Sexuality and cinema: these directors who want to change the image of women on screen
Female gaze. Since #MeToo, Time's up and recent movements within the film industry that question the place of women, this emerging term has snowballed. The expression refers to the female gaze. She opposes the historical male gaze, theorized and denounced in 1975 by Laura Mulvey in her article Visual pleasure and narrative cinema: according to this feminist critic and director, cinema, phallocentric, mainly offers passive female characters, accessories to the intrigue and codified by human society.
Particularly on questions of desire and pleasure: the camera follows the gaze of a male character on the female body, it undresses it, reduces the woman to the rank of sexual object, fetishizes certain parts of her body... The point of view of the woman ? It would be non-existent. Forty-five years later, this problem has not been resolved and it has returned to the heart of the debates.
A new deal
Admittedly, female directors (Chantal Akerman, Claire Denis, Catherine Breillat, Jane Campion in the emblematic The Piano Lesson) and also directors (David Lean, Todd Haynes, etc.) have filmed heroines fully assuming their desire and their sexuality, but their attempts have been marginalized or drowned out. In an industry where men make up 75% of filmmakers, women's voices and perspectives remain a minority. Not for long, perhaps?
Aware of these shortcomings, eager to build different and multiple models, a new generation of filmmakers intends to redistribute the cards. And already, the change is taking place. Iris Brey, academic and author of Sex and the Series, devotes a book to her entitled The Female Gaze: a revolution on the screen (Ed. de l'Olivier, to be published on February 6). “The novelty in France is these directors who are part, in full consciousness and with the same momentum, in a movement of reappropriation of the female body, in tune with the times. They claim it: the question of the representation of female bodies and pleasure is as artistic as it is political.
The credo of these artists? Telling about other experiences and experiences, filming dominant or dominated women if that is their choice, straight or not, transgender or cisgender (whose gender identity is in line with birth sex, editor's note), thin or round, young or mature, and above all to put an end to a female sexuality that makes you feel guilty or fatal or criminal and only dictated by male fantasy.
Deconstruct the clichés
In Une fille facile, director Rebecca Zlotowski thus reversed the paradigm by entrusting the sulphurous Zahia Dehar with the role of a young woman who uses her body as an object of power and assumed enjoyment. “There is a belief, partly linked to a medieval heritage, that we would be impregnable fortresses: our sexuality would be conquered like a stronghold, observes the filmmaker. My film aims to deconstruct this cliché by telling that a woman who goes ahead of her sexuality is free. Rare but relevant, this angle has troubled the backsliders, angry that such a gendered beauty could be anything more than a toy, a ravishing idiot or a victim. “We also call on female directors with regard to emotion,” continues Zlotowski. When we film neither tears nor hysteria nor feelings nor motherhood, there is "cheating on the goods".
Showing a woman on the screen multiplying one-night stands seems (still) considered absurd. But these prejudices no longer stop women authors. In You deserve a love, her first film, actress and director Hafsia Herzi painted the portrait of a thirty-year-old woman who, after being left, ventures without feeling guilty into other male arms. “She assumes her desires and does not collapse in tears after a one-night stand. Besides, why would she be ashamed of it? Why not show pleasure as part of everyday life? Some viewers found my approach scandalous: they would have preferred the character to console himself with a tub of ice cream…”
This is akin to trying to display HD video, but you are so early that you try to figure out how to make it work wit… https://t.co/Ufdr3dlyvN
— Haruka T. Thu Jul 19 23:08:24 +0000 2018
In video, "Portrait of the girl on fire", the trailer
Women in cinema work today to present a broader, more subtle and above all more accurate vision of themselves. On TV, they have already initiated this paradigm shift. Long considered a minor art, and therefore able to afford to welcome women into their creative teams, series have set an example for the past ten years by promoting the inclusion of other skin colors, sexual identities, practices, morphologies. No more dictatorship of 36 and the guilt linked to luscious shapes in Girls, by Lena Dunham. Welcome to the transidentity of Maura in Transparent, by Jill Solloway, or to the lesbian loves in The L Word, by Ilene Chaiken.
Finally, new models are emerging to fill the gaps: how, indeed, to build yourself when no one represents you on the screen, when identification is impossible? This is what Céline Sciamma explained to Madame Figaro when Portrait of the young girl on fire (2019) was released: “I never imagined what the film could have been with a man and a woman. I didn't imagine it because what you imagine is your own story. When I was younger, I spent my life identifying with love stories that weren't about me."
She will therefore tell the story of universal and egalitarian love between two women, preserved from censorious or guilt-inducing gazes and dirty fantasies about female homosexuality. "It is essential to multiply supports and identifying configurations", according to Charles-Antoine Courcoux, teacher and director of the Center for Cinematographic Studies at the University of Lausanne. “Cinema can take on a crucial role: giving substance to realities that still have neither name nor face. In men as in women, it can represent complicated, minority, multiple, contradictory pleasures, outside supposed norms, or even question these norms. And, by doing so, to give to see and reflect to the spectators still nourished by the stereotypes of the male gaze.
restore balance
In Victoria (2016) and Sibyl (2019), director Justine Triet thus deconstructs the dominant myths with complex, imperfect, independent heroines determined by their own desire, including in sexual relations. The camera then only adopted Sibyl's point of view in this scene where the heroine, astride her lover, was masturbating, then guiding the act with a man listening to her pleasure - and objectified, d some way. This is also one of the other challenges: to look at men's sexuality, sensuality and virility differently, to democratize their nudity without making it gratuitous.
In other words: restore the balance and bring together the female gaze and a vision of modern men, eager to reflect realities freed from patriarchal clichés. Obsolete and reductive schemas and pornography will no longer be the only educational tools. “Many women do not yet have access to their bodies, their fantasies, their enjoyment, because it is not shown enough, concludes Iris Brey. To show a woman who enjoys on the screens is today the ultimate political gesture.
Three feminine looks that matter according to Iris Brey
Wonder Woman by Patty Jenkins (2017)
The first woman to have directed a superheroic blockbuster, Patty Jenkins imagined an independent, strong heroine, raised away from men. Also, when in a scene Wonder Woman sees the naked body of her future lover during their first meeting, she doesn't care. “Desire is built by what we are taught: educated by women, this heroine does not care about this sex which means nothing to her. A snub to male "omnipotence".
Girlsby Lena Dunham (2012-2017)
Actress and creator of the series, Lena Dunham has revolutionized the representation of women in the United States. “She does not correspond to the usual canons of beauty, she showed other desirable and desiring bodies, filmed nudity without sexualizing it, staged herself in bed with a super handsome kid…”
Portrait of the young girl on fire by Céline Sciamma (2019)
“Without ever filming sex scenes, in the true sense of the term, between her two heroines, Céline Sciamma captures their confusion in each shot and questions the way in which desire is constructed: in the gesture of a hand, the beauty of a neck, a gaze that lingers…”
