The Female Gaze - Yes, It Can Exist

what i want people to see is the female gaze is a conscious effort to create empathy what does a female gaze even look like in a world where the male gaze shapes how we look at everything women want to see themselves the way men see them on screen the male gaze has long dominated camera conventions for how cinema frames women while off-screen women look at and judge ourselves against these images under the male gaze the camera focuses on the woman's body not her face saying words she shot an extreme disembodied close-ups making her feel less like a person than a collection of sexually exciting body parts even medium shots will find a reason to cut off her head often slow-mo or a well-chosen musical track we'll punctuate the moment when we first get a close glimpse of the female body the actress will always be lit for beauty not to fit the scene you might wonder is it really so bad to show off a woman's stunning beauty now and then some of cinema's most memorable scenes are iconic awestruck images of knockout actresses but the problem with the male gaze especially as a universal guiding principle and assumption is that it robs female characters of agency emotional nuance and the respect that comes with being a flawed active character we identify with you're one of the most beautiful girls i've ever seen thank you but i think my mouth is too big no it's the right size as janice loreck of the school of media film and journalism at monash university put it in the mail gaze woman is visually positioned as an object of heterosexual male desire her feelings thoughts and her own sexual drives are less important than her being framed by male be desire what does that have to do with the plot of the story her being but as naked it's also important to underline that the male gaze isn't just at work and obviously hyper-sexualized examples it's the default way that women are filmed even in many films and shows that are sympathetic to female characters the male gaze camera is so mainstream that it's simply the camera and all people in our society are conditioned to look through its eyes what is the male gaze guys it's pretty much everything everything you've ever seen it's most tv shows it's it's all movies so in this environment how can female filmmakers begin to construct a real female gaze in a way that's more than just response to the male one or just flipping the objectifying gaze onto men here's our take on the female gaze what it could look like and whether it can even exist women have got ambition and they've got talent as well as just beauty if you're new here be sure to subscribe and hit the bell to be notified about all of our new videos i want to thank skillshare for sponsoring today's video skillshare is an incredible resource for exploring your creativity the first 1000 take viewers to use the link in our description will get a free trial of skillshare premium membership so check it out now and get the skills to share your voice with the world by supporting our sponsors you're supporting the take then he had his way with me with his eyes ugh the male gaze the term the male gaze was first theorized by feminist film scholar and filmmaker laura mulvey in her groundbreaking 1975 essay visual pleasure and narrative cinema in it movie said the male gaze is composed of three looks the look of the camera the look of the audience and the look of the characters all three of these looks are typically male the woman is defined by her to be looked at ness in molvy's words you better come check this [ __ ] chicken look at this [Music] she is isolated glamorous on display sexualized according to mulvey the male gays can either put the woman on a pedestal or investigate and punish her often these two processes lead to each other take vertigo scotty idolizes madeleine when she appears to him as a perfect ghost-like illusion don't you think it's kind of a waste for the two of us to want later he tries to idolize judy the actual woman who was impersonating madeline but investigation into her backstory spoils her in his eyes did he train you did he rehearse you did he tell you exactly what to do what to say it's the madonna horror complex in action the male gaze divides film characters into passive female and active male we can see the male gaze projected onto women when they are framed as isolated body parts see how top gun frames astrophysicists and instructor charlie walking into a room in the classic jib shot that moves up a woman's body so the male camera can check her out this disembodying gaze extends to a movie's marketing how many movie posters have you seen where the lead actor is framed by the disembodied legs of a woman even mega powerful wonder woman in the joss whedon cut of justice league is sometimes depicted as a disembodied butt or filmed with the camera looking up her skirt we also see the male gaze at work when women are dressed in highly impractical sexy clothing a common complaint from moviegoers resisting the male gaze is how is she supposed to run in those heels i trained for running in heels as if i was in the olympics or fight in that outfit why does this character's armor expose her stomach full of all sorts of vital organs but the male gaze goes way beyond obvious sexualization it's also how women are marginalized now they're framed in normal dialogue scenes director lexi alexander pointed out that tv's use of shallow focus puts women and people of color at a disadvantage tweeting google the percentage of lines women have versus men then google the percentage of lines poc actors have versus white actors then understand that in shallow depths of focus the choice is to keep the actor who speaks in focus do the math we were helping out at a refugee center does that not count for anything alexander also pointed out in an interview with cinema vidas that women are always lit for beauty whereas men are lit for acting the male gaze is personified as a deadly force in the michael powell proto-slasher peeping tom the film follows mark an aspiring filmmaker who's obsessed with looking at women and by looking killing them we often see mark's kills through his camera making us complicit in both his objectification and violence pushing the buttons of those who have paid to watch something sensational but who found themselves creepily implicated in these photophiliac crimes at the end of the movie we discovered that mark has attached a mirror to his camera so that the last thing his victims see is their own fear and objectification i made them watch their own deaths i made them see their own terror as the spike went in so what does a female gaze potentially look like i think the female gaze might be a way of feeling seeing it uses the frame to share and evoke a feeling of being in feeling rather than looking at the characters in a patriarchy where the male gaze is simply the water we're all swimming in the visual language we all speak and almost all women have deeply internalized misogyny you can't even really know how females would see each other or themselves without the male gaze that's conditioned to be deep inside their minds thus many have argued convincingly that a female gaze in life or on screen is actually not possible often what many people assume to be a female gaze is just turning the table so that women become the intended audience and men become the objectified looked at ones but that's just using the male gaze on men it's not changing the ways of looking just the subject of the look the law says that you cannot touch but i think i see a lot of law breakers up in this house equal opportunity oggling keeps the same language of objectification and dehumanization in place it's still a cinema of dominance a big reason the male gaze is so dominant is because of who has long made movies on average out of the 100 highest grossing films per year 96 are directed by men and four percent by women in early cinema female directors like lois weber and dorothy arsner were able to flourish but as making movies became an increasingly profitable and desirable job and power coalesced around studios and their male heads these jobs went to men the same process happened a little later with female screenwriters even by 2019 a mere 10.7 percent of directors of the top 100 grossing films were women only five percent of the 250 top grossing films in 2019 had female cinematographers and only seven women have ever been nominated for the best director oscar with just two ever winning and here are the all male nominees men making the vast majority of movies has meant that female desire has largely been excluded from on-screen stories so what kind of emerging female gays can we see in the films and shows of today's most prominent women creators when you look at somebody they're also always looking at you there is no news there's only collaborators and women inspiring in mutual way returning to mulvey's three separate looks that make up the male gaze the camera the characters and the audience we can start to see all of these shift as we gradually find more women behind the camera and more women as the lustful heroes i'm not obsessed with sex i just can't stop thinking about it the performance of it take jlo's introductory pole dance as ramona and hustlers strippers have been depicted in films and tv made by men for decades ranging from the frenzied hypersexuality of showgirls to the background flesh on the sopranos but in hustlers through the eyes of our viewpoint character destiny a young woman who looks up to ramona as a glamorous mentor we don't see ramona as an object directed by laureen scafaria we watch the way ramona commands the room encouraged to feel awe for her power when she dances we're seeing ramona in control of everything including the camera we wanted to see destiny's point of view destiny seeing ramona for the first time but really highlight the athleticism of it the strength the power female creators are more likely to represent the reality of female experience rather than project an ideal it's about how it feels to live inside a body rather than what it's like to look at one from afar this tendency in woman-created art may go as far back as the stone age archaeologists used to think the venus of willendorf was made by a man representing a faceless thick ideal of fertility but it's recently been theorized that the venus and other figures like her are actually self-portraits made by women a record of female experience when a woman is steering the production it's much more likely that something gross unpleasant or just imperfect about the body is discussed or shown just get your hands off my miscarriage works by women can also deconstruct the gaze in portrait of a lady on fire a painter is tasked with creating a wedding portrait of a woman who does not want to get married so eloise the object resists her objectification marianne has to covertly study her subject mirroring the way queer women must conceal their desire even after eloise agrees to sit for marianne she reminds her that the gaze goes two ways the two-way nature of the gaze may explain why so many recent male gaze-defying works break the fourth wall in her essay movie notes that if a mainstream movie succeeds you're supposed to lose yourself in identification with the look of the hero that's me but in works like fleabag the heroine looks at you looking at the camera forces the audience to remember that they chose to watch this work of art that they have power and responsibility as spectators who decide where and how to look the lookers have become the looked at look at them too meanwhile thanks to the internet today's women as audience members are more than ever articulating what they like to see in a screen hottie we definitely have other sketch ideas where you aren't just being an extremely hot sex man no we're screwed fangirls are still into the occasional body part isolated in a frame but there's a stronger emphasis on different less stereotypically sexualized parts of the body mouths and hands get a lot of time in the spotlight perhaps because hands and mouths are more likely vehicles of female pleasure delivery than our phallocentric society would have you believe sex scenes made by and for the male gays focus on flesh but love scenes intended for women focus on a woman's pleasure not her body being displayed the ones most women vibe with aren't also necessarily explicit maybe just emotionally intense and loaded with subtext there's a lot of love for male characters written by women ones who don't necessarily have the muscles of a hemsworth and stories that don't devote a lot of explicit camera time to their bodies one tick talker put it this way men's desire objectifies women women's desire personifies men i see something like this and i'm like wow he must be really in touch with his feelings so what do you think george is like i think he's shy oh yeah yeah i don't think you have to draw him out while the scenes of stripping and magic mike might not necessarily be the female gays the parts where he's designing furniture maybe entrepreneur stripper entrepreneur either one recently women have also been expressing their desire with the most traditionally feminine of all cinematic pursuits editing many of the most highly acclaimed directors work very closely with female editors quentin tarantino had sally menki george lucas worked with his then wife marcia and martin scorsese has been working with thelma schoonmaker for 50 years i've known him since he was in his last year at new york university and worked with him then on his first feature film called who's that knocking but with the democratization of editing software a new genre of thirst has emerged the fan cam starting in k-pop stands have been able to create fan videos of their favorite stars often geared toward a primarily female audience using fan footage shot by a female camera through fan cams and stan tick tock women can articulate who they're into and why in the language of cinema we can see an emerging female gaze in these trends like personifying rather than objectifying desire writing through editing and deconstructing the fourth wall to remind us that the people being looked at are capable of looking back oh you do have someone to talk to yeah but some filmmakers resist the idea that we should even seek a unified female gaze at all why create cliches of style in response to those that men made up as natasha breyer cinematographer of the neon demon and honeyboy told vulture i think every cinematographer has their own unique gaze technical skills and style regardless of their gender and reducing things to two types of gays doesn't make much sense to me indeed the male gaze isn't the only dominating and objectifying lens of looking to name just a few there's an orientalist gaze a medical gaze a rich gaze a straight gaze and a white gaze as though our lives have no meaning and no depth without the white gays so while it's still useful for women viewers to articulate their desires as they are still very much taboo performative horniness may not always be the most revolutionary act i think he's just a man trying to do my job for the us postal service not a stripper yes i dance yes i'm sexy but i don't do professionally it is that personification versus objectification and desire that is revolutionary the internet has even coined a phrase for the type of thirst or gaze that we should all strive for looking respectfully whether as audiences creators or lead characters in our lives we can acknowledge the personhood of the object of our desire if we can hold two thoughts in our head this person is hot and this person is a person imagine what we could accomplish as a society the conventions of filmmaking were designed in part to dehumanize entire segments of the world's population but we all have our own story to tell right now all of that is being funneled at us through the prism of this one perspective it's not that it's a bad perspective but don't we deserve to hear them all this is the take on your favorite movie shows and culture thank you so much for watching and for supporting us please subscribe and never miss a take thanks again to skillshare for sponsoring today's video for too long film and video were made inaccessible with expensive schools or apprentice and mentoring circles that excluded women in marginalized groups the more people who have access to storytelling tools the more exciting fresh content we get to enjoy that's what's so cool about dan dan lu's class how to film solo without the fomo filmmaking tricks for the one person crew this class will help any aspiring filmmaker speak their truth on their own terms right now skillshare is offering our viewers a free trial of skillshare premium membership but that's only if you're one of the first 1000 people to click the link in the description below so join today and jumpstart your creative journey for less than 10 a month with an annual subscription [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: The Take

Views: 496,413

Keywords: female gaze, skillshare premium, transformers, suicide squad, birds of prey, hustlers, fleabag, high fidelity, 30 rock, little women, chloe zhao, greta gerwig, i may destroy you, portrait of a lady on fire, the dark knight rises, catwoman, james bond, vertigo, benedict cumberbatch, mean girls, superbad, roger rabbit, the seven year itch, wolf of wall street, the mask, lord of the rings, peeping tom, charlie's angels, not another teen movie, the sopranos, booksmart, bridgerton

Id: eCPD7Mi9504

Length: 17min 10sec (1030 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 12 2021