In 1981, the film " Sois belle et tais-toi " by Delphine Seyrig was released. 35 years before #MeToo, the actress and director gave the floor to some twenty women in cinema, from Maria Schneider to Jane Fonda, Shirley McLaine, Patti d'Arbanville and Anne Wiazemsky. Without naming the concept, these women were already talking about the " male gaze " and its effects on the condition of actresses on film sets and in the 7th art industry but also on the image of women in society as a whole. In the cinema, men look at them and women are watched, in short. And this would shape our imaginations in a distribution of gendered roles.
But why does this " male gaze " sometimes cause controversy ? We talk about it!
Psychoanalysis of the 7th art
We owe the concept of the " male gaze " to the art historian Laura Mulvey. This academic specialist in cinema integrates into her thinking the theories of Freud and Lacan on phallocentrism as an imaginary system determined by the fear of castration, the feeling of power associated with the penis, the male fantasies of possession and the impulses that promote the conversion of sexual desire into energy transferable in work, the conquest of power, the search for speed, the quest for performance.
For Mulvey, cinema mirrors this phallocentrism by being the repository of all the fantasies of directors, at the same time as it feeds it in the general population by infusing all pop culture with stereotyped and eroticized imagery.
Concretely, when cinema presents men as active characters, without whose actions the plot cannot move forward, women are presented as objects of desire, the embodiment of a trophy to be conquered, a warm home that we leave for the time of the adventure to find it in its state afterwards, as a foil to the powerful man or as the victim of the villain.
And my gaze, do you like it, my gaze ?
Mulvey's analysis of Hollywood cinema in the 1950s and 1960s seems to survive fully today only in highly scripted genres such as the action and spy film that assumes its self-caricature even in the unavoidable figure of the " James Bond girl " or the classic romantic comedy and its share of vulnerable heroines who are saved from a " lost girl" destiny by the love of a stable and well-to-do man (Pretty Woman, if you're looking at us).
But the " male gaze " would survive in the unconscious of directors and on the entire chain of the cinematographic imagination through a whole series of signals indicating that cinema seeks to satisfy the gaze of men : the preference for the beauty (and youth) of actresses when the beauty (and youth) of actors would be a less important criterion for defining a character and therefore landing a role ; the frequency of scenes where women are naked ; but also a lesser richness of personality in the female characters who we readily see reduced to functions or roles (the wife, the mistress, the mother, the secretary, the temptress, the pervert...) and even dialogues of less interest put in the mouths of women. Thus, the screenwriter Alison Bechdel has she noticed that mainstream cinema too rarely offers scenes where women talk to each other about things other than men ...
The " male gaze " is also expressed through
the frequency of scenes of sexual violence and their valorization in the name of
the director's subversive audacity (from Last
Tango in Paris to Elle, via
Breaking the Waves or
Irreversible, among those that made the headlines) and the recurrence of the positioning of female characters as flabbergasted or terrified victims (the critic
Frédéric de Manassein estimated that 70% of the screams of fear in films come from female characters).
When the hero is a heroine
Yes, but... Cinema has more and more heroines, figures at the heart of the plot and complex characters, rich in nuances and whose depth defies stereotypes. We think of Ellen Ripley in Alien, Lara Croft, Nikita, Kill Bill, Million Dollar Baby, Erin Brokovich, Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel among other superheroines, or in another genre of Amélie Poulain or La Vie en Rose...
Does being the headliner protect against the " male gaze " ? Yes and no, answer those who track down this bias that leads us to appreciate the quality of a film and the strength of a character through the eyes of men. Because to begin with, the powerful woman on screen will have to be beautiful, and be as close as possible to the aesthetic canons that refer to sexyness. As if female power was only allowed if you met the standards of thinness, youth, glamour. And if the plastic is not enough, the script and the framing will gladly highlight the sensuality of a part of the body, of a sway, of an outfit (even if it turns out to be inconsistent with the heroine's movements. We challenge you to do acrobatics in tight latex suits, while wearing thigh-high boots !). We will gladly eroticize the effort (and the wet T-shirt contest redraws its rules of the game to make the sweaty girl an object of desire).
And then, what happens to heroines often leads to stereotypes of femininity: their emotional movements are more emphasized than those of men in similar situations (the expression of fear, for example, is not very present in the acting of adventure film actors, whereas it is more easily present when it is a woman who faces dangers). Their romantic emotions are more central (the romantic plot will be relatively marginal in the scenario in which a man is the hero, while it takes a more important place when it is a woman who is at the heart of the plot), their friendships are more frivolous and talkative than those of men whose brave and loyal camaraderie is praised as a moral value.
And the right to fantasy, then ?
Now that we have a certain glimpse of this " male gaze " that would surreptitiously imprint the film of unconscious sexism, we must look at what reactions the denunciation of this phenomenon arouses. First, let's stop at the accusation of voyeurism at the center of Laura Mulvey's remarks when she deciphers the " visual pleasure" of seeing sexy women from every angle on screen and placing them in positions that replay male fantasies. Some answer that cinema is precisely made for that : to have fun while watching ! Moreover, male actors do not escape eroticization, even if this eroticization of men summons other parts of the collective imagination. The fact remains that cinema is indeed an industry of fantasy : it would be, along with literature, comics and the other arts, the very place of Freud's " daydream " and the narration of impulses, say the defenders of the most extensive vision of freedom of expression and creation. Thus, to contest the artist's most complete right to express his vision of the world and to transmit his phantasmatic projections would be of the order of contradiction.
Whose fantasies?
But then, two questions arise : first, is cinema only the expression of an artistic intention without its impact on mentalities and societies being taken into account ; secondly, are all fantasies represented or only those of a rather small portion of the population ?
Only bad faith would answer the first question by affirming that cinema does not carry the intention of cultural influence. More than any other art, it is a vector of soft power : it is sometimes concretely assumed (the examples are legion, but one of the most documented cases is that of Top Gun) and it is sometimes more independent of the will of the directors, but cinema is always the expression of a certain vision of the world, which carries ideology, values, points of view, and the extraordinary capacity of dissemination of this art form de facto places cinema in front of its responsibilities in shaping mentalities.
To the second question, the answer is largely provided by the #MeToo movement: an industry in the hands of powerful men with common socio-demographic characteristics systemically conveys the point of view and fantasies of this portion of the population. Also, what the movement tells #MeToo to its origins is that what happens on screen and what happens behind the scenes is part of a certain continuum that goes from the desire of producers and directors to stage their fantasies to the trivialization of these fantasies in the minds of the spectators and of society as a whole. through the breaking of the boundaries between acting (" for fakes ") and the actors' experience in the workplace (realizing " for real " the director's fantasies in the artistic blur ( !) between work and sacrifice, in the name of realism here or exceptional performance there). Several directors have been singled out for having imposed violent filming conditions: Bertolucci subjecting Maria Schneider to a surprise rape on the set of Last Tango in Paris, Abdellatif Kechiche for methods of filming controversial sex scenes for Blue is the Warmest Colour or the Disney studios for the violence denounced by Demi Lovato.
To respond with a " female gaze " ?
The " male gaze " is not only the work of male directors, however. Because if it is partly the reflection of the fantasies of those who hold the camera, it is also the result of the intention to seduce and flatter the gaze of a target audience: for the journalist Clémence Edgard-Rosa, founder of Gaze Magazine, the unconscious of marketing considers by default the heterosexual man as the standard of the universal. What is true in cinema is also true in many other areas : it has been shown that the majority of drugs are tested on panels of middle-aged men or that the standards of safety equipment in cars are based on the characteristics of male bodies. Because of this collective unconscious that assumes the masculine as the reference of the normal, it is not surprising that women directors also wear the " male gaze " on the women they film.
But the growing awareness of the " male gaze " leads many of them (and also men) to make the effort of counterpoint by wearing a " female gaze " in their creations : the director Reed Morano , to whom we owe several episodes of the series The Handmaid's Tale , assumes that she has done everything to prevent the " sexy " from inviting itself into this dystopia on violence against women ; Lena Dunham, creator of Girls, also makes no secret of her intention to show imperfect and desiring female bodies (having cellulite does not prevent you from showing yourself naked on camera, having sexual desire and arousing it... and getting rid of her bulges is in no way a subject for the heroine); With Portrait of a Lady on Fire , Céline Sciamma intends to do the full work of a filmmaker by producing the same emotion in the face of passionate love between women, by suggesting only the sex scenes and by skilfully circumventing the temptation of male fantasy around lesbians ; Jane Campion has been committed for at least three decades to showing the point of view of women on all the themes she tackles. But the " female gaze " is not a novelty, reminds us Iris Brey, whose essential TedX conference allows us to understand everything in a few minutes what the " male gaze " is: the very first film with a woman's gaze dates from 1906, it is called Madame a des envies and its director Alice Guy deserves to be re-discovered.
The " female gaze " is not to be taken only as a feminist riposte, however: it is above all a broadening of the horizon of the gaze, beyond the stereotypical expectations and biases that make us look at the world from too narrow a window. And finally, diversifying the " gauze ", in terms of genre but also of other markers of identity and socialization, is undoubtedly to give cinema (and life) the best gift of all: that of an ever-expanding field of creativity.
