Gender in Cinematography: Female Gaze (Eye) Behind the Camera
ABSTRACT. For the last thirty years, feminist film theory has explored gender in cinema through detailed analysis of filmic texts, focusing on elements such as modes of narrative address, structuring principles of vision, and patterns of identification. Beginning with Laura Mulvey's landmark essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," the evolution of feminist film theory was grounded in a paradigm of sexual difference in which the gaze of spectorial pleasure was affiliated with masculinity, and the "female" within mainstream cinema was assigned the position of object and spectacle, connoting, as Mulvey put it, an exemplary "to be looked at ness." Now, a recent generation of feminist film theorists has critiqued this founding paradigm, and the axioms of psychoanalysis on which it was based, arguing that it does not allow for other forms of difference: sexual orientation, race, and ethnicity. These arguments were largely based in deconstructions of mainstream (i.e. Hollywood) films.Keywords: female gaze, cinematography, camerawoman, female director of photography, gender differenceWhen I look at the movies, film theorists try to tell me that the gaze is male, the camera eye is masculine, and so my look is also not a woman's. But I don't believe them anymore, because now I think I know what it is to look at a film as a woman. Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of GenderThe task of theorizing how sexual difference and spectorial patterns of pleasure and identification are produced in films authored by women is certainly a less developed part of feminist film theory. I would like to examine whether or not there is a unique and distinguishable difference in the aesthetic perception of the female gaze and whether or not there is a concomitant difference in the audience' response to that gaze. For the purposes of this chapter, I will look at various excerpts from my own work in cinematography and attempt to analyze them within this context. How do we, as women filmmakers, theorize about experience in the world? What is the nature of the different experiences of women's vision on film? Perhaps my examples will shed light on how to theorize experience not as something that is unmediated or value free but, rather, as something that is culturally produced. For example, Teresa de Lauretis tries to devise a feminist approach to theorizing.3 She examines the theoretical relations between the social and the subjective, experience and representation, the personal and the political. For her, meaning is produced in language, but language is the process and practice of mutually determining interactions between meaning, perception, and experience.In shifting my methodology away from a purely textual based analysis of Hollywood films, I look at sexual difference at the point of production (not reception) and I look at "perception" as the ground where sexual difference is played out.My role in the cinematic process is that of cinematographer.In shifting my methodology away from a purely textual based analysis of Hollywood films, I look at sexual difference at the point of production (not reception) and I look at "perception" as the ground where sexual difference is played out. My role in the cinematic process is that of cinematographer. American filmmaker Morgan Wesson describes cinematography as the art of creating visual images and imagery unique to every motion picture. The cinematographer must take anything a writer or director can imagine, help find or create that image, and then record it for audiences. The influence of a cinematographer can be great or small, depending on the relationship with the director and scope of the film. The major body of my work has been in documentary film, where the cinematographer has the most license and freedom. She must respond spontaneously to events happening around her and, thus, has little time to mediate the reality of any given situation. A documentary is a film authored by a director who chooses, or is given, a subject to document as a story or event that unfolds in real time: it is not reconstructed time, as in a narrative or fiction film.