The Horizon of Women’s Cinema
Meek’s Cutoff, Kelly Reichardt, 2010. The frame and the horizon as precarious edges.
Women’s filmmaking has been a key catalyst for debates on the pleasure and politics of looking since activist and avant-garde practices of the 1970s challenged dominant ways of seeing. Beyond the imperative for gender equity behind the camera and the need for rich and varied perspectives in the stories, subjects, and approaches we encounter on screen – does women’s cinema retain critical currency in what is widely considered to be a post-feminist moment of media convergence? In my book Women’s Cinema, World Cinema I argue that in its expansiveness and futurity the concept of women’s cinema retains its promise, helping us think about “the world” and imagine an ethical position for the spectator in it.[1] In several key art films by women the figure of the horizon inscribes pleasurable looking with a political perspective. Thematically, a number of films by women deconstruct a colonial gaze through literal representations of landscape; formally they reflect on the act of global art cinema reception through projecting divided visions into theatrical screen space.
My horizon of understanding for these films’ aesthetic strategies extends from two canonical works of feminist film theory that theorize the space of women’s film reception as heterogeneous and potentially utopian. Both Teresa de Lauretis and Miriam Hansen interpolate the word horizon from philosophical discourses in their elegant formulations of both feminism and film audiences as what Hansen would call alternative public spheres. de Lauretis reads women’s cinema in terms of an “aesthetic of reception.”[2] In her work on gender and silent cinema spectatorship, Hansen regards “Cinema as an intersubjective horizon for the articulation of experience.”[3] Much more recently, Jose Muñoz developed the concept of “queerness as horizon” in a beautiful formulation of the necessary utopian thought and practice that makes the here and now bearable, and I would argue that these films’ gendered visions of divided spaces share that project.[4]
Today, neither feminism nor theatrical film exhibition has precisely the social role that it did in the 1970s, when women’s cinema was imagined as an oppositional practice – Women’s Cinema as Counter Cinema” was the title of Claire Johnston’s 1970s manifesto – unified if not in its aesthetic program than in its assumption of gender as the “sexual difference” of women from men.[5] The understanding that gendering happens at the intersection of embodied, racialized, economically and geographically positioned experiences and their performative and affective enactment shattered the unity of “women.” In the meantime the scale of cinema changed, with smaller and more privatized screens, and greater financial and logistical barriers to envisioning collective experiences. Yet I argue that the utopian dimensions of feminism and cinema, as public and global phenomena, remain important in the era of the 24-hour news cycle, Hollywood hegemony, and the googlization of everything. Politically committed, artists’, and auteur films function, in the words of James Tweedie, as “an emergency brake that reimagines the cinematic image as a source of friction rather than the quintessence of globalization and its flows.”[6] Carefully composed big-screen images and sounds of place and space in films by Chantal Akerman, Claire Denis, Kelly Reichardt, and Tracey Moffatt articulate gender with race and national identity as sources of this friction.
One optic of this reading is a look back – a “re-vision” to borrow a feminist trope imported from poet Adrienne Rich – at how feminists theorized women’s cinema as both “the creation/invention of new images” and the “creation/imaging of new forms of community,” with reference to a number of the films screened in conjunction with the symposium.[7] The other optic is projective, looking ahead to ask about the future of the concept of women’s cinema in a digital era. The horizon is at once an ever-receding image and an augur of imminent change. After showing how the colonial gaze functioned as a blind spot in a feminist film theory too narrowly focused on binary gender, I illuminate contemporary debates on millennial global art cinema by reading recurrent figures of place and perspective in women filmmakers’ work.
The symposium’s affirmative exploration of the multiple intersections of the keywords pleasure, politics, looking and gender is grounded in a compelling and influential “negative” critique of male-defined visual pleasure and aesthetic traditions in cinema. Laura Mulvey’s now 40 year-old essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” established the formal and psychic parameters for Hollywood cinema’s reproduction of a pervasive gendered imbalance that she summed up as “women as image; man as bearer of the look.”[8] Her solution in that essay was to reject hegemonic film form and its easy pleasures in favor of a rigorous avant-garde aesthetics that interrogated conventions around gendered representation and ways of seeing. Mulvey’s idea of “destruction of pleasure as a radical weapon” no longer has much traction in our postmodern, postfeminist consumer culture, but her critique of how an objectifying male gaze is built into the language of mainstream cinema and visual culture has generated decades of productive feminist theorizing in film studies, art history, literature, philosophy and the arts. If it were a simple condemning of female objectification under patriarchy, Mulvey’s powerful argument would not have attracted so much interest, spawning as it did a swirl of queries about the pleasures and politics of looking: What about the female spectator? Male masochism? Queer looks? Black looks? The colonial gaze? These many elaborations of her thinking are evidence of the multiple, perverse pleasures of narrative cinema and of feminist epistemology itself.
Mulvey herself was her own first critic. Despite her dramatic conclusion: “Women, whose image has continually been stolen and used for this end [– the satisfaction, pleasure and privilege of the ‘invisible guest’– ] cannot view the decline of the traditional film form with anything but sentimental regret”[9], she soon after took up the subject of the sentimental female gaze as a distinct source of pleasure in All That Heaven Allows, Douglas Sirk’s 1955 melodrama of a small town widow’s socially disapproved desire. “As women are an oppressed group, the small number of Hollywood films made with a female audience in mind gain their strength by showing contradictions rather than mimicking success” she reasoned, locating those contradictions in the film’s formal system and emotional impact.[10] “The strength of the melodramatic form lies in the amount of dust the story raises along the road,” she concludes: “a cloud of overdetermined irreconcilables”.[11]
Later, in a wonderfully nuanced voiceover commentary on the Criterion edition of Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) – a film about a serial killer who not only films women’s deaths but also rigs a mirror on his camera that forces them to watch their own horror– Mulvey reads the film as critiquing the equation of the cinematic gaze with violence against women. Thus in essays on two classic narrative films Mulvey complicates the formula “woman as image, man as bearer of the look,” taking seriously the generic consolations of melodrama and the deconstructive aesthetics of auteur cinema. Desire, curiosity, reciprocity, embodied perception, the return of the gaze: all are dimensions of women’s appropriation of the power of looking in these films.
Mulvey’s own authorial gaze contributed richly to her critique of classical cinema. Her films with Peter Wollen, including Riddles of the Sphinx (1977) and Amy! (1979) interrogated the gendered language of cinema and modeled an alternative film practice, participating in a dynamic, largely Anglophone feminist avant-garde. Working at the same time in San Francisco, Lynn Hershman Leeson acted as both artist and female image to be looked at in her multifaceted performance and documentation of the fictional, blonde-wigged Roberta Breitmore. Decades later in the film Teknolust (2002), selected for the symposium, Leeson pushed on similar questions of multiplicity and epistemology as the female body and gaze intersected with new technologies in the form of four characters all played by Tilda Swinton. Certainly, Mulvey was not alone in advocating for women’s self-representation in film; however, not all definitions of women’s cinema embraced the avant-garde experiments to which she and others like Leeson committed in the 1970s.
Documentaries, popular genre films, video, and auteur films were better recognized aesthetic options to which more women were gaining access. But more important, by the early 1980s it was clear that not all definitions of women were accounted for in the theoretical discourse stemming from Mulvey’s work. Understanding gender as implicated with sexuality, race, culture, and nation demanded new theoretical models and attention to film histories and practices informed by multicultural and postcolonial feminisms. Prompted by women of color’s critique of any unitary conception of Woman, and skeptical of both prescriptive aesthetics and political orthodoxy, Teresa de Lauretis offered a conceptualization of women’s cinema envisioning the social space of feminism.
In her 1984 essay, “Rethinking Women’s Cinema: Aesthetic and Feminist Theory” de Lauretis revisited the tension between formalist and activist approaches to women’s filmmaking and declared it a productive one. No specific kind of aesthetic practice or specific gender/race/class or ethnic identity behind the camera can define women’s cinema. Rather, de Lauretis urges us to “rethink the specificity of women’s cinema and aesthetic forms in terms of address – who is making films for whom, who is looking and speaking, how, where, and to whom.”[12] Conceived of in this way, creative choices and their recognition by viewers mutually inform and constitute the field.
de Lauretis begins to build her argument around Chantal Akerman’s 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23 rue du commerce, 1080, Bruxelles, by any reckoning a key text in discussions of feminist film aesthetics and importantly one that can be understood as both modernist and realist. The film matches content – the daily routine of a bourgeois Belgian housewife (Delphine Seyrig) – and form – static medium distance frontal long takes that observe her tasks in real time. The mise-en-scène is never traversed by the camera through the use of close-ups; the viewer regards Jeanne’s gestures analytically, but also empathically, even distractedly as the pace of the three-hour-plus film is established. de Lauretis argues that the effect is “aesthetic but not aestheticized”: “it is a woman’s actions, gestures, body, and look that define the space of our vision, the temporality and rhythms of perception, the horizon of meaning available to the spectator.”[13] The film goes beyond a “feminine aesthetic” defined by cuisine and décor; beyond the formal pleasures of balanced compositions, complementary colors, soothing sounds, and precise editing. de Lauretis explains our identification thus: “the film’s space is also a critical space of analysis, a horizon of possible meanings which includes or extends to the spectator… insofar as the spectator is led to occupy at once the two positions [of character and director, feminine and feminist]… and to perceive them as equally and concurrently true.”[14] Viewers’ subjective recognition of dimensions of female habitual experience is crucial to a feminist identification with the film’s formalist critique of female oppression, class hierarchy, and, I would argue, national assimilation. While critiques of Akerman’s film at the time of its release heralded the film as “écriture feminine” that abstracted the female body from time and place, later readings saw in her story the traces of her experience of displacement in the wake of Nazi genocide of European Jews. Importantly, Jeanne Dielman’s street address, a geopolitical location, is part of the film’s title.
Obviously, obsessively, domestic space defines the mise-en-scène of Jeanne Dielman, 23 rue du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, another reason why the apartment itself is highlighted in the title. The distance maintained by Akerman’s camera and conveyed to the viewer’s perception is echoed in figural dimensions of other works by women that make palpable what de Lauretis calls the “difference between women and Woman,” between social experience and a representational ideal. Domestic spaces and outside places are rendered real and present through cinema’s indexicality and the scale of its images, but the horizons that define actual landscapes are marked by the dimensions of gendered inscription, address, and response that de Lauretis describes.
She speaks of “the feeling of an internal distance, a contradiction, a space of silence, which is there alongside the imaginary pull of cultural and ideological representations without denying or obliterating them… Women artists, filmmakers and writers acknowledge this division or difference by attempting to express it in their works, spectators and readers think we find it in those texts.”[15] Women’s work can thus redefine the category of the aesthetic by incorporating the space of reception, a field of social meanings around gender, into the viewer’s subjective and perceptions, which are both different from others’ and internally differentiated according to intersecting dimensions of social experience like race, age, sexuality, and national identity. Anchored but not residing in the text or the auteur’s intention, gender is defined by more than sexual difference.
I am struck by de Lauretis’s spatial metaphors of boundary and horizon. In contemporary world cinema by women directors, modernist oppositional aesthetics have been all but absorbed into the protocols of the auteurist art film/festival sector – Akerman’s film can be seen as a transitional text with its structuralist rigor and “slow cinema” realism. But even within these conventions I see a similar set of contradictions structuring contemporary viewers’ experiences across cultures and degrees of power and privilege. Gender is everywhere, but it isn’t everything in this aesthetic of reception. de Lauretis uses the term horizon when referring to feminism as a shared space constituted in difference. If we expand the scope of women’s cinema to the global, and contract it to feature-length theatrically exhibited work, then the division and distance de Lauretis associates with gendered experience must be mapped onto geopolitical terrain and the space of the cinema itself.
In “Post Third-Worldist Culture: Gender, Nation, and the Cinema,” Ella Shohat notes feminist film theory’s lack of attention to women working in national cinemas and transnational contexts and “examin[es] recent feminist film and video work… as a simultaneous critique both of Third-Worldist anti-colonial nationalism and of First-World Eurocentric feminism.”[16] My examples of women’s filmmaking that carry out this double critique are produced from both hegemonic and non-dominant positions. They include actual landscapes in which the horizon is also used figurally. Bart Verschaffel writes about conventions in landscape painting: “on the horizon… begins the world.”[17] Women filmmakers and spectators are global subjects, addressed and located by the pleasures and politics of looking across cultures. The films I turn to by Denis, Reichardt, and Moffatt “define the space of our vision, the temporality and rhythms of perception, the horizon of meaning available to the spectator” in terms of gender and geopolitical position: in other words they make visible how women’s cinema functions in the world.
Claire Denis’ now-canonical 1988 debut feature film, Chocolat, is a flashback narrative in which a white woman – unsubtly named France – recalls her childhood in Africa, where her father was posted as a colonial administrator in the waning days of the French empire. Africa may be all that the young girl knows of home, but in the course of the story she comes to recognize that she doesn’t belong, that she cannot divest herself of her gendered racial privilege. Chocolat is not simply a nostalgic look at the days of empire through the privatized prism of the colonial household. Rather, it is firmly located in a landscape (and by now in Denis’ extended body of work made in Africa) and deeply concerned with how the pleasures and politics of looking play out across hierarchies of race, gender, generation and national belonging. By telling a story in which French and African, master and servant, male and female play out power within the household, Chocolat correlates the “space of silence” within white female gender identity with colonial oppression and exilic distance.
The film overdetermines the figure of the horizon as the end of empire in a speech by France’s father. Late in the film, after the tensions among family, staff and visitors have split the household open, he visits his daughter as she falls asleep:
Do you still want to know what the horizon is? When you look at the hills, beyond the houses, beyond the trees to where the earth touches the sky, that’s the horizon. Tomorrow, in the daytime, I’ll show you something. The closer you get to that line, the farther it moves… You see the line. You see it, but it doesn’t exist.
It is clear from his words that he realizes their days in Africa are numbered, his presence drained of purpose by the lack of telos. After he stops speaking and France pretends to be asleep, the film cuts to a shot of the mountain she believed marked the end of their world. The shot is taken from inside the house, still now that the family has departed, the doors wide open to the view. The horizon, a figure of melancholia for the male colonist is rendered as a concrete image, balanced, neutrally framed by an empty domesticity and by the screen itself.
Compositionally, the mountain dominates. In his work on what he calls the “accented cinema” of exile and diaspora, Hamid Naficy notes that images of mountains are “powerfully cathected collective chronotopes that… condense the entire idea of nation.”[18] If for exilic filmmakers the mountain “expresses nostalgia for an authentic ‘world before’,” the mountain in Chocolat marks the historical process that pushes the colonizer out. The view from the private, feminized domain of the home cuts across the opposition between colonizer and colonized, portraying an “internal distance,” but one that is located historically and geographically in the world. Denis’ career as an auteur starts with a break that never heals: she returns to Africa, where she herself grew up, to make other films; but even when shooting on location, she cannot breach the line between north and south, between her subjective point of view and objective history.
A more recent art film, Kelly Reichardt’s neo-realist tour de force Meek’s Cutoff (2010), similarly conveys white women damagingly partial perspective on the colonial project by reframing the strongly cathected landscape of the American West in decidedly less heroic terms. A small rag tag wagon train in the 1840s elects to follow the trapper Stephen Meek on a short cut to the Oregon coast and loses its way on the arid plane. The sun rises and sets as the party trudges on, as consistent as the direction of movement across the screen from right to left, but the horizon cannot guide them on the correct path. Instead it underscores the upper edge of the screen – a limit to vision, entitlement, even existence, as in one striking shot in which one of the women appears to be blown across the screen to its very edge.
Meek’s Cutoff makes strikingly clear the contrast between women and men’s perspectives on horizons west. Gone are the heroic contours of John Ford’s Monument Valley; instead there’s a squeaky wagon wheel and repetitive “housekeeping” tasks. Even the frame width – the now-archaic academy ratio square frame, indicates lack of access to the dream of “virgin territory”; the frame mimics the limited point of view of the women’s bonnets, another figural representation of gender division. The horizon is just visible through the wagon cover, which in turn mimics the bonnet as the protagonist Emily Tetherow (Michelle Williams) unloads the dead weight of the family’s rocking-chair, condensing the western antinomies of home and wilderness into one beautifully composed image. But as in Chocolat, though white women may see differently than the male adventurer, as settlers they represent the expropriation of native land. In Meek’s Cutoff the main female character allies herself with an Indian they take captive (Rod Roundeaux). But her affinity with the native man is tentative; fading into the sunset is not an option and the party’s fate remains uncertain. In Meek’s Cutoff the “division” or “subjective limit” figured in the film’s rigorous aesthetic scheme locates gendered subjectivity, in place, in history and in so doing makes visible the consequences of a limited point of view.
Denis and Reichardt use the mode of art cinema, which according to David Bordwell privileges discourses of both authorship and realism, [19] to open onto the world and to mark the limits of white colonial women’s place within it. The figure of the horizon appears in their films as both “subjective limit” and sign of a vaster perspective. The directors’ authorship is allegorized as implicated in, and critical of, imperial projects both historical and cinematic. Australian aboriginal filmmaker and visual artist Tracey Moffatt’s Night Cries allows a different picture of what de Lauretis calls the “differences between and within women” to emerge, painting a devastating portrait of the white settler woman’s demise from a perspective that is at once inside and outside.
In just 17 minutes, Moffatt’s film is a hyperbolic performance of the pleasure and politics of looking, a wrenching maternal melodrama acted out on a soundstage standing in for the Australian outback. It enacts in its formal language a division between native and white women that is specific to Australia’s historical policy of forced adoption. The perspective of women of color is strikingly absent from both Denis and Reichardt’s films, in which white women’s entitlement is dramatized over and against the diminished personhood of men of color. In its condensed and saturated aesthetic, Night Cries makes vividly present the mutually constitutive yet incommensurable perspectives informing the cross-racial female relationship at its heart.
The film’s expressionist set endows the daily drama of taking care of an elderly woman in a remote outback location with a grandeur that is mocked by the prominence of an outhouse in the mise-en-scène and the decidedly pissed-off affect of the caretaker. The film reveals their familial bond without the use of dialogue, and binarisms of indoor/outdoor, caretaker/patient, mundane/emblematic – clash with the affective intensity native to mother-daughter bonds. This intimate family tie was forged by the state practice of placing aboriginal children in white families well in to the 1960s, Australia’s “stolen generations.” Night Cries’ garish mise-en-scène – all Sirkian oranges and blues – and sound mix – the howl of an animal, the rush of a train, the crack of a whip, night cries – create a vivid dreamscape registering the traumatic effects of the injection of nationalist ideology into the most intimate relationships.
Visually, the film features several of the motifs we have already encountered: a home – a homestead – where women are in charge. A landscape held in frame by that domestic vista, again through the window and finally, when the ranch is abandoned, by the frame’s own borders. Moffatt’s self-consciously cinematic aesthetic generates intense affect – the film’s subtitle is “a rural tragedy” and its intertext is the film Jedda (1955), a mid-century Australian melodrama about an aboriginal girl raised by a wealthy white ranch family. The fake horizon figures Australia’s contested landscape, preventing any naturalizing of settler colonialism, refusing direct representation of aboriginal land – and at the same time achieving an aching, gendered sublimity. The viewer shares in the overwhelming grief over the death of the mother while being made to understand that this is only one dimension of the tragedy of the daughter.
But on one level, the painted background in Night Cries is no more a trompe l’oeil than the realist cinematic image – which is itself only virtual. As the father says in Chocolat: the horizon isn’t real. It leads us on; it is a screen for our projections – of the future and the foreign, which necessarily take the measure of our own position in the world. The roaring sunset of Night Cries just makes more spectacularly visible the horizon as chronotope of the end of empire.
Women’s cinema, defined as de Lauretis’s urges in terms of address – “who is making films, for whom, who is looking and speaking, how, where, and to whom” – has figured the “discursive boundary” of gender in terms inextricable from barriers of racial, geopolitical and historical difference and as a way of contesting the masterful, proprietary, male and colonial gaze implied in the conventions of landscape painting and universalist understandings of world cinema alike. In Chocolat, Meek’s Cutoff and Night Cries, this boundary can be traced in actual representations of truncated horizon in the mise-en-scène and in formal systems that remind us that the horizon is always figural, even in a realist mode.
de Lauretis looked to the spaces of reception in defining women’s cinema in recognition that differences of race, class, and sexuality are also always gendered experiences. By extending the concept geographically to questions of empire and connecting it to the work of women directors in contemporary global art cinema – Women’s Cinema, World Cinema includes readings of figural space and place in the work of Lucrecia Martel, Samirah Makmalbaf, Shirin Neshat, and Claudia Llosa among others – I wanted to invoke both the cinema’s promise of futurity and the “sunset scenarios” linked to the passing of the medium in the wake of new media, the era of postfeminism, and the limiting perspective a white/Euro-American gaze.
Miriam Hansen also used the term horizon figurally to talk about the space of reception and the utopian potential of cinema for women. In her book on silent cinema spectatorship, Babel and Babylon, she emphasized the importance of cinemagoing as a public experience for women emerging into modernity in the first decades of the 20th century. Hansen uses Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge’s theory of experience to explore: “how the public, as a collective and intersubjective horizon, is constituted and constitutes itself under particular conditions and circumstances.”[20] This notion of the public sphere allows for heterogeneity, transformation and the emergence of new subjectivities. A century later in moving-image and gender history, interrogating the ways women’s cinema is global and art cinema is feminist, trains our eyes on the intersections between the publics constituted by cinema and feminism as well as on their divergences. This is the horizon of women’s cinema toward which these works can orient us.
Notes
1. Patricia White, “Women’s Cinema, World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminisms,” Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015.
2. Teresa de Lauretis, “Rethinking Women’s Cinema: Aesthetic and Feminist Theory,” in Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction, Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1997, 141.
3. Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 38.
4. Jose Esteban Munoz, Cruising Utopia, New York: New York University Press, 2011, ch. 1.
5. Claire Johnston, “Women’s Cinema as Counter Cinema,” Notes on Women’s Cinema, Claire Johnston, ed. London: Society for Education in Film and Television, 1973; Teresa de Lauretis, “The Technology of Gender,” in Technologies of Gender, 1.
6. James Tweedie, The Age of New Waves: Art Cinem and the Staging of Globalization, London, Oxford UP, 2013, 301.
7. De Lauretis, “Rethinking Women’s Cinema,” 135. / The Symposium Pleasure and Politics of Looking in Oslo, 2015
8. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16 (1975), 11.
9.Mulvey,18.
10. Laura Mulvey, “Douglas Sirk and Melodrama,” Australian Journal of Screen Theory 3 (1977) 29.
11. Mulvey, 27.
12. De Lauretis, “Rethinking Women’s Cinema,” 135.
13.De Lauretis, 31.
14. De Lauretis, 32.
15. De Lauretis, 134.
16. Ella Shohat, “Post-Third Worldist Culture: Gender, Nation, and the Cinema,” Rethinking Third Cinema, edited by Wimal Dissanayake, Anthony Guneratne
Routledge, 2004, 53.
17. Bart Verschaffel, “The World of the Landscape." CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture” 14.3 (2012): <http://dx.doi.org/ 10.7771/1481-4374.2036>
18. Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton University Press, 2001, 160.
19. David Bordwell, “Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice,” Poetics of Cinema, New York: Routledge,” (Revised) 2008, 151-170.
20. Hansen, 8.
On print in Wuxia 1/2, 2015