The Evolution of the Female Gaze: from Laura Mulvey to ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’
Abstract:
There is a well-known aspect of cinema regarding the objectification of women in movies by men, either through the camera, the male character in the film or the audience. The focus of this study is to investigate how far the film industry has evolved after the term male gaze was coined by Laura Mulvey in 1975, looking for what would be a female gaze, how this term has been interpreted as in other feminist film studies and how the production of films has impacted on the presence of those gazes. This literature review is based on the analysis of 5 main papers, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (Mulvey, 1975); A Female Gaze? (Jacobsson, 1999); Gender in Cinematography: Female Gaze (Eye) Behind the Camera (Dirse, 2013); Blue is the Warmest Color: or the after-life of ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (Williams, 2017); Portrait of a Lady on Fire director Céline Sciamma on her ravishing romantic masterpiece (VanDerWerff, 2020). It is then, after establishing what the paper will consider as the female gaze, possible to compare how differently female relationships were portrayed in Blue is the Warmest Color (2013) and Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), and how the making of these films has influenced the way they present those relationships to the audience.
Keywords: female gaze, Laura Mulvey, film production, male gaze, Portrait of a Lady on Fire.
The term Male Gaze was originally used by Laura Mulvey in her article Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975), in which the author states the existence of an imbalanced gender dynamic in films, with an active/male objectifying a passive/female through the look. By using psychoanalytic theory, Mulvey analyses the unconscious influence of patriarchy ideology in film form. She intended to destroy the pleasure and beauty surrounding this image of women that is portrayed in Hollywood cinema by analysing it and revealing its problems. From Freud’s definition of scopophilia (pleasure in looking), the author develops her argument, stating the existence of three looks present in cinema; the one between the characters dynamic inside the film narrative, the one of the cameras (controlled by the director, cinematographer or even the cameraman), and the one of the audience, usually affected by the previous two.
Due to the presence of patriarchal culture in the industry, mainstream films show a pattern when presenting both male and female characters. The man holds the power in the narrative, he controls the film fantasy and is the bearer of the look, the story revolves around him and his actions, while the woman occupies a place of an object, a position of what Mulvey calls to-be-looked-as-ness. By being displayed as a sexual object, the female character is shaped to suit the male visual pleasures and fantasies, making her presence work against the development of the story-line (Mulvey, 1975).
The film being structured around the main controlling figure is a consequence of how those who work behind the camera want to impose an identification between this character and the audience. There is an influence on how the spectators view the film, through the use of camera angles, points of view, framing and close-ups, consequently making the woman be once again objectified by the looks.
This thesis written by Mulvey was an important starting point for discussions in the feminist film theory regarding gender difference, with subsequent texts agreeing and disagreeing with her ideas when analysing more recent films, and even questioning whether these ideas apply to contexts other than the white heterosexual and cisgender relationship of Hollywood protagonists. The evolution of these discussions also led theorists to investigate if the objectification of women has already been subverted and if a female gaze exists.
But what would be a Female Gaze? Mulvey herself expressed in her 1981 article Afterthoughts On ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ inspired by ‘Duel in the Sun’ (King Vidor, 1946) that the female gaze would only be the gaze of a woman behaving in a masculine way. This approach was used by Eva-Maria Jacobsson when analysing the movie Fatal Attraction (1987) in her paper A Female Gaze? (Jacobsson, 1999). Jacobsson questioned herself if a reversed definition of the male gaze was achieved by that time and if women objectification by men was still happening. In the paper, she states that “Fatal Attraction provides us initially with a demonstration of a possible female gaze but is also an example of how the audience’s preferences and desires force the film text to be altered into the more traditional male gaze. Furthermore, the movie can be seen as an example of portraying the liberated woman as a frustrated, unhappy individual, in need of “traditional” values, i.e. the norms imposed onto them by male ideology. (Jacobsson, 1999). By painting the female character, Alex, as a monstrous person, after taking away the previous male traits that gave her the power of the gaze, the film was able to protect the traditional male gaze.
This change in how the character is depicted during the narrative was in fact intentional. The initial script, written by James Dearden, intended to hold the male protagonist, Dan, accountable for having an affair. One of the producers, Sherry Lancing, saw in the film a potential to deliver a feminist message, to make the audience feel great empathy for Alex, the single woman Dan was having the affair with. The production company, Paramount, on the other hand, had some disagreements with how unsympathetic the man was, what led to the script being rewritten, and a final film presenting the woman as extreme and the one to blame (Faludi, 1991). That shows that not only the female gaze as the objectification of a man by a woman was not achieved, but also how the industry protects the male gaze as a mechanism to maintain the power and domination of the patriarchy.
A more recent interpretation of the female gaze was made by Zoe Dirse in her work Gender in Cinematography: Female Gaze (Eye) Behind the Camera (2013). As a cinematographer, Dirse explores the look in the making of the films, analysing the sexual difference from the point of production. Her goal was to examine if there is a unique and distinguishable difference in the aesthetic perception of the female gaze. By defining the role of a cinematographer as the one who, starting from the director’s and writer’s imagination, creates the visual images that will be presented to the audience, the author highlights how crucial is this work when discussing the way the narrative will be depicted.
When exploring film history throughout her paper, Dirse points out the underrepresentation of women in the cinematography field and other technical areas of filmmaking. She shows that not only there is a lack of documentation historically of the first ones that were part of the industry, but also how even nowadays studies in North America show a discrepancy in the number of women occupying roles behind the camera when compared to men. It becomes clear that the male gaze prevails because men are the ones that control the industry. The author also discusses how that affects minorities trying to join the field since an environment dominated by white straight wealthy men usually lack opportunities to those that do not follow this pattern, and when these opportunities appear, they require a level of experience that professionals facing such obstacles have difficulties to achieve. These minorities, whether ethnic, class or gender, tend to work together in their own projects trying to progress in the field, and Dirse states that, when they do, then there needs to be a shift in the gaze to reflect their point of view.
While going through her showreel, composed of documentary films with a feminist subject matter, Zoe Dirse tries to deconstruct notions of the gaze and affirms that the political manifests itself in how she sees and constructs the images for a film. One of her works, the film Forbidden Love (1992), revolves around older lesbians in the 1950s. As a cinematic process directed by women, captured by women, with female characters leading the narrative and a lesbian audience, there is a subversion of Mulvey’s three looks theory. Almost all the gazes in this film are female and, contrary to Jacobsson’s (1999) way of using this term, the gaze was female because of how the visuals were portrayed and reconstructed from the standard narrative form, not because it was an inverted male gaze. When discussing the love-making scenes, the author stated that the scene ultimately appears seamless due to the delicate direction and non-threatening female technical crew and camera eye. She also points out that when the gaze is so deliberately subverted from the male to the female, we finally have an opportunity to view ourselves as we really are, in the case of this film, not as objects of male desire but as objects of female desire. (Dirse, 2013).
From experience, Dirse notices that the female subject in many of her documentaries seems to feel safe and not threatened by her, even when they live in fear inserted in an unstable environment, like in Shadow Maker (1998), where the cinematographer explores a Sufi parade in the bazaar in old Cairo. In another film, A Tale of Two Sisters (1997), about two actresses, the author points out how she felt a shift in their behaviour in front of her camera. The two Canadian television personalities that are used to male looks coming from the audience or the camera appeared relaxed like they lost their self-conscious performing role during a production with both narrator and camera gazes being female. As a result of her study, Zoe Dirse believes that it is crucial for women to take control of their art in order to subvert patriarchal assumptions concerning gender. The cinematographer finishes by saying that if, in fact, the female gaze is almost absent from dominant culture, then the challenge is to change the patriarchal way of looking by imposing the female gaze on our cultural life, even if we must ‘’steal’’ in or ‘’fly’’ by (Dirse, 1999).
It is possible to apply these notions when analysing fiction narratives as well, starting with Blue is the Warmest Color (2013), a French film directed by Abdellatif Kechiche that tells the story of Adèle, a high school girl, and the development of her relationship with Emma, an aspiring painter. The three-hour-long motion picture was praised by its realism, bringing the audience closer to Adèle’s life and the rise and fall of her romance with Emma, and even received the Palme d’Or, but the reception was overshadowed by the controversial love-making scenes between the two characters. Julie Maroh, the author of the graphic novel the film was based on, affirmed in their blog that even though these scenes only last for a few minutes, if people are talking this much about it, it is because of the director’s visual bias (Maroh, 2013). In fact, the duration of the sex scenes is longer than expected, lasting nearly 7 minutes, and it seems like they have gone past the point of accomplishing what they needed to in a dramatic sense.
Kechiche’s choice ended up breaking with the rest of the movie, because these shots at the same time work against his film with the critics, and aren’t even relevant to the story. By being so explicit and long for this type of scene, it makes the audience aware that they are watching a movie, taking them out the narrative that was dragging the spectator so well until this point. What would be the purpose of a sex scene that lasts longer the character’s entire first conversation? The problem is behind the camera. Julie Maroh stated that, except for a few passages, this is all that it brings to their mind: a brutal and surgical display, exuberant and cold, of so-called lesbian sex, which turned into porn, and made they feel very ill at ease. Especially when, in the middle of a movie theatre, everyone was giggling. The heternormative laughed because they didn’t understand it and found the scene ridiculous. The gay and queer people laughed because it’s not convincing at all, and found it ridiculous. And among the only people they didn’t hear giggling were the potential guys too busy feasting their eyes on an incarnation of their fantasies on screen (Maroh, 2013). It appears to the graphic novel author that there were lesbians missing on the set, and they do not refer to the main actresses being straight, but to the lack of representation while making the film. This is a case in which the story may have a female gaze and praises female pleasure, but the director’s male gaze affected the final product, and it shows.
Linda Williams, a professor at UC Berkeley, actually disagrees with the negative criticism regarding this film, and shows it in her paper Blue is the Warmest Color: or the after-life of ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (Williams, 2017). The author argues that many American women critics excoriated this important lesbian sex film, different from the French press reaction, and that this was caused by these women being too attached to Mulvey’s work, which referred to its own time in film history. She goes to separate her thoughts in two points to explain why Kechiche’s film has such a negative reception in the US. The first is the association of the sex scenes with pornography, and the second is that Mulvey’s work about Hollywood cinema was, according to her, inappropriately applied to this French art film (Williams, 2017).
It is possible to see where her opinion comes from since there are some altered variables in Blue is the Warmest Color, like not revolving around a heterosexual relationship, nor being a Hollywood film. The issue here seems to be how Williams tries to minimize the real problems in the cinematic production to sustain her opinion that the critics were negative because, maybe, Americans have become pleasure-phobic after too many over-literal readings of Mulvey (Williams, 2017). Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975) not talking about homosexual desires does not invalidate applying its ideas to male/female dynamics between director and actress, especially since Mulvey already talked about the camera objectification in her three looks theory. The fact that this is a French art film cannot justify the perpetuation of unbalanced relationships and the objectification of women in film production.
Williams seems to get too attached to how important the narrative is, and can’t see that the pleasure expressed by the characters does not erase the valid criticism regarding the cinematic process. Both main actresses complained about difficulties with the director, criticizing his exploitative shooting practices in an interview with Marlow Stern to the Daily Beast (2013). Léa Seydoux (Emma) and Adèle Exarchopoulos (Adèle) stated that, during the sex scenes, he wanted them to give him everything. It was the first scene they shot together, and the actresses were ashamed because the director didn’t tell them what to do nor give them choreography. They spent 10 days on just that one scene, which was shot with a lot of close-ups, and made the artists very embarrassed. They finished saying that the filmmaking experience was horrible and that they would never work with Kechiche again (Stern, 2013). There is no denying that these behind-the-camera issues are rooted in a problematic gender issue. The way Kechiche choose to create these scenes from his clueless male approximation of what he though lesbian sex would look like, and how he treated his main actresses during such a sensitive shot represents the presence of the male gaze in a production that needed a female one, especially by having such an important story about a lesbian romance.
A more recent film, Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), directed by Céline Sciamma, has been compared to Blue is the Warmest Color (2013) for doing it right where Kachiche’s film went wrong. But Céline’s grows far beyond these comparisons. The story follows Marianne, a painter in France, late 18th century, who was commissioned to do the wedding portrait of Héloïse, a young aristocratic woman. Héloïse is a reluctant bride to be and Marianne must paint her without her knowing, so she observes her by day, to paint her secretly. Since the film revolves around this artist and muse relationship, the camera puts the spectator in Marianne’s shoes when she joins Heloïse in her daily walks. The audience can’t see Heloïse’s face until it is finally revealed to Marienne when they first meet, and the scene builds an expectation around this subject that is so important to the painter. The close-ups shots are common in these moments to represent how the painter is focusing on her features so she can memorize them and work on the portrait later. The gaze becomes a relevant part of the narrative, with Marianne’s looks towards Héloïse caring so much meaning. And eventually, these glances become reciprocal, escalating the relationship between them. Director Céline Sciamma didn’t want to objectify the muse with these gazes, as she sought a balance in the common artist and muse relationship. (Araújo, 2021). In an interview with Emily VanDerWerff for Vox (2020) Sciamma stated that the narrative of the film is based on equality among the love story because there is no gender domination. (VanDerWerff, 2020).
The director herself affirmed that she sees this film as a manifesto about the female gaze, and when asked on the same interview about the power of looking into the limitations for women and queer people historically, Sciamma said that these stories are really dangerous for patriarchy. That’s why the male gaze is obsessed with representing lesbians, for instance. It’s a way to control it. These stories are powerful because they are dangerous. So it’s a very good strategy to despise [lesbians] — to undermine them — because it’s giving them less leverage for a very powerful political dynamic. (VanDerWerff, 2020). It is possible to see in her words how important it is for Sciamma to take over and create narratives that represent her and others like her realistically. Like Zoe Dirse, Céline is aware of the gender difference in her field, even when occupying the highest position in film production. However, it is noticeable how the presence of women in those places makes a positive difference in the cinematic process, and how taking control of the art is the most effective way to overcome the male gaze.
The purpose of this review was to analyze the rise of the female gaze in the film industry, how it has been interpreted and applied in papers for the past five decades and, by comparing two recent films about lesbian romance, to examine how the gaze behind the camera is important when portraying these stories. Throughout the paper, it becomes clear the influence of patriarchy in the cinematic process till this day, but it is also possible to state that the female gaze, as a distinguished and female way of depicting visuals without the objectification of women, can finally be evidenced when women are part of the production. It was also shown a disagreement when older theories are applied to more recent discussions, but it cannot be denied that some aspects of these theories are still applicable to new contexts, as initial ideas presented by them evolved and were shaped to better fit deeper analysis regarding gender in the film industry. Despite the female gaze being part of a praised recent production, there is a need for feminist studies to better examine the marginalization of other productions that also have this gaze. It is important to keep researching about the female gaze occupying a field historically dominated by the patriarchy, and how these changes are occurring as there is a larger women representation in more technical areas of filmmaking, but it is necessary to bring other issues like race and gender identity to the equation.
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