- The female gaze "it's getting out of identification [with the male hero] to go towards sharing experience, it's feeling with the heroine", explains Iris Brey, author of the book Le Regard au féminin , by Editions of the Olive Tree.
- Rape seen through a male gauze, for example, is a spectacle, rape seen through a female gauze is an "experience that marks the flesh," says the author in her book.
- Regarding the César ceremony, Iris Brey retains the image of Adèle Haenel leaving the room, after the award of the best achievement to Roman Polanski. "The striking image of this ceremony is a moving female body" tells us the critics, summoning the directors to leave the crumbling house of French cinema, to "go elsewhere", "invent something more interesting" .
What if, instead of showing a fragmented body, the camera capturing ass, breasts, hips and other pieces of women, the cinema was trying to penetrate the feminine experience from the inside? By showing for example, with regard to eroticism, the images that parade through the heads of heroines during orgasm, or the texture of the flesh, in close-up. Forty-five years after the invention by critic and director Laura Mulvey of the concept of male gaze, Iris Brey intends to deconstruct our view of fiction, by highlighting the directors who have tried to translate the feminine experience as closely as possible, in Le Regard au féminin. A revolution on the screen (Editions de l'Olivier). Alice Guy, Marie-Claude Treilhou, Agnès Varda, Jane Campion… There were many pioneers, but not always listened to. Today, these are widely distributed series and films that adopt or have adopted the point of view of the female experience, such as Fleabag , The Scarlet Maid , Titanic , Wonder Woman and more recently, Portrait of the young girl on fire . A revolution in progress…
Can we briefly define the female gaze , and in what way is it revolutionary?
The female gaze is a response to the concept of male gaze that Laura Mulvey [film critic and film director] described in 1975, where she explains that the viewer identifies with the camera. even relays the gaze of the hero who takes pleasure in looking at women as objects. The female gaze is not the opposite of the male gaze : it is going out of identification [with the male hero] to go towards sharing experience, it is feeling with the heroine, it is a look which highlights the female experience in our images.
There are for example two ways of filming the rape, one which eroticizes, the other where one is with the woman who suffers and suffers ...
If we look at rape through the male gauze , it would be the rape scenes in Game of Thrones , which are not filmed as an act of violence, but as an erotic act. The female body becomes an object that the hero can take. Whereas in the rape scenes of The Scarlet Maid , the scenes are filmed from the female point of view, and we feel what June goes through during this experience. Thanks to the voiceover which explains what is going on in his head, thanks for example to the movements of the camera in slow motion, we are told that time passes in a different way during this act. June looks at the tints of color on the ceiling of the room in which she is raped, she begins to describe the color blue, and to list all the songs she knows, whose title begins with the word blue. And it is a way of showing that she is completely dissociated from what is going on with her body. Dissociation is one of the psychic remedies of the human body when there is too much violence, one dissociates to survive the experience. All this is not explained, but these remedies with the voiceover describe real processes that the violated body goes through. We are therefore immersed in the experience of this violence.
You write in the book that "rape seen through a male gauze is a spectacle, rape seen through a female gaze is an experience that marks the flesh" ...
Yes, violence, when it is represented through the male point of view, is there to entertain us, not to tell the violence. The experience of The Scarlet Servant penetrates our bodies, makes us feel uncomfortable, which is why it is sometimes difficult to watch for many people. It's much easier to look at it as an erotic spectacle…
A female gaze can also be worn by a man, you say ...
Not all female filmmakers produce female gauze in their films. And some male directors want to marry the female experience of their heroines. This is the case of Ridley Scott in Thelma and Louise or the film Titanic by James Cameron. They make us dive into the experience of heroin instead of watching them from a distance. All Titanic is a flashback told from Rose's point of view, and at no time is the character of Rose eroticized for free. She is still a heroine in action. Even when Leonardo Di Caprio draws it naked, it is not at all reduced to an object. They look at each other and talk and we stay with her, with her eyes. Even when it's a blockbuster, even when it's a man filming, it's entirely possible not to reduce the female body to the status of an object, to film a woman as a thinking subject.
How does the female gaze translate in Portrait of the girl on fire ?
In Portrait of the young girl on fire the female gaze translates into an aesthetic of desire, not through domination, but through the notion of equality. There is a horizontal flow in the shots of the film: the bodies are almost symmetrical, the heroines share many shots, and the whole relationship is based on a loving dialogue. Equality translates for example through dialogues: the painter Marianne arrives on an island to paint Héloïse, and Héloïse explains that even if she is the subject of the painting, she is also a subject who looks, that she participates in creation … And visually, in the sex scene of the film for example, instead of having the field and the back shot - a shot on a face, then on another, like a ping pong game - we have a medium shot where the two faces are in the frame together. These two faces side by side indicate to us that we are not in a conflict, but in a dialogue. We also film a finger that slips under the fold of an armpit, this is a way of saying that eroticism is not in the classic masculine codes, we delocalize pleasure ...
Do you think that Céline Sciamma's film received only one César award [best photography] because it expresses an annoying female gaze ?
Yes, in any case in France it is a disturbing film because it questions a system of domination. It offers a glimpse of a world without patriarchy. But the film was very well received in the United States or in Korea. There is real French resistance.
We see there a scene of abortion, a scene of painful rules. Images cruelly absent from the cinema, while for many women, they are very present in everyday life or have marked their lives.
In the cinema, all the scenes which represent scenes linked to the female body, whether physical or social, are absent from our screens. As if it had no value from the moment it is exclusively linked to the body of women. All this is absent from our stories, because our stories are mostly written and produced by men.
More generally, what inspires you the evening of Caesar, and the reactions which followed?
I think that the César evening is the symptom of a divided society. On the one hand, we see a patriarchal world that does not want to listen to the stories of women and who wants to trivialize and minimize sexual violence against women. When we reward with the best achievement, it is the man we reward, not the work. But Adèle Haenel's reaction is even stronger, and that is what we will remember.
The striking image of this ceremony is a moving female body, this is the last chapter of my book, and it tells the same thing: women are finally breaking free from the chains of patriarchy. And these are the bodies that create the stories that change the world. But unfortunately, by giving the prize to Roman Polanski, we are trying to make Adèle Haenel's story invisible. We must not forget that there is a struggle of stories.
We are in a crumbling house, but we are going to decide to go elsewhere, we are going to invent something more interesting than the world in which they are trying to lock us up. With this price, they try to terrorize us, to bring us back to silence, but we are not going to let it go, we are going to create with others and elsewhere.
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