What do The Lady from Shanghai (Orson Welles, 1947), Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (Tarantino, 2019), Le Contempt (Godard, 1963), Raging Bull (Scorsese, 1980) and Requiem for a Dream have in common? (Aronofsky, 2000)? Classics, which have marked the history of the 7th art, sometimes in addition to popular successes. But not only.
By editing nearly 200 extracts from films – from the creation of the 7th art to the present day – fiction director Nina Menkes underlines, in a brilliant cinema master class, a constantly reproduced representation of women as sexual objects and reveals a systemic sexist structure, the famous male gaze (male gaze), including in films with a feminist theme or which are directed by women.
This staged enumeration could have been banal, boring or sickening. On the contrary, Nina Menkes, obsessed with this subject for thirty years, delivers a film of great significance as it is intellectually rich and finely produced. Built in a little over two years – notably thanks to the Internet – it is structured around its conference “Sex and power: the visual language of cinema” and the work of actresses, producers, directors and teachers, like film theorist Laura Mulvey, who defined male gaze in 1975.
Subject-object relationship
Nina Menkes makes the striking demonstration that the construction of shots with female characters, through framing, camera movements, lighting, or effects such as slow motion, defines a subject-object relationship that systematically places women as object of gaze, often reduced to sexual functions. “The image of women has nothing to do with them, synthesizes Laura Mulvey. She is the product of the male consciousness that has appropriated her. »
The documentary does not content itself with making visible and readable a patriarchal norm perpetuated in a more or less conscious and subliminal way. “We really have the impression that the cinematic visual language that surrounds us corresponds to the basic language of rape culture”, underlines the director, who endeavors to demonstrate the cyclical links between this language and, on the one hand, sexist discrimination in the world of work, and, on the other hand, the omnipresence of sexual violence in our society.
In 2018, only 8% – compared to 9% twenty years earlier – of the 250 most viewed films were directed by women. And 94% of women working in the Hollywood industry – from which 80% of the “entertainment” content released around the world originates – have experienced acts of sexual assault or harassment in their careers.
Conducting a very powerful reflection on the gaze and the representation of genres based on the legacies of Michel Foucault, bell hooks (pen name of Gloria Jean Watkins) or Audre Lorde, Nina Menkes’ documentary is a refreshing experience of political significance of cinema. At the same time a creative invitation to imagine other codes, representations, characters and production, it is just as much a cinematographic work in that it multiplies the levels of reading, questions the viewer’s gaze, formulates relevant leads.
