568

TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT....................................................................................iii
ABSTRACT..........................................................................................................vii
ÖZET...................................................................................................................viii
INTRODUCTION..................................................................................................1
CHAPTER 1: THE GAZE IN PHILOSOPHY...................................................4
1.1. The Gaze and Subject Formation in Psychoanalysis..........................4
1.1.1. Oedipus, Mirror Stage and the Symbolic
Order................................................................................................4
1.1.2. Other/other/ objet petit a ...................................................7
1.1.3. Lacan on the Gaze................................................................8
1.2. The Foulcauldian View.......................................................................11
1.2.1. The Gendered Subject as a Discursive
Construct.......................................................................................11
1.2.2. The Gaze in Foucauldian Theory.....................................12
1.2.2.1. Panopticism..........................................................12
1.2.2.2. Las Meninas.........................................................15
1.3 Summary: Between Lacanian Psychoanalysis and
Foucault.....................................................................................................16
CHAPTER 2: CONTEMPORARY THEORY: THE MALE GAZE AND
THE FEMALE SUBJECT IN FILM.................................................................18
2.1. Phallocentrism and Occulocentrism: The Feminist Take on the
Subject.........................................................................................................18
2.1.1. The Female Subject..........................................................18
2.2. The Male Gaze ....................................................................................22
2.2.1. The Three-fold Look........................................................25
2.3. Questioning the Male Gaze................................................................28
2.3.1. Desire, The Real and The Gaze.......................................30
2.4. Summary.............................................................................................33
CHAPTER 3: FEMALE SUBJECTIVITY IN VARDA..................................34
vi
3.1 The Gaze Recreated .............................................................................37
3.1.1 Directorship and Narrative................................................38
3.1.2 Female Characters as Subjects..........................................42
3.1.3 Spectatorship.......................................................................43
3.2 Time and Space.....................................................................................45
3.3 Objet Petit A and The Real..................................................................47
CONCLUSION.....................................................................................................51
REFERENCES.................................................................................................... 54
vii
ABSTRACT
This thesis aims to provide an alternative to the patriarchal tendencies in the
production of the female subject on film through the work of Agnes Varda. The
first chapter of the thesis focuses on defining the philosophical terminology
necessary to conceptualize the ideas and theories in the realm of psychoanalysis,
Foucauldian thought and at their intersection in subject formation. The second
chapter consists of a survey and a literary report of the concepts in Lacanian Film
Theory, put forward by Laura Mulvey in the 1980s. The concept of the ‘male
gaze’ is studied in depth via Mulvey’s essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema, as well as John Berger’s Ways of Seeing and other feminist literary
works. In other words, the thesis first identifies the necessary terminology in the
philosophical associations of the ‘male gaze’, then focuses on contemporary
feminist thought in the context of film and the subject-object relationship between
the active looker(men) and those being looked at(women). The final part of the
thesis is an investigation with an aim to show how the ruling patriarchal ideology
can be disarmed by employing techniques such as those used by Agnes Varda,
who re-writes the structure of the female subject as a character, as the spectator
and as the director/author of film by situating woman’s desire and the Lacanian
Real within the film narrative.
Keywords: Psychoanalysis, Male Gaze, Agnes Varda, Lacanian Film Theory,
Desire
viii
ÖZET
Bu tez, sinemada kadın öznenin ataerkil eğilimlere yaratılmasına Agnes Varda
filmleri üzerinden bir alternatif sunmayı amaçlamaktadır. Tezin ilk bölümü,
psikanalizden ve Foucault düşüncesinden ve ikisinin kesiştiği yerde yani öznenin
oluşum süreci ile ilgili bir takım fikirleri kavramsallaştırmak için gerekli olan
felsefi terminolojiyi tanımlamaya odaklanmaktadır. İkinci bölüm, 1980'lerde
Laura Mulvey tarafından ortaya atılan Lacancı Film Teorisindeki kavramların bir
incelemesi ve edebiyat taramasından oluşmaktadır. 'Eril bakış' kavramı, Mulvey'in
Görsel Zevk ve Anlatı Sineması adlı makalesinin yanı sıra, John Berger'in Görme
Biçimleri ve diğer feminist eserler aracılığıyla derinlemesine incelenmiştir. Başka
bir deyişle, tez önce 'erkek bakışı' nın anlaşılmasında gerekli olan felsefi
terminolojiyi tanımlar, ardından film ve bakma-bakılma bağlamında çağdaş
feminist düşünceye odaklanır ve son olarak, egemen ataerkil ideolojinin, 'erkek
bakışı' nı kullanılarak nasıl dönüştürülebileceğini inceler. Bu son kısımda, Agnes
Varda’nın kadının arzusunu ve Lacan’cı Gerçek konseptlerini filmin anlatısına
dahil ederek, bu ataerkil ideolojiyi nasıl bertaraf ettiğinin üzerinde durulmuştur.
Anahtar kelimeler: Psikanaliz, Eril Bakış, Agnes Varda, Lacan’cı Film

1
INTRODUCTION
The Western protocol of the Subject has been created, dissected and reconstructed
in the past few centuries through the use of philosophy, psychoanalysis and
critical theory. In the 20th century in particular, the subject was understood by
power-knowledge dialectics through the work of great theoreticians who
borrowed from the philosophical teachings of their predecessors ranging from
Ancient Greece to the Enlightenment Era. The question at hand usually dealt with
the forces behind the nature of the self as an autonomous subject. For generations,
humans sought to understand whether our choices and behavior were determined
by who were born to be or the rules and norms of societies we reside in. Feminists
took a further step into the realm of the subject and investigated how women in
particular, have been oppressed, regulated through their bodies and limited to
certain valid positions in society. So, the case of being or becoming a subject for
women has yet another layer added.
“The Gaze” or Le Regard (Lacan, 2004) has been discussed by many
philosophers, artists and scholars in a plethora of contexts and time periods. This
notion of looking and being looked at is particularly of interest here due to its
effects on creating and perhaps re-creating the modern subject, in particular the
modern female subject. As its meaning and value might change in different
contexts, I will limit the meaning prescribed to it as a tool in the mentioned
theories and scholars listed in each of the sections named below in this
Introduction.
For the purpose of this thesis statement, I aim to survey and analyze how the
female subject/self was produced in the modern age through the use of the Gaze
and apply this analysis to the work of one of the most influential contemporaries
of our times: Agnes Varda. Through out the research, I will aim to answer the
questions: What is the role of the Gaze in creating the modern female subject on
2
the screen? How did Agnes Varda utilize another kind of Gaze and can examples
like Varda’s films produce an alternative, post-modern female subject?
In Part One, I will compile a survey of how the modern subject was created
through the use of the Gaze by referencing theoretical framework from
psychoanalysis, philosophy and critical theory. It will be necessary to define the
role of the Gaze through the works of Freud, Lacan, Sartre and Foucault, the
relevant terminology such as Oedipus complex (Freud, 1977), the mirror stage
and the object of desire (Lacan, 1987), as well as Panopticism (Foucault, 1995)
here.
In Part Two, I will pan-out how the notions of looking and being looked at
connect to the construction of a gendered subject. The gendered female subject
that is constructed within critical theory is without a doubt fragmented and
affected largely by the zeitgeist of certain movements such as Marxism, feminism
or real-world events such wars, shifts in political power structures, etc. However,
at the very core, it is of interest to understand how the ideal image of femininity is
created and re-injected into women as a self-regulatory tool in being or becoming
objects rather than subjects in this context. In this section I will study the works of
Laura Mulvey (1975), John Berger (2008), Evelyn Fox Keller and Christine
Grontowski (1983), Luce Irigaray (1985), Ann Kaplan (1983) and Anneke Smelik
(1998). The general idea of this section is to provide evidence of how masculinity
is represented by ‘looking’ while femininity is represented by being ‘looked at’
and how the hierarchical relationship of the two prevails in film.
Visual arts, specifically cinema is a fundamental arena for illustrating these
constructs outlined by the theorists named above. So as I finally will zoom into
the realm of film in Part Three, I will investigate the possibility of a modern
female subject in film through subverting the ‘Male Gaze’ and by illustrating an
alternative route to recreating the narrative and the aesthetic surrounding the
3
female subject. In order to do this, I will turn the attention to one of the strongest
directors and artists of the post-modern era: Agnes Varda. While discussing
Varda’s application of a truly non-male gaze I will go over her use of the
apparatus outlined by Mulvey in the previous section: director’s gaze, characters’
gaze and the audiences’ gaze, providing examples from her films including
Vagabond (1985), The Gleaners and I (2000) and Cleo From 5 to 7 (1962). This
part of the text will also provide analyses of scholars like Phil Powrie, Sandy
Flitterman Lewis, Todd McGowan and Hilary Neroni who have studied Varda in
depth to reinforce the major claims of the possibility of a non-male gaze.
4
CHAPTER 1: THE GAZE AND THE GENDERED SUBJECT IN
PHILOSOPHY
“Within cultural studies the argument that femininity and masculinity are
malleable social constructions has taken its inspiration either from the
work of Foucault or from psychoanalysis.”
(Barker, 2012, p. 301)
1.1 The Gaze and Subject Formation in Psychoanalysis
1.1.1. Oedipus, Mirror Stage and the Symbolic Order
In the process of understanding how gendered subjects are formed from a
psychoanalytic standpoint, we must first revisit some of the key concepts in
psychoanalysis as they relate to this process. In one of his major works titled
Three Essays on Sexuality (1977) Sigmund Freud outlines the human psyche as a
total consisted of three parts: the Id- an unconscious source of drives and internal
processes, the Superego- the learned rationale related to social rules and norms,
and the Ego- the rational mind that balances these two areas. The Oedipus
Complex is another one of Freud’s key constructs as he believes it to be
responsible for the successful formation of an individual by starting to form his
Superego. Inspired by Sophocles’ story Oedipus the King, the Oedipus Complex,
in the psychoanalytic context, is known as child's sexual desire for the mother and
unresolved anger driven out of competition toward the father (Freud, 1977).
Through this process the law of the father, symbolized by the phallus, represents a
threat of castration for the boy, as he is the one standing between him and the
mother. Thus, the father becomes the enforcer of the incest taboo in the Symbolic
order (Lacan) and represents for the boy a possible agent of castration. In girls on
the other hand, castration complex happens in the form of ‘penis envy’. In this
process the girl sees that she is lacking the penis that the boy has and is already
‘castrated’ therefore identifies with the mother and hopes to later develop a
phallus through bearing a child. This compulsory period for child’s development
of sexual role and identity, symbolizes the child’s unconscious feelings, thoughts,
impulses and fantasies into the ego.
5
Influenced largely by Freud, Jacques Lacan reorganizes the human psyche into
three different categories: The Imaginary, The Symbolic and The Real. In his
reading of Freud (1977), Lacan draws a parallel to this process as he states, “the
resolution of the Oedipus Complex marks the formation of the unconscious as the
realm of the repressed. It establishes the very possibility of gendered subjects
through entry into the symbolic order” (Barker, 2012, p.98). In Lacanian theory,
during what he calls the Mirror Stage the baby sees him/herself for the first time
in the mirror and faces the uneasy enlightenment of being a subject separate from
the mother. Up until this point the baby misrecognizes herself as a continuation of
the mother rather than a free-standing structure. This self-identification process is
extremely complex in that the baby realizes that she is not only not a part of the
mother but also the image in the mirror looks more intact and orderly than what
the toddler, up until that moment felt. This process provides a structure of image
replacing the chaos. It creates a unified sense of self against the Other1 (Fink,
2000, p.88-9).
In his book titled Ways of Seeing, John Berger2 provides a very intelligible
explanation of mirror stage and entry into the Symbolic order:
“Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can
speak but there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words.
It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we
explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we
are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know
is never settled.
…
Soon after we can see, we are aware that we can also be seen. The eye of
the other combines with our own eye to make it fully credible that we are
part of the visible world.
…
The reciprocal nature of vision is more fundamental than that of spoken
dialogue. And often dialogue is an attempt to verbalize this- an attempt to
explain how, either metaphorically or literally, ‘you see things’, an attempt
to discover how ‘he sees things…In this sense… all images are man-made”
(Berger, 2008, p.7-9).
1
First the mother, but subsequently other reflective surfaces such as other family
members, teachers, God etc.
2
This will be revisited in the next chapter.
6
For both Lacan and Freud, the subject is fragmented at birth until the formation of
the ego. It is through the Mirror Stage and through the fear of castration that the
child is also introduced to its first understanding of a lack along with it not being a
part of the outside world (Grosz, 2015, p.35). In Lacanian theory specifically,
sexed subjects are defined in relation to the phallus: “Analytic experience attests
precisely to the fact that everything revolves around phallic jouissance3, in that
woman is defined by a position that I have indicated as “not whole” with respect
to phallic jouissance” (Lacan & Fink,1999, p.7). As the baby moves first into the
Imaginary Order and subsequently into the Symbolic Order by the introduction of
language, the sexed subjects are formed under these structures.4
We can think of castration and the loss or lack of the phallus as the symbolic
object of the mother’s desire. Accepting the paternal metaphor for both boys and
girls means accepting that they do not have the phallus, that someone else has the
desire of the mother. The difference between boys and girls “corresponds to the
difference between a castration that has been carried out [the 'feminine' situation]
and one that has merely been threatened [the 'masculine' situation]" (Freud, 1977,
p. 341) Also, while the boy accepts this lack in him, he may identify with the
father in hoping to one day be the bearer of the phallus. However, by renouncing
the idea that she has the Phallus, the girl “can continue to identify with the
mother… she may choose… to try to become the object of desire of the
father…The girl’s position after castration is therefore not of wanting to possess
the Phallus (or fragments there of) but to attract someone who appears to have it”
(Bailly, 2009, p.147).
3
Jouissance:
n. in the theory of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, enjoyment or
pleasure that goes beyond mere satisfaction of an instinct. Such pleasure is seen as a
subversive and destabilizing force. (APA Dictionary of Psychology, 2021)
4
Further reading involving these processes can be found in Lacan’s Seminars: Book I
and Book IV, as well as Ecrits.
7
1.1.2 Other/other/ objet petit a
What’s important about the mirror stage is the alienating force that declares to the
baby that there is an outside, ideal image and that although it is a subject it is also
an object defined in this extraneous scopic field in which he/she is gazed upon. In
going through the mirror stage, the subject is introduced to both other(s) and the
(Big)Other as sources of desire. In decoding the formation of the subject through
desire in Lacanian theory we must look further at the terms Other/other and objet
petit a as they play a significant role in forming the ego in the Symbolic order.
“…the lower-case-o other designates the Imaginary ego and its
accompanying alter-egos. By speaking of the ego itself as an
“other,” Lacan further underscores its alien and alienating status…
Additionally, when relating to others as alter-egos, one does so on
the basis of what one “imagines” about them (often imagining them
to be “like me,” to share a set of lowest-common-denominator
thoughts, feelings, and inclinations making them comprehensible to
me). These transference-style imaginings are fictions taming and
domesticating the mysterious, unsettling foreignness of one’s
conspecifics, thereby rendering social life tolerable and navigable.
….
The capital-O Other refers to two additional types of otherness
corresponding to the registers of the Symbolic and the Real. The first
type of Other is Lacan’s “big Other” qua symbolic order, namely,
the overarching “objective spirit” of trans-individual socio-linguistic
structures configuring the fields of inter-subjective interactions.
Relatedly, the Symbolic big Other also can refer to (often
fantasmatic/fictional) ideas of anonymous authoritative power and/or
knowledge (whether that of God, Nature, History, Society, State,
Party, Science, or the analyst)”(Johnston, 2018).
In its simplest form Lacan’s use of the small o-other refers to the alter-egos or all
the internal others that the subject lives to satisfy within itself. The big Other on
the other hand, is represented by the mother subsequently the father and peers and
representations of all other external forces (subjects) in relation to the subject in
the real world (Grosz, 2015, p.44-48). Both in the Freudian Oedipal stage and in
the Lacanian father metaphors, the mother and the father can be placed as big
Others who are in direct relation with the phallus or the lack there of (Johnston,
8
2018). In this sense, the Big Other represents the social aspect of psychoanalysis
as it relates to the effects of external figures on the subject.5
The objet a is something from which the subject, in order to
constitute itself, has separated itself off as organ. This serves as a
symbol of the lack, that is to say, of the phallus, not as such, but in
so far as it is lacking.’ (Lacan,1998, p.103)
‘Objet petit a’ is first mentioned and redefined by Lacan over the course of a few
different seminars in the 1950s. It can be translated as ‘the small object of other’
as the ‘a’ stands for ‘autre’ in French. It can be perceived as the desirable quality
of objects in the real world. In its simplest form, it can be defined as “the object
cause of desire which we seek in the other. It denotes the object which can never
be attained, which is really the cause of desire rather than that towards which
desire tends… it is any object which sets desire in motion… the drives do not seek
to attain the objet petit a, but rather circle around it” (Evans, 1996, p. 125). The
small o-other(s) are imaginary object relations as they represent how the desires of
the child are met. For example, real world objects like money or the breast all
have connotations in the Symbolic order, as there are demands to be made or rules
to be followed in attaining these desired objects. The child can only aim to satisfy
the desire by following the necessary otherness related to the objects but never
truly do so as illustrated in the following passage:
“The objet petit a may be seen as a fragment of the Phallus, which arises from
castration, when the child understands that the Phallus is possessed neither by
itself nor its father, nor yet any living person. However, the lost Phallus cannot
be forgotten… the Phallus leaves traces of itself everywhere… these phallic
fragments are the objet petit a- the object cause of desire…” (Bailly, 2009,
p.130)
As defined by Lacan and discussed by many psychoanalysts, the small other,
the Big Other as well as the objet petit a are all components that limit or cause
desire in the human psyche. After defining the relevant terminology in
psychoanalysis regarding subject formation, we must now turn our attention
to the significance of the gaze in this process.
5
Foucault’s ideas involving the Panopticon can be perceived as parallel to this
notion of the Big Other .
9
1.1.3 Lacan on the Gaze
Lacan’s utilization of the term ‘gaze’ (le regarde) was influenced largely by Jean
Paul Sartre’s definition in Being and Nothingness (1956). Sartre first talks of the
gaze as a force that directs us as subjects by reflecting an uneasy sense of being
observed by the other. This suspicion created by another human observing us is
never proven nor disproven yet it largely influences the image we present through
our bodies, appearance and our behavior in that we fear or become ashamed of the
expectation in relation to the rest of the world. According to Sartre, the process of
seeing is also not reciprocal; meaning the feeling of “being observed by the other
is not returned to the gazer in that same sense but rather it encompasses the
subject of the gaze as an ever-present source of anxiety” (Groys, 2012). Sartre’s
views on the gaze of the other also embody an implication of the power dynamics
that it entails. In Being and Nothingness he states, “insofar as I am the object of
values which come to qualify me without my being able to act on this
qualification or even to know it, I am enslaved” (Sartre, 1956, p.110). His views
suggest that when we are confronted with the gaze of the other we become aware
of our self as objects and this robs us of our power as a subject (Reinhardt, 2008).
Lacan visits the concept of the gaze a few times in different contexts. He first tells
an anecdote in the Four Fundamental Concepts of a day when he is out on a
fishing trip and sees a piece of tin can floating on the ocean, reflecting a beam of
light (Lacan, 1998, p. 95). One of the fishermen he is with tells him that even
though Lacan can see this tin can; the tin can does not see him. It is here that
Lacan finds meaning in the concept of the ever-present sense of being seen, being
gazed at and that it leaves no man behind. Perhaps combining this experience with
Sartre’s ideas of which he was greatly influenced by, he claims “the gaze I
encounter is not a seen gaze, but a gaze imagined by me in the field of the Other”
(ibid, p.84). By this he not only suggests that the gaze is an imagined notion but
also that it belongs to the outside realm; the world out there projects it onto the
object.
10
In analyzing Hans Holbein’s painting, The Ambassadors, Lacan suggests that the
gaze is present in the distorted shape in the foreground of the painting. Lacan
claims that this blot is “there to catch in its trap the observer...we are litterally
called into the picture, and represented here as caught” (ibid,p.92).
This cut or split by the blot in this painting allows Lacan to formulize a kind of
alienating property for the subject as it turns it into an object of the drives
(specifically the scopic drive), more specifically the ‘objet petit a’ (Scott, 2015) .
When we look at the role of the gaze in forming the gendered subject, we can see
in both Lacan and Sarte’s writing that the lack of the phallus or the fear of losing
it is ever present in the gaze. “The gaze is presented to us only in the form of a
strange contingency, symbolic of what we find on the horizon, as the thrust of our
experience, namely, the lack that constitutes castration anxiety” (Lacan, 2004,
p.72). According to Sartre “…the gaze of the specter causes not only shame
within us but also a feeling of unconditional responsibility with regard to what is
absent, because what is absent refuses to enter into negotiations with us” (Groys,
2012, p.66). Perhaps through this understanding, Lacan presents to the world this
Holbein, 1553
11
all-encompassing, imaginary notion of the gaze with symbolic functions, which
solidify the uncanny feeling of the lack within us. The evolution of Lacan’s ideas
about the gaze eventually position it into the realm of the Real after the Imaginary
and the Symbolic, which as we will see in Chapter 3, makes the gaze’s effects on
subjectivity more complex.
1. 2 The Foulcauldian View
1. 2. 1 The Gendered Subject as a Discursive Construct
Michel Foucault was interested in understanding subjectivity through studying the
social history of different populations. His genealogy of the modern subject lies
on a detailed study of power/knowledge relations amongst discursive structures.
By studying sexual practices within their historical contexts, treatment and
behavior concerning marginalized groups like the mentally ill, the incarcerated
and disciplinary models of unified organisms such as schools and military,
Foucault aims to understand the social being, what we have previously discussed
as the subject or the self. He uses a genealogical form of study in which he tries to
“investigate[s] the complex and shifting network of relations between power,
knowledge and the body which produce historically specific forms of
subjectivity” (Armstrong). In doing so, Foucault finds that for the most part
“subjectivity is a discursive production” (Barker, 2012, p.301) rather than
biologically determined.
Foucault’s deconstructionist view on how the modern subject is produced through
knowledge stripped away the notion that there were drives and desires that made
man who he is, but rather a product of the societal practices, norms and power
structures. Foucault studied gender in depth as he found sexuality to be a “focal
point for the exercise of power and the production of subjectivity in western
societies. He believed that sex was put into discourse through the church, the
schools and demography” (ibid, p. 302). In The History of Sexuality (1978) he
discussed in depth, how in the 17th century the sovereign ruled society by fear and
how in the 18th century the power apparatus was designed more around norms and
12
self-regulatory tools, specifically on the human body. In this text, instead of
perceiving this bio-power as an oppressive force against the human self, Foucault
contests that in modern society power produces the human subject through two
tools: the use of regulations on the population as a whole through the
“management of the life processes of the social body... such as birth, death,
sickness, disease, health, sexual relations” and through “disciplinary power which
targets the human body as an object to be manipulated and trained” and through
the use of disciplinary power on an individualized level (Armstrong).
1.2.2 The Gaze in Foucauldian Theory
Foucault’s use of the notion of the gaze is apparent in many of his texts. He
clearly points to the use of the medical gaze in the Birth of the Clinic (1973) and
in the History of Sexuality (1978) indirectly, by explaining how the government
produced tools for injecting its omnipotent surveillance through regulating
sexuality and the bodily and psychological practices relating to sexuality.
Foucault scholar Paul Rabinow (1984) classifies the three major areas Foucault
claims humans are made into subjects as:
1. “dividing practices” separating the sane from the insane, guilty from the
innocent etc.
2. the “scientific classification” through discourse
3. “subjectification”, a process of self formation in which the subject is
active although still mediated by external authority
For the purpose of this thesis, the third category is of interest in the parallels it
draws to the psychoanalytic subject formation as discussed thus far in this chapter.
In this context, two specific mentions of the gaze in Foucauldian theory will be
covered: Panopticism and the subject/object notion of the gaze in Foucault’s
analysis of the painting Las Meninas.
1.2.2.1 Panopticism
The goal of disciplinary power, as Foucault demonstrates in Discipline and
13
Punish, is to “subject bodily activities to a process of constant surveillance and
examination that enables a continuous and pervasive control of individual
conduct. The aim of these practices is to simultaneously optimize the body’s
capacities, skills and productivity and to foster its usefulness and docility”
(Armstrong???). Foucault claims that through the disciplinary technologies
utilized by variety of institutions like prisons, hospitals, asylums and schools
‘docile bodies’ are produced and that these docile bodies could be “subjected,
used, transformed and improved” (1977, p.198).
In studying the genealogy of clinics and prisons, Foucault came across a design
for a prison created by Jeremy Bentham in the 18th Century. The Panopticon is
essentially an idealized form of a prison with a central tower of observation for
the guards and officials, “overlooking the surrounding buildings and cells which
have a window facing the tower. The inmates of the cells are visible to the
observer in the tower but the onlooker is not seen by the prisoners” (Barker, 2012,
p.92). He claimed that Bentham created a design in which “there was a central
observation-point which served as the focus of the exercise of power and,
simultaneously, for the registration of knowledge” (1980, p. 148).
“The major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of
conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic
functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is
permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the
perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise
unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for
creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who
exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power
situation of which they are themselves the bearers” (Foucault, 1995,
p.205).
What was so important to Foucault about the panoptic gaze was it “inscribed on
docile bodies its domination” (Morin, p. 323). This round-the-clock and
anonymous surveillance did not only discipline the body but also created a
14
psychological sense of “conscious and permanent visibility” (Foucault 1977, p.
201). Therefore, as mentioned earlier, there is a norm that is created in which the
object is ‘subjectified’ through a disciplinary technology. In other words, the
modern subject internalizes the panoptic gaze as a self-regulatory tool. A certain
truth is produced in this effort to ‘normalize’ the subject by propagating the
correct norms, classifications and behavior under the guise of giving the subject
agency in forming its identity.
Dubois, 2002 Simpson, 2013
Another important point (one that helps us decode his views on the discursively
gendered subject) Foucault underlines regarding the Panoptic gaze is its
applicability beyond the purpose it was originally designed for. He states “this
movement that stretches from the enclosed disciplines… to an indefinitely
generalizable mechanism of Panopticsm” (Foucault, 1984, p. 206). He speaks
about the Panopticon in awe, holding it as a metaphor for the disciplinary power
he initially elaborates on in all possible environments. The individual or the
subject in this sense is “not to be conceived as a sort of elementary nucleus, a
primitive atom, a multiple and inert material on which power comes to fasten or
against which it happens to strike, and in so doing subdues or crushes individuals.
The individual… is not the vis-à-vis of power; it is … one of its prime effects”
(Foucault, 1980, p. 98). So we can think of the examples he talks about that
15
regulate women’s bodies for example through the discourse created by the
power/knowledge systems. In Foucauldian terms, the self-produced, gendered
subjects are results of the discursive and disciplinary (panoptic gaze) tools
amplified by the norms and categories created by the very environment and
conditions they live in. We can see a different use of the gaze by Foucault in
terms of positioning the subject in the next section.
1.2.2.2 Las Meninas
Diego Velasquez’s famous painting titled Las Meninas has been revered as one of
the most significant works of art in Western society. Due to its perplexing
elements it has been dissected and analyzed by philosophers, scholars and critics
alike since it has been painted. The unique setup of the painting pokes the viewer
to question who the subject of the painting is, who the spectator is and whether or
not we as the viewer are in the space of the painting or if we are simply viewing
the artist painting a portrait of the central figure. Because of the positioning of the
figures, the gazes of three of the central figures looking directly at the
Velazquez, 1599
16
spectator, “the spectator himself becomes the subject of the painting, captured by
the gaze of the painter insofar as he remains a spectator gazing at the painting”
(Reinhardt, 2008).
Foucault devoted the whole first chapter of his book The Order of Things (1970)
to analyzing the painting and investigating the function of the gaze in it. He gives
detailed explanations about the placement of the painter, use of the linear space,
the use of space and subjects, but most importantly of the gaze(s) of the specter,
the model(s), the painter. What he found noteworthy was how the “observer and
the observed take part in a ceaseless exchange. No gaze is stable…subject and
object, spectator and model reverse their roles into infinity” (Foucault, 1970, p. 5).
Similar to Lacan’s interpretation of the use of gaze in Holbein’s The Ambassadors
Foucault’s views suggest that “depending on the position of the spectator...as the
site of the gaze, or the point in the painting at which the object looks back at the
spectator and invites participation” (Reinhardt, 2008) plays with the subject/object
dichotomy in a sense that the artwork brings about an uneasy feeling of
surveillance which only exists is the space of the gaze of the Other. The object is
subjectified, the subject is objectified depending on the placement and the agent
of the gaze.
1.3 Summary: Between Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Foucault
This chapter attests to the role of the gaze in creating the gendered subject through
psychoanalysis and Foucauldian critical theory. As discussed above, the gaze
plays a significant role in the symbolic order through the formation of the ego and
the successful resolution of the castration anxiety in the psychoanalytic field as
well as the construction of a gendered subject as a discursive practice from a
Foucauldian perspective.
Although Lacan and Foucault come from different academic backgrounds and
study different areas, we can observe the undeniable parallels in terms of
17
their views on the role of the gaze in creating the subject. Just like how “Jean
Paul Sartre saw the gaze as the battleground for the self to define and redefine
itself” (Reinhardt, 2008) the Lacanian (in the field of the Other) and Foucauldian
(Panoptic) gazes converge in this very idea.
Foucault analyzes the effects of the gaze “by exposing its operations...in the
power/knowledge matrix” while Lacan studies the function of the gaze in forming
the identity through “focusing on the importance of the reciprocity implicit in le
regard for the subject-text[object] relationship” (Morin, 2001. P. 326). Similar to
the Lacanian view, in the Panopticism theory, “order exists submission of
everyone to an omnipresent and impenetrable gaze; we are seen yet cannot see”
(Reinhardt, 2008).
Despite the common belief that that the first is more interested in the internal and
libidinal processes of the human psyche, while the latter is more so on the power
and knowledge production of societies and norms, in the works of both Lacan and
Foucault, we see the following similar ideas:
-“We become aware of our self as subject only when confronted with the gaze
of the Other and become aware of our self as object. (ibid)
-“The gaze of the Other is outside our immediate control and the way the gaze
objectifies us robs us of our freedom as a subject”
(ibid)
-“…the gaze is not the vehicle through which the subject masters the object,
but a point in the Other that resists the mastery of vision.” (McGowan, 2008,
pp.11)
-“…the gaze may operate to captivate us by means of its elusiveness; [which]
may ultimately be maddening enough to force us to renounce our search for it
and symbolize our failure.” (Scott,2015)
There has been much debate about the convergence and divergence on the two
theoretical frameworks. More specifically, feminism and film theory have been
the grounds in which the parallels and the differences of the role of the gaze and
its scopic implications have been discussed in depth in the last four or five
decades. As the following chapter will demonstrate, whether the use of gaze
18
in theories of Lacan and Foucault were taken as the truths through which other
theories in feminism and film theory were established around or strongly rejected
untruths, they were without a doubt, greatly influential.
19
CHAPTER 2: CONTEMPORARY THEORY: THE FEMALE SUBJECT
AND THE MALE GAZE
2.1 Phallocentrism and Occulocentrism: The Feminist Take on the Subject
The previous chapter highlights the processes in which the gendered subject is
created in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis as well as Foucauldian theory.
In this chapter, I will aim to discuss the ways in which not only the theoreticians
named above, but how Western thought in general have been criticized from a
feminist point of view. Feminism is a meta-theory with a designated utopia in
which there is an equality of the sexes in terms of rights and power. It takes its
agency as a political means to fight oppression through historical investigation
and appropriation of adding updated, alternative values and routes to achieve them
in the real world. It is by no means a single, proposed truth but rather a vast
philosophy and movement, so it is important to limit the scope of this chapter to
feminist film theory. However, we must first understand feminist opposition to the
views we have summarized in the preceding chapter regarding the role of the gaze
in forming the gendered subject.
This chapter aims to provide a survey of feminist thought across works of Luce
Irigaray and Grontowski and Keller, regarding women’s subjective position in
relation to men in society and what role the act of ‘being looked at’ plays in this
sense. It is designed to provide an introduction into feminist film theory by
directing the attention to the signification of the visual process with regards to
sex.
2.1.1 The Female Subject
In studying the formation of the subject across different ideologies (specifically
psychoanalysis and Foucault) we can see that the common thread lies in the idea
that the subject is neither a whole consisted of its interior forces or drives, nor a
simple machine put together by the outside world; it is rather a combination of the
two. In fact, the “unified narrative of the self is something we acquire over time
through entry into the symbolic order of language and culture… through
20
processes of identification with social discourses we create an identity that
embodies an illusion of wholeness” (Barker, 2012, p.227). In feminist theory, we
can see an over-arching theme of accepting the ‘outside’ truths as regulatory
power structures similar to the views of Foucault. However, feminists like Julia
Kristeva and Judith Butler make use of psychoanalysis in trying to understand
how these “regulatory norms form a sexed subject in terms that establish the
indistinguishability of psychic and bodily formation” (Butler, 1993, p. 22).
Within the realm of feminism much debate has taken place between sexual
difference and biological determinism. Post-modern and post-structural feminists
have discredited the views that cannot be explained in terms of biology (Barker,
2012, p.292). Rather than an essentialist view of possessing certain set of genitalia
determining one’s gender, a combination of the discursive (production) and the
psychoanalytic (identification) models brings a common understanding of how
“anatomy is to be destiny not because of genetic determination but because bodily
differences are signifiers of sexual and social differentiation” (ibid, p. 304). It is
here that we must look deeper into the problems of phallocentrism and
occulocentrism specifically through the works of psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray as
well as feminist writers Evelyn Fox Keller and Christine Grontkowski.
In her reading of Freud in The Sex Which is Not One (1985), Irigaray finds that
that Freud classifies the clitoris as a “truncated penis” and that preceding the
castration phase “The little girl is… indeed a little man, and all her sexual drives
and pleasures, the masturbatory ones in particular, are in fact ‘masculine’” (p.35).
The problem begins in the fact that despite the girls’ masturbatory and pleasure
instincts are the same, her organ, unlike the phallus of the boy, is not visible;
hence, she argues that femininity is completely conceptualized in relation to
masculinity, or lack there of, specifically in the process of the castration complex.
She further elaborates on this in her book Speculum of the Other Woman (1985a):
“The gaze is at stake from the outset ... Now the little girl, the woman,
supposedly has nothing you can see…she shows nothing that is penisshaped
or could substitute for a penis ... This nothing, which actually
cannot well be mastered in the twinkling of an eye, might equally
21
well have acted as an inducement to perform castration upon an age-old
oculocentrism
It might have been interpreted as the intervention of a difference, of a
deferent, as a challenge to an imaginary…improperly regulated in terms of
sight ... Woman's castration is defined as her having nothing you can see,
as her having nothing. In her having nothing penile… That is to say, no
sex/organ that can be seen in a form capable of founding its reality,
reproducing its truth. Nothing to be seen is equivalent to having no thing.
No being and no truth. The contract, the collusion, between one sex/organ
and the victory won by visual dominance therefore leaves woman with her
sexual void" (p.47).
Irigaray’s main concern lies in the fact that as long as there is only one referent
(the male phallus) there is not a system of sexual difference, but merely a system
of opposition: male and non-male. Therefore, “a focus on sight or the gaze is
inadequate for formulating any useful account of the little girl's sexuality: that the
little girl's difference from the boy requires a different, non- visual approach”
(Storr, p.20). By putting sight first as men have been doing for centuries, Irigaray
argues that the source of pleasure for women have been put aside:
"Woman's desire has doubtless been submerged by the logic that has
dominated the West since the time of the Greeks. Within this logic, the
predominance of the visual, and of the discrimination and individualization
of form, is particularly foreign to female eroticism.
Woman takes pleasure more from touching than from looking, and her
entry into a dominant scopic economy signifies, again, her confinement to
passivity: she is to be the beautiful object of contemplation" (1985, p.25).
In their essay “The Mind’s Eye” (2004), Keller and Grontowski take the truth as
proposed by Iragaray et al. specifically that “vision is a phallic sense” (Keller and
Grontowski, p. 207) and survey the notion of looking above all the other senses
over the history of science. They provide details as to how vision has proven to
have two major roles (different than the rest of the senses) from the time of Plato
to the theories of Descartes and Newton: “the “objectifying” function of vision,
and the corresponding relegation of its communicative – one might even say
erotic – function” (ibid, p.220). They suggest that the sexual bias that has entered
22
this system lies in the communicative function and state that in the earlier Western
philosophy, predominantly Platonic Greek philosophy, the “functions of the visual
can be discerned in its metaphoric uses – a connective and a dissociative. Vision
connects us to truth as it distances us from the corporeal” (ibid, p.209). To open a
parenthesis, as time and science have progressed there was a “splitting, finally,
into functions of two different eyes, the body’s eye and the mind’s eye. This split
is paralleled by the division of the functions of science into the objectifiability and
knowability of nature.” (ibid, p.209)
Within the realm of scientific objectifiability two things are necessary:
1. The separation of object from subject6
2. Dematerialization of knowledge (prejudice, perception)
Through their archeological survey of the role of sight in the context of science
and philosophy, Keller and Grontkowski draw-up the idea that the very methods
and self-evident truths which we take for granted are in fact products of the ideas
embedded very deeply in these disciplines. Throughout the text, their main
concerns are to question how these truths came about and whether a different way
of shaping vision is different in the sciences. As knowledge is equated with vision
and thus is a phallic notion, both in their lexicon as well as in those they take as
references, they separate how desire is then left out in these methods. They
conclude that:
“The net result of such disembodiment is the same as that implied in the
radical division between subject and object assumed to be necessary for
scientific knowledge: Once again, knowledge is safe- guarded from desire.
That the desire from which knowledge is so safeguarded is so intimately
associated with the female (for social as well as psychological reasons)
suggests an important impetus which our patriarchal culture provides for
such disembodiment” (p.220).
6
It is interesting to look at this like the mirror stage in Lacanian psychoanalysis as well
as the enunciation techniques used by Varda, mentioned in Chapter 3. These are focused
on engaging the spectator through questioning the plot and character through a
contemplative dialectic process rather than identifying with the protagonist as suggested
by Mulvey.
23
To conclude, a combination of the preceding ideas of sight being a phallic sense,
and the sense of sight being at the forefront over the other senses proves the
problematic utilization of the gaze in a phallocentric, patriarchal society in which
women only exist as the object. Laura Mulvey takes these ideas as reference
points and elaborates further on the male gaze through the use of psychoanalysis,
as we will see in the following section.
2.2 The Male Gaze
In her groundbreaking essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, first
published in 1975 in Screen magazine, Laura Mulvey defined the structure of
psychoanalytic film theory from a feminist perspective. Parallel to this, John
Berger’s book titled Ways of Seeing, originally published in 1972, outlined
theories of gaze throughout the visual arts including painting, advertisement and
film. In examining both of these prominent texts, we can see the commonalities of
psychoanalytic and contemporary feminist theories reflected in the examples they
both provide under the roof of the coined term ‘the male gaze’. This section of
this thesis is where the previous theoretical works mentioned come together for us
to let us have a wholesome understanding of “the function of woman in forming
the patriarchal unconscious” and how this “has structured film form” (Mulvey,
2006, p. 342).
The term ‘scopophilia’ is used by Mulvey repeatedly through her essay.
Originally created by Freud, this term is defined as follows in the American
Psychological Association’s dictionary:
n. sexual pleasure derived from watching others in a state of nudity,
undressing, or engaging in sexual activity. If scopophilia is persistent, the
condition is essentially voyeurism. Also called ‘scoptophilia.’
Although this drive, according to Mulvey, “continues to exist as the erotic basis
24
for pleasure in looking at another person as object” (ibid, p.344) it is by no means
reciprocal in nature, between men and women. So far as to say: “going far beyond
highlighting a woman’s ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’, cinema builds the way she is to be
looked at into the spectacle itself” (ibid, p.351). Berger is of the same opinion
here as he states “women are depicted in a quite different way from men…
because the ‘ideal’ spectator is always assumed to be male and the image of the
woman is designed to flatter him” (2008, p. 64).
Mulvey discusses that the function of the woman in forming the manifestation of
phallocentric scopophillia happens in two stages: the symbolization of the
castration threat by her absence of a penis and the child she bears into the
Symbolic. In her view, in the patriarchal culture, woman can only exist as the
male other and “in relation to castration and cannot transcend it” (Mulvey, 2016,
p.342).
As discussed in Chapter 1, the Mirror Stage holds significance in the
identification process of the subject. As Mulvey revisits the Mirror Stage, she
draws a parallel between how the baby recognizes “his mirror image to be more
complete, more perfect than he experiences his own body” and how then, this
superior image which is “re-introjected as an ego ideal, gives rise to the future
generation of identification with others” with the experience the spectator has of
identifying with the world on the cinema screen (ibid, p.345). She claims that the
fascination the spectator feels towards the characters in film represents a
“temporary loss of ego while simultaneously reinforcing the ego… (I forgot who I
am and where I was) is nostalgically reminiscent of that pre-subjective moment of
image recognition” (ibid). Therefore, cinema, through the construction of its
characters creates ego ideals for the spectator to identify with in the imaginary
world. By identifying with the fictional characters, who are idealized versions of
active protagonists in the case of male main characters the spectators feel whole,
or like the image the baby sees in the mirror, more perfect and powerful than their
25
real world selves.
As described above the first function of cinema, according to Mulvey, is a
scopophilic one as it basically stems from “pleasure in using another person as an
object of sexual stimulation through sight” while the second function is a
narcissistic one as it relates to the constitution of the ego and comes from
identification with the images (characters) that are seen on the screen. Like Keller
and Grontkowski, Mulvey comes to the idea that, like science, film disembodies
the subject from object and through its different processes (mostly through
language) disembodies desire from knowledge. According to her, both functions
of cinema, mentioned above, are pivotal as they help in “creating the imagized,
eroticized image of the world that forms the perception of the subject and makes a
mockery of empirical objectivity” (ibid, p.346).
To dig a little deeper, the role of desire should be noted in this context. The
following passages show the point where Mulvey and Berger’s ideas converge in
this topic:
“Desire, [is] born with language, but its point of reference…the traumatic
moment of its birth: the castration complex. Hence the look, pleasurable in
form, can be threatening in content, and it is woman as
representation/image that crystallizes this paradox. In a world ordered by
sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male
and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to
the female figure which is styled accordingly… so that they can connote
to-be-looked-atness… she holds the look, plays to and signifies male
desire” (ibid, p.346).
***
“Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch
themselves being looked at. The surveyor of woman is herself as male: the
surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object- and most
particularly an object of vision: a sight” (Berger, 2008, p. 47).
The undeniable commonality in all of the texts mentioned thus far in terms of the
active/passive, subject/object roles come together quite clearly here: the
psychoanalytic gaze beginning with the Oedipal stage, castration anxiety and the
26
mirror stage creates a gendered subject in which the self is formed through an
identification process by seeing. This initial gaze(s) then becomes the tool to
repress desire as mentioned by Irigaray and Keller and Grontkowski, and attain
order through language in the Symbolic order both by creating the docile body
that Foucault talks of and creating the ideal image the female is to identify with as
a subject. As woman is representative of desire (ie. the mother, objet petit a) the
gaze becomes oriented towards her as the object of desire. As her image connotes
and reminds of a lack, the castrated phallus, she poses a constant threat.
Discursive and normative powers then become a part of this formation in a
Panoptic society where women are even more succumbed to the gaze of the other
as something they internalize and carry within them as described quite explicitly
by Berger as follows:
To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined
space, into the keeping of men…at the cost of a woman’s self being split
into two. A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost
accompanied by her own image of herself…. From earliest childhood she
has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually.
And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as
the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman.
Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being
appreciated as herself by another. (ibid,p. 46)
Much like Foucault’s ideas on a Panoptic prison, the metaphoric Panoptic gaze
becomes a tool for the normative patriarchal society in which women are gazed at
both by men and by themselves from their imagined vantage point of men and recreate
themselves accordingly, on an ongoing basis. As Berger discusses in Ways
of Seeing this becomes a cyclic process in which the power structure produces
what it means to be a woman through surveillance and self-surveillance.
Mainstream cinema, according to Mulvey, does this on a larger scale, through
narrative and in combination with the Lacanian gaze in the field of the Other on a
gendered dichotomy.
27
2.2.1 The Three-Fold Look
Mulvey’s theory, in addition to the phallocentric scopophillia that cinema bares,
consists of a male gaze that is three-fold: the look of the spectator watching the
film (presumed to be male), that of the characters within the film, and that of the
director/camera as it records the film. The female characters in the film function
as “erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic object for
the spectator within the auditorium” (ibid, P.347).
Through what she calls the “active/passive heterosexual division of labour”
Mulvey describes the male in film, a representation of the ruling ideology and
portrays the “man’s role as the active one of forwarding the story, making things
happen” (ibid). By creating leading, active, controlling male characters with
whom the audience can identify with, directors and filmmakers make sure these
main characters also become the surrogate of the spectator as the bearer of the
look. In doing so, Mulvey contests that the “male movie star’s glamorous
characteristics…more complete, more powerful ideal ego conceived in the
original moment of recognition in front of the mirror. The character in the story
can make things happen and control events better than the subject/spectator, just
as the image in the mirror was more in control of motor coordination” (ibid).
Berger shares similar ideas that in art and representation, “man’s presence is
dependent upon the promise of power which he embodies…but the pretense is
always towards a power which he exercises on others” (2008, P. 45). To underline
this notion, he points out that for example in the European nude art-form, “the
painters and spectator/owners were usually men and the persons treated as objects,
usually women” (ibid, p.63).
The female character/object on the other hand, “is isolated, glamorous, on display,
sexualized” but the woman also signifies something much more uncanny: the lack
of a phallus “implying a threat of castration and hence unpleasure” (ibid). This
28
threat, this anxiety of castration that she evokes is reminiscent of what is essential
for the entrance into the Symbolic order and the Law of the Father, yet it needs to
be resolved for the spectator to escape from this anxiety. Through the examples
she provides, Mulvey claims that the male unconscious (the character in the
narrative, as the surrogate of the spectator) has two ways of escaping this anxiety:
1. “Demystifying the mystery of the female by either investigating, undoing her
followed by a punishment or saving of the guilty object”
To apply this in film, the narrative usually directs the female character to fall in
love with the male protagonist, “become his property, losing her outward
glamorous characteristics, her generalized sexuality, her showgirl connotations;
her eroticism is subjected to the male star alone.” By possessing the now
unraveled, disarmed threat the male protagonist can ease this anxiety and “by
means of identification with him, through participation in his power, the spectator
can indirectly possess her too” (ibid).
2. “complete disavowal of castration” is made possible by turning the object into
a fetish so that “it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous (hence overvaluation,
the cult of the female star). This second avenue, fetishistic scopophilia, builds up
the physical beauty of the object, transforming it into something satisfying in
itself” (ibid, p.348).
Whether it is to sadistically subject them to power or voyeuristically to the gaze
and fetishize them, both these routes, as Mulvey describes them, ultimately turn
the woman to the object by overcoming her threat.
Furthermore, specifically in some of the Alfred Hitchcock movies that are
referenced in the text, there is a patriarchal, phallocentric “shallow mask of
ideological correctness – the man is on the right side of the law, the woman on the
wrong…he also sees her as a guilty intruder exposed by a dangerous man
threatening her with punishment, and thus finally saves her” (ibid, p.350)
29
According to Mulvey, “The Hitchcock hero has… all the attributes of the
patriarchal superego... he can have his cake and eat it.”
Berger claims that these patriarchal, unequal dynamics of the gaze are “so deeply
embedded in our culture that [they] still structure the consciousness of many
women and [women] do to themselves what men do to them. They survey, like
men, their own femininity…today the attitudes and values, which informed that
tradition, are expressed through other more widely diffused media.” (p. 63).
Mulvey’s writing provides a deeper understanding of this through how the cinema
plays on this notion, through using the mechanisms and formations of the
scopophilic instinct (voyeurism) and the ego libido (identification). Her work is
significant for it draws on Lacan’s framework yet diverges from it on a number of
points. As I will elaborate on below, a purely psychoanalytic criticism of
Mulvey’s essay can be drawn from two major factors: the correct positioning of
desire and the lack of the mention of the Real while associating the gaze with only
the Imaginary and the Symbolic orders.
2.3 Questioning the Male Gaze
Many film theorists, feminists and critics have questioned the validity and depth
of the Lacanian Film Theory put forward by Mulvey in the last few decades. One
of the major problems of this “theoretical universality” due to the breadth of its
claims, was that it was “effectively insulated from sustained logical and empirical
analysis by a cloak of political correctness” (Carroll, 2003, p.367). Theorists like
Carroll critiqued Lacanian Film Theory because it lacked empirical data to verify
its claims, and rather produced a hypothetical spectator that existed only in theory.
Although the empirical implications and shortcomings of the Lacanian Film
Theory may be of importance, many scholars have been discussing the true
political/ideological construction of the narrative of a truly feminist cinema7. In
the last few decades, feminists have taken on the prospect of a less phallocentric,
7
Some of which are Smelik, Kaplan, Studlar etc.
30
less patriarchal cinema which creates meaning through the use of different tools,
rather than recreating a previously formulated, embedded image of the female
subject. In other words, they have been discussing how to create a ‘mind’s eye’
rather than a corporeal one when reformulating the woman in film through the
gaze of the spectator, the filmmaker and the characters in film. In this
deconstruction and rebuilding process psychoanalysis can be and is still utilized
but it is hardly the only tool.
Mulvey’s preposition in achieving a feminist cinema was for women to create a
counter-male gaze, by flipping the features of the patriarchal system. In her book
Women and Film (1983), Director and author E. Ann Kaplan argued that film has
taken a crucial role in creating a history for our capitalist social and interpersonal
structures. She claimed that both psychoanalysis and film “support the status quo;
… they are inserted in history, linked to the particular moment of bourgeouis
capitalism that gave both their birth” (p.24). Because of this, Kaplan digests that it
is “extremely important for women to use psychoanalysis as a tool, since it will
unlock the secrets of our socialization within patriarchy” (ibid). In this text, she
carefully aims to answer the following questions with the use of a psychoanalytic
framework:
- Is the gaze necessarily Male?
- Could we structure things so that women own the gaze?
- Would women want to own the gaze?
- What does it mean to be a female spectator?
Kaplan draws attention to certain genres like family melodramas being designed
towards the identification of women more than others. She agrees with Mulvey
that, in this form, the objectification and surrender of women are almost always
prominent under the veil of heteronormative family structure and questions why
women then find this objectification and surrender pleasurable. She identifies that
much like the male view of the Oedipal process, the woman also knows that she is
31
the “recipient of male desire, passively appearing, rather than acting. Her sexual
pleasure in this position can thus be constructed only around her objectification…
given the male structuring around sadism, the girl may adopt a corresponding
masochism” (ibid, p.26).
Through research done on women’s fantasies, Kaplan suggests that it is not only
the male gaze that embodies the active/passive, subject/object positioning but also
that “the woman places herself as either passive recipient of male desire or, as
watching a woman who is passive recipient of male desires and sexual actions”
(ibid). In other words, she confers that in western civilization, the dominancesubmission
patterns are a part of both male and female fantasies rather than just
male. She finds it problematic that even in films where the female characters are
dominant and male characters are the object of the woman’s gaze (where the roles
are reversed per say), the woman than “loses her traditionally feminine
characteristics in so doing- not those of attractiveness but rather of kindness,
humaneness, motherliness. She is now often cold, driving, ambitious,
manipulating, just like men whose position she has usurped” (ibid, p.29). This
flipping of the sort then, is not a revolt but rather a way of keeping the structure
intact; even when women gaze at men, they do not possess the gaze, meaning that
the female gaze is not objectifying.
So then, if it is possible to create a remedy of a truly female cinema or the female
gaze, it is not enough to subvert the roles in the narrative. A real feminist cinema
needs to step away from the stereotypical male and female roles, or stay clear of
creating a counter-cinema in which the same structures remain even if flipped.
However, she is perplexed by the idea of taking away the pleasure aspect when
reformulating a politically/ideologically even cinema.
2.3.1 Desire, the Real and the Gaze
Since it first surfaced in the writings of Mulvey et al. in the 1970s, Lacanian Film
Theory has been criticized for the “its conceptual arrogance…the very breadth of
32
its claims- its theoretical universality.” (McGowan, 2007, p.5) However, certain
theorists such as Todd McGowan, who has written extensively on this topic,
criticized Mulvey’s theory from a different point of view. In this view, the
problem is not that Lacanian psychoanalysis is an invalid frame when studying
film form and its proclivities in terms of gender inequality but rather that Mulvey,
et al’s ideas have proven to divert from original Lacanian thought on the gaze.
The solution is not to disengage from psychoanalysis to understand the
political/ideological apparatus of film but to stay loyal to the original Lacanian
theory and to stay away from the “Foucaldinization” of Lacan’s gaze (Copjec,
1994, p.19). He elaborates, in agreement with Copjec, that in Mulvey’s theory
“the filmic experience is an experience of power over the object and when we
desire in the cinema, we desire to dominate” and finds this concept closer to the
understanding of desire through power which is closer to the ideas of Foucault
and Nietzsche rather than those of Lacan. To return to Foucault: let us note once
again that his main theory circled around the idea of subject formation by using
discourse as a power tool to produce docile bodies. However, some of Foucault’s
ideas mentioned in Chapter 1 such as the Panoptic gaze and the lack of
reciprocity, the interchangeability of subject and object depending on the position
of the gaze as he discusses regarding Las Meninas are examples that are parallel
to the Big Other in Lacanian psychoanalysis. Here, we must avoid getting
confused by these two positions as binary opposites, but rather look at where they
converge: namely the role of the gaze in subject formation. Thus it is important to
note that while we borrow from Foucault’s work, what we are trying to stay loyal
to as our main framework of criticism and for providing an alternative, more
politically correct gaze in film is Lacanian psychoanalysis, perhaps even more so
than Mulvey is able to do in her essay.
McGowan’s analysis of the gaze in accordance with film theory is a
comprehensive one which includes the basis of the philosophical work behind it
(ie. Lacan, Foucault, Freud, Sartre), the actual writings of the authors of Screen in
the 1970s (Mulvey et al.) as well as the critics who have been trying to change
33
this theory who came afterwards (ie. Kaplan, Copjec, Studler). The evidence he
provides suggests two major problems with this theory above all: the correct
positioning of desire and the lack of the mention of the Real while associating the
gaze with only the Imaginary and the Symbolic orders.
Similar to McGowan, Clifford Manlove’s reading indicates that in Lacanian
theory, there is a split between the unconscious and the conscious. This split
“reveals the existence of a register prior to the symbolic and imaginary registers:
the real… [it] is the result of a primary trauma or loss: castration anxiety is
secondary, a result of a fear of the return of the real” (2007, p.91). Manlove
claims that in films like Vertigo the gaze offers a brush-up, an encounter with the
Real as it signifies getting too close to this uncanny feeling.
When we discuss the role of film as a tool for imposing ideology, we must
understand that “film here had a precise role: to provide the imaginary lure
necessary for subjects to accept their subjection. Hence, film became the
handmaiden of ideology, its imaginary supplement.”(McGowan, 2010, xvi) In
doing so, the signifier in the film becomes the tool for the subjects to relate to (in
Mulvey’s theory, identify with). The problem with this lies in two major points;
each spectator relates to the signifier differently and there is a major blank space
between the ideology (signifier) and subject (signified). According to McGowan,
the “symbolic order continually comes up against a barrier that disrupts its smooth
functioning- a barrier that Lacan calls the Real….[this is] the role that failure
plays in the effective functioning of the signifier”(ibid).
To elaborate further, the point in which the signifier fails to impose the ideologythrough
narrative- onto the subjects (the spectator) is the very point, the very void
that Lacan calls the Real. The Real, as defined in Chapter 1, is the “indication of
incompleteness of the symbolic order…a gap in social structure…language’s
inability to say it all, to speak the whole truth” (McGowan, 2007, p.3). This point
of failure is the point through the subject can enter his/her desire, it is the only
place for true subjectivity. Without these cracks in the system, ideology,
34
language or the symbolic order cannot function, improve or have any interaction
with its objects. As we will see in the following chapter, or as Manlove describes
films like Vertigo, an encounter with the Real in the narrative of film can help the
spectator truly question the ideology or break it.
McGowan’s biggest criticism of Lacanian Film theory lies in this non-mention of
the Real as it relates to the gaze. He believes that Lacan’s views on the gaze are
not those he initially mentions when defining the mirror stage but those he later
develops in his writings such as the sardine can anecdote and Holbein’s skull in
The Ambassadors (Lacan 1977, 1998). He contends that because Lacan sees the
gaze as something that is in the field of the object rather than the subject, it is not
an active process but rather a glitch in the visual field; “but as an object the gaze
acts to trigger our desire visually and as such it what Lacan calls an objet petit a
or an object-cause of desire. There is, according to Lacan, a form of the objet petit
a that corresponds to each of the drives. The gaze is the objet petit a of the scopic
drive” (ibid, p.6). What is critical in this concept is that the objet petit a only
exists as a lack, because it is the cause of desire. So in a filmic sense, the gaze of
the spectator only exists insofar as the signifier is out of reach. The following
passage summarizes quite well, what McGowan means by this:
“As the objet petit a in the visual field, the gaze is the point around which
the gaze organizes itself…The gaze compels our look because it appears to
offer access to the unseen, to the reverse side of the visible. It promises the
subject the secret of the Other, but this secret exists only insofar as it
remains hidden. The subject cannot uncover the secret of the gaze, yet it
marks the point at which the visual field takes the subject’s desire into
account” (ibid).8
When the subject (the spectator) is exposed to the Real in cinema, he or she is
traumatized. However, because it is the failure of the symbolic order to explain
everything, the subject is also freed from the constraints of ideology and finds a
space to enter his/her objet petit a and truly manifest a subjectivity.
8
This is exactly the type of film-making Agnes Varda propogates as I will demonstrate in
Chapter 3.
35
2.4 Summary
While Chapter 1 defined the role of the gaze in the formation of the subject and its
relation to the object, Chapter 2 was an overview of the utilization of the gaze in
film theory and its implications. Lacanian Film Theory has become politically
problematic with the subject-object relationship becoming oppressive, as roles are
assigned to gendered subjects. Critics who came after Mulvey protested the use of
psychoanalysis, the breadth and the arrogance of the theory, its lack of empirical
data about the spectator but for the purpose of the thesis, I have focused
specifically on the criticisms of this theory relating to the feminist and
psychoanalytic shortcomings of it.
Through understanding the missing or wrong parts of Lacanian Film Theory while
still staying within this framework, we can seek to answer the question of
providing a better alternative: a Female Gaze in which the preconditioned
formulas are reformulated and ideology that the narrative provides can be
interactive, updated and politically correct. To do this, as we have seen in
Feminist writers’ like Kaplan’s as well as McGowan’s psychoanalytic analyses,
we must redirect our attention to how to place the female in the narrative to ensure
subjectivity, how to encircle the Lacanian Real through the placement of desire
and to provide a different model for the spectator to enter the realm of subjectivity
instead of identification and voyeurism. The next chapter will be an investigation
into this possibility through a study of female filmmaker Agnes Varda’s highly
influential and revered cinema.
36
CHAPTER 3: FEMALE SUBJECTIVITY IN VARDA
It is said that analyzing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this
article. The alternative is the thrill that comes from leaving the past behind without
rejecting it, transcending outworn or oppressive forms, or daring to break with
normal pleasurable expectations in order to conceive a new language of desire.
(Mulvey, 2006, P.344)
I wish to put the framework mentioned in the previous chapters to work in this
final chapter of this thesis. I begin by asking questions like: How does Varda
subvert the male gaze, if at all? How can Varda’s films be read from the
perspective of feminist film theory that draws on Lacan? How does Varda
position the Real in her films? The ultimate aim is to answer the following
question with evidence: ‘Can a truly female gaze like that of Varda’s disarm a
patriarchal ideology through film?’ As we have seen in the previous chapter, the
use of psychoanalysis, more specifically of Lacanian thought, was at the basis of a
feminist criticism of mainstream cinema. Instead of ignoring or discrediting it as a
tool, we must adhere to the same framework in finding the answer to this
question. Certain directors and filmmakers have taken various positions in terms
of subverting this male gaze in search of finding a better alternative for a more
ideologically just cinema. Agnes Varda is, without a question, one of the pioneers
of this movement.
Agnes Varda can be identified by many words: feminist, filmmaker, artist,
surrealist, photographer, documentarian, pioneer and one of the founding
members of the French film movement, the ‘nouvelle vague’. Varda has received
many awards, including the Honorary Palm D’Or and Honorary Academy Award
and has been a ubiquitously influential figure in the sphere of cinema. Her style,
her narrative and her use of a unique gaze have been discussed by many theorists
and critics. Most of her films have been studied and dissected to provide a new
theory of film. In this section, I will focus mostly on three of her most profound
37
films: Vagabond (1985), The Gleaners and I (2000) and Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962)
in trying to decipher the possibility of a truly female gaze and the features it may
carry. My aim is to examine whether Varda’s creation of a female subjectivity
through a female gaze(three-fold, as mentioned in the previous chapter) can
provide modern filmmakers an example of a truly feminist cinema, not by
denying the structures and tools of the existing system, but by re-appropriating
them. The point is not only to flip the existing structure or to oppose it, but to
create alternative form, style and approach to the existing order.
The three films mentioned above are essentially road movies of women in search
of their identities. In Cleo from 5 to 7, we follow along the path of a singer/actor
Cleo through Paris, in search of finding her true identity in the midst of an
anxious two hours as she awaits the results for tests from her doctor to let her
know if she has cancer. The film opens with an iconic tarot-reading scene in
which we are introduced to the anxiety of the main character, the tarot reader tells
Cleo she will go through a great transformation. This is the only color shot in the
otherwise black-white movie9.
We subsequently follow along Cleo’s tour of Paris, encountering different
characters such as her assistant Angele, her boyfriend Jose, her composer and
lyricist friends, her friend Dorothee, Dorothee’s lover Raoul and finally a soldier
named Antoine visiting Paris and is about to return to the war front shortly.
Almost each of these encounters takes place in a different setting including a café,
a theater, a boutique, Cleo’s apartment, the park, an art gallery and the hospital
and they are all embedded with elements of the transformation that is taking place
in Cleo from an object into a subject. The film is divided into chapters that are
boldly highlighted via text headings at the beginning of each chapter and they are
named after the characters involved and the minutes out of the 1 hour and 30
minutes the narrative is supposed to fit into.
In Vagabond, we witness the last few days of a young nomad named Mona
9
The reason behind this will be further mentioned in the last section of this chapter.
38
roaming freely, through the French countryside, not running from anything
specific, nor running toward anything specific but eventually she is found dead in
a ditch. The characters she encounters are as influenced by her as she is by them.
This film is also divided into chapters with encounters of different residents of the
countryside as well as static interview shots of those who came in contact with
her. There is a series of tracking shots on the road, Mona walking that interrupts
the sequences with other characters. Phil Powrie points out that Varda wanted the
film to “focus on Mona’s journey, and that the journey should be punctuated by
meetings. In other words, social interaction had to be subordinate to a relentless
drift” (2011, p. 72). Through this drift, we meet the characters and events that
brush up on Mona’s life in the final weeks leading up to her death.
On the road, she finds odd jobs working at a car wash, a goat farm, she meets
house squatters, stays with an Algerian farm-worker, meets a professor trying to
save dying trees in the area, enjoys drinks with an elderly lady while being envied
by her house maid and is offered to act in a porn film by a group of nomads and
thugs under the influence. We never discover Mona’s whole truth; only that she is
a vagrant woman who refuses to confine herself to living in a social or symbolic
order. We don’t know what happened to her, why she left home or even what
caused her death. This is true for Varda as the narrator of the story and the
interviewer of her encounters. “Mona eludes Varda just as she eludes everyone,
yet the desire to know, and to tell, is deeply felt by all…Varda simultaneously
foregrounds and disturbs the invisible enunciation of the patriarchal narrative”
(Flitterman-Lewis, 1996, p.289). 10
Finally, in Gleaners and I, we join various types of ‘collectors’ through Paris and
the French countryside constantly comparing them to the gleaners from the
previous centuries who collected crops in large fields. This documentary also
10
Mona is a unique character because her character represents what happens when one
totally disengages from the Panoptic gaze. She is not concerned with consequences or
threats, she does not self-regulate based on norms or relations she has with others,
whether positive or negative.
39
includes Agnes Varda herself first as a gleaner collecting materials in search for
her own identity, then eventually collecting stories through filming, as she does.
Inspired by a 19th century painting by Jean-Francois Millet, Varda creates this
documentary in awe of those who collect crops from the agricultural fields due to
poverty, or urban scavengers including a teacher with a Master’s degree who
teaches immigrants how to read, artists who scout the streets for materials they
can use and a restaurant-owner whose ancestors were gleaners in the past. Varda’s
own persona as a gleaner is integrated into the documentary as she portrays
herself as a collector of random memorabilia; heart-shaped potatoes she comes
across while filming the gleaners on the field, an accidental shot of nature as she
leaves her camera lens open as well as intentional narrative construction such as
filming glimpses of different parts of her body and home while narrating
memories about her life. Like the other two films, the film is structured into
episodes and subjects. Varda, interviews collectors of all sorts and comes into the
shot from time to time, exposing herself as a collector too.
What follows is an analysis of how Varda reappropriates female subjectivity
through a female gaze through the three areas Mulvey defines, with a unique use
of time and space and a correct positioning of desire and the Lacanian Real.
3.1 The Gaze Recreated
In analyzing the scholars and theorists who study filmmakers like Varda, and
trying to decipher the makings of a truly feminist cinema, it is evident that we
must understand the dichotomist positions of subject and object embedded in a
patriarchal, phallocentric cinema and steer away from them. According to Phil
Powrie, Varda does exactly this, by utilizing a “nomadic gaze” which
“...undermines the binary rather than confirming it…her cinema crosses
boundaries between the object and subject to create the space of the imaginary.”
Powrie suggests that instead of fixating the spectator into identification with the
protagonist, Varda employs a non-stationary gaze, which wanders back and forth
40
between object and subject, between contrasting figures, colors or even
forms/genres within each film. For example her use of black and white in Cleo,
her collage or drama and documentary in the Gleaners and I and the characters
encountered in both Vagabond and the Gleaners and I are all great examples of
the ‘nomadic gaze’.
The spectator is set up to enjoy questioning and participating by actively engaging
in the narrative rather than identifying with the protagonist. Varda’s use of stark
binaries such as “woman seen to woman seeing, enclosed and open space, still
and moving images” (Powrie, 2011, p.71) are all elements of her authorial gaze
that is nomadic. Powrie’s ideas will be further investigated in the next section.
Varda’s cinema, is a true testament of the subversion of the three-fold look coined
by Mulvey, as mentioned in Chapter Two. Her films are created and shot through
her authorship and view, the lead characters are all women yet not just objects but
subjects as well and the spectator is never presumed to be male or identify with
the divisive forces of activity/passivity embedded in prescribed gender roles. She
defies the traditional narrative rules firstly by placing women at the center of each
of these films yet, although they are central characters in the story, none of these
women are fetishized or saved/defeated as threats by sadistic power structures as
Mulvey suggests. They are designed to spark interest, decipher and even get
disliked at times by the spectator. Also, secondary characters are designed this
way as well, regardless of their sex.
3.1.1 Directorship and Narrative
At the very beginning of Vagabond, after the spectator is introduced to Mona’s
body in the ditch, Varda’s narration of the story begins with questions like “I
wonder, do those who knew her as a child still think about her?” followed by
statements like “She impressed those she met last: they spoke of her as if she
wasn’t dead, or they didn’t know she had died. I know little about her myself, but
41
it almost seems to me that she came from the sea.”
By positioning herself some where far from the ultimate source of truth as the
filmmaker, Varda “marks herself as distributor of the visions we are about to see,
but yet retains no power over those visions—she simply offers them to us for our
own active judgment. This is a process that renders enunciation dialectical, calls
into question the text’s controlling force”(Flitterman-Lewis, 1996, p.244) As we
can see in the following quote by Varda herself, this authorial stance is designed
to be dialectical and investigative rather than authoritative, intentionally:
The artist is one who shows you the feeling without telling you what
you have to feel. I love films that allow the filmmakers not to decide
what is good and bad, not to make statements. (Harkness, 1986)
By establishing herself as the ‘auteur’ filmmaker Varda plays with the gaze in all
aspects of film. The characters, the narrative and the room the gaze leaves for the
spectator to place his or her desire into the film as the gaze moves around
nomadically all help with this cause equally.
As we have discussed the role of discourse in creating the subject from a
Foulcauldian perspective, the discourse (narrative in this case) that Varda creates
in her films produces a female alternative to the prevailing patriarchal ideology.
From a Lacanian perspective on the other hand, “the gaze is understood as an
omnipresent space external to the subject. Men do not own the gaze any more
than women do, but in Hollywood film the male look transfers its own lack to the
female subject, and attempts to pass itself off as the gaze”(Smelik, 1998, p.86).
This is not true in any of the mentioned films of Varda’s. In Vagabond, the story
of Mona is not at all created and dispersed through voyeuristic sadism or
narcissistic identification, but rather as a quest for truth in the midst of a culturally
constructed femininity. The things that happen to Mona, the characters she
encounters are all representative of different functions. The narrative is a mixture
of documentary truths of the French countryside and fictional situations that show
42
possibilities. Sandy Flitterman-Lewis describes this quite well:
“This manner of “filming as a woman” is precisely what Varda powerfully
achieves with her remarkable 1985 feature film. Sans toil ni loi
(Vagabond), for it is here that she brings to bear a distinctly feminine
authorial voice in exploring the social articulation of vision and (feminine)
identity… it resumes all of the issues and discursive strategies associated
with Varda’s work: The basic sense of dialectics that informs her films; the
interest in narrational processes that blend documentary and fictional
modes; the narrative fragmentation and temporal dislocation of
episodically structured texts; the production of a critically engaged
spectator; the redirection of the gaze into a dispersed erotics of looking; the
sociological investigation of a cultural milieu; the concern with women’s
issues and the representation of the female body. And precisely because of
this, it is here in Vagabond that we see most clearly what has arguably
been Varda’s central concern all along: constructions of “the feminine” as
they are visually and culturally inscribed” (1996, p.243)
A similar case is apparent in Cleo where although the protagonist can be
perceived as a fetishized object of desire, the plot and the narrative are designed to
deconstruct this character as she unravels to find her true subjectivity. Varda’s
auteurship in this film, creates, shatters, recreates a stance where the spectator is
to witness and participate in the formation of an autonomous female subject with
her very own desires and questions in the face of death.
Themes of physical beauty and fear of the lack of identity are omnipresent
throughout the visual and narrative structures of the whole film. The scene in
Cleo’s bedroom including the encounters with her assistant, her boyfriend and the
musicians who have composed songs for her musical career, or the scene in the
boutique when Cleo is purchasing a hat are great examples of the type of
superficial narrative Varda sets out to decipher. The sequence in the apartment
“investigates the expectations that others have of Cleo and reveal that everyone
considers her through her lens of attractiveness” (Neroni, 2016, p.106). The props
and the demeanor she puts on here are deemed meaningless to her as she has the
urge to leave it all behind abruptly and wander off onto the streets of Paris, in
what we later find out to be a path to her self-discovery. Therefore, as discussed in
the previous section, this scene marks a “turning point in Cleo’s ability to see how
43
the markers of beauty that provide social status also erase her subjectivity” (ibid).
Similarly, Varda’s use of mirrors throughout the film symbolizes the phases of
Cleo’s discovery of identity. In the very beginning, right after the fortuneteller
and through the first half of the movie Cleo encounters mirrors in various settings.
With each encounter the mirrors are positioned differently or are distorted by
certain obstacles such as the Chinese Letters of a restaurant in the street, or the
shattered pieces of a mirror that Cleo’s friend Dorothee accidentally breaks right
after they go to the cinema. Each of these scenes are important to point out in the
over all theme of equating beauty with femininity as Varda “employs
mirrors…because they are metaphorically at the center of the feminist question
about ideal female beauty and its relationship to individual women…[she]
contends that our relationship to mirrors can change”(ibid, 122). Strategic tools
like this are examples of the many tools Varda employs to design the visual and
the discursive narrative, the point of view of the spectator trying to find a sense of
belonging along with the protagonist.
Varda also actively retains different “styles of filmmaking often within a single
film…she often combines narrative conventions with documentary conventions or
with performance art tropes, and the effect is that she confounds genre
expectations”(Neroni, 2016, p.94). By doing this, she designs her films for
“…privileging spectator engagement over identification. Varda is not as interested
in the spectator’s identifying with a character in a particular way as she is intent
on the spectator engaging in actively seeing the links between the contradictions
or the mixed styles and shots”(ibid). The film-within-the-film sequence in Cleo is
a great example of a dark, absurd comedy popping up in the middle of an
otherwise gloom melodrama. Another example is Agnes’ own story of collecting
stories and objects such as the clock without the hands or flashes of images of her
aging hands and her whitening hair embedded in a more dramatic set of sequences
throughout the otherwise objective, documentary nature of The Gleaners and I.
Through juxtapositions like this, “this cinema creates form that is subservient
44
to content… the spectator learns as much from the form as from the movement of
the plot”; in Cleo, in particular, “these formal juxtapositions continually highlight
the tension within ideal beauty, between looking and being looked at” (ibid,
p.127). Varda’s use of the gaze and her empowerment of the spectator as well as
the characters to engage in different types of looking are what set her work
opposite that of the mainstream, patriarchal ideology in cinema. Each of these
techniques and plays in aesthetic, form, plot are evidence of an auteur cinema in
which feminist values are embedded by subverting the pre-existing male gaze of
the director. The other routes, as suggested by Mulvey of course, are the main
characters of the films and the spectator assumed to identify with these
protagonists who are the active ones moving the story forward.
3.1.2 Female Characters as Subjects
In each of the above mentioned films, “the woman in the mobile and eccentric
center is Varda herself, or versions of her, and each of these films is structured
around the gaze of a woman, and the roaming of that woman as she gazes”
(Powrie, 2011, p.78). Varda uses female characters as the central figure in most of
her films. In these three films, Mona, Cleo and Agnes herself are all women in
search of their subjectivity.
Since “feminist cinema either avoids fetishization of the female subject, or
critically deconstructs it” (Smelik,1998, p.84) Varda’s sense of feminism is
apparent in her refusal to establish these characters as objects to be looked at. This
type of stance in filmmaking calls “for 'realist' images of women, but it mostly
follows from making the female character in the film subject of both story and
narration. When the female character takes up the position of subject, or struggles
to establish her agency and desire, she can no longer be represented as fetishized
image” (ibid). Varda’s characters therefore, represent a feminist type of
filmmaking and by placing these characters in her narrative as the representation
of female subjectivity she establishes a way of communicating the questions that
women face, their desire and their journeys. All three of these characters are
45
ambivalent, insecure and on a quest, which represents the very idea of ‘woman’ in
a patriarchal society. Posing these puzzling(ed) central characters “who remain an
enigma, she offers us, and her characters, the possibility of engaging in the
process of meaning construction… We see [them] from a variety of perspectives,
each discourse constructing another vision of [them]” (Flitterman-Lewis, 1996,
p.245). The woman is represented in the center, yet from an eclectic point of view
of others, she lets the spectator question rather than accept a prescribed truth.
The secondary characters employed in all three of these films (maybe a little less
in Cleo) are a mixture of real people and professional actors. They are all affected
differently with each encounter and the spectator can find something to identify
with in each of these characters. In Vagabond “these characters (both actors and
professionals) remember their impressions, the plurality of discourses –
documentary, direct testimonial, fictional construct- creates what Varda calls an
“impossible portrait” of Mona. At the same time, the complex interweaving of
their testimonies constructs a social vision of French culture as well. Varda
refuses to offer us the security of a fixed identity for her character; rather, through
her careful orchestration of meaning- of this woman, of her situation, of the
necessary social context for all human activity” (Flitterman-Lewis, 1996, p.243).
Gleaners and I is identical in this sense; a mixture of interviews of collectors of
all kinds, interwoven with Varda’s story as she reflects back on her life and
herself as a collector of mementos, stories and people create the same exact effect.
Cleo, although a more fictional, less documentary film than the other two, still has
the same elements visible through the different chapters created with the various
encounters Cleo has with the other characters.
3.1.3 Spectatorship
Mulvey’s thoughts suggest that, within the paradigm of the ‘male gaze’ prevalent
in mainstream cinema, the spectator is to identify with the male characters active
position and the female characters are to be gazed upon voyeuristically or
fetishized to become satisfying rather than threatening. Ann Kaplan’s view as
46
mentioned in the previous chapter, take this notion further and claim that even the
female spectators fantasize about being the passive object with a sense of being
desired by the other. Varda’s work is pioneering in this sense as it dismantles the
previously discussed gendered roles (i.e., Berger, Mulvey) of who is meant to
look and who is meant to be looked upon. Flitterman-Lewis defines “The logic of
enunciation- a logic that describes how the filmic vision is both organized for, and
activated by, the spectator- traverses all three categories of author, viewer and
text, combining production and reception in a perpetual play of psychic and social
forces”(1996 p.319).
In an interview in 1986 regarding Vagabond, Varda states “I want spectators to
define themselves vis-a-vis Mona. For example, would you give Mona a ride?
Would you let her sleep in your car? Would you give her money? It’s not the
question, but the questioning that matters” (Insdorf, 1986). In Varda’s work, the
spectator is not considered female rather than male, but genderless. Varda designs
her films so that the viewer gets pleasure from the process of looking, regardless
of his/her gender, rather than voyeuristically looking at a fetish object or
identifying with the ‘doer’. This process is summarized well by Flitterman-Lewis
as follows:
“In a move that combines techniques of critical distanciation11 with a
conception of cinema-viewing as the assumption of a point of view,
Varda has constructed all of her characters in terms of broad social
outlines, thereby replacing psychological depth with social complexity.
The resulting activity of judgment on the part of the spectator involves
a renunciation of emotional identification in the name of critical
reflection and evaluation” (Flitterman-Lewis, 1996, p.243).
The spectator is constantly trying to figure out the perplexed main character who
is not male in any of these films. By participating in these journeys of Cleo, Mona
or Agnes, the spectator contemplates reality and questions the ruling ideology.
The spectator is not meant to simply identify with the character as the protagonist
as Mulvey describes, but rather move alongside her in a dialectical process.
11
This is similar to Keller and Grontkowski’s first rule established in the Mind’s Eye,
mentioaned in Chapter 2.
47
Varda does this by establishing the distance between the spectator and the screen,
particularly in The Gleaners and I; therefore allows for room for identification
with the character not as the object that is desired like Mulvey suggests, but as the
primary source of the gaze that is inquisitive. Varda invites the viewer to think
with her, to feel what she feels and follow her footsteps in her inquiry into the
patriarchal structure as the main character of this film.
When comparing Mona and Cleo, we can see that “Mona’s progress is the inverse
of Cleo’s, whose trajectory through Paris leads to self-knowledge and acceptance
of others. Mona in fact, moves farther and farther away from self-discovery as she
travels…” (ibid, p. 298). We can compare this to Agnes’ journey in The Gleaners
and I, as she reflects on her own life, the objects she collected and the people she
has encountered. Although they may differ in order or personality traits, the
construction of all three of these characters “yields the social meaning: There is an
undeniable social network of human culture in which we must exist”(ibid, p.303).
This relationship these characters build with this social network are what makes
them question the truth of their existence, their true power as subjects.
3.2 Time and Space
In her essay, Mulvey states “the first blow against the monolithic accumulation of
traditional film conventions (already undertaken by radical filmmakers) is to free
the look of the camera into its materiality in time and space and the look of the
audience into dialectics, passionate detachment” (2016, P.352). Varda’s cinema is
a direct testament to this call. Therefore in studying these three films, it is
important to take note of Varda’s use of time and space as discussed by Phil
Powrie through what he calls “Varda’s Nomadic Gaze” (2011). In his article
Heterotopic Spaces and Nomadic Gazes in Varda, Powrie outlines the different
tools, utilized by Varda in a groundbreaking manner. He uses the Foucauldian
term ‘heterotopic spaces’ to describe the “utopian spaces… that contest and invert
everyday space” and claims that these spaces in Varda films can be characterized
as “marginal, imaginary, sacred and festive”(ibid). He also uses this term for
48
certain moments in each of the mentioned films as such. The heterotopic spaces
and moments he uses as examples are in no way in opposition to normal moments
or spaces, but rather “’in normal space, as well as eccentric to it”(ibid).
Powrie identifies the series of 12 tracking road shots12 in Vagabond and the
painting theme embedded in the Gleaners and I as these spaces and moments in
each film which “subvert binaries and create a moment of radical self-questioning
for the spectator”(ibid). Along with Powrie, according to other critics including
Neroni, Flitterman-Lewis, in Cleo, there are two major turning points in the plot
as per these heterotopic moments and spaces. The first turning point, which takes
place approximately halfway through the plot, is the song Cleo sings with her
colleagues in her apartment and the second is the film-within-the-film she watches
with Dorothee and Raoul, who is a projectionist at the movie theater. This shortfilm
that Cleo is invited to watch is a silent-film starring Jean-Luc Goddard and
Anna Karina in which two lovers are to unite on a bridge when the man puts on
dark glasses and sees his lover dies, and then takes off the glasses and saves her
from being carried into a hearse by the paramedics and they reunite. “The theme
of the glasses, is clearly linked to Cleo’s world view, as she sees everything
figuratively in black as result of her cancer, and starts seeing others rather than
just herself once she wears the dark glasses” (ibid, p.74). It is not only the content
of the story within the story but also the placement of the short film within the
time structure of the plot in which things take a completely different turn after the
movie-viewing process. For example, everything from the color of the taxi to the
dress Cleo wears before this moving from black to white as Cleo’s views start
changing.
Another pattern we can see across all three of these movies is the use of episodes
or chapters in different settings and with different secondary characters.
Flitterman-Lewis discusses this issue in depth in To Desire Differently, stating
that “the episodic narration that fragments linear causality into a series of
12
Which he states, were later named ‘Grande Series’ by the crew of the film
49
situations-each with a demonstrable social lesson, and each with an invitation to
the spectator’s critical judgment” (p.298). This is true in each of the three films
we have discussed. However, more specifically, “time is expanded in Vagabond
through the delayed testimonies of characters who have perhaps been forgotten: it
is condensed through unexpected ellipses that compress events into
nothingness…each account of Mona is an account of the self as well” (ibid,
p.299). By using these interrupted sequences in structure which Varda creates
“moments of narrative suspension that generate our own reflection on the events”
(ibid). These chapters, interviews or encounters and the division between them
makes us, the spectators, reflect upon the lesson or the message in each sequence
and how it relates to the story as a whole, all the while questioning where we
would stand.
3.3 Objet Petit A and The Real
As mentioned above, if desire is the tool for the spectator to identify with the
characters on the screen, we must identify different kinds of desire rather than just
that of the phallus (in one way or another). As discussed in the previous chapter,
in Lacan’s original thought desire is very closely related to the Real or the void in
the Symbolic order of which we can glide into with the ever eliding objet petit a
(the subject cause of desire).
In his book The Real Gaze, Todd McGowan classifies the nouvelle vague or the
French New Wave movement as an “aesthetic that produces desire through a
depiction of the gaze as an impossible object within the filmic image” (2007,
p.83). He elaborates that in Lacanian theory, desire (the objet petit a) is about
what can never be attained or reached where as fantasy is an imagined ideal of
enjoyment if this acquisition or grasp were possible. Because of its “fidelity…to
the path of desire” the nouvelle vague “joins the project of struggling against the
role that fantasy has in supplementing ideology…by constantly emphasizing the
impossibility of the gaze as objet petit a” (ibid). In simpler terms, McGowan
claims that the nouvelle vague puts desire over ideology by focusing the narrative
50
on the impossibility of attaining the objet petit a rather than imposing a symbolic
order through the story.
Drawing a parallel to this, Flitterman-Lewis claims that in Vagabond, "it is the
desire to know (rather than to possess the woman)” that structures the vision,
allowing the viewer to identify with the process itself. The spectator’s power of
vision is not over the female character, a woman constructed as the object of
desire, but over all of the images and their interrelation; it is a power of
questioning rather than one of possession” (1996, p.313). The object cause of
desire in this film becomes the truth about Mona that evades us. The
“contemplative gaze of meaning (what it means to be a woman, how being female
defines Mona’s situation) redefines our fascination- redefines it as a process
which does not objectify the woman in the traditional way”(ibid) as Mulvey’s
theory suggests. As the spectator, we are distanced from13, even appalled by the
character, just as we are in Cleo, yet drawn to her and fascinated by this notion of
wanting to understand her.
As mentioned earlier, one of the most attention-grabbing feature of Cleo From 5-7
is the opening tarot scene that is the sole color image in the whole movie.
McGowan anlayzes this choice by Varda as:
“The cards shot in color represent the gaze: unlike the actual characters of
the film they see the truth in Cleo’s being- her impending complete
transformation. By opposing the tarot cards to the Other through the
opposition of black and white to color film, Varda points toward the
irreducibility of the gaze to the Other. The subject cannot find a fantasmic
resolution for desire because the Other cannot embody the gaze” (2007,
p.87).
Much like this scene, the final scene makes apparent the impossibility of Cleo
satisfying her desire through finding out the results of her tests from her doctor.
13
This distancing is once again similar to the distancing in the Mind’s Eye by
Grontkowski and Fox Keller
51
Through a very brief encounter with the doctor in the courtyard of the hospital, all
she gets is a sentence or two from the doctor stating that she will be fine after a
few months of treatment. Once again she fails to receive the recognition she seeks
throughout the whole movie, and cannot find in the Other. By emphasizing the
impossibility of the gaze in the field of the Other, “Varda shows Cleo freed from
the seductions of power…Cleo has not discovered the gaze but she has now
embraced its absence. This …is not a form of self-empowerment but a realization
of the failure of power” (ibid, p.88)
The mirrors in Cleo, as well as the dark sunglasses she puts on after changing
from her white outfit into her black one, “objects placed iconically at the end of
each segment of the ‘grande série’; and, …in Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse, the
many objects gleaned and transformed by painters, or by nature itself in the case
of the potato in the form of a heart” (Powrie, 2011, p. 80) are signifiers of the
gaze that changes from object to subject are distortions in the visual field. They
are what Powrie calls “anamorphic objects” that can be perceived as intentionally
placed unlikely images which for the simple purpose of distortion of the
“narrative surface” (ibid). Similar to the death’s head or the skull in the Holbein
painting from which Lacan drew a finalized theory of his construct of the gaze,
these objects are there to remind us of our nothingess and the possibility of death
(both in the metaphorical and literal senses).
Death as a concept is a repeated pattern across these three films. In Vagabond, we
know that Mona is dead from the beginning, in Cleo there is a tension created by
the possibility of her having cancer and in the Gleaners and I, Varda’s age and her
getting closer to the end is reminded to her and to the spectator with flashes of
images like her white hair, and the wrinkles on her hands. Perhaps this presence
of death is one of the best ways that Varda is in touch with the Lacanian Real as
Mulvey was criticized for leaving out from her theory. The rotting collection of
potatoes in The Gleaners and I, the “lyrics evoking absence, lack and death”
(Flitterman-Lewis, 1996, p.270) of the song that Cleo sings in her apartment
52
which ends up brining her into a new social awareness at the turning point of the
plot are great examples of this encounter with the Real.
McGowan puts much emphasis on film’s role in exposing the real in its traumatic
nature. He states, “when the subject experiences the traumatic real, it recognizes
symbolic authority’s failure to account for everything. Though the encounter with
the gaze traumatizes the subject, it also provides the basis for the subject’s
freedom- freedom from the constraints of the big Other” (2007, p.16). The gaze,
in this way, can be perceived as the petit objet a and a traumatizing encounter with
the Real at the same time. By placing this encounter in the realm of film,
filmmakers like Varda open up spaces for us to question ideology and the
symbolic order in order to create something new.
53
CONCLUSION
Anneke Smelik states: “The position of the female subject is an impossible one:
'woman' finds herself in a meaningless nowhere where women cannot represent
themselves, caught between masculine representation and the specular image of
femininity it produces” (1998, p.16).
Throughout this thesis, my aim was to understand if a feminine subjectivity could
be created in film; if it could, could it be used to disarm an otherwise patriarchal,
phallocentric ideology? Agnes Varda’s cinema has proven that this is not only
possible but eminent. Varda’s ‘nomadic’ gaze has replaced the male gaze in film
and her use of time and space and integration of the Real have made female
subjectivity and desire possible. This has given us an opportunity to gain access to
a more just art form, in which the spectator can participate in the production of
meaning and truth rather than accepting a pre-formulated version imposed onto
him/her.
In Cleo, we participate in the discovery of a woman’s journey from an object of
visual desire to a subject with her own desires. In this participation, we are
exposed to the strong sub-topics of the ruling ideology such as ideal beauty, fear
of aging or losing vitality and the insincerity of pseudo-popularity. In Vagabond,
we are contemplating our possible positions in accordance with mini-stories and
subjects in relation to a nomadic figure who is truly cleansed of the Panoptic gaze.
We watch a woman who is far from the idealized, fetishized object; Mona is truly
a subject, operating freely, yet her demise comes from her inability to find her
place in the social order. In The Gleaners and I, we are exposed to stories of
subjects with different personalities, socio-economic statuses and habits who
converge over one act: collecting. Agnes’ integration of herself into the narrative
of the documentary lets us, as the spectators, roam back and forth between the
emotional, raw and dramatic side and the objective truth of those documented.
Each of these films introduce a truly unique use of the gaze. The nomadic female
gaze that Varda employs proves that the director, the characters and the spectators
54
of a film can meet in the middle rather than participate in the active/passive roles
of identification and fetishization as decribed by Mulvey. The use of time and
space including the episodic form of the plots, the use of anamorphic objects and
heterotopic spaces create the distancing and contemplation which would
otherwise not have been a part of the viewing process. And finally, Varda’s
integration of the Lacanian Real and the objet petit a in all of these films make
them more vulnerable, more open to the possibility of disrupting the perfectness
of the patriarchal world that is imposed upon us. These become the blots, the
stains like that of the skull in The Ambassadors, the uneasiness of the ceaseless
exchange which lets us question our subjectivity in Las Meninas.
In her reading of Teresa de Lauretis’ views, Smelik emphasizes that “subjectivity
is not a fixed entity but a constant process of self-production”(ibid, p.16). In this
process the quest for truth becomes the ultimate desire however, women are
seduced by the narrative into femininity. Varda shatters this order by creating a
world in which this questioning journey is the narrative itself and it does not
discriminate but rather integrates the author, the characters and the spectator into
dialectic. “Varda’s films have continually represented efforts to elaborate a
feminine discourse through modernist techniques of narrative and address.
Hilary Neroni suggests that instead of disparaging patriarchal or ideological
techniques of film making, “the feminist film theorist must examine the
relationship between form and content” (2016, p. 152). By loading both of these
tools for change the French New Wave and Varda create a revolutionary process
in changing the preconceived notions of subjectivity. Her films “not only recreate
a character experiencing the gaze but also work to stage the experience at the level
of form” (Neroni, 2010, p.183). In her attempt to subvert the dominant masculine
position-as viewer of the woman-spectacle and as controller of the narrative
events- Varda has literally invented deconstructive textual strategies that rework
processes of vision and narration, and in doing so she has conceived a new form
of ‘feminine text’” (Flitterman-Lewis, 1996, p.318). To underline this point I
55
have also made previously, the ‘subversion’ of the male gaze is not the only thing
that makes Varda’s work influential; it is also her putting forward an alternative
route that is more just, more realistic and more fruitful. She does not simply create
art form that is oppositional, but rather explores tools in form, aesthetics and
narrative, which offer an alternative. Her world is neither utopic nor dystrophic; it
is open to endless possibilities.
Throughout her career, Agnes Varda has proven that the female subject can be
created on the screen, and by example off the screen, through creating an
inquisitive form of identification (rather than an objectified one) with female
characters with which the spectator can engage with, contextual truth production
within the time and space matrix and the inclusion of desire, death and other
elements of the Real. Her work set precedents as art form and is a testament to her
efforts to diminish the patriarchal, phallocentric ideology film was accustomed to.
To answer my initial question: I believe the evidence and analyses provided in
this thesis clearly show that Agnes Varda has verified that this patriarchal
ideology can and will be disarmed by engaging in production of a new truth by
recreating the female subject in film.
56
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