Women by Women
cover art by Grace Kwon
Film history has been marked by a lack of representation of women – beyond that, representations that say much more about the male mind than about women themselves. Female characters are often seen through the male gaze, the standard viewpoint from which women are looked at in film: the eyes of the heterosexual cis male. Through this point of view, women are nothing but a fantasy of sexual desires, literal objects with no power of thought – and oftentimes speech –, whose image is put in movies to satisfy the male character as well as the viewer. As explained by Laura Mulvey, the author of the Male Gaze theory, the female character assumes two display levels; “as erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic object for the spectator within the cinema auditorium.”
This way of seeing women has only become the benchmark in cinema because the vast majority of filmmakers and directors are men. It is always important to remember that within the 93 years of distribution of the Academy Awards, the most important event in the industry internationally, only eight women have been nominated to ‘Best Director’, with only two winners; Kathryn Bigelow, who directed The Hurt Locker, and Chloé Zhao, for Nomadland. Therefore, from the invention of cinema to this day, audiences have been conditioned to look at women as passive objects, contributing to the silencing of women in the industry.
Trying to dismantle such ideals, many women filmmakers have taken up their cameras and shown the world as it is, through the unbiased lens of those who actually live the lives so frequently portrayed by men who have never looked at women in their lives as something beyond an accessory or body part. The female experience is so closely related to the male that it has turned into simply a part of it, making people forget that female sexuality is a thing, that women can have actual roles in people's lives, that women’s bodies don’t have to be an object of desire, and many more facts that seem to have been ignored throughout the years of television and cinema we’ve subjected ourselves to.
The female gaze goes well beyond the way women see themselves aesthetically, and directors have been exercising such a viewpoint since the 1960s, when New Wave cinema began emerging. One of the first directors to stand as a woman in an industry ruled by men was Agnès Varda, the “angry feminist” who became one of the main voices of the Nouvelle Vague. Varda challenged the views of women her male counterparts had been reproducing with no judgment of the American cinema they so deeply despised. In her 1962 feature, Cléo de 5 a 7, the director displays female identity through a decidedly feminist lens. Guided by de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Varda creates a character who becomes herself as she gets rid of the role she played in order to attend to society’s standards of womanhood, she defines herself by her own terms as she becomes a real woman, leaving behind the voyeuristic fantasy.
Similarly, Vera Chytilová abandons societal conventions surrounding being a woman in order to create scenarios filled with joy and rebellion towards the world she lives in. As one of the precursors of the Czech New Wave, Chytilová fights the systematic oppressions forced upon women, questioning communist morality and condemning the violence perpetrated against her gender. In Daisies, her anarchic adventure of chaos and liberation, the director puts women in the main roles of a tale that ridicules patriarchal conventions through its psychedelic visuals and dadaistic storyline.
One of her most well-known critiques lies within the origins of Christian morality – which happens to be one of the roots of the patriarchal conventions which lead to all the damage I now discuss within this article. Not only in Daisies but also in films such as Fruit of Paradise, Chytilová portrays her own takes on the tale of Adam and Eve, a story so blatantly misogynistic it speaks volumes about the disdain society has learned to project upon women without any need for an explanation, something the director uses to her advantage when she condemns the moral atrocity by which western society lives.
A few years later came Chantal Akerman, who would become one of the main voices of cinema when it came to portraying female lives and desires. One of the main topics very poorly portrayed in cinema is female sexuality, a theme often taken by Akerman as fundamental in films such as Je Tu Il Elle and Jeanne Dielman. The director builds an especially humanistic view of the female experience, tackling issues such as the naturalization of misogyny, female desire, LGBTQ+ life and intimacy, sex work, and female roles within family and society.
What is especially attractive within Akerman’s filmography is the way she actively displays her discontent towards how women are seen and portrayed by society, naturally turning that indignation into a representation of her own experience as a queer woman. In Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the ‘60s in Brussels, she lightly talks about sexuality and the turmoil of coming of age as a girl in a beautifully subtle way, enchanting the viewer, who becomes so deeply involved in such a simple tale. The same goes for Je, Tu, Il, Elle, in which the director turns the idealized views surrounding sexual relations – scenes where women are subject to the power of men, seen as parts of a plastic body in which they shove their sexual desires – into something real, genuinely sexual and raw pleasure.
A number of women have been doing the same throughout the years, yet they have not been granted the same praise as their male counterparts. Some of those are Maya Deren, Cecelia Condit, Cecilia Mangini, Ana Mendieta, Carole Roussopoulos, and many more, whose films one may watch on youtube and alternative streaming platforms such as Another Gaze’s Another Screen. These directors have influenced many more women to fight the standards and show their life as it is. Whether it be through Sofia Coppola’s aesthetically female gaze, Greta Gerwig’s feminist coming-of-age films, or Emma Seligman’s humorous take on bisexuality and sex work, women stand stronger than ever against the amorality of the film industry.