Between Gazes Camelia Elias

interventions in feminist filmmaking  How to formulate an understanding of a structure that insists on our absence even in the face of our presence? (Ruby Rich)  What is there in a film with which a woman viewer identifies?  How can the contradictions be used a as a critique?  How do all these factors influence what one makes as a woman filmmaker, or specifically as a feminist filmmaker?

methods  go against narrative illusionism and be in favor of formalism  construe other representations of women:  formulate a feminine aesthetic  a new language of desire  avoid a politics of emotion and seek to problematize the female spectator’s identification with the on-screen image of women  engage in a process of self-definition  present the possibility of envisaging oneself as a subject

identification  “is not simply one physical mechanism among others, but the operation itself whereby the human subject is constituted” (Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis 1973)

deaesthetisizing  “to ask of … women’s films: what formal, stylistic or thematic markers point to a female presence behind the camera?, and hence to generalize and universalize, to say: this is the look and sound of women’s cinema, this is its language – finally only means complying, accepting a certain definition of art, cinema and culture and obliquingly showing how women can and do “contribute”, pay tribute, to “society”. Put another way, to ask whether there is a feminine or female aesthetic, or a specific language of women’s cinema, is to remain caught in the master’s house, and there … to legitimate the hidden agendas of a culture we badly need to change” (T. de Laurentis, “Aesthetic and Feminist Theory: Rethinking Women’s Cinema”)

feminist film poetics  the film needs to define all points of identification (with character, image camera) as female, feminine, and feminist  the film should not be just what it says but be about what is shown and how it’s shown  the film should focus on gestures  the film should render a presence in the feeling of a gesture, to convey a sense of an experience that is subjective, yet socially coded

revisionist views  Gertrude Koch:  “the issue remains whether films by women actually succeed in subverting this basic model of the camera’s construction of the gaze, whether the female look through the camera at the world, at men, at women and objects will be an essentially different one” (“Ex-Changing the Gaze: Re-visioning Feminist Film Theory”, 2004 in Feminist Film Theory, Simpson et al.)

revisionist views  Teresa de Laurentis: “the emphasis must be shifted away from the artist behind the camera, the gaze or the text as origin and determination of meaning, toward the wider public sphere of cinema as a social technology: we must develop our understanding of cinema’s implication in other modes of cultural representation and its possibilities of both production and counterproduction of social vision”

 en-gendering  constructing  defining  the female subject  heterogeneously across multiple representations of class, race, language, and social relations  the ‘other’ subject  homogeneously fixed in class, race, language, and social relations

heterogeneous elements in Titus  the use of language  the use of sets  the use of music  the use of costumes  the use of ideology