AUGUST PLAYLIST
THE FEMALE GAZE
This month, we’re thinking about perspective. Specifically, the clear, strong presence of perspective in our female protagonists’ gaze.
In Laura Mulvey’s 1975 feminist manifesto Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, the sexual objectification of women in film is given a name: “Male Gaze theory”. We asked ourselves which current films obliterate this theory, with storylines shaped by and dependent on female characters’ gazes instead.
The films in this playlist significantly rely on the gazes of their female protagonist(s), either to drive the plot or as a formal storytelling element. In Promising Young Woman, the threat of Mulligan’s sober glare is more powerful than any words, often bringing the conversation to a complete halt. Conversely, in Fleabag, Waller-Bridge’s perfectly timed glances to the camera are a private winks to her viewers, bringing them into her unique, comedic tragedy as though they are friends and not some curious voyeurs. In A Month of Single Frames, Barbara Hammer’s intimate perspective offers a stirring reminder of life’s beautiful simplicities. These films are not bound by genre or subject matter, but rather by the pronounced use of their female protagonists’ gaze -- complex, exhilarating and divisive with a perspective in their own right.
Solia Cates is the Editor-In-Chief of WomenDo, a graduate of Yale University’s Film and Media studies program, and a writer and actress based in Los Angeles.
Fleabag
By Phoebe Waller Bridge
2016, TV Series
Born from her one-woman show, Fleabag stars creator Phoebe Waller Bridge as the titular character in a comedy about a woman who uses her dry wit and wry sensibility to escape the emotional repercussions of a recent tragedy. At its outset, Fleabag masquerades as a comedy about a woman with no filter who often gets in trouble for her brutal honesty, and is punctuated by her quippy comments to the camera (or to us, as we may take it). Dig a little deeper, however, and you find that her superficial honesty is at odds with a darker, shame-ridden secret - one which we are able to see through flashbacks, but, unlike the rest of the story, is rarely touched by Fleabag’s own words. The result is a fascinating tale about a woman performing herself for her understood audience, showing us her most hilarious self until a moment of weakness or revelation forces her to be truly honest and look inward.
Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy Blaché
By Pamela B. Green
2018, Documentary Feature
Documentary Feature
In this feature, Pamela B. Green sets off into a gripping investigation of the life and work of the first female filmmaker, Alice Guy Blaché. A luminary in filmmaking who has been virtually wiped out of history, Blaché was the first to explore the storytelling capabilities of film, and in her day was, in essence, both the head of a studio as well as a director/producer. In the documentary, Green continues the work of historians and archivists to unearth letters, artifacts, videotapes, descendants, any and every piece of information that she can use to puzzle together the life of this filmmaking pioneer. What we’re left with is the frenzied portrait of a woman patched together by sentences and segments uncovered. While the other films in this series are dominated by their protagonist’s perspective, this one is spent searching for Blanché’s. Consequently, the film takes on a sort of meta-gaze, as one female filmmaker casts her gaze on another.
A Month of Single Frames
By Lynne Sachs with and for Barbara Hammer
2020, Documentary short
Working with and for filmmaker Barbara Hammer during the final year of her life, Lynne weaves together film from Barbara’s personal archive, resurrected from her 1998 artist residency in the C Scape Duneshack in Cape Cod. She layers words over the film, a mellifluous, intimate voice whose voice and lyrics evoke the feeling of a meditation or video diary. Through a patchwork of emotional, thoughtful frames, and in the eve of Barbara’s approaching death, she and Lynne make the casual elements of life - insects, gusts of wind, flickers of light, feel incredibly significant. Learn more about director Lynne Sachs in our FEATURED INTERVIEW.
The film is available from distributor Canyon Cinema via Vimeo-on-Demand
Roma
BY: Alfonso Cuaron
2018, Narrative Feature
Set in Mexico City in the years 1970 and 1971, Roma follows Cleo, one of two live-in housekeepers for a middle class, white, six-person family on the brink of collapse. Cleo is responsible for the four children, and completes her duties even as conflict tears through both the family and her own life. The film paints a vivid, intimate portrait of Cleo’s life, delivering each frame with more intention and beauty than the last. It is not so much the extraordinary circumstances of Cleo’s life events that imbue the screen with such emotion, rather it is her self. Even the banal, menial, mundane - clothes billowing on a clothesline, soapy water mopping up dirty floors - is rendered with the extravagant, complex beauty of her quietly exquisite perspective.
Invisible Portraits
By Oge Egbuonu
2020, Documentary Feature
On its website, Invisible Portraits is described as a feature documentary that “shatters the too-often invisible otherizing of Black Women in America and reclaims the true narratives as told in their own words.” We reiterate this description because there are really no better words to explain the movie than those the filmmakers chose themselves. Notably, it is the ‘reclaiming of the true narratives’ that sets this film apart. In it, women and girls are literally put on a pedestal, standing in front of the warm, chocolatey-brown backdrop of a could-be portrait studio in honest conversation about the truths of their own, independent lives and the greater context of black womanhood. Their voices, their words, their faces in the center of the frame become the main figure of the story; their direct gaze at the camera beckons the viewer to join their world, or, at the very least, to understand it.
Promising Young Woman
By Emerald FennelL
2020, Narrative Feature
A breakout film at Sundance’s 2020 Festival, Promising Young Woman is a femme fatale story about Cassie (Carey Mulligan), an incredibly intelligent and curiously unambitious introvert who lives with her parents after dropping out of medical school. While her days are quiet and routine, her nights are spent out at bars and clubs, where she wears mini dresses and drinks until she’s in a blackout (or, at least appears to be), which is usually when a man finds her and offers to take her home. What follows is a cunning role reversal which places Cassie in the driver’s seat as she enacts searing revenge for a past trauma. Throughout the film, Cassie’s sentience is her power, at times even a weapon in itself; her harsh gaze, one which I will not spill in detail as it threatens to spoil the conceit of the movie, a knife of its own accord.
There are countless films, television shows, and short media with provocative female points of view which help to propel the story. Instead of curating a collection of films that explore the female gaze, we encourage you to consider perspective while watching in your independent life - where does the film’s gaze lie, and whose gaze is prioritized? How is the female gaze significant in the crafting of the piece as a whole?