On Women as Seers: Some Considerations

South Shore Film Festival: "Women of the Screen"

Purdue University North Central

I know that I’m risking a misunderstanding by giving such a title to my short talk today.  Possibly you read the title and thought that I mean to say that women are “seers,” as in clairvoyants or fortunetellers.  Maybe you imagined that you would hear me talk about how women are naturally intuitive or empathetic, maybe even psychically tuned in to others, and so forth.  But that’s not really what I want to say.  Instead, I wanted to find a clever way to call attention to what is special and important about the theme of today’s film festival: about the fact that every one of these films is made by a woman.

I wanted to play on the word “seer,” which does indeed mean somebody who is gifted with a special way of knowing things not available to others – a “seer” is a prophet or a visionary – but it’s also derived from the verb “to see.” When I proposed to talk about “Women as Seers” in connection with a festival featuring the work of female filmmakers, I meant to pose the question: what happens when women go from being primarily involved in moviemaking as actresses, as bodies to be looked at, to being those doing the looking? What happens when women cease to be only the seen – that’s S-E-E-N, but it could also be spelled S-C-E-N-E, as in “part of the scenery” – to become the ones who do the seeing? How might filmmaking change as more women become filmmakers?

Well, from a certain perspective, that’s not a very interesting question to ask, because the answer isn’t going to be anything special.  That is, if your idea is that film is a neutral medium, then it doesn’t matter much who uses it; it’s just a matter of making sure that everyone has a chance to get their hands on the tools.  Getting women into filmmaking, from this perspective, would be like getting women into accounting: the point would be that the field of accountancy should be open to everyone regardless of gender, not that one expects women to add up figures in some different way than men.

Now, opening up filmmaking as a profession is a serious and important project, and there’s a lot of work to be done there.  In 2003, a group of clever agit-prop protesters called the Guerilla Girls picketed the Academy Awards to make the point that women are still largely left out of the creative end of filmmaking.  As one of their signs declared, “Even the US Senate is more progressive than Hollywood”: while there were 14 female senators at the time, only 4 percent of directors were female.  Times are sure a-changin’, huh? In 2004, in fact, a study found that the percentage of women directing films had actually declined by half since 2000.  By the way, that goes not only for directors, but also for “executive producers, producers, writers, cinematographers, and editors” (Martha M. Lauzen, School of Communication, San Diego State University).

What’s the effect of this overwhelming exclusion of women from creative control over film? Well, the answer to that depends on what you believe about the nature of pop culture.  If the films that get made are simply what the public wants to see, then it probably doesn’t matter much who makes them, apart from the interest of fairness and equal opportunity.  Again, it would be like opening up the field of accountancy.  But then there’s also the possibility that maybe, just maybe, films don’t always simply reflect the desires of the audience; that maybe, just maybe, films also reflect the life experience and interests of their creators.  That shouldn’t come as a surprise.  And in that case, a 96% male-directed film industry starts to look like a real problem.

There is a popular belief that Hollywood is a hotbed of liberalism.  However, the industry is really still overwhelmingly run by guys – some would say in their own image and after their own interests, reflecting mainly male outlooks.  This shows up in all kinds of ways:

• First of all, in terms of representations of women’s lives and perspectives.  As one actress remarked recently, “I've read a lot of scripts where I've thought: ‘No woman would ever say that!’” Perhaps that’s because a man wrote the lines.

• Secondly, in terms of the range of kinds of story that are told.  A big percentage of the most commercially successful films are in genres such as action, adventure, crime, and big-budget special-effects films, which tend to favor male-centered storylines.

• Finally – and this is the subtlest, most difficult thing to discern – even in films with storylines that focus on female characters, there may just be some tendency to view things through a masculine lens.

What would it mean to see things through a masculine lens? There’s a famous essay by the film theorist Laura Mulvey which argues that mainstream Hollywood cinema carries a male bias on two levels: 1.) on the level of plot, where male protagonists are the ones who drive events, and 2.) at a deeper level, where the camera itself invites us to watch the action from a basically male perspective.  Think of that classic shot used to introduce the love object of a screen romance or the femme fatale in a film noir– the camera looks her up and down, focuses our attention on her legs, her waist, her chest, then her face.  That’s putting the entire audience in the place of a man who is looking at her with desire; we’re being asked to consume her appearance as an erotic treat.  Women tend to appear in movies as things to be looked at, as a spectacle; the spectator is invited to look at things from a man’s perspective.  The lesson that gets reinforced by this, as the art critic John Berger once put it, is that “men act and women appear,” that women are supposed to be passive and leave the action to men.

But what about when women are part of the audience for a film? Doesn’t this make the man on the screen into a spectacle? Well, Mulvey argues that things aren’t necessarily so symmetrical.  Again, Berger summarizes the point very neatly, saying: “Men [are supposed to] look at women.  Women [are supposed to] watch themselves being looked at.” Here, movies operate much like popular magazines: men’s magazines are full of eroticized images of women, and so are women’s magazines.  Only in the case of a magazine like Vogue or Elle, the reader is not supposed to look at the images with erotic desire, but to imagine herself being looked at with erotic desire.  In other words, this is part of how women are taught to be spectators of themselves, to watch themselves and watch over themselves.  Every woman is trained to look at herself from a man’s point of view, “taught and persuaded,” as Berger says, “to survey herself continually.” Hollywood film is part of the apparatus that teaches and persuades.

If all this is true, to the extent that it is true, then it is probably not enough for women to become directors in order to change the culture.  What is called for is not only a change of directors but a change of direction – a fundamental change in the way we use cameras to tell stories.  We need women who are genuinely, and in both senses of the word, visionaries, seers. 

Do the films we are showing today measure up to this challenge? I don’t know.  Out of all of them, I have only seen Karyn Kusama’s Girlfight, which left me as breathless and dizzy as its protagonist after one of her boxing matches.  There was something thrilling in it, something surprising: it gave me the chance to inhabit, for a short while, the perspective of Diana Guzman, this young woman, this boiling-angry hothead who is as hungry for respect as she is for love, played brilliantly by Michelle Rodriguez.  The plotline, the story of an underdog fighting to escape a world of mundanity and poverty, is familiar; if you squint, it could be anything from Rocky to Star Wars.  But more has changed, I think, than the insertion of a woman behind the camera and a woman in front of it.  Neither Luke Skywalker nor Rocky Balboa has to experience the kind of disorientation that Diana has to go through in order to find herself.

Michelle Rodriguez has since parlayed that breakthrough performance into a career which has mainly centered around playing the kinds of roles that Hollywood currently favors for women, with a veneer of girl-power added on, in movies like Resident Evil, The Fast and the Furious, and Blue Crush.  Karyn Kusama, too, seems to have been “type-cast” as a director, trading in her indie-film credentials for the chance to direct one of those big-budget Hollywood special-effects extravaganzas, Aeon Flux, starring Charlize Theron as another version of the female action hero, supposedly independent and empowered but simultaneously always required to be the object of male desire.  I haven’t dared to watch Aeon Flux yet – I’m afraid that I will be disappointed, that this will turn out to be a case in which the star is a woman, the director is a woman, and the lens is corporate, conformist, and male.  I can’t help it: I hope for so much more.

More than a hundred years ago, in the middle of a revolution in France, a poet wrote to a friend, prophesying that “when the eternal slavery of Woman is destroyed, when she lives for herself and through herself,” women would become the creators of a new art that would be all but unimaginable from our present perspective – an entire “world of ideas” that will “differ from ours”: “strange,” “unfathomable,” even “repulsive,” but also “delightful”: “Woman will discover the unknown!” he declared.  In that same famous letter, he wrote: Je dis qu'il faut être voyant, se faire voyant : “I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer.” Today, watching the films of women like Jane Campion, Dorris Dorrie, Miranda July, we are fumbling toward that unknown world, we are witnessing the transformation of women into seers.