_
Rehovot's Women Film Festival Day 4 Preview: Desire in Women’s Cinema
by Dr. Amalia Ziv
What is desire from women’s point of view? Since the 1980s women artists in various fields have been posing this question with growing urgency and attempting to answer it. In the visual field, and in cinema in particular, the question has a double meaning: first, how do women experience desire? Does their experience differ from men’s experience of desire, and in what ways? And secondly, how can this experience be represented visually? Cinema enables us not only to see things but also to see them in a certain way. Hence, one of the basic claims of feminist film criticism has been that since most filmmakers are men, the way of seeing which this medium offers us is of necessity male. Thus, for example, the female figure is constructed as the object of desire – not only at the level of the plot, but also by the look of the camera that follows her, lingers on different parts of her body, and takes pleasure in her as a sight; and the look of the camera is fused with that of the spectators. In other words, cinema not only represents desire but also creates desire, and since mainstream cinema constructs the spectator position as male, in order to enjoy the pleasures that it offers, women spectators need to adopt (at least partially) a male gaze.
But what happens in women’s films, films that present female characters as protagonists and not only as objects of desire, and that address themselves (also) to female spectators? Do such films represent female desire differently than men’s films? And what kinds of desire do they construct? In the cinematic context, to ask what is desire from a female point of view is to ask what is the desiring female gaze – what does it look at, how does it look, and what pleasures does it offer?
The films in the Festival’s desire program deal with desire between women and men; the program does not include lesbian cinema. The films all grapple with different aspects of the challenge of representing desire from a female point of view, whether it is shooting a sex scene or communicating the very experience of desire, and they offer a whole array of answers to the question how women represent desire, or how female desire looks. The documentary Filming Desire, that contains a large number of interviews with women directors, demonstrates that different filmmakers not only provide different answers, but also understand the question in different ways. Nevertheless, it is possible to trace cautiously some joint coordinates, and point out a number of major strategies.
Female Body/Male Body, and the man as Object of the Gaze
One central question concerns the visibility of the female body and the male body and their modes of representation.
In Filming Desire, Deepa Mehta alludes to the cinematic exploitation of the female body, which in sex scenes is always exposed first and more completely than the male body. Agnes Varda observes that men’s films tend to cut the female body and focus on the erogenous zones, while, as Jeanne La Brun points out, there is a taboo on showing the male sex organ, especially in its erect state. On the other hand, the women’s films in the program expose the male and female body in equal measure and in similar ways, and some of them contain male nudity that includes the penis.
Sex Is Comedy by Catherine Breillat, which depicts a woman director shooting a sex scene, even addresses explicitly the problematic visibility of the male organ: the director wants the erect penis to be visible in the scene, but on the other hand it must not dominate the frame since that would make it obscene. The film also offers an original and parodic solution to the taboo on showing the male organ by means of a phallic prosthesis worn by the actor, a prosthesis that covers his actual member though modeled on it. Thus the actor can be shown walking around the set with a huge erection protruding from his bathrobe without offending decency, yet the fact the artificial member is an exact copy (though larger in size, at the actor’s request) of the real one throws into relief the absurdity of the taboo.
In many of these films the male body is presented as an object of erotic interest, and the look of the camera, identified with that of the female protagonist, lingers on it in its entirety or hovers on parts of it.
In Deep we follow the gaze of the teenage protagonist drawn again and again to the figures of adolescent boys, and resting briefly on the neck of one, the bare torso of another, and the trendy accessories of a third (the fleetingness of the gaze characterizes it as a female gaze, because social norms forbid women, let alone young ones, to stare at men).
Between Two Houses by Clara Von Gool goes further and offers the near-naked male body as a pleasurable spectacle for the woman protagonist – one time when she watches her partner applying body-lotion (a narcissistic ritual culturally coded as feminine) and encourages him by her responses to turn the act into a quasi-erotic quasi-parodic dance, and another time when she watches her foreign and exotic lover do gymnastics. In the second case, it is the very liberty of staring at his muscular body and enjoying its performance that betrays the sexual intimacy between them, despite the fact we haven’t witnessed it.
Shooting Sex
One answer to the fetishistic fragmentation of the female body in mainstream cinema through close-up shots of women’s legs, breasts, buttocks, and lips is offered by Claire Denis in her film Friday Night. Denis adopts – mostly in the sex scenes but not exclusively in them – a strategy of hyper-fragmentation: close-ups of a stretch of back, a shirt collar, hair, the edge of a bed, hands. Fragmentation often impairs intelligibility, but on the other hand it creates an effect of intimacy and sensuality. The sex scenes do not contain full nudity, and the sexual event is represented metonymically (i.e. through a part that stands for the whole or an object that stands for a contiguous object): we see hands clasping one another, grabbing hair or a piece of clothing, and later on the torn condom wrap on the floor. The film’s aesthetics is one of an all-embracing sensuality: from its very beginning, long before the sex takes place, the camera’s gaze lingers on the details of commonplace objects, charging them with an unusual intensity, and it is this sensual and quasi-hallucinatory quality that enables the sudden intimacy between the protagonist and the stranger she gave a ride to.
Refraining from explicitness in the sex scenes is a common feature of most films in the program. Carine Adler’s strategy in Under the Skin is having the protagonist give a detailed verbal past-tense description in voice over of the acts that we do not see. Does avoiding sexual nudity in sex scenes attest to female modesty? Not necessarily. In Adler’s film the absence of visual explicitness is compensated for by the graphic verbal description, and makes it possible to represent “improper” female sexual behavior; and in Denis’ film, the fragmentation is an attempt to avoid clichés of sexual representation, and to impart the experience of sexuality “from the inside”, that is in extreme close-up. It is also important to remember that alongside strategies of this kind for representing sex, there exist too women directors (though quite few and mostly American) who work in the pornographic genre itself, and attempt to create alternative porn, i.e. graphic sexual representations that aim to induce arousal but propose a different view of female (and male) sexuality, and address themselves first and foremost to the desires of female spectators.
Predator and Prey
To move from the question of the relations of the gaze and cinematic rhetoric to that of the experience of desire and the sexual interactions depicted in these films, one recurring theme is the complex negotiation – both internal and with the male partner – around the issue of consent, and the problematic transition from object of desire to subject of desire. In Sex Is Comedy the director instructs the actress who plays a virgin to show resistance and push away her partner despite the fact that she desires him.
In Magic Paris the protagonist first recoils from the unsolicited advances of the stranger who kissed her without her permission, but as she walks away to avoid him she changes her mind and turns back. In Friday Night too a tortuous negotiation takes place between the characters: first it is the protagonist who drives, and her passenger asks her to drop him wherever she likes; later he takes hold of the wheel, frees them from the traffic jam, and steers at high speed in deserted streets; at this stage she panics at losing control of the situation and demands that he stop the car, but when he pulls up, hands her the keys, and disappears she goes in search of him. The car’s role is allegorical of course: when the man leads and initiates, there is no room left for the woman’s desire. According to the prevailing cultural script the man is the sexual predator and the woman his prey, and she is expected to defend against predatory male desire even if in the end she yields to it. Faced with this script, it is not easy for a woman to recognize her own desire and act upon it, hence synchronizing the desires of both parties is no simple matter.
The negotiation concerns not only the very occurrence of the sexual encounter but also the how: in the short film My Knickers, the woman repeatedly stops her partner with the words “not like that” – his attempts at staging passionate sex according to ready-made scripts are mechanical and insensitive to her needs.
A complete reversal of the predator/prey paradigm takes place in Sex Is Comedy, which, as mentioned, depicts a director shooting a film; yet the reversal takes place not in the relationship represented in the film-within-a-film but rather in the interaction between the director and the male actor. The actor is characterized as narcissistic and behaves in a coquettish and manipulative manner, while the director takes the role of the aggressor, courts him insistently, and demands that he submit to her will. This reversal of the gendered paradigm is presented as having to do not with their individual relationship but with the very roles of director and actor: the director explains to her assistant that a director is a predator, and an actor is female. The director’s dominant and aggressive behavior takes on a particularly sexual aspect, since the scene she is shooting is a sex scene, but interestingly, the scene itself depicts a highly conventional and oppressive sexual interaction. The reversal of the gendered dynamics on the set leaves no trace in the film being shot.
Such duality demonstrates how difficult it is to disrupt gendered norms on all fronts, and attests to the complexity of the challenge of representing desire from women’s point of view both in the sense of an egalitarian visibility and posing men as objects of an erotic female gaze, and in terms of the nature of the interaction. The films in the program all offer new and exciting alternatives in some fronts, and give up trying in others. As opposed to the conventional ways of seeing offered by mainstream cinema we find here nor one female gaze or one female desire but many, and a plurality of representational strategies. Women’s attempt to introduce new ways of seeing to the cinematic medium is still an ongoing project.
Dr. Amalia Ziv – lecturer in the Literature Department and the Women and Gender Studies Program of Tel Aviv University. Source: iwff.net
What is desire from women’s point of view? Since the 1980s women artists in various fields have been posing this question with growing urgency and attempting to answer it. In the visual field, and in cinema in particular, the question has a double meaning: first, how do women experience desire? Does their experience differ from men’s experience of desire, and in what ways? And secondly, how can this experience be represented visually? Cinema enables us not only to see things but also to see them in a certain way. Hence, one of the basic claims of feminist film criticism has been that since most filmmakers are men, the way of seeing which this medium offers us is of necessity male. Thus, for example, the female figure is constructed as the object of desire – not only at the level of the plot, but also by the look of the camera that follows her, lingers on different parts of her body, and takes pleasure in her as a sight; and the look of the camera is fused with that of the spectators. In other words, cinema not only represents desire but also creates desire, and since mainstream cinema constructs the spectator position as male, in order to enjoy the pleasures that it offers, women spectators need to adopt (at least partially) a male gaze.
But what happens in women’s films, films that present female characters as protagonists and not only as objects of desire, and that address themselves (also) to female spectators? Do such films represent female desire differently than men’s films? And what kinds of desire do they construct? In the cinematic context, to ask what is desire from a female point of view is to ask what is the desiring female gaze – what does it look at, how does it look, and what pleasures does it offer?
The films in the Festival’s desire program deal with desire between women and men; the program does not include lesbian cinema. The films all grapple with different aspects of the challenge of representing desire from a female point of view, whether it is shooting a sex scene or communicating the very experience of desire, and they offer a whole array of answers to the question how women represent desire, or how female desire looks. The documentary Filming Desire, that contains a large number of interviews with women directors, demonstrates that different filmmakers not only provide different answers, but also understand the question in different ways. Nevertheless, it is possible to trace cautiously some joint coordinates, and point out a number of major strategies.
Female Body/Male Body, and the man as Object of the Gaze
One central question concerns the visibility of the female body and the male body and their modes of representation.
In Filming Desire, Deepa Mehta alludes to the cinematic exploitation of the female body, which in sex scenes is always exposed first and more completely than the male body. Agnes Varda observes that men’s films tend to cut the female body and focus on the erogenous zones, while, as Jeanne La Brun points out, there is a taboo on showing the male sex organ, especially in its erect state. On the other hand, the women’s films in the program expose the male and female body in equal measure and in similar ways, and some of them contain male nudity that includes the penis.
Sex Is Comedy by Catherine Breillat, which depicts a woman director shooting a sex scene, even addresses explicitly the problematic visibility of the male organ: the director wants the erect penis to be visible in the scene, but on the other hand it must not dominate the frame since that would make it obscene. The film also offers an original and parodic solution to the taboo on showing the male organ by means of a phallic prosthesis worn by the actor, a prosthesis that covers his actual member though modeled on it. Thus the actor can be shown walking around the set with a huge erection protruding from his bathrobe without offending decency, yet the fact the artificial member is an exact copy (though larger in size, at the actor’s request) of the real one throws into relief the absurdity of the taboo.
In many of these films the male body is presented as an object of erotic interest, and the look of the camera, identified with that of the female protagonist, lingers on it in its entirety or hovers on parts of it.
In Deep we follow the gaze of the teenage protagonist drawn again and again to the figures of adolescent boys, and resting briefly on the neck of one, the bare torso of another, and the trendy accessories of a third (the fleetingness of the gaze characterizes it as a female gaze, because social norms forbid women, let alone young ones, to stare at men).
Between Two Houses by Clara Von Gool goes further and offers the near-naked male body as a pleasurable spectacle for the woman protagonist – one time when she watches her partner applying body-lotion (a narcissistic ritual culturally coded as feminine) and encourages him by her responses to turn the act into a quasi-erotic quasi-parodic dance, and another time when she watches her foreign and exotic lover do gymnastics. In the second case, it is the very liberty of staring at his muscular body and enjoying its performance that betrays the sexual intimacy between them, despite the fact we haven’t witnessed it.
Shooting Sex
One answer to the fetishistic fragmentation of the female body in mainstream cinema through close-up shots of women’s legs, breasts, buttocks, and lips is offered by Claire Denis in her film Friday Night. Denis adopts – mostly in the sex scenes but not exclusively in them – a strategy of hyper-fragmentation: close-ups of a stretch of back, a shirt collar, hair, the edge of a bed, hands. Fragmentation often impairs intelligibility, but on the other hand it creates an effect of intimacy and sensuality. The sex scenes do not contain full nudity, and the sexual event is represented metonymically (i.e. through a part that stands for the whole or an object that stands for a contiguous object): we see hands clasping one another, grabbing hair or a piece of clothing, and later on the torn condom wrap on the floor. The film’s aesthetics is one of an all-embracing sensuality: from its very beginning, long before the sex takes place, the camera’s gaze lingers on the details of commonplace objects, charging them with an unusual intensity, and it is this sensual and quasi-hallucinatory quality that enables the sudden intimacy between the protagonist and the stranger she gave a ride to.
Refraining from explicitness in the sex scenes is a common feature of most films in the program. Carine Adler’s strategy in Under the Skin is having the protagonist give a detailed verbal past-tense description in voice over of the acts that we do not see. Does avoiding sexual nudity in sex scenes attest to female modesty? Not necessarily. In Adler’s film the absence of visual explicitness is compensated for by the graphic verbal description, and makes it possible to represent “improper” female sexual behavior; and in Denis’ film, the fragmentation is an attempt to avoid clichés of sexual representation, and to impart the experience of sexuality “from the inside”, that is in extreme close-up. It is also important to remember that alongside strategies of this kind for representing sex, there exist too women directors (though quite few and mostly American) who work in the pornographic genre itself, and attempt to create alternative porn, i.e. graphic sexual representations that aim to induce arousal but propose a different view of female (and male) sexuality, and address themselves first and foremost to the desires of female spectators.
Predator and Prey
To move from the question of the relations of the gaze and cinematic rhetoric to that of the experience of desire and the sexual interactions depicted in these films, one recurring theme is the complex negotiation – both internal and with the male partner – around the issue of consent, and the problematic transition from object of desire to subject of desire. In Sex Is Comedy the director instructs the actress who plays a virgin to show resistance and push away her partner despite the fact that she desires him.
In Magic Paris the protagonist first recoils from the unsolicited advances of the stranger who kissed her without her permission, but as she walks away to avoid him she changes her mind and turns back. In Friday Night too a tortuous negotiation takes place between the characters: first it is the protagonist who drives, and her passenger asks her to drop him wherever she likes; later he takes hold of the wheel, frees them from the traffic jam, and steers at high speed in deserted streets; at this stage she panics at losing control of the situation and demands that he stop the car, but when he pulls up, hands her the keys, and disappears she goes in search of him. The car’s role is allegorical of course: when the man leads and initiates, there is no room left for the woman’s desire. According to the prevailing cultural script the man is the sexual predator and the woman his prey, and she is expected to defend against predatory male desire even if in the end she yields to it. Faced with this script, it is not easy for a woman to recognize her own desire and act upon it, hence synchronizing the desires of both parties is no simple matter.
The negotiation concerns not only the very occurrence of the sexual encounter but also the how: in the short film My Knickers, the woman repeatedly stops her partner with the words “not like that” – his attempts at staging passionate sex according to ready-made scripts are mechanical and insensitive to her needs.
A complete reversal of the predator/prey paradigm takes place in Sex Is Comedy, which, as mentioned, depicts a director shooting a film; yet the reversal takes place not in the relationship represented in the film-within-a-film but rather in the interaction between the director and the male actor. The actor is characterized as narcissistic and behaves in a coquettish and manipulative manner, while the director takes the role of the aggressor, courts him insistently, and demands that he submit to her will. This reversal of the gendered paradigm is presented as having to do not with their individual relationship but with the very roles of director and actor: the director explains to her assistant that a director is a predator, and an actor is female. The director’s dominant and aggressive behavior takes on a particularly sexual aspect, since the scene she is shooting is a sex scene, but interestingly, the scene itself depicts a highly conventional and oppressive sexual interaction. The reversal of the gendered dynamics on the set leaves no trace in the film being shot.
Such duality demonstrates how difficult it is to disrupt gendered norms on all fronts, and attests to the complexity of the challenge of representing desire from women’s point of view both in the sense of an egalitarian visibility and posing men as objects of an erotic female gaze, and in terms of the nature of the interaction. The films in the program all offer new and exciting alternatives in some fronts, and give up trying in others. As opposed to the conventional ways of seeing offered by mainstream cinema we find here nor one female gaze or one female desire but many, and a plurality of representational strategies. Women’s attempt to introduce new ways of seeing to the cinematic medium is still an ongoing project.
Dr. Amalia Ziv – lecturer in the Literature Department and the Women and Gender Studies Program of Tel Aviv University. Source: iwff.net
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home