As a filmmaker and as a woman,
I found myself drowning in a powerful vortex
of visual language,
from which it is very difficult to escape.
Yeah, Lara, are you there?
I'm just sitting here hoping to hear from you,
I don't care if it's three o'clock in the morning
because, I've been thinking about all the things
that could possibly happen to you because of this,
and I don't want you to ruin
your whole acting career over it.
You know, all they have to do is call sag
and pull your card and from now on,
for the rest of your life,
you'll come up not cleared for work and that's the end.
This visual language, this cinematic visual language,
dictates to us ways of seeing
that are so specific, it almost feels like a law.
The great writer James Baldwin once said,
"not everything can be changed,
but nothing can be changed until it is faced."
What we're gonna do today is look at a series of film clips
from a list movies,
the ones that win cannes and the academy awards,
as well as cult classics, and other notable works.
And what we're looking at is how shot design is gendered.
That means that male lead actors and female actresses
are filmed very differently,
consistently differently and consistently in a certain way
that can be labeled and tracked and named.
Now, I personally see a very clear connection
between this visual language of cinema,
employment discrimination against women,
particularly in the film industry,
and an environment of pervasive sexual harassment, abuse,
and assault.
I had the chance to meet Laura mulvey last year,
the "original gangster" film theorist
who identified the male gaze for all of us.
I only actually used the male gaze once in the essay,
I think, but it's become its dominant memory.
The essay really came out of my love of cinema.
Well, having left university in 1963,
I really spent a lot of my time just going to the movies.
Only retrospectively realizing that part of my pleasure
in this film going was that I was watching these movies
as a male spectator.
Almost all of us are familiar with the phrase
the objectification of women,
but it's worth taking a moment to break that down.
What exactly is an object and what is a subject?
So let's get back to basic grammar
in like an English sentence for a second.
The cat eats the mouse.
The cat is the subject,
he's eating the mouse,
the object is acted upon.
Similarly, the man sees the woman,
the man is active doing the locking
and the woman is looked at.
Here she comes.
We'd like a statement from you...
This phrase, to-be-looked-at-ness,
was made famous by Laura mulvey back in 1975
and used to describe the basic essential position
of women in cinema.
That dress will be ahead of fashion a hundred years
from today.
You ain't seen nothing yet.
The accessories are even cuter.
J” I can hear the river call j“
j” no return, no return j“
Through time, the woman's body
becomes more and more sexuahzed,
but the basic structure of looking remains the same.
Even though mulvey's foundational work
was written in the '705,
we still totally normalize the male gaze in cinema.
You know, I think the majority of people
don't ever really question that form of looking.
It's so normal it's like the idea of a fish asking
if it's wet.
It's the stuff that I think you thought,
and maybe I thought, well, everybody knows this,
it's in the ether, but it's the ether.
And so to name it and to show it is, you know,
something that I believe can change the world.
The poet philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson
once made a beautiful remark that I feel speaks very well
to the situation.
He said, "perception is not whimsical, but fatal.“
you know, this is something that people like to say,
like they think creative work and films are whimsical.
It's just my vision. It's just my idea. It's whimsical,
but no, it's really serious.
It's fatal, and it impacts us on the deepest possible level.
As filmmakers we have to be courageous
and be willing to be that force.
Willing to speak our minds,
willing to say, "hey, wait a minute,
what's wrong with this picture?
What are you telling me?
What's the visual rhetoric that we're looking at?
It doesn't feel good. It doesn't feel correct.
Let's rethink this."
I think sometimes with films that are considered
part of the canon, part of, you know,
what are the best quote unquote films,
there is a reticence to even question how they were made
and the stories that they tell.
And I think that it's okay to still love and to see a film
and say it's great,
but that it has some issues.
And I think without questioning it,
we're doing a disservice to our own humanity.
Now most of you guys are probably aware
of the idea that there's a sexist element to script,
dialogue, and character.
You know, we know that we'd prefer not to see women
always playing a maid or a sexy babe,
as opposed to being a ceo or something like that.
That's something that we're well acquainted with.
What's less well known is how shot design itself
is perpetuating these different positions of power.
So when we talk about shot design,
what exactly does that mean?
We're talking about subject, object,
the visual relationship,
framing, camera movement, and lighting,
and how all of these techniques
contribute to the narrative position of the characters.
So the first thing is subject, object.
When we see a shape like this,
we know it means that this guy here is looking
at this person over here,
who happens to be a woman.
- Haven't I seen you somewhere before?
This pov shot can be done in one shot, like this.
It's dropping down. We need to get that adjusted.
It's ridiculous.
I should just drop my brushes, and just, fuck it. Oh!
It's amazing what do you think about that, man?
Pretty amazing. Jerry! Jerry!
Or in two separate shots.
- Hey!
I think a lot about how to create points of view.
It's not just optical, it's perceptual,
you know, we are experiencing the...
You're putting the audience in the character's shoes
so that they aren't just seeing directly
what the character sees,
but they are aligned with them emotionally
and in their thought process.
What's interesting about Robert Montgomery's,
"lady in the lake" is that it's an extreme example
of what subjectivity is.
So it becomes this point of view shot
throughout the whole film.
It aligns with my ideas about a male point of view
and what is the male gaze.
And about sort of the image of a certain kind
of Hollywood beauty or Hollywood victim.
Framing of shots.
Women actors are often shot with fragmented body parts.
And that fragmented body can be part of, of course,
a pov situation.
So you have one shot somebody is looking,
second shot, fragmented body.
- What is that noise?
What noise?
Really, sir, there wasn't any noise.
Or it can be in one shot.
And again, repeating the pov structures.
Another thing that's very common is a female body
on direct display for the audience
without a specific person looking.
This is just like general audience display.
I think we have to consider
that it is through the formal visual language
that we are effectively communicating meaning.
And we inherit so much subliminally
that comes from this language
and it has to do with how shots are composed and framed,
how they're assembled and ordered in a sequence of shots.
All of that becomes the grammar and syntax
by which meaning is conveyed to a viewer.
So in a visual culture, such as ours,
in which there's a ravenous appetite
towards the female as object,
if the camera is predatory
then the culture is predatory as well.
Camera movement.
A common thing that we've all seen a million times
is a pan of a female body.
And that can, of course, be a horizontal pan
or a vertical pan.
Furthermore, what you very often see is slow-mo,
as a way to emphasize.
And with men, when do we get slow-mo?
Action, military, right?
- Heel kick to diaphragm.
80 men get slow-mo for action,
and women get slow-mo for sexualization.
The dissemination of these kinds of shots
is actually a sort of global hypnosis
around how masculine power brings satisfaction.
Whether it's objectifying women
or killing or pretending to kill.
This is propaganda for patriarchy.
Lighting. Lighting is a bit more subtle.
Normally a male lead actor gets to have 3D lighting
with shadow and depth,
and he's located somewhere real
in a space that we understand,
whereas Rita Hayworth here,
this is two frames
from Orson welles' "lady from Shanghai,"
Rita Hayworth is shot in this timeless zone
of female beauty.
Women are not allowed to age
and they're not really allowed to have full-on
lives as subjects.
Myself and other directors,
we have been conditioned to present women, actresses,
in the best light possible.
So we put nice soft lights up
and use a nice long lens and, you know,
set it at a high angle, not looking up at something.
And, you know, all the different ways to film women.
I don't worry if a guy has wrinkles,
because that just makes them look rugged as they get older,
but you don't wanna think about that for women.
Can I kiss you?
You know, I got this great movie recently,
it would've moved the needle,
it was very great for me,
and they decided to go younger.
And, what can you say?
So, that happens a lot, that happens a lot.
I have a lot of sadness,
and just even talking about it,
I have a lot of, oh.
'Cause I love to work.
I think this visual language really contributes
to female self hatred and insecurity in a way
that is not insignificant.
What is normalized as beauty is really seen specifically
and dominantly through a male gaze.
I think that really changes how
we relate in the world in general
and not necessarily in the best way.
Shot design is the meta message, right?
It's the aesthetic that is normalized,
and it's very sneaky kind of in that way.
- Priest, let me in.
Here in "super fly"
the cult classic by Gordon parks Jr.,
we can see a number of the techniques
that we've been discussing so far.
We have the man in the subject position.
Although, the two heads are photographed quite the same,
suddenly we get the music,
fuzzy lighting,
slow-mo,
body pan.
One of my students when she saw this clip,
she said, "the minute you see the two heads
in the bathtub, you start waiting for the pan
of the woman's body."
Obviously they're both naked in the tub.
We do not see the male body.
Watching this "superfly" bathtub scene,
yeah, I mean, that's an actor's worst fear.
That, you know, they are given a script
that they've agreed to work on,
and the director totally objectifies her
by the choice of shots, the placement of the camera,
and the editing choices.
All of these techniques that we've just reviewed
contribute to the narrative position of the characters.
And very often in ways that seemed strangely irrelevant
to the story.
- More! - No more.
In an ideal world, we would be able to see a huge amount,
a huge variety of films getting kind of equal amount
of play.
You know, so if you are a heterosexual male,
and you want to photograph some woman's behind,
I am certainly not the sex police.
I am not telling you what to do.
I'm not saying do not do that.
I'm just pointing out the fact that a whole lot
of majorly acclaimed directors through time
have done just that.
And since 96% of the films through time
have done just that,
there isn't a whole lot of wiggle room
for those of us who are sick of seeing these things
and are sick of the result of that kind of attack
on our selfhood.
For women, because you're looking at those films,
for instance, she would like to shape herself
to be that object of the gaze.
But she thinks, some part of me, which is me,
is not matching to that, you know, image.
So I would just, kind of toss it out.
So, in that case, she loses her own self,
she feels empty.
All of her, you know, attention or energy
is spent for the external, you know,
establishment of her image.
But when she sits down, she feels empty.
That's the problem.
So here we have very clearly
the narrative position of the woman
and her to-be-looked-at-ness place delineated,
while we hear on audio,
the names of all the male filmmakers,
and we see the male cinematographer shooting her.
"Our desires," of course, they're not referring to me.
Traditionally the audience has been assumed
to be a cis male heterosexual
lined up with the cis male heterosexual director,
lined up with the director of photography,
who controls all the shots,
lined up with a male subject in the frame.
And they are all looking at the female object.
This is the standard line of identification.
Now, obviously, if you are not a male heterosexual,
you're going to inhabit this process of identification
in somewhat a different way.
And depending on where you're located,
you know, for example, if you are a female heterosexual,
which would be me, how does this play out?
How does this affect us?
When I was a student at the ucla film school,
I was very completely obsessed with my work
and I was surrounded by my films on every level
and I was a complete go-getter.
And if somebody would get in my way
and I needed to get into the mix room or something,
I would just be like, "here's $20 move, go, go.
I need to do my work."
I was a complete subject.
I had no problem with that.
But what happened when I tried to be romantic
or go on a date,
that's when I got into trouble.
I experienced myself as to-be-looked-at-ness.
I experienced myself as an object.
I didn't know how to act.
It was very confusing for me.
And I had a very hard time integrating those things.
So I sort ofjumped from object position
to subject position where I identified
with a male subject as an active mover.
And I had no idea how to be a woman as an active mover
and also be sexy.
And this kind of is just a little tip of the iceberg
about how this stuff affects us personally.
So here's the next scene in “contempt."
I'm aware that this scene is supposedly a comment
on female objectification.
Supposedly the producers forced godard
to show more of brigitte bardot's behind,
but whether he had an intention to be sarcastic or not,
the impact on a gut level of seeing a film like this,
and being told that this is a masterpiece
along with all the other films that we'll be seeing today,
that it's one masterpiece after another,
think about how that affects us deeply, internally as women.
It's pretty intense.
You know, this talk is kind of confrontational
and all this stuff,
but I want people to know,
you know, it's built on my sadness.
I know. It's built on my struggle.
It's built on my sadness.
You know, it's not a beautiful thing
that I'm talking about here.
But Nina, don't you think all women feel that sadness?
All of my own narrative fiction films
have been centrally concerned with expressing
the abject feminine
and the wound that is carried deep inside.
It's really such a sacred place to make cinema.
It is a sacred act.
You are really entering people's imaginations
and their psyches in such a way that
it should be treated with care.
It's a place of magnification,
it's almost like speaking on a microphone.
Whatever you say it's amplified,
so just being aware of that, it's so important.
The researchers green and Brock
coined a term, which is transportation,
transportation is the effect of movies and television
on viewers that moves us from where we are,
when we walk into a theater, into a new world.
It takes us from the familiar along a continuum,
into a new place.
And we go into a state of suspension of disbelief,
and in that state, we have the highest knowledge gains,
the biggest shifts in attitude,
and the greatest changes in behavior
or behavioral intention.
This is the power of storytelling on the screen.
In "lady from Shanghai,"
we can see so many of the basic gendered
shot design techniques
that continue to inform filmmaking today.
Lover, this really concerns you more than anyone else.
J” don't take your arms away j”
so here you can see the men in 3D lighting
and 3D space controlling the story,
controlling the narrative.
Did you know about that, lover?
No I didn't.
Shut up, George.
Rita Hayworth, of course, is in a bikini
while everyone else is fully clothed.
And of course, we have the ever present male subject
looking at the female object.
Rita Hayworth is floating in a strange dislocated space.
Maybe we'll call it male fantasy space.
In this clip and in subsequent clips,
the beauty of the woman can be seen
as having a certain power,
you know, the power to attract the gaze.
This is what we're always told,
like the way to be powerful as a woman is to be beautiful.
But to answer that and to respond to that,
I would like to quote Angela Carter,
who says that women have to be seduced into femininity.
And what does she mean by seduced into femininity?
She really means seduced into powerlessness.
And how are we seduced into powerlessness?
By glamor.
That's it, keep it up.
Lovely.
Love, love, head up. Head up.
Yes. Yes. Yes.
So glamor, in my opinion, is a coverup,
is a veil and is a sort of bait
and switch for powerlessness.
A woman's agency is always interrupted
by the way that we frame her as a spectacle
at the same time.
Whatever action she's doing it's super important
to make sure that she has a certain aesthetic
and a certain look that is specifically sexually attractive
for a heterosexual male gaze.
Who's that girl?
Which one? The one I was talking about?
- Yeah. - The blond? Yeah.
You went with her? You didn't try to fuck her?
I try to fuck anything, you know that.
She didn't go with it?
No, she didn't go for it.
Naturally, she knew better.
What do you mean she knew better?
She knew you were an animal.
She knew it was no good if you go with her.
Her reputation will be ruined.
I thought he was talking to you, Vicky.
- That's the same guy? - Yes, it's the same guy.
- I gotta break his neck. - He was over here yesterday.
- He was here yesterday? - You missed him.
I was at the house yesterday
and he was over here.
So as usual, we have the men in 3D space.
We have the men talking to each other about a woman.
We have her legs fragmented.
We have her legs in slow-mo.
Same old, same old.
There is one interesting thing though about this scene
that I want to dissect.
And that is the way that audio is handled.
When you look at the scene, you notice that,
Robert De Niro is looking at Vicky
and she's far away from him.
So you think that it makes sense
that we hear Robert De Niro and his friend talk,
but you don't hear Vicky talk because she's far away,
but maybe not, okay?
We actually did some research on exactly
how the scene was shot and laid out the dimensions.
Here's Robert De Niro, he's with his friend
on one side of the pool,
and here's Vicky way far away.
That's why we can't hear her talking, right?
But maybe not, because how come the other two guys
who are sitting exactly right near Vicky,
we can hear them perfectly well.
And they are equidistant from Robert De Niro.
So basically what we have here is something
that when we watch the movie,
we would have absolutely no awareness of this.
It infiltrates our consciousness in a subconscious way.
And maybe that's why when a young woman shows up
to pitch a film to a male executive,
he just sees her mouth moving,
but he doesn't hear a single word that she says.
Absolutely objectification of women
impacts hiring practices.
I think for all of us who were exposed
to sexually objectifying media,
we all be embed it a bit in our perception
of how women should be.
It becomes this way of dealing with women
that is primarily around their sexual value,
that if they're attractive to you.
And so absolutely has everything
to do with certainly how you're treated on the job.
The challenge is that employment discrimination in general
in the entertainment industry is not enforced.
Coming out of film school, we have 50/50 gender parity
and we've had that for a while in the top us film schools,
and yet the top 250 films directed by women
back in 1998 was 9%.
And moving up to 2018, we're down to 8%.
People are really happy for women
to be attending film schools 50/50 at parity with men,
as long as they're paying money into the system.
But when we move into the professional playing field,
and we're asking the industry to pay money out to women,
well, that's where the doors get closed.
At the very heart of the issue
and the work that I've been doing is title vii,
which is equal employment opportunity law.
Hollywood has been the worst violator of title vii
of any industry in the United States of America.
Even worse than coal mining.
It wasn't always this way,
in fact, the very first narrative film,
the very first use of film to tell a story
versus just documenting an existing event,
features a woman subject, a woman protagonist
and was created by a woman producer, writer, director,
Alice guy blaché, in 1896.
During early Hollywood, during the silent era,
there was a significant amount of women
working in the new industry
that had a significant amount of power, of artistic agency.
This is a really special moment for women directors.
“The red kimono" by Dorothy Davenport
expresses the inner subjective experience
of the main character,
who was forced into prostitution.
Once the transition to sound takes place,
wall street is brought in because the transition
to sound has significant financial demands
and so the masculinized culture of wall street then begins
to structure Hollywood.
The most pressing need today
is to start the flow of capital
which turns the wheels of industry.
Women are maneuvered out of these positions
of artistic, creative power, and then for 40 years
there were only two women making feature films in Hollywood,
Dorothy arzner and ida lupino.
Go ahead and stare, I'm not ashamed.
Go on, laugh, get your money's worth.
Nobody is going to hurt you.
I know you want me to tear my clothes off
so that you can look your 50 cents worth.
50 cents for the privilege of staring
at a girl the way your wives won't let you.
So that you can go home when the show is over
and strut before your wives and sweethearts
and play at being the stronger sex for a minute?
I'm sure they see through you just like we do.
Dorothy arzner's women defined themselves
and very beautifully so.
Sadly, she was a rare exception
and a male perspective continued to control cinema
for decades.
I think the history of Hollywood often times, you know,
has made it so that the word director is synonymous
with a male director.
You know, that's what it has been for many years
and still is, I think, to this day.
I, you know, I never thought,
oh, I'm going to go to school and be a film director.
You didn't say that back then.
Maybe I could be an editor or a script supervisor
or some other job that girls could do on a movie.
Never occurred to me when I was in school,
went all the way through and got a master's degree,
never occurred to me that I could be a director.
No, actually I wanted to talk to you
about dawn's project, "real life"
it could be exactly what Cyrus is looking for
and I was thinking we get somebody really big to direct,
maybe penny Marshall?
What? Shut up, listen, and learn.
Avoid women directors, they ovulate.
By the time I started prepping to make "daughters of the dust"
I was very much aware I was, you know, a graduate of afi,
a graduate of ucla,
and I was very much aware of point of view camera placement.
So I very much placed my camera within the circle,
within the culture of women.
I wanted to depict something
that had never been seen before.
Once I saw a pink satin case for jewelry for each woman
in a shop window.
I couldn't afford that case for myself.
And I didn't ask nobody to buy it for me, you know.
But in my mind I put all those bad memories
in that case and I locked them there.
I don't let nothing in that case
or nobody outside the case tell me who I am
and how I should feel about me.
Yeah, in 1991, when we did, when we were at Sundance
and I had "daughters of the dust"
and you had "queen of diamonds,"
we were kind of like pushed to the background,
it was like "nice job, girls. See you later."
And all of the other filmmakers who were there
who were male did go on to make, you know,
many, many films after that.
I would've sworn that by the turn of the century
that there will be 50% of people making films
would've been women.
And due to that, the whole way of thinking
about the image and about gender
would've been completely transformed.
And it just seems extraordinary thinking back,
how little progress has actually been made.
You know, when I went to Sundance with my first feature,
I couldn't get an agent and I couldn't get a distributor.
You know, and I would have male agents write me
to see the film and then they would say, "it's not for me
or it's not what I'm looking for."
And then you would look at their rosters,
like this was just 2013,
you know, I would look at their rosters
and their rosters were all male.
Then it's like "okay, well, I know what you're looking for."
You know, what kind of coded language is that?
There's still only 3 women
in competition out of 21 films.
And that's because the director of the film festival said,
"we just look for the best films.
It has nothing to do with gender,
we just look for the best films."
With all due respect,
this comment does not reflect very much understanding
of the concept of diversity
and the way that the idea of good film is created
through identification with what is being shown,
that's how we...
I love this film, I relate to this film
because, because it talks to me, right?
That's how we define what a good film is.
Burn 'em!
Put down the cellphone.
Get out of the way.
I can't get a shot!
So Kathryn Bigelow's film "hurt locker,"
which was the first film where a female ever won
best director, was a film about men, featuring men,
watching men in action blowing things up in slow motion.
It's also quite interesting that every single department head
in this movie was male.
Gender is a huge factor when you look around the sets.
Things haven't changed that much,
I feel like it is mostly white men
and even in my own productions where I've funded myself,
I'd hire a white man and he hires all white men
and I was like, "oh, did I have to communicate with you,
like, to make it inclusive?"
There's no question that,
because so many men are directors of photography, 95%,
the male gaze is definitely normalized in our society.
Even when a woman is the protagonist of a film,
she is still often objectified and exploited.
Here's the opening scene when we are introduced
to Carrie, who's the protagonist of this film.
We're learning about her as a person,
she's klutzy at sports,
you can't win a game with her on the team.
She's bullied a bit.
You eat shit.
Then suddenly, we cut to the interior
of the girls' locker room.
Slow-mo, fuzzy lighting,
naked women.
All while we have the names of the male filmmakers
superimposed over the scene.
You have to wonder, I mean, the last time
I was in a woman's locker room I wasn't prancing around.
- When you see what's happening is completely predatory.
It takes the development of that, as bell hooks says,
oppositional gaze to really kind of like,
not just take things at face value
and to investigate a little further and ask, like,
what is this communicating?
So here we get the girl who was being bullied,
who was the subject of the story
in a completely non-sequitur scene.
This one student told me,
"when I'm in the shower,
I'm imagining how I look.
When I'm alone in the shower."
You can't even have an experience of your own body
without seeing your own body
from this like weird perspective of, you know, that.
So many of the examples, I wanted to watch and just enjoy,
the way that they are supposed to be,
the way that they are supposed to be fun,
the way that they are supposed to be tantalizing or sexy.
My first reaction was to just ingest it that way,
because that was the easiest thing
and I had to consciously decide to lift the veil
of my perception and it brought up anger
and it brought up the way my own mother taught me
to think about my body and the way she thought
about her body.
And I'm thinking about the way I'm being taught
to think about my body on a minute by minute basis.
We've secured the perimeter
but I don't think we should hold it for too much longer.
Well, in watching the avengers movies,
even when I'm watching Scarlet Johansson play "black widow"
and she's taking a very active role, right?
It still makes me feel like women,
even at their most empowered in culture right now
are still subject to this predatory way of looking.
We're seeing this woman maybe as a boss,
but we are seeing, you know,
yes, details of her chest or, you know, boobs, or butt,
or whatever.
So it is working on your brain in a subliminal way,
like, in a subtext.
I think it does have an effect
and we all are susceptible to this.
Communists claim to leadership
can't be upheld much longer
and if rapid change is not forthcoming,
today's relatively calm protests
could be seen as the calm before the storm.
I've had a pretty shitty day so far
but it looks like it just got worse.
Even in Patty Jenkins' "wonder woman"
the actress almost looks like she's walking down
a model's runaway.
It's ridiculous when you have these wonder women,
power women, and yet they are shot
and they're stylized, and they're costumed to look like,
you know, another post modern Barbie.
If that's all we're seeing,
it's invisible, it's the air, you don't notice the air.
So that, it's just as likely for a woman to reproduce
those tropes as it is for a man.
Notice bill Murray, we get his face,
we get his feelings.
He's in 3D light.
He's having an experience, a human experience of his own,
whereas the lead actress is introduced
via see-through underwear, fuzzy lighting,
fragmented body.
And one might wonder if this is supposed to be her face.
"Bombshell" is interesting because the content of the film
is ostensibly feminist.
It's about women who were sexually harassed on the job.
Then they went into a lawsuit against Roger ailes
and they actually won.
There's only one scene where we see
sexual harassment happening in front of the camera.
- Let me see your legs.
So let's watch how that scene was constructed.
- It's a visual medium, Kayla.
Come on.
Higher.
Come on, higher.
That's fine, Kayla.
Needless to say this shot is not from Kayla's point
of view, right?
How would you shoot that scene where you really felt
like we're feeling what margot is feeling,
but not being exploitative about it or objectifying her?
Could it have been better if we just implied it
and stayed on her face?
I mean, that would've been another choice
or if we showed her gaze on the guy
and just watch her watching him more, you know.
There could've been other ways to do it.
As audre lord said,
"the master's tools will never dismantle
the master's house."
We could apply that quote to the male gaze way of filming.
When you use those tools to reinforce, reenact, rekindle
objectifying women, then there's a problem.
Here's another film,
in this case directed by a woman
that has been described as feminist.
It features the objectification of very young girls.
And while your topic such as in "cuties"
can be about the objectification of women and girls,
in the case of "cuties,"
you can still perpetuate a way of shot design
that really appropriates the male way of looking
and really just regurgitates that male gaze,
even though you're a female director.
It's important to remember that the male gaze
onto young girls is not a new phenomenon.
Pretty baby was nominated for the palm d'or
at the cannes film festival.
Leon, I think I'm kind of falling in love with you.
It's the first time for me, you know.
How do you know it's love
if you've never been in love before?
'Cause I feel it.
Where?
In my stomach.
The reversal of desire with younger women
is completely...
It's ubiquitous, it's pervasive and it's so erroneous
and it's so harmful.
I mean, you see it time and again
in the way that, like, courts will rule in favor
of the predator because they'll say, you know,
"it was consensual."
This whole consensual thing, right?
I don't know.
I don't think the 13 year-old even knew what to consent to.
It's difficult to think of any examples
where boys are shot like this.
In fact, boys are recruited into the male gaze
at a very young age.
Hoochie mama.
What does that mean?
I don't know but it feels right.
Nice.
This right here is a long standing
and very popular shot design angle on a woman's body.
Of course, we have many sexy male stars.
How are they shot?
Almost always full body and involved in some sort of action.
In "crazy rich asians" there's a scene
where the woman character looks with desire
on her boyfriend.
- Hubba, hubba!
Notably, his body is full frame and he moves into action.
Her ' e m cuarén's " roma"
there's an unusual case of full frontal nudity
for a male actor.
And yet consistently it's full frame on his body
and he's involved in a military style action.
Here's even a further example
where we have an overt sexualized object of the gaze,
men performing in a club for women.
And yet amazingly their bodies are not fragmented
for an extended sequence.
I do know and I've been told!
Big dick ritchie got a cock of gold.
- Big dick ritchie got a cock of gold.
- Now, let's give it up for the virgin king.
- Let's give it up for the virgin king!
- There's a kind of taboo on the male body
being exposed as the object of the look.
So he has to be protected by having this energetic drive.
Ho, ho, ho, ho!
On the other hand, the female protagonist
takes on this role of spectacle.
General anesthetic?
General anesthetic.
And the male protagonist is often controlling the movement
of the story forward, controlling people,
controlling the woman and subordinating her
to his will and determination.
How's that?
Perfect.
You know, I always think of the sleeping beauty story
where you have, you know, the fairy tale
that we read as children.
The prince is galloping along and he chops down
all the thorns and he reaches the sleeping beauty.
You look back on a movie now, like "sixteen candles"
"oh my god, that was like a date rape drug."
I mean, trying to get people drunk,
I mean, stuff that we've been programmed to just accept
and actually not accept, embrace, you know, emulate.
In fact, the position of the passive object
is so deeply coded as feminine
and the passivity of that feminine object
is seen as highly sexual,
to a point where, for example, in this scene
from "after hours"
the sexy passive object is so passive, she's actually dead.
I'm dead, in bed, and the camera does go slowly down
the stream of my body.
Yeah, and I look back at that now and just like
"wow, what was I...
It was just part of what you did, you know?
It was part of the storytelling.
Stories about very beautiful, unconscious women
continue to exert a certain fascination.
I didn't realize that as a young man,
I was, in a way, trained to objectify women.
What I found in watching this talk was,
if this woman is the object and we're looking at this woman
from this lens,
we will see so many women from that lens,
which makes us think we can just have
whichever one we want, right?
And when that woman doesn't have the speaking roles,
we see her, like in "raging bull" we can't hear her talk.
So we have no idea of her emotion.
You have no idea of who she is as a person,
to what you were saying.
So it's like, of course I can just objectify these women
and just use them and do whatever I want.
Because even in the imagery that I've seen,
I've never had to think about how she feels
about my actions.
Harry Dean Stanton in complete 3D lighting.
His eyes are closed.
We can hear Natasha kinsky's voice
but we can't see her because we're completely
in his point of view.
When he looks up, we get to see the 2d vision
of the young woman.
If there's anything you want to talk about,
I'll just listen, all right?
I'm a real good listener.
The way we look at films will always change
and there will always be a cultural moment
that may allow us to reflect on a film's impact
in different ways.
There's a nostalgia that is dangerous.
That when you're putting a film in a moment of nostalgia
you are saying that everything it says is perfect
and I think that's where we get into trouble.
Take your clothes off.
Mooki, I already told you it's too fucking hot
to make love.
It's too fucking hot? Yeah.
Why are you always cursing?
I don't fucking curse that much.
Of course you fucking curse that much.
What the hell are you talking about, mooki?
- All you do is curse. - I do not.
Anyway, no rawness is jumping off tonight, all right?
And that's it.
No rawness?
Mooki, come on.
I mean it. I'm not playing.
I'm not playing.
Spike Lee is, of course, the director of this film,
as well as being the main character and the subject.
So, controlling the story on multiple levels.
Look, freeze, don't move, I'll be right back, okay?
Just stay there.
Freeze. Don't move.
I'll be right back.
What the hell you got me standing on the bed for?
Where the hell are you going?
Thank god for the neck.
Thank god for the knee caps.
Thank god for elbows.
Thank god for thighs.
Thank god for the right nipple
thank god for the left nipple.
It feels good.
Ah, you likes you likes you likes.
In this clip, first of all, you, of course,
have the male voice describing the female body
while she's silent.
But there's another interesting aspect to this clip.
The beginning of the scene,
spike Lee is trying to convince this woman
to have sex with him and she's pretty strong in saying no,
but by the time we get to the end of the scene,
she's decided to agree.
And she appears at the end of the scene
to be actually very happy that she said, yes.
This kind of scene where a woman says no,
and the man insists and then in the end she's happy,
this kind of scene we could make a 10 hour lecture,
just going from one example to another,
showing kazillion examples of where that kind of behavior
is normalized and even celebrated.
And this too is a very important reason
why we have an epidemic of sexual abuse and sexual assault.
The sudden change in music tells us exactly
how we're supposed to feel about this scene.
Music is a super important element of every film,
but only 5% of film composers are women.
Will you kiss me?
Did you hear me?
"365 days" was one of the top watched films
in 2020 on Netflix and they are now making 2 sequels.
Excuse me, miss.
Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.
Shut up!
You're hurting me.
Shut your mouth or I'll really hurt you.
Remember you promised me you'd come back.
I promise.
I just want you to know
I think
you're the sweetest guy in the world
and the most handsome.
This kind of scene certainly contributed
to Yale fraternity men shouting
this in front of a woman's dorm.
The challenge with media images around sexual assault
and around rape culture and around how women are portrayed,
is that it normalizes those types of behaviors
and so what people absorb is through those images,
then they absorb those behaviors as normal,
which then translates to how they treat people
in the actual world.
Extensive research over decades has shown
that after watching sexually objectifying media,
men are more likely to engage in sexual harassment
and abuse.
If you have systems of representation
that always subjugate certain people and frame them
and shoot them and always makes them the objects
of the gaze rather than self acting agents,
you're more likely to have a culture that is susceptible
to rape myths.
The male protagonist is the subject, he is not the object,
he's the hero, he's who we revere.
That's very hard to dislodge then,
when you're faced with a woman telling her truth
and her story.
80% of the entertainment media content
that is distributed around the world is made in Hollywood.
These images are coming from an industry
that is built on power imbalances,
which results in sexual harassment and abuse
in the work place.
And the cycle goes round and round.
One of the people
who was involved with the studio
asked to meet me for dinner.
He was like, "you could play her roles,
you'll be like the next one."
And I'm thinking, yeah, he's right. I could be like that.
And I do, I love her. She's great.
But you know, he was like, but you have to do this.
I was just thinking like, "oh, I can't wait to get home.
I wish I hadn't had talked to this guy tonight"
because I couldn't see it ending well.
He was still talking the whole way
and he was getting more and more agitated as we drove
because I was still just politely declining his offer.
And he said, "I want you to take a nude jacuzzi with me.
Can you just come right now and take this?"
This is ridiculous.
I started to get out of the car
and he reached across me
and palmed the window
on my side and put it, and blocked me with his arm.
And he said, "look, I can help you or I can fuck you up!"
Through the me too movement, we know that 94%
think about it, 94% of women in Hollywood,
whether they're actresses or behind the camera
experienced sexual harassment or assault.
Because people think the entertainment industry
is magical,
they don't remember that these are workers,
that these are actual human beings who are on your screen.
The thought pattern or the assumption
that the actor's body is fair play,
both within the role and outside of the role,
has been part of, you know,
sort of the industry's mindset.
It absolutely was that if an actor said no,
in any way shape or form,
they were absolutely considered a troublemaker, certainly,
and they would absolutely be in fear of their job.
They were disposable.
Yeah, Lara are you there?
I'm just sitting here, hoping to hear from you.
I don't care if it's three o'clock in the morning.
I can't imagine what would be so important
to cause you to do that to yourself.
Please think very seriously and call me tonight
because I think we can fix this.
If we can get you back to work in time
to not have it destroy your life.
So that is the message I came home to back in 1989
after refusing to do a sex scene that was not in my script.
And it basically, effectively, ended my acting career.
Exactly what she said.
I think there's always gonna be a power dynamic
with people on set unconsciously,
whether they wanna verbalize it or not, intellectually
and I feel it and I've experienced it.
I've been in a couple of situations
where I'm like trying to improvise
and someone, the director, chimes in and says,
"okay, now get down on your knees
and give this man a blowjob."
Which is like non-consensual,
they didn't talk to my representatives,
they didn't talk to me
and so I'm like a deer in the headlights,
that's like pressure,
that's like, the crew is watching,
what are you gonna say?
Cry and go like, "please don't make me do this?"
This problem is not limited to Hollywood.
Léa seydoux, star of "blue is the warmest color"
said that the excessive hours spent naked filming sex scenes
was humiliating and left her feeling like a prostitute.
The film won the top prize at cannes.
Maybe that's why in his next films,
the "mektoub, my love" series,
which premiered at the prestigious
venice international film festival,
director kechiche felt empowered to use
even more coercive methods on set.
Reportedly including the very heavy use of alcohol
in order to obtain his unsimulated sex scenes.
And then the statements from directors
saying "oh, I wanted to get an authentic reaction
from somebody."
Well, that's not the realm of make believe,
that isn't the realm of drama.
That's the realm of actually choosing to assault somebody
for the sake of art, or in the name of art.
How is rape culture normalized?
- Its ok, don't mind me, keep on going.
There are really three key elements
that we see on the screen and in real life.
One is the objectification of women's bodies,
another is the glamorization of sexual assault,
especially on the screen.
And the third is disregard for women's rights and safety.
Even if a hand is not laid on another person,
these are all of the elements that create an environment
that allows one group to gain and maintain power
over another.
I look back at my encounter with Harvey weinstein
at the Beverly Hills hotel.
He was in his white bath robe
and he wanted me to...
His penis was coming out of his robe
and he wanted a massage.
I was like no, but I'll get you a masseuse
and heart racing, how do I get out of here?
And he says I'm making a very big mistake,
"you're making a very big mistake."
And I said "I'll never be that girl."
The me too movement spoke out loud about
what so many of us had experienced privately.
In my own fiction films I often tried to express cinematically
how it really feels to be a sexualized object.
"Magdalena viraga" was my first feature film,
which I made at the ucla film school.
It stars my own sister, actress,
and long time collaborator, tinka menkes.
This is one of 5 films we made together.
Here, she's playing a highly alienated prostitute.
The issues that we are talking about,
they are not just, you know, the images that we see
in films,
you know, they are not just who's behind the camera.
The issue is also in this larger context
of who decides what gets seen.
You know, we have mostly men making decisions
around what gets distributed.
It's what gets out into the world is curated by a male gaze.
- Hello, handsome.
Even in this Sci-Fi vision of the future,
we get the same old male subject,
sexualized female object once again.
- You look lonely.
I can fix that.
This cinematic visual language
which surrounds us on all sides
can really feel like the bedrock language of rape culture.
In fact, the name of the female lead character in this film,
played by Ana de armas, is joy.
But they spelled it interestingly, j-o-i.
In porn culture, j-o-i stands for jerk off instructions.
So just think how women feel when they go see this film,
then they hear about all the academy award nominations
that it's getting or got.
- It's this horrible cycle that Hollywood has,
because it takes in what the population has that's toxic
and then it feeds it right back,
which then energizes it and brings it right back.
So there is this circle of violence.
This is all connected, it's all connected.
- One key principle of feminism was that the female body
was a sight of struggle.
But, it shifted to realizing that the image
of the female body was also a sight of struggle.
The image does not refer to women.
This image is being appropriated and produced
by male consciousness.
All of these techniques,
they're definitely deliberate.
We don't know if they're conscious or unconscious,
but they're deliberate.
Deliberate decisions.
Someone made a decision how to shoot that person.
It's worth taking a moment to consider
that the objectifying camera techniques
we've been discussing can also sometimes be seen
in other types of very telling contexts.
For example, in "silence of the lambs"
the character buffalo bill is in the masculine zone
with the goggles as the murderer
with Jodie foster as the object of his gaze.
But, when he is feminizing himself,
when he's in the so called feminine position,
he is shot just like a woman.
- Watching the scene with buffalo bill
when you have this almost deformation of self
to uphold this white male gaze behind the camera,
it was the internalized sexism and internalized misogyny
that was showing up in that space for that character.
It's not only for cis women,
but also trans folks and other folks
who don't fit the boundaries.
As I was re-watching the scene and just remembering
how much trauma has been caused by a scene like that.
So I'm gonna show you a film now
that is not an a list movie.
In fact, it's probably an f.
It's been called racist trash by Roger ebert.
And I would agree with that.
But I'd like to take a look at the scene today,
as it's quite relevant for our analysis.
We have a white plantation owner who calls a black slave
to come to her room.
She informs him that if he doesn't have sex with her,
that she will report him as a rapist,
which would be a death sentence for him.
So basically she's raping him.
The camera pans up from a fragmented body part.
Notice who's wearing the clothes and who is being undressed.
The woman is in control of the scene on many levels.
-Ah, ah!
And finally we get a long sexy body pan.
The reason I've included this clip as cringe worthy
as it is,
is I feel it's the exception that proves the rule.
And when we're talking about these scenes,
they're not really about sex.
They're about power and the person who is shot like this
is not empowered.
So the example of "mandingo" shows that
shot design systematically perpetuates
these power dynamics that exist within our society.
So in that film you see the same like sweeping pans
of his body, the fragments of him.
The true essence of like what we're talking about here
has to do with power.
And commodification of bodies and how bodies relate
to each other in terms of power.
When you have, as foucault says, webs,
webs of ideology
and they are all interlocking
and they're all reinforcing a certain way of looking
and a certain way of experience that you're locked out of,
it takes a lot of strength to say,
"I don't see things this way
and I'm going to create something that is different."
The sexual predators in amirpour's film
meet a very unexpected avenger.
There's a saying that people say that if people
were to get rid of all the sexual predators
that there would be no film industry.
And they would have to start from the ground up
and they laugh about it.
They're like, "haha you know, we would have
to start from scratch." And I'm like,
then let's fucking start from scratch.
You have to build your own house
and you need your own tools to build your house,
and your tools are your creativity, your work,
your work ethic and your ability to produce above and beyond
what someone else is clamoring for, let's say.
Women directors often depict their characters
as full on subjects with their own intense desires.
Nature, nature, I am your bride.
Take me.
Dunye's "watermelon woman" makes the close ups so close
that we feel the sensation of the experience
and we are blocked from gazing in the traditional way.
Without question, throughout the history of cinema,
sex scenes have been shot with the male gaze appropriating
and objectifying women's bodies.
If that's what we do
then there's a lack of imagination
that we'll have to make up for ourselves.
In this scene, Gus Van sant
shoots male and female bodies
very equally.
Van sant may have been influenced
by Agnes varda's film,
"happiness."
In my own film, "phantom love"
the sex scene tries to focus on the woman's psychic
internal experience.
For tarkovsky lovers, you'll notice my homage.
I think of this poem by Gwendolyn Brooks that,
it's "still do I keep my look, my identity."
And she talks about how each body has its art
and how they're like, whether they're in a state of abject
whatever, or they're in an exalted state,
they still maintain this intrinsic human quality
within them.
In "Juniper tree" nietzchka keene focuses on
the inner life of her characters.
People often feel, you know, I should be freed
from all those things that are unconsciously soaked
into our own mind.
Those emotions are always accumulated somewhere hidden,
so that's the part which is anger or, you know,
the sadness or dissatisfaction,
all these emotions are, I imagine, like cooking,
these things are ingredients of your meal.
So you chop, you know, you cook,
you do all these things,
but, by the end, you'd like to get some nice dish.
So it's a transformation of this raw material.
Which has lots of creative energy in there.
Ugh!
Films about female rage have been made by women
for many, many generations.
So there's a history, there's a legacy,
but today there's something very different in the climate,
social, political climate
that is connected to mainstream media.
And so, it's a really unique moment for filmmakers
for women filmmakers who are interested
in taking on these issues.
What are you doing? It's okay.
What are you doing?
Hey, I said what are you doing?
When it comes to money and when it comes to opportunity,
things don't change unless you force change.
My having been able to take this issue to the aclu,
who began their campaign for women directors in 2014,
and the eeoc, equal employment opportunity commission,
that began their investigation in 2015,
attacking the pocketbooks of the studios for violation
of title 7, which is equal employment opportunity law.
So right now, in 2021 we are beginning to see
the results of this action.
In a historic sign of real change,
Chloe zhao, a woman of color, won the academy award
for best picture and best director.
Hey, find anything interesting?
Rocks!
Her film features the perspective
of a woman in her 605.
What does desire look like
when it's not about subject and object?
I think we're in a process of discovery, you know.
Each of us obviously is in a process of discovery
for ourselves in our own lives.
So now as a filmmaker, as a non-binary filmmaker,
I'm asking myself, where does the camera go?
These questions that you're asking,
well, where does the camera go?
And who am I looking at?
Am I showing how it feels to be looked at?
And am I showing how it feels to see
while I'm being looked at?
What is the heroine's journey?
"Portrait of a lady on fire"
is concerned with the issue
of subject and object in the case of two women
who seem to desire each other equally.
Here we get the question of, what is a subject,
what is an object?
And how does the object find a way of becoming,
discovering their own subjectivity,
having their own subjectivity and becoming a subject,
which changes the power dynamic.
In my own films, working with tinka,
she often broke through the 4th wall
and confronted the camera,
claiming her own subjective perception
of both herself and the world.
Would you like a ride?
Whether you're a heterosexual man
or you're a woman or you're anything in between
or on the sides or whatever,
you know, how do I actually experience desire?
How do I actually experience my day?
You know, because we've been taught, what is time?
What is sex?
What is a man? What is a woman?
We've been taught all these things
and if we just accept it,
we're trapped in the collective consciousness
which tends to be on a kind of low level.
What happens if you try to listen inward,
if you try to tune in on a very, very, very delicate
and quiet way to what you're actually experiencing
and what would be actually the true expression
of that experience as translated into a shot.