own and Kathryn Bigelow did her apprenticeship there,” says Bays. “She has ‘assimilated’ the male gaze, then given an expert female spin on hyper-male subjects/genres, so I think she’s been an outlier because of this.” While playing within the Hollywood system, Bigelow also tackled male mental health in Point Break (number 15), vampires in Near Dark (41) and criminals in Strange Days (59). With its story about bootleg virtual reality machines that literally put customers in other people’s positions, the latter is an interesting example of a film that specifically tackles the notion of seeing, or the gaze, echoed by the closed-circuit surveillance in Andrea Arnold’s seminal Red Road.

One of my personal favourites is the period drama Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which concerns a woman who’s hired to paint a portrait of another, and who finds her a tantalisingly elusive subject. I think director Céline Sciamma captures the intensity of sapphic love far better than Todd Haynes’ much-celebrated Carol. There is barely a speaking role for a man, and yet the spectre of arranged marriage looms ominously, inescapably, in the background as two women forge a heartbreakingly intense bond.

Truly seeing is truly knowing in Sciamma’s film, which hasn’t even come out yet in the UK. It’s rightfully earning comparisons to our number one, Jane Campion’s The Piano, which was voted for by 43.5% of respondents. The story of a non-speaking pianist who is sold to a man, but gradually uses her musicality and sexuality to control the men around her, The Piano is also about communication, or the challenges thereof. “It’s interesting that she’s a female artist, and yet can’t communicate in a straightforward way,” says film critic Pamela Hutchinson, who specialises in silent film. Bays points to The Piano’s other charms. “It’s about sex and eroticism and is about a woman caught between two men who we watch self-actualise – what’s not to like?!”

Eroticism and seduction are explored through distinctive lenses in other charting films: The Night Porter, India Song, Le Bonheur, Eve’s Bayou, and The Meetings of Anna. Marital infidelity seems to concern many female directors, some because they have been directly affected by it: Sarah Polley’s documentary Stories We Tell asks who her real father is. While several films tackle single parenthood and paternity, pregnancy is a subject that comes up surprisingly rarely in this survey, although there have been distinctive recent releases, such as Alice Lowe’s comedy horror Prevenge, which she shot while eight months’ pregnant, and Seahorse, Jeanie Findlay’s documentary following a trans man’s pregnancy. Several films in the poll directly explore trans issues, from Boys Don’t Cry to Orlando, and in so doing, these speak to the female experience, exploring the concept of gender and the pros and cons of identifying as a woman or a man in a specific society.

While The Piano was widely liked by both sexes in the poll, a few films had a noticeable divide: Penny Marshall’s Big was almost twice as popular with men as women. It’s hardly surprising that men identify more with the story of a young boy who wakes up in a grown man’s body: this is arguably a case of a female director adopting a man’s point of view, right up to the dubious moment when he loses his virginity to an unknowing female colleague. Yet as Hutchinson says, “Women look at everything, we’re everywhere – there’s no subject a female director can’t tackle.”

And it looks like the studios – who traditionally put more fiscal trust in male directors – are finally listening. While just four of last year’s top 100 grossing films in the US were directed by women, that number looks set to have risen to 14 in 2019. There are direct efforts to raise the number of female directors in Hollywood. Stars including Tessa Thompson have taken the 4% challenge, committing to announcing one project with a female director in the next 18 months. Universal and MGM recently became the first studios to sign up to the same pledge, meaning that in a few years’ time, our voters should have even more wonderful female-led films to choose from. And here’s hoping that one day, female directors will have become so commonplace, it won’t even be a conversation at all.

Top 100 films directed by women: What is the ‘female gaze’? By  Anna Smith. BBC , November 27,  2019

Also interesting :

The directors celebrated in a new season at the Barbican – focusing on films about men, made by women – on turning the traditional gaze on its head

What do female film-makers have to say about male stories?

 By Ann Lee. The Guardian, February 19 , 2020

Filmmakers Work to Reframe the ‘Male Gaze’. By  Randee Dawn. Variety,  January 23, 2020.