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.
