MALE GAZE AND FEMALE SPECTATOR
Considering the way that films are put together, many feminist film critics have pointed to what they argue is the "male gaze" that predominates classical Hollywood filmmaking. Budd Boetticher summarizes the view:
"What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself, the woman has not the slightest importance."
Laura Mulvey expands on this conception to argue that in cinema, women are typically depicted in a passive role that provides visual pleasure through scopophilia and identification with the on-screen male actor.
The work of Alfred Hitchcock is a great example of this. For example: if you look at this trailer for Rear Window, a voyeuristic male gaze is immediately evident. The dollhouse like setting, the premise and the construct of the female characters all exemplify this theory.
Laura Mulvey asserts: "In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness,” and as a result contends that in film a woman is the "bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.” Mulvey uses psychoanalytic theory to talk about how film creates a space for female sexual objectification and exploitation through the combination of the patriarchal order of society, and 'looking' in itself as a pleasurable act of scopophilia, as "the cinema satisfies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking."
Mulvey calls for a destruction of modern film structure as the only way to free women from their sexual objectification in film. She argues for a removal of the voyeurism encoded into film by creating distance between the male spectator and the female character. The only way to do so, Mulvey argues, is by destroying the element of voyeurism and "the invisible guest". Mulvey also asserts that the dominance men embody is only so because women exist, as without a woman for comparison, a man and his supremacy as the controller of visual pleasure are insignificant.
The problem of objectification persists even in so called female oriented films. For instance, if we look at the camera angles or gestures in this trailer of Sex and The City, we can see how the angles clearly objectify the women and the sexual innuendo caters to the male sexual fantasy. This despite Sex and City initially being touted as one of the hallmarks of post feminist films celebrating the new age woman.
Objectification reduces female characters from complex, multifaceted characters to mere vehicles for the sexual voyeurism of men.
For Mulvey, it is the presence of the female that defines the patriarchal order of society as well as the male psychology of thought.
Mulvey calls for an eradication of female sexual objectivity, aligning herself with second-wave feminism. She argues that in order for women to be equally represented in the workplace, women must be portrayed as men are: as lacking sexual objectification.
In Michael Powell's controversial film, Peeping Tom (a film about a homicidal voyeur who films the deaths of his victims), the cinema spectator's own voyeurism is made shockingly obvious and even more shockingly, the spectator identifies with the perverted protagonist. The inference is that even female spectators identify with the male observer rather than the female object of the gaze.
Similarly the Netflix film on serial killer, Ted Bundy: Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil, and Vile succumbs to the same easy stereotypes that the press did during his trial, marveling at how a well-spoken, decent-looking man could possibly do such heinous things. The film clearly doesn’t intend to sympathize with Bundy, yet in making him the star and focusing on only Bundy’s public face, it can’t avoid doing so to an extent.
REALISM
The early work of Marjorie Rosen and Molly Haskell on the representation of women in film was part of a movement to depict women more realistically, both in documentaries and narrative cinema. The growing female presence in the film industry was seen as a positive step toward realizing this goal, by drawing attention to feminist issues and putting forth an alternative, true-to-life view of women.
However, Rosen and Haskell argue that these images are still mediated by the same factors as traditional film, such as the "moving camera, composition, editing, lighting, and all varieties of sound." While acknowledging the value in inserting positive representations of women in film, some critics asserted that real change would only come about from reconsidering the role of film in society, often from a semiotic point of view.
COUNTER CINEMA
Claire Johnston put forth the idea that women's cinema can function as "counter cinema." Through consciousness of the means of production and opposition of sexist ideologies, films made by women have the potential to posit an alternative to traditional Hollywood films.
Initially, the attempt to show "real" women was praised, eventually critics such as Eileen McGarry claimed that the "real" women being shown on screen were still just contrived depictions. In reaction to this article, many women filmmakers integrated "alternative forms and experimental techniques" to "encourage audiences to critique the seemingly transparent images on the screen and to question the manipulative techniques of filming and editing".
EXAMPLES AND DISCUSSION
Birds of Prey is an action film with 5 female leads and is diverse in terms of both LGBTQIA and people of color(POC) representation. Similarly Little Women(2019) gives centre stage to the narratives of its 4 main female characters and has a female director and a largely female led production team.
Female led films like Wonder Woman also lead one to question the extent of emancipation because while the movie essentially showcased the strength of the female superhero; the sexualisation of her costume, the casting of Gal Gadot and the fact that she fights entire fight sequences without ever having a hair out of place leave many things to be desired.
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