In the penultimate episode of Channel 4’s The Story of Film:An Odyssey, Mark Cousins interviewed New Zealand director Jane Campion.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Campion spoke about the need for women to have a more prominent voice in movies but also added: “one of the betrayals of the female is that they want to see themselves through male eyes”.
This struck me as a slightly different slant on the traditional feminist arguments about the dominance of the voyeuristic ‘male gaze’ and suggests that it is not simply a question of women gaining key roles in the production of TV and cinema but also of using such positions to challenge the patriarchal order.
The critic Suzanne Moore in her essay Here’s Looking At You, Kid!, said that many men have “a fear that the female gaze will soften everything in its path”; a fear that is certainly borne out with limp movies like You’ve Got Mail and Julie And Julia directed by Nora Ephron.
Other, more strong-minded women in film seem to go out of their way to show that they are sassy broads who can hold their own with the guys. For example, Sofia Coppola’s excellent films are quite ballsy while Kathryn Bigelow’s Oscar-winning movie The Hurt Locker is a fairly macho war movie and certainly less critical of Americans at war than something like Sam Mendes’ Jarhead.
I may be biased but ,personally, I think two of the best recent role models for women in movies come from Britain. Scotland’s Lynne Ramsey and English director Andrea Arnold each made remarkable debuts (Ratcatcher and Red Road respectively) which I think would have been very different movies with a man behind the camera.
This year Ramsey released We Need To Talk About Kevin and Arnold weighed in with a radical makeover of Wuthering Heights. I have yet see either of these but, based on early reviews, both sound like the kind of bold films we need to challenge the same old same old of mainstream cinema.
Related articles:
Lynne Ramsey interview (guardian.co.uk)
Andrea Arnold: ‘I don’t do easy rides’ (guardian.co.uk)
I am so fortunate to be an educated male cinephile in an era when stupendously talented women like Ramsey and Arnold are making films. “Red Road” and “Fish Tank” are superb, and the interlaced themes in “Ratcatcher” of animal cruelty, childhood guilt, and female subjugation is as potent a combination as one will find anywhere. (You might like the brief but thought-provoking comments on “Ratcatcher” and the impressive shorts that accompany here: http://violence-hurt-animals-in-film.blogspot.com/2014/02/ratcatcher.html ).
I love reading your blog. You have pointed me toward some wonderfully rewarding experiences, and I thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts.