Intro to Film 2025 • Professor Gregory Zinman • Emory University

Category: Week 2: (9/1+9/3) • Film Form

  • The Female Gaze in Film

    In contemplation of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, I thought a comparison to another recent movie which demonstrates the female gaze could be useful: Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. 

    If the Male Gaze envisions women as sexualized objects of desire, then the Female Gaze sees women as full, real human beings, as complex individuals. In adopting the Female Gaze, a difficulty that arises is how to navigate nudity, sexuality, and desire on screen. Gerwig’s Barbie sidesteps that issue and decides to emphasize that women (and men) are complete individuals who are not defined by their sexual or romantic relationships. Ken, in an obvious reversal of typical gender structures, tells Barbie, “I just don’t know who I am without you” and “I only exist within the warmth of your gaze.” Ken also cited the way others define him as part of a pair, saying, “it’s ‘Barbie and Ken.’” Barbie challenges that construct, saying, “Maybe it’s Barbie and it’s Ken.”

    The happy ending of the movie isn’t the boy and girl getting together, it’s the boy and the girl learning how to stand on their own and be happy independently. When Ruth took Barbie’s hands to show her what it means to be human, none of the images in the montage depicted relationships between men and women. There were children, there was a women laughing, a woman playfully kissing her friend on a couch, a woman playing in a pool, a woman skydiving, bowling, putting on makeup, and there was even a brief shot of a woman in what appeared to be a wedding dress— but there were no men. The implication seemed clear to me: there is more to life for a woman than heterosexual romantic love. The way Barbie talked about becoming a human rather than a doll also sounded a lot like breaking free from the limitations of the male gaze. She said she wanted to make meaning rather than being the thing that’s made. “I want to do the imagining. I don’t want to be the idea,” she continued. With all this in mind, I think Gerwig’s movie is a powerful denunciation of the male gaze.

    I found the lack of nudity or sex scenes in Barbie refreshing, given film’s long tradition of stripping and sexualizing women under the male gaze. But Portrait of a Lady on Fire shows that that a film can maintain a feminist point of view and a female gaze while incorporating sexuality and nudity. The scene where Marianne sat naked in front of the fire initially worried me. It seemed unnecessary to have her be fully nude, and I wondered what the purpose was. She just sat by the fire, warming up, smoking a pipe— apparently at ease and comfortable in her own skin. I’m still not entirely clear on the point of this scene, but I suppose I appreciated that it showed her body outside of a sexual context. Putting this confusing take aside, I thought the way the relationship between Marianne and Héloïse was captured catered more to women than to men. The film showed their knowledge of each other and their emotional intimacy, and the more sexual scenes were slow, sensuous, reciprocal, and tender. The movie allowed both women to embody desire without degrading their agency. Actually, their sexual relationship seemed to be a powerful expression of their agency, as they seized upon a brief window of freedom and acted upon their own desires.

    In Barbie, the focus was independent identity and agency, and sexual desire wasn’t really dealt with. In Portrait of a Woman on Fire, a sapphic relationship allowed women to act upon their sexual desires in a way that enhanced their agency. After watching Portrait of a Lady on Fire, I wondered if there was a movie with both the female gaze and heterosexual desire as beautiful and feminist as Portrait of a Lady on Fire. No one movie title immediately sprung to mind. Is it even possible to fully realize the female gaze with a male-female relationship that may at some level always have inequality baked into it? I found this BBC article, “Top 100 films directed by women: What is the ‘female gaze’?,” and maybe there is such a movie listed therein— it bears further investigation! I hope my classmates might also enjoy pursuing this list! https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20191127-the-100-films-directed-by-women-what-is-the-female-gaze 

  • Blogging Sample

    The cycle of natural decay is both materially enacted and mirrored in the making of Jennifer Reeves’s Landfill 16 (2011), which takes up the idea of recycling, waste management, and the death of film. Reeves buried 16mm outtakes from her double-projection celebration of the natural world, When It Was Blue (2008), in a homemade landfill in Elkhart, Indiana. She then gave the exhumed film new purpose, hand-painting the corroded and soil-stained frames. The resultant imagery scans as densely textured terraforms, like pebbled plastic covered in mold. No photography was required to re-animate this celluloid originally consigned to the literal scrap heap. Images of animals briefly appear—a deer, an eagle, an ominous black widow—all barely recognizable through the garbage-battered frames, and seemingly buried under the decaying and dirty film. With its foreboding score, which mixes bulldozers, nature sounds, factory noise, and a trapped bird tweeting in pain, Reeves addresses not only the ways in which the media of analog moving images is literally and metaphorically being disposed as it approaches its industrial obsolescence, but also the disastrous environmental consequences of modern life.

    Brimming with alternatively mottled and lapidary images, Landfill 16 pulses like living thing, a horror film about, to use Jussi Parikka’s phrase, “zombie media”—here, discarded moving images coming back to life, deformed. And while she never conceived the work as a collaboration per se, Reeves acknowledges the way the project represents a conjoining of forces that includes, she says, “the world, her thinking mind, and her spiritual muse….I had a feeling it wasn’t all me…that something else was at work.”

    Furthermore, Reeves’ work illuminates a politics of process. It does not merely exhibit political engagement through content, but also describes a mode of deeper philosophical inquiry regarding the role and positioning of humanity vis-a-vis the world through methods of production. Landfill 16 demonstrates that how things are made matters, and that making carries ramifications for how we think about and conduct ourselves in relation to other people, objects, and things. Art therefore provides a useful model for broadening our approach to thinking about the nonhuman, about the limits of authorship, and about attributions of agency. Works like Landfill 16 show that when we decenter the human, that when ego gives way to an “at-oneness with whatever,” we ironically gain a better sense of humanity’s place in the world.

    Plants, insects, and people all die, but cinema lives, every time it is played. Is dead/is dying.; a reversal of time, a reversal of nature itself. This is what cinema can do—change time, change the way things look or appear, open us up to new kinds of sight, new kinds of visions.

    All photographs carry an indexical relationship to their referents—Roland Barthes notes that he “can never deny that the thing has been there.There is a superimposition here: of reality and of the past” (Camera Lucida, 76.  Emphasis in original).  Barthes labels this persistent presence of the referent the essence of photography and the “That-has-been.”  How does this change when there is not a camera?