Films By Women – Page 13

‘Concussion’: When Queer Marriage in The Suburbs Isn’t Enough

This film about a queer woman is, unlike the same year’s ‘Blue Is The Warmest Color’, directed and written by a queer woman (Stacie Passon who was nominated for “Best First Feature” in the Independent Spirit Awards and will be will direct an episode of ‘Transparent’ this coming season), and in many aspects is the answer to those who dismissed ‘Blue’ as a product of the male gaze.

This repost by staff writer Ren Jender appears as part of our theme week on Sex Positivity.

How many distinctive, acclaimed films about queer women can be released in American theaters at the same time? If we extrapolate from the actions of film distributors in 2013, the answer is apparently: only one. Concussion was named one of the top 20 films of that year by Slate’s Dana Stevens and was also named one of the top films of 2013 in Salon. Shortly after its premiere, at Sundance, The Weinstein Company acquired it for distribution. For most films that acquisition (and the later support from reviews in traditional media) would mean a national release, but the film had a very limited run in theaters that fall and never played a theater in my art-house-friendly city. The film was on Video On Demand, iTunes, and Google Play, but deserves much more attention than most films that never have a national theatrical run.

This film about a queer woman is, unlike the same year’s Blue Is The Warmest Color, directed and written by a queer woman (Stacie Passon who was nominated for “Best First Feature” in the Independent Spirit Awards and will direct an episode of Transparent this coming season), and in many aspects is the answer to those who dismissed Blue as a product of the male gaze. Instead of a teenage protagonist, the main character in Concussion, Abby (played by Robin Weigert: Andrew O’Hehir in Salon summed up her performance as “OMFG”), is a 40-something, stay-at-home Mom, married to another woman and living in the suburbs.

When her son accidentally hits her in the face with a baseball, we see the confusion and blood in the family car ride to the hospital, as she moans to no one in particular, “I don’t want this. I don’t want this. I don’t want this.”

In the ER Abby says she is going back to work in the city (and that she really means it this time). Abby doesn’t need to work for money: her spouse, Kate, is a divorce attorney, kept busy by the dissatisfied wives in their social circle. We see the wives’ well-maintained bodies in slow motion, at the beginning of the film, in spin and yoga classes as David Bowie sings on the soundtrack, “Oh you pretty things…”

Passon knows this world well She lives in the town (Montclair) Abby does. She is married to a woman and has children, one of whom accidentally hit her in the face with a baseball. The parallels between her life and Abby’s may be why the character and setting seem so fully realized.

Abby for the most part blends in with her straight women friends but we see she’s different from them–and not just in her orientation. She reads books while she vacuums. When a friend is circulating a “new motherhood” survey for an article in a parenting magazine, Abby writes of dreams in which she sticks her then newborn son in the microwave–and other dreams in which she and her son are married. She writes, “My poor baby, I didn’t know whether to kill him, fuck him, or eat him.”

At times Abby’s queerness does separate her from the other women. When Abby mentions to her friend that one of the group of women they work out with is “cute,” the friend (played by Janel Maloney) reproaches Abby, “She’s not a lesbian!”

Abby starts work with a contractor to refurbish a city loft. As they transform the apartment, she transforms too, first hiring women to have sex with her and then working out of the loft as a high-priced escort, “Eleanor,” whose clients are all women.

A woman character turning to sex work for reasons other than money is usually a male artist’s conceit, as in Luis Buñuel’s great Belle de Jour, which features stunning, beautifully dressed, doctor’s wife, Catherine Deneuve, working in a brothel while her handsome, attentive (but clueless) husband sees his patients. In women’s memoirs of sex work (like Michelle Tea’s Rent Girl) the money is the point of the work (as it is with most work).

A sex worker character whose clients are all women (when the vast majority of sex work clients are men) is also usually the creation of a straight male artist–and is usually a male character so the work avoids any explicit same-sex scenes.

Perhaps because Concussion turns that last trope on its head (or perhaps because New York is a big city that can cater to many kinds of tastes) we accept the conceit of a woman over 40 seeing women clients (for $800 a session) every day. The queer women we see in sexual situations in Concussion are not cut from the same Playboy-ready cloth as the two women in Blue: one client is fat, another is an obvious real-life survivor of breast cancer and some of her clients, like Eleanor herself, are nowhere near their 20s anymore.

Robin Weigert doesn’t have a Barbie Doll face or a porn model’s body, but does have a passing resemblance to the young Ellen Barkin. Weigert exudes the same confidence and sexiness–reminding us those two qualities are often one and the same.

Concussion has a scene similar to one in Blue in which a straight man interrogates a queer woman about her sexuality. But because Abby is in her 40s, the mocking tone she takes with him is completely different from what we hear from the 20-something main character in Blue, Adele.

In Concussion are we seeing the female gaze? Well, we’re definitely seeing one woman’s gaze, that of Passon. The sex scenes in Concussion, unlike Blue, don’t seem like outtakes from an amateur porn video, but flow from the other nonsexual encounters in the film. (Concussion’s expert cinematographer is David Kruta.) We also don’t see full frontal nudity from any of the actresses, and although we see the bare breasts of some of Eleanor’s clients, we never see hers. Eleanor/ Abby is both a psychological and corporeal enigma to us.

Some clues for her motives are in the scenes between Abby and her spouse. They are affectionate and loving with each other, even when they’re alone, but the sex has gone out of their marriage. After a disastrous first encounter with an escort, we feel Abby’s ache of longing when a second “better” escort begins to touch her. Later we see Eleanor’s first client, a 23-year-old virgin, react to Eleanor’s touch in much the same way.

In the city we see Abby in punk rock t-shirts (vintage Blondie and the now-defunct C.B.G.B) and boyshort underwear and in the suburbs we see her fitting in with her friends in yoga pants and an expensive down-filled jacket. At a suburban dinner party the guests talk about their days hanging out in pre-gentrified downtown New York clubs, Squeezebox and The Limelight, and we realize yes, many of the club kids of the ’90s have become comfortable, suburban Moms and Dads.

The loft is decorated with posters for Louise Bourgeois and The Guerrilla Girls and has Diet For a New America on the bookshelf, distinct touches some of us in the audience recognize from our own living spaces. In the dialogue we hear echoes of conversations we too have had (or overheard) at parties: “I finally took the Myers-Briggs.” Writers of satire often seem to want their audience to hate the people, especially the women, they create (the Annette Bening character in American Beauty is just one example). Passon’s satire is much trickier–and kinder. She wants us to recognize these people. She wants us to recognize ourselves in them.

The film Passon says inspired Concussion is from the 1970s: Jeanne Dielman.., (and is also written and directed by a queer woman, Chantal Akerman). In Concussion, as in Dielman, we see the first signs of the housewife/sex-worker protagonist starting to unravel when she fails to stick to her usual daily routine: Abby misses picking up the kids after school for the first time in six years. Unlike Dielman, Passon’s film captures the monotony of domestic tasks, but doesn’t ask the audience to endure that boredom themselves.

Although Concussion was made before queer marriage became legal in New Jersey, the film brings up some interesting questions about the queer community’s quest for “equality.” What if we become just as disenchanted with being soccer Moms as straight women sometimes do? What then? At the end Abby throws herself into a home renovation project, the way so many of our married friends, straight and queer do, and we marvel at the mystery of other people’s marriages, not just in the film, but all around us.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8Wg–Mh8YY” iv_load_policy=”3″]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing. besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender

Clitoral Readings of ‘The Piano,’ ‘Turn Me On, Dammit,’ and ‘Secretary’

But how can female arousal be visually expressed? If women stereotypically prefer to read literary erotica over watching porn, with erotica’s descriptions of the interior sensations of female arousal, is that because many women imagine that female performers of porn are uncomfortably simulating their pleasure? Can there be a clitoral cinema of female arousal, and what would it look like?

Written by Brigit McCone as part of our theme week on Sex Positivity.

In Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right, a lesbian couple justify their preferred choice of pornography – gay male porn – by the fact that erections make desire excitingly visible and unarguable. The essence of sex positivity is shared arousal, yet, as Nora Ephron and Meg Ryan famously reminded audiences of When Harry Met Sally, female arousal and orgasm are easy to visually fake. Male craving for confirmation of orgasm in their own porn-watching leads to the “cum shot” becoming a standard trope of male-oriented pornography. But how can female arousal be visually expressed? If women stereotypically prefer to read literary erotica over watching porn, with erotica’s descriptions of the interior sensations of female arousal, is that because many women imagine that female performers of porn are uncomfortably simulating their pleasure? Can there be a clitoral cinema of female arousal, and what would it look like?

I would like to investigate that question using examples from three female-authored films: The Piano, Turn Me On, Dammit!, and Secretary. Judged only by their premises, they appear to be the height of exploitation – The Piano explores the sexual blackmail of a mute woman, Turn Me On, Dammit explores the lustful fantasies of a slender, blonde Scandinavian teenager, and Secretary explores an inexperienced young woman’s desire to be spanked and dominated. Yet, by making the female erotic imagination and self-stimulation central to their aesthetic, each of these films became erotic classics for female audiences. How?

The Piano

Written and directed by Jane Campion, The Piano contains some equal opportunity nudity and straightforward sex scenes, but it also disrupts the male gaze and centers the female spectator at key moments. Consider the scene in which Harvey Keitel’s Baines is examining Holly Hunter’s Ada from every angle, with casual male entitlement, as she plays her piano. Lying on the floor, he discovers a small hole in her thick, woollen stocking. The hole is symbolically clitoral to the female audience, as Baines circles his finger slowly over the little patch of heightened sensation and Ada gasps, but for the male audience it offers no spectacle. It is, rather, an evocation of the sensation of clitoral stimulation, in the same way that a woman licking an ice-cream may evoke oral sex to a male sexual imagination.

With Ada reaching through a crevice of wood to play secretive piano notes, Campion portrays the instrument as inherently sensual. Later comes a lovingly lit shot of a naked Baines caressing and rubbing the piano itself with a cloth. The hetero-female audience can take pleasure in both the spectacle of his body, and the suggestive quality of his attentive and caressing touch, but the female body is removed from the realm of spectacle. Instead, Baines is caressing the piano as a symbol of Ada’s voice and will, representing his deeper appreciation for her. Some critics (including Bitch Flicks) have said that it is problematic for Ada to fall in love with a man who is sexually blackmailing her. I would suggest, however, that, in a society that normalizes the purchase and conquest of women, it is Baines’ initial desire to negotiate, and his eventual total rejection of models of ownership,to request that Ada shows active desire for him, that marks him as her chosen mate.

Sam Neill’s controlling husband Stewart voyeuristically peers through a chink in Baines’ cabin to see his sexual play with Ada. At the moment at which Baines performs oral sex on Ada, Stewart’s gaze is distracted by his dog licking his hand. If Stewart carries the male gaze and male identification in this scene, then Jane Campion playfully interrupts that gaze to turn the man’s own hand into a symbolically clitoral site, vividly evoking the sensation of being licked for female audiences. The Piano, and its reputation as peculiarly erotic to women, is perhaps the strongest evidence that the female imagination responds to clitoral symbolism on a level that equals male susceptibility to phallic symbolism.

When Neill’s Stewart submits to Ada’s exploring his naked body with her hands, the male body becomes available to woman as spectacle and tactile pleasure while the woman herself remains clothed. If the male audience is uncomfortable with this passivity, they can identify with Stewart’s own discomfort, which explodes when Ada reaches the taboo territory of his backside, and he pulls up his hose and dashes from her, eyes averted. Just as his relationship with the Maori is colonial and acquisitive, Stewart’s only model for sex is male conquest and female submission. Just as Baines has surrendered to Maori language and culture, so his model for male/female relationships is a negotiated dual surrender and an attempt to learn the meaning of Ada’s piano language. The film’s finale rewards Baines’ model of negotiated interdependence and dual surrender over the Stewart’s domineering conquest model, with clitoral cinema triumphant.

Turn Me On, Dammit!

Depictions of female masturbation as erotic spectacle tend to focus on a woman moaning softly as she caresses her face, breast and thighs, running her fingers through her hair. The clitoris, effectively, becomes dispersed and distributed across any secondary sexual characteristics that the male audience happens to find attractive, hence the weirdly clitoral scalp of compulsive hair caressing. Female writer-director Jannicke Systad Jacobsen of Turn Me On, Dammit!, by contrast, opens with her teenaged heroine lying clothed on the floor, her hand jammed down her panties, frantically rubbing her clitoris, breathing rapidly and screwing up her face in unphotogenic arousal. This realistic depiction of masturbation immediately establishes the woman as sexual agent, not object. Because it is solitary and largely unphotogenic, masturbation has no function but to be the expression and release of female arousal.

Alma is masturbating to a phone sex hotline, where a male voice describes a hot encounter in the imaginary realm, like narrated literary erotica. Despite its sexed-up publicity, Turn Me On, Dammit! features only one brief, confusing sex act, as Alma is poked in the thigh by the naked erection of her crush, before he immediately withdraws. Instead, the film is saturated with Alma’s erotic imagination as she narrates imaginary encounters over fragmented photographs, ridiculous surrealism and vivid close-ups. Fragmenting the encounters in this way evokes the partial and inadequate imagination of a sexually inexperienced girl, attempting to project what sex might be like. Her fantasies include older men to whom she is not attracted, as well as female rivals, capturing the wide ranging of a horny teenager’s exploratory imagination. By combining fragmented visuals with Alma’s own narrated voiceover, the female viewer never feels an intrusive male gaze. The teenaged female voice of desire and sexual curiosity dominates and narrates throughout.

Secretary

Although the film is directed by Steven Shainberg, he is sensitive to the female origins of his story, adapted by Erin Cressida Wilson from a short story by Mary Gaitskill. Determined to portray the sexual awakening of a submissive woman, rather than the focussing on the pleasure of a dominant man, Secretary harnesses many of the same techniques used by the fully female-authored The Piano and Turn Me On, Dammit. Where Baines demonstrated his attentive, caressing nurture by lovingly wiping Ada’s piano, James Spader’s Mr. Grey demonstrates attentive, caressing nurture to the delicate, vulva-reminiscent orchids in his office. The flowers symbolize burgeoning arousal and desire explicitly in the heroine’s own fantasy sequence, as giant blooms burst open behind Mr. Grey. This fantasy sequence is alternated with shots of the heroine’s frantic, realistic masturbation. Like Turn Me On, Dammit!‘s Alma, Secretary‘s Lee is fully clothed during her masturbations, emphasizing that they are expressions of arousal rather than spectacle. After the film’s most potentially degrading act of domination, where Lee is required to bare her ass while Mr. Grey masturbates over it, the act is reclaimed for audiences as having been arousing for Lee, by her immediate withdrawal into the bathroom to masturbate over the memory of it. A middle-aged woman in a neighbouring stall is shown overhearing her masturbation with a look of compassionate understanding that emphasizes the universal female experience of arousal and desire. Finally, however, it is Lee’s own narrating voice, like Alma’s, that owns the film and challengingly asserts her active role in submitting.

So, can we say that these three films – The Piano, Turn Me On, Dammit! and Secretary – are sex-positive films? I would argue that their clitoral aesthetic of female-authored desire and imaginative sensation make them sex-positive for their female audience. However, in the world of the film, its men are still technically committing acts of sexual harassment where the woman consents by her imagination rather than her voice. This harassment is reclaimed for the female audience by our insight into the heroine’s desire. Can we assume that the male heroes are aware of the women’s desire, because they’ve read it on her face or in her subtler physical responses? We are still a long way from a society that takes it for granted that women should voice their desires, and that sex should be openly negotiated. But recognizing and developing a clitoral aesthetic of film is a step in the right direction. A cinematic language of female desire can be harnessed to support conversations about female needs and sensitivities.

Brigit McCone became obsessed with Harvey Keitel after seeing The Piano at an impressionable age. She writes short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and reveling in trashy romances.

Johanna Hamilton’s ‘1971’: A Thrilling Portrait of Activism

Bonnie offers a very different take, one that speaks volumes about her resoluteness, level of engagement and selflessness: “We felt that just because we were parents didn’t mean that we could remove ourselves from responsibility, that that would have been kind of a cop-out. We decided that we weren’t going to be content when we continued to see things that really disturbed us.”

Written by Rachael Johnson.

The documentary 1971 (2014) tells the gripping story of a group of peace activists who broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania on March 8, 1971. They called themselves the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI and their aim was to expose abusive, anti-dissent practices by the Bureau. The activists found what they wanted and were never caught. Making off with a trove of office files, they uncovered an immense and illegal government surveillance program of domestic political groups. One of the stolen documents referred to the now notorious COINTELPRO, a political surveillance program that targeted Black, left-wing, Puerto Rican, and women’s rights organizations as well as the anti-Vietnam war movement. Overseen by FBI head, J. Edgar Hoover, it was both unlawful and un-American as it violated First Amendment rights. The group anonymously dispatched photocopies of the damning evidence to national newspapers. The Washington Post published the story and the FBI was later investigated by Congress.

Directed by Johanna Hamilton, 1971 mixes present-day interviews with members of the group who have broken their silence with footage from the period, photographic stills, documents, and dramatic recreations of the event. Interesting and diverse in terms of personality, age, and background, the group included a married couple with three young children, Bonnie and John Raines; anti-war activist and physics professor, Bill Davidon (the leader of the group); and two younger men, cab driver (and lock-picker) Keith Forsyth and social worker Bob Williamson. The interviews give us a clear sense of what motivated and united them. Keith, still visibly moved decades after, explains that it was his revulsion at the Jackson State shootings that drove him to more “confrontational” political action. “I was done talking,” he says. John speaks eloquently of how surveillance, agent infiltration, and the engineering of paranoia and fear impair both political debate and the morale of activists. “It shrinks the discourse, it shrinks the possibility of resistance,” he observes. It was Bill’s intention to expose the FBI’s anti-dissent aims and practices.

Although very much a committed activist, Bonnie recalls how she was, also, expected to perform a traditionally feminine, domestic role at meetings: “I felt a little bit like I was the den mother for the group…I was fixing meatballs and spaghetti but it was expected that I was going to play that role almost exclusively and I was not real happy about being a little bit marginalized in that kind of way.” It’s a telling reminder that chauvinist, patriarchal attitudes persisted even in progressive circles in the so–called sexually liberated early seventies. John, however, does seem very much a partner and recognizes that Bonnie’s determination to carry out the mission was greater than his. She, also, plays a key part in the break-in.

Bonnie and John are an interesting, admirable couple. Family life did not turn them insular and self-absorbed. They remained committed to caring about the world around them. John had been a freedom rider in the South and he explains how his experiences gave him an understanding of how power operates. John and Bonnie’s situation was, of course, unique. Both parents could have been locked away for a long time. They made plans for close relatives to look after the children if the worst happened but I suppose many would judge them irresponsible and selfish. Bonnie offers a very different take, one that speaks volumes about her resoluteness, level of engagement and selflessness: “We felt that just because we were parents didn’t mean that we could remove ourselves from responsibility, that that would have been kind of a cop-out. We decided that we weren’t going to be content when we continued to see things that really disturbed us.”

Hamilton’s dramatic recreations of the extraordinary event bring to life this real-life political thriller. They are evocative and quite nail-biting, a good deal less phony than most recreations. We follow the group’s preparations and witness the break-in itself, which took place during the night of the Madison Square Garden Ali-Frazier fight of March 8, 1971.

1971 conveys an understanding of the oppressive nature of the FBI’s power as well as an acute awareness of the nastiness of its methods. For many years, the Bureau dedicated itself to stifling freedom of thought and expression through the spread of fear and paranoia, invaded the private space of American citizens and destroyed personal lives. Their schemes were plain evil. The viewer is reminded of that anonymous letter send by the Bureau to Martin Luther King encouraging him to commit suicide.

1971’s depiction of one of the most politically fascinating eras in modern U.S. history is vibrant and characterful but it doesn’t romanticize its subjects. It doesn’t have to. The activists come across as principled, courageous people. Their transgressive act of daring exposed extraordinary abuses of state power. It is a troublesome truth for conservatives and historical amnesiacs but injustice is not always uncovered by strictly lawful means. Hamilton recognizes the story’s historical parallels with Snowden and Wikileaks (Laura Poitras, interestingly, is one of the film’s co-executive producers) as she underscores its importance in the history of American anti-surveillance activism. 1971 is an informative, exciting documentary that needs to be seen.

The Angry Young Man in Horror

These films work to varying degrees, and the circumstances are diverse, but the core of each story is the same – one violent little boy. In a society where privileged young men (i.e. heterosexual, white, young adult males) are committing heinous crimes like date rape and mass shootings on an alarmingly regular basis, a fear of angry young men seems valid, and reason enough for a trend in horror.

This guest post by Claire Holland previously appeared at Razor Apple and is cross-posted with permission.

Be warned: This post is full of spoilers for Goodnight Mommy, Cub, and The Boy.

More often than not, horror movies reveal the fears of our time. In Axelle Carolyn’s excellent book, It Lives Again! Horror Movies in the New Millennium, the author illustrates how our collective fears end up reflected in different ways on screen. Carolyn makes the argument (and backs it up) that the popularity of every big horror trend originated somewhere in our collective consciousness, connecting trends to a country’s political climate, terrorist attacks, and other big events that resonant deeply throughout cultures.

As the late and great Wes Craven said, “Horror films don’t create fear. They release it.”

Carolyn’s book came to mind recently as I watched a crop of new films, each about the potential for violence in young boys: Goodnight Mommy, Cub, and The Boy. These films work to varying degrees, and the circumstances are diverse, but the core of each story is the same – one violent little boy. In a society where privileged young men (i.e. heterosexual, white, young adult males) are committing heinous crimes like date rape and mass shootings on an alarmingly regular basis, a fear of angry young men seems valid, and reason enough for a trend in horror.

Of course, these are horror movies, not case studies. As much as horror reflects society’s fears, it distorts them, making them ever more monstrous. In Goodnight Mommy, a young boy, Elias, suffers from a break with reality, imagining his dead twin brother is still alive and the woman living in his house is merely masquerading as his mother. In Cub, Boy Scout Sam stumbles onto the lair of Kai, a feral child living, and killing, out in the woods. The Boy takes the most realistic tack by far, examining the lonely childhood of a budding murderer, Ted, growing up in the middle of nowhere. These are the origin stories of the Angry Young Man, told through the lens of the horror genre.

There are numerous parallels between the three boys, who all engage in gradually escalating forms of violence: they kick chickens, kill dogs, and eventually wind up super gluing their mothers’ lips together or setting buildings full of people aflame. They’re all isolated: Elias’s brother and father are dead, his mother distant; Sam is a foster child without friends, a kid whom even the Boy Scout troop leader disdains; and Ted lives in a desolate motel with only his alcoholic father and a few passing guests for company. Most importantly, though, their attempts at connecting with others are constantly thwarted, or even actively discouraged.

When Elias, out of grief and guilt, insists that his mother speak to Lukas or make him breakfast, his mother reacts furiously, verbally and physically berating Elias. She slaps him and makes him to repeat aloud, “I will not speak to Lukas,” over and over again, when what Elias clearly needs is his mother’s love and understanding – and therapy. Bafflingly, Elias and his mother live in a lavish house that seems completely sequestered from the rest of the world, making the boy’s isolation all the more palpable. Given no one to talk to or work through his feelings with, Elias lashes out at the only person he can, creating an elaborate fantasy wherein his mother is an evil imposter who must be tortured until she can bring back his real mother and, presumably, the rest of his family.

In The Boy, Ted seems like a fairly normal kid, albeit one who is very comfortable with death. His father pays him pennies for picking up road kill, a pastime that eventually morphs into Ted luring animals onto the road. This is troubling, but the sort of behavior that might be curbed by an involved parent (preferably one who doesn’t demand road kill in exchange for attention). Under the nonexistent supervision of his father, however, Ted’s interest in death blooms, as does his inferiority complex – a dangerous combination. As with Elias, when Ted reaches out for companionship and acceptance – first to his father, and then to a kind but troubled drifter – he is beaten down, emotionally and physically. His pain and anger eventually culminate in murderous arson. This doesn’t seem like the story of a cold, calculating sociopath, no matter how much the filmmaker bills it that way. Ted is full of feelings, but because those feelings are never validated, he can only find destructive ways to express them.

Cub carries out this same model, but to cartoonish heights. Sam is the odd kid out in his Boy Scout troop, so when he encounters feral Kai on a camping trip in the woods, he feels an immediate kinship with the outcast and the two form a cautious rapport. At one point, the troop leader sics his dog on Sam as a mean joke, so Kai kidnaps the dog and hangs it from a tree so that Sam can kill it. Kai, a boy who has been used and abused by those bigger and stronger than him, considers this a gift. Sam is initially shocked and repulsed, but when he tries to help the dog and is bitten for his trouble, he retaliates, sick of being hurt by those he reaches out to again and again. Unable to truly forge a bond with anyone, Sam finally kills Kai so that he can take over the feral boy’s malevolent, vengeful persona.

The shared element in these three stories of angry young men is an unwillingness of the guardians and role models to nurture, or even condone, sensitivity in these boys. They constantly demand that the boys be tougher, thicker-skinned, less vulnerable, regardless of their actual feelings or needs. When Ted’s father allows a prom afterparty to take place at the motel, sans parents, he tells Ted, “The boys’ll be boys and the girls’ll be girls; good, harmless fun. You get what I’m sayin’?” One can easily imagine the kind of behavior Ted’s father is allowing, and tacitly condoning. “Boys will be boys” encompasses all manner of sins. When those same boys hurt Ted and his father blames him, Ted sees no other option than to become a stronger (read: hyper-masculine) version of those cruel boys in order to survive.

We can’t excuse violent criminals for their actions just because they may have had bad childhoods, but our society’s emphasis on the masculine above everything else is a real problem. Forcing young boys to “toughen up” before they’re ready only forces them to give up their empathy, and that benefits no one. These three stories are horrific, but they are, after all, just stories. Unfortunately, the real crimes committed by angry young men – Sandy Hook, Steubenville, Aurora – are as gruesome as fiction.

Claire Holland is a freelance writer and author of Razor Apple, a blog devoted to horror movies and horror culture with a feminist bent. Claire has a BA in English and creative writing, but she insists on writing about “trashy” genre movies nonetheless. You can follow her on twitter @ClaireCWrites.

A Tinge of Melancholy Saves ‘Sleeping with Other People’

For the rest of the film, which covers a period of years, we follow the relationship of these two characters who are “not a couple but…act like one.” They don’t kiss or have sex but don’t deny they want to either.

Sleeping with Other People, the new film from writer-director Leslye Headland (Bachelorette) has elements that make me hate most other rom-coms. Though set in New York City, every character with more than a few lines is a white, straight person and the script had enough gender-stereotyping to make me want to bite someone. But near the start we see Jake (Jason Sudeikis), the lovable Lothario star of way too many other movies, try to explain away his latest infidelity to his girlfriend as they argue in the middle of a busy New York street. As he seems to bullshit his way back into her heart–and bed–she suddenly pushes him, hard, into the path of an oncoming cab. He escapes with only minor injuries, but he does get hit, and we in the audience feel the impact: this film is trying to be different from the rest.

The most interesting conceit of the film is that both main characters realize they’re too damaged to be together. Alison Brie as Lainey cannot stop hooking up with her gynecologist fuck-buddy (Adam Scott) who went to college with both Sudeikis’s and Brie’s characters (it’s supposed to be 13 years later and, uh, some of the actors seem a little mature to be in their early 30s) whether or not the two are in “monogamous” relationships with other people or not. After Jake and Lainey have dinner together and confess their failings, Lainey says, “We gotta just be friends.” and they discuss a “safe word” they can use to dispel sexual tension between them. They decide on “dick in a mousetrap” (“mousetrap” for short).

For the rest of the film, which covers a couple of years, we follow the relationship of these two characters who are “not a couple but…act like one.” They don’t kiss or have sex but don’t deny they want to either. When they’re in a store talking as they browse one of the clerks tells them what “cool” married people they are and Jake and Lainey play along. When, in a crisis, Lainey rushes to Jake’s place they lie in the same bed, fully clothed and she asks, “Are we in love?” He doesn’t say no.

Sudeikis’s character is one of those annoying guys in movies who doesn’t have to worry about money (he and his business partner have developed software together that is bought out by another company for millions). He brings a nice self-awareness (including a touch of self-loathing) as a man who compulsively picks up women and can never stay faithful to any of them (the concept of polyamory seems not to have occurred to anyone in the film).

Brie has the better written part in Lainey. Instead of, like Jake, having sex with strangers she takes some time off from dating, and in a great rarity for any onscreen character, especially a woman, begins a process of permanent change. She gets into medical school. She stops answering the gynecologist’s calls. When someone asks her why, she says, “Because I’m not an asshole,” leaving unsaid the words “any more.” When Jake asks her why she continued the relationship with the gynecologist for so long, she tells him, “I thought he’d choose me,” and the melancholy and weariness in her voice comes closer to real-life romantic disappointment than most rom-coms ever tread. Her last scenes with the gynecologist seem to imply he feels a sadness too, demonstrating what most adults learn: getting to choose what you want (or don’t) and not getting to can be equally dissatisfying.

Sudeikis and Brie have great chemistry together and the film is quite funny especially when Jake’s business partner (Jason Mantzoukas) and his wife (Andrea Savage) are in a scene. The wife, Naomi, tells Jake and Lainey, “Don’t have kids,” then says to the adorable preschool daughter she’s carrying on her hip, “No offense.” The other supporting roles (except for Natasha Lyonne’s throwaway appearance as Lainey’s queer friend) are also written and cast with exceptional care, especially Amanda Peet (who really shines here) as Jake’s knockout boss, whom he’s always asking out even after she tells him she doesn’t date her employees.

The film is not without parts I would complain about in a film by a man and am dumbfounded to see in one directed and written by a woman. Lainey spends time in lingerie for seemingly no good reason except to show off Brie’s lovely body (the film purports to be a sex comedy but never shows any real nudity). In another scene Jake uses an empty glass bottle to shows Lainey how to touch her own clit. For maximum offensiveness he imitates Public Enemy while he does so.

But even these scenes can’t ruin the emotional resonance of Jake and Lainey’s relationship which we see makes each a better, more whole person able to move on and have a romantic relationship with someone else. As a bonus we see the two characters attend a child’s birthday party high on ecstasy (molly) and the script has them act like real-life people who’ve taken the drug. When the entertainment for the party is a no-show, Lainey tells a worried parent, “Re-laaaaax,” and leads the kids in a dance to David Bowie’s “Modern Love.” Even if this method isn’t how adults usually get through these occasions, the film suggests maybe it should be.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYlEqlTsSJY” iv_load_policy=”3″]

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Vintage Viewing: Lotte Reiniger, Animation Innovator

Part of Vintage Viewing, exploring the work of female filmmaking pioneers.

Lotte Reiniger: It’s a Snip

Born in Berlin in 1899, Lotte Reiniger became fascinated by Chinese silhouette puppetry. Beginning her film career working on intertitle designs for Paul Wegener’s Rumpelstiltskin’s Wedding at the age of 16, Wegener introduced her to a collective of animators. At first, Reiniger created special effects sequences for German expressionist films such as Rochus Gliese’s Apocalypse and Wegener’s The Pied Piper of Hamlin. Reiniger had developed and refined her own technique for completely animated films by 1919’s Ornament of the Lovestruck Heart. In 1921, Reiniger married Carl Koch, who became her producer and camera operator, while Reiniger was responsible for concepts, storyboards and silhouette cutting. In 1922 she made Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, demonstrating the magic of Grimm’s fairy tales and the appeal of princess stories, years before Disney abruptly switched from masculine cartoon heroes like Mickey Mouse, to folklore princesses.

A still of Prince Achmed, showcasing its multiplane silhouettes

Reiniger transcended the flatness of silhouette animation by pioneering the multiplane Tricktisch (trick table), in which layers of glass are inserted into a table so that images with layers and depth can be shot through the table’s central hole. Walt Disney’s U.S. patent (no. 2,201,689) for his own multiplane camera would strongly resemble Reiniger’s earlier design. Far from patenting her own work, however, Reiniger wrote and filmed tutorials on her techniques, with a passion for spreading the art of animation. In 1925, Lotte Reiniger completed three years of labor on The Adventures of Prince Achmed, a fully animated feature film drawn from the folklore of the 1001 Nights, followed by 1928’s half-hour Dr. Dolittle and his Animals. That’s over a decade before Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves received an honorary Oscar for screen innovation. Reiniger’s visionary contribution continues to receive little recognition in official histories of animation.

Despite this woman’s major significance to the development of the art of animation, Disney would make a notorious company policy that excluded women from creative work in his company. Reiniger, meanwhile, fled Nazism in the 1930s, losing all her original prints (watching copies of copies means we lose a lot of the fine detail in her originals). However, with her small team of collaborators, she continued animating in her distinctive silhouette style, adding color backgrounds to later films, finishing a long and productive career with 1980’s The Four Seasons. The longevity of her career speaks to her skill in carving out and developing her own unique niche and flavor, which survived competition with rival animators who were working on an industrial scale.

Cinderella – 1922

Many feminists find the tale of Cinderella problematic, because of the role that Cinderella plays in accepting her own servitude and being rewarded for this passivity. Reiniger solves this problem in her film’s first frames. We see a speeded-up portrait of Reiniger’s hand and scissors cutting out the figure of Cinderella, before the little figure seizes the scissors for herself. Cinderella will cut the scenes of her own fantasy jaggedly from the film’s black background, as a dress-maker cuts the pattern of their outfit. Is it because the wicked stepsisters pull the tail of their caged bird that Cinderella has a bird army at her disposal? These scenes are far more faithful to the original Grimms’ fairy tale, where birds helped the heroine sort the lentils from the ashes as one of the impossible tasks she was set before she was allowed to go to the ball.

Reiniger also anticipates Disney’s habit of rewarding his virtuous heroines with armies of animals that substitute the girls’ own agency. If Cinderella is the one cutting out her bird army, does this mean she identifies as a caged bird herself? Are the rolling eyes of her stepsisters a true representation, or has Cinderella mischievously cut their silhouettes as grotesques to express their inner ugliness? The farcical padding of the thin stepsister’s bust, and the girdling of the overweight one, show a sharp female eye for the constructed nature of female beauty.

Rather than a fairy godmother, the apple tree growing from her own mother’s grave clothes Cinderella in finery. In a cruel twist, the Prince finds her at her mother’s grave after the fairytale clothes have fallen from her, and is unable to recognize her without her artificial finery. The plan to marry the first woman who fits Cinderella’s abandoned shoe flies out of a courtier’s head as a magic bird–a sly dig at its birdbrained logic? Such witty details are a trademark of Reiniger’s work. Notice the tiny figure of a man on the minute hand of her great clock, and a lady on the hour hand. Though the man moves 60 times as fast, he constantly passes the lady by, just as the prince overlooked Cinderella without her finery. The gruesome slicing off of her foot’s excess weight by the stepsister, to fit the slipper, is a detail kept from the original story, that adds to Reiniger’s darker tone. Only magic birds can provide the prince with the right answer, for fortune favors the unscrupulous. But with a “Snip!” that fate can be changed, when a girl is wielding her own scissors. Her physically abusive stepmother can only huff and puff and blow herself apart. The price, however, is to pass forever the unreal imaginary space of “fairyland.”

Soundtrack Suggestion: Evanescence “Bring Me To Life”

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kku75vGDD_0″]

Papageno – 1935

1935’s Papageno uses the new technology of synchronized sound to the full. Mozart’s playful classical music from comedy opera The Magic Flute is brought to life by Reiniger’s rhythmically animated fantasy interpretation. Long before Disney’s Fantasia, Reiniger, a fan of the hyperreal arts of shadow theater and opera, showed that animation could be used to popularize supposedly elite art forms like opera.

Mozart designed The Magic Flute as a popular entertainment, not an elite spectacle, and Reiniger’s “silhouette opera house” restores that sense of accessible magic with her sprightly bird catcher and his magical pan pipes for charming the birds from the trees, who lives in lonely longing for a female counterpart. The film also showcases Reiniger’s development of multiplane depth in her use of detailed backdrops. Great care must have been required to exactly synchronize with the music, as when the parakeets play the bells while Papageno swings on vines and pictures his bird friends as the women that he wished he could charm. From giant snakes to an attempted suicide, this adaptation doesn’t shrink from the darker undertones in Mozart’s libretto and music, while the freedom of animation brings talking birds and a dashing, ostrich-riding heroine to life, enriching the musical fantasy, just as the classic music of Tchaikovsky’s ballet Sleeping Beauty was brought to more literal life in Disney’s 1959 film of the same name. Working with few collaborators, Reiniger may not have achieved such a lush result, but her work clearly shows her visionary grasp of the medium’s potential.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCR-GFKmMGU”]

Thumbelina – 1954

Hans Christian Andersen’s Thumbelina told the tale of a tiny girl grown from seed to be a companion to an old woman, Reiniger has her Thumbelina born spontaneously and magically from a flower, beholden to none but herself. Without parents to guide her, Thumbelina explores the world and resists all attempts at coerced marriage in her own search for her soul kin. Kidnapped by a bullying toad to be a bride for her son, Thumbelina prays for release from her lily-pad prison and is rewarded by the intervention of kindly fish who tow her to shore, along with a sympathetic butterfly, the first hint of Thumbelina’s kinship with creatures of the air.

After an autumn feeding on berries and playing with the woodland animals, Thumbelina finds herself freezing with the coming of winter and seeks shelter with an apparently kindly, motherly mouse. In exchange for her home, Thumbelina does housework for the mouse, but the mouse attempts to use her leverage to emotionally blackmail Thumbelina into accepting marriage with the neighboring mole, who can bribe Thumbelina with necklaces and jewels that mark him as a good match. Under the pressure of her debt to the mothering mouse, Thumbelina accepts a ring and allows herself to be pushed into bridal regalia, but a late migrating swallow helps her to fly away after hearing of her despair at the upcoming wedding. In Andersen’s original tale, discovering a fairy prince who is her own size makes Thumbelina’s happy ending, reinforcing the idea that Mr. Right must be the ultimate reward. In Reiniger’s retelling, Thumbelina discovers a whole fairy community, who fit her with wings so that she can join them as an equal. It is the final vision of Thumbelina dancing in a line with other fairies that makes Reiniger’s happy ending, not a romantic resolution. In asserting Thumbelina’s right to reject unsuitable suitors and search for her own soul kin, the fairy tale takes on its feminist edge. Thumbelina may be vulnerable, but she struggles for her own desires throughout the tale.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDojanzKKmw”]

Carving out their own unique niche in the filmmaking world was one way for women to resist mainstream pressures that were pushing them out of the directing craft. Lotte Reiniger can lay claim to being the greatest silhouette animator. In the USA, avant-garde, arthouse film was pioneered by Maya Deren. Next month’s Vintage Viewing: Maya Deren, experimental eccentric.

Brigit McCone began her film career making stop-motion animation with play-dough, writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and watching animations that are supposed to be for kids.

Parajanov and Puppies: Queering the Soviet Superman

“If the Socialism is Authoritarian; if there are Governments armed with economic power as they are now with political power; if, in a word, we are to have Industrial Tyrannies, then the last state of man will be worse than the first… Over the portal of the new world, ‘Be thyself’ shall be written.” – Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde’s polemic “The Soul of Man under Socialism” offers a prophetic warning about authoritarian tendencies in socialist philosophy, and the need to safeguard individualism, as Wilde attempted to reconcile his belief in social equality with the protection of minority opinion and divergent personalities. The philosophies of Karl Marx advocated radical equality, including gender equality, but through imposed conformity rather than equally accepted diversity. For gender equality, this meant achieving conformity of the sexes by abolishing the female domestic sphere, not integrating it, and by rejecting emotionalism in women, not promoting it in men. The female ideal created by Soviet artists like Vera Mukhina was a distinctly muscular, masculinized one.

If masculinizing the Soviet Superwoman was state orthodoxy, feminizing the Soviet Superman was subversive rebellion. The rejection of appeals to include gay rights in the socialist agenda dates back to Marx and, particularly, to the homophobia of Friedrich Engels. Personal distaste and pointed silence became political persecution and erasure in 1933, when Stalin outlawed homosexuality as “bourgeois deviation” punishable with five years in prison camp (ironically, McCarthyism would stigmatize homosexuality as socialist subversion).

Problem Child – 1954

Tatyana Lukashevich directed at the height of Socialist Realism, a form that placed limitations on style (realism), genre (relentlessly optimistic musicals and romantic comedies, or anti-capitalist propaganda), and theme (the glorification of collective labor). As such, her work is usually dismissed by Western critics as mindless state ideology. But there is passionate individualism striving against her Stalinist limitations. More than any filmmaker of her era, Lukashevich’s work expresses the pain of Soviet suppression of femininity. In The Foundling (1940), a lonely geologist is tempted to adopt a lost little girl, the film dwelling sympathetically on his longing for family and the emptiness of a life dedicated only to work. Written by Agnia Barto and Rina Zelenaya, and directed by Lukashevich, this entirely female-authored film harnesses a man to express its sharpest parental urge. In musical comedy Wedding With A Dowry (1954, mistranslated as “Bride With A Dowry”), scripted by Lukashevich herself, the top workers of rival Kolkhozes (collective farms) are a woman and a man in love. They almost break up over their rivalry as workers, before realizing that that rivalry has created a record-breaking harvest (the joint dowry of the wedding). The film criticizes the role of male insecurity in undermining female talent.

Perhaps Lukashevich’s most interesting film is Problem Child (the Russian title is a pun between “Certificate of Education” and “testimony of maturity”). Problem Child‘s antihero, Valentin, advocates an Individualism remarkably similar to Wilde’s in “The Soul of Man Under Socialism.” Valentin relishes poetry, aesthetics and daydreaming, while shirking manual labor and conventional masculinity. In the film’s Komsomol (Communist Youth) masquerade ball, Valentin arrives costumed as a long-haired Demon, standing on a comrade’s shoulders to tower symbolically above his peers. His costume is revealing: 19th century Romantic Mikhail Lermontov wrote Demon to portray a scorned outcast of heaven, but one who is a sexually magnetic rebel. The appeal of Vasily Lanovoy’s charismatic Valentin is essential to Problem Child. To justify his existence as a character in Stalinist film, he must suffer a public denunciation by his peers for egoism, and be proposed for expulsion from the Komsomol by his best friend, Zhenya (short for Evgeny). The viewer must endure a lesson about Great Lenin’s Komsomol philosophy. Yet the film remains subtly ambivalent about Valentin’s punishment; his accusers are nasal and visibly jealous, and Zhenya’s own mother reproaches him for denouncing his friend: “How could you? … you think shockingly little of each other… it’s no good.”

Modern fans celebrate the relationship between Valentin and Zhenya as “slash” and “the Soviet Brokeback Mountain,” highlighting the role of its female writer, Liya Geraskina, and director Tatyana Lukashevich, in frankly eroticizing the Soviet ideal of brotherly comrades. Taking shelter in a deserted cabin, after a dangerous mountain descent, a soaked Valentin averts his eyes and sighs, “When we descended the mountain, it seemed to me there were only us two in the world,” before his eyes roam Zhenya’s face and linger on his lips, he tickles his nose and the two giggle and hug. Waiting to give a bouquet to his female love interest (Zhenya’s sister), he tells Zhenya blushingly, “I’m revealing the greatest treasure to you. I deeply love…” “Who?” Zhenya demands. Valentin laughs self-consciously (and ambiguously), “What do you mean, who? You, of course!” At the masquerade ball, another boy tries to lure Valentin away with him to “a house he knows,” while one of their peers sneers “look what a tender friendship! Quite the pair – a goose and a loon!” Censors could not risk perceiving homoerotic subtext in such moments, lest they themselves be accused of perverted imaginations.

The Komsomol’s crushing persecution and expulsion of Valentin’s “egoism” can easily be read as a coded persecution of his homosexuality. Just as The Foundling uses a man to express its sharpest parental urge, so Problem Child harnesses a man to express stereotypically feminine romantic tenderness, dissociating its heroine from the stigma of excessive femininity. We can only speculate how it was received by closeted viewers in rural regions of the Soviet Union.

[youtube_sc url=”https://youtu.be/NDLsL2dbrk4″]

Sayat Nova (The Color of Pomegranates) – 1969

“In the USSR, it’s impossible for a person not to be intimidated. But all the same, they didn’t intimidate Parajanov. He is perhaps the only one in his country who embodied the saying: ‘if you want to be free, be free.'” – Andrei Tarkovsky

The bisexual Armenian-Georgian director Sergei Parajanov, who had Ukrainian and Tatar wives, was inspired by the creative freedom of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood to break away from Socialist Realism and create his own unique style, fusing lush camp with mystical symbolism and the cultural distinctiveness of the USSR’s ethnic minorities. His first film in this new style was 1965’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, set in the Hutsulian culture of the Ukrainian Carpathians. His second, The Color of Pomegranat e s (original title: Sayat Nova) dispensed with narrative altogether, to create an idiosyncratic visual meditation on the writings of medieval Armenian poet Sayat Nova. Already convicted of homosexual acts with a KGB officer in 1948, the international success of Parajanov’s new style led to a playful interview in a Danish magazine, in which he claimed to have given sexual favors to 25 Communist party members. He was sentenced to five years’ hard labour for “the rape of a party member” and “propagation of pornography” in 1973. Andrei Tarkovsky and Lilya Brik were among the Soviet artists who campaigned for his release. In prison, Parajanov created hundreds of drawings and collages, now displayed in the Parajanov Museum in Yerevan, Armenia. His monument in Tbilisi, Georgia, is based on an iconic photograph of the director leaping, as if to take flight, reminiscent of Mikhail Kuzmin’s 1906 novel Wings, which compares its hero’s acceptance of his homosexuality to growing wings.

Released from prison after four years of petitioning, Gorbachev’s glasnost allowed Parajanov to produce two more films, 1985’s The Legend of Suram Fortress, set in Georgia, and 1988’s Ashik Kerib, set in Azerbaijan. Both take place in a vivid and stylized past, like Sayat Nova and Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. Our tendency to describe Vladimir Putin’s anti-gay laws as “medieval” is misleading; medieval Russia was remarkably tolerant of gay culture, while gay themes were unusually prominent in pre-revolutionary Russian literature. The role of Marxist ideology in fostering state homophobia in Russia may be compared to the Marxist publication Molla Nasreddin and its role in stigmatizing traditional homoeroticism in Iran as “cultural backwardness” and “elite decadence.” To varying degrees, the same was true of many cultures in Parajanov’s native Caucasus Mountains, which stretch between Russia and Iran, with entire ethnic groups persecuted and deported under Stalin. The relentlessly progressivist rhetoric of Soviet homophobia fostered the link, perhaps counterintuitive to our eyes, between nationalist conservatism and camp radicalism that is observable in Parajanov’s films, conflating ethnic and sexual minority politics. In Sayat Nova in particular, the film’s symbolic meditations on love, wisdom, religion and death – “I am a man whose life and soul is torment” – are accompanied by experimentations in gender bending. Parajanov presents his Georgian actress, Sofiko Chiaureli, in a variety of guises, including both the poet as a young man and the poet’s mother. Cutting hypnotically back and forth between Chiaureli’s masculine and feminine forms, between a woman’s spinning and a man’s reading, a skull and a rose, Parajanov creates a subversive aesthetic of gender fluidity and male femininity.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZwhS_b4Df4″]

The Light Blue Puppy – 1976

The Light Blue Puppy is an adaptation of Hungarian author Gyula Urban’s children’s book about a bullied and rejected black puppy, who acts as a metaphor for the USA’s treatment of African Americans (the official anti-racism of the USSR attracted African American intellectuals such as Paul Robeson and Langston Hughes, though ordinary Russians were frequently racist, despite the Black ancestry of Russia’s beloved national poet, Alexander Pushkin). The cartoon’s writer, Yuri Entin, altered the puppy’s color from black to a “nontraditional” light blue (“nontraditional orientation” is the conventional Russian euphemism for homosexuality). It was apparently after the cartoon’s appearance that “light blue” (goluboi) became standard slang for gay, though it’s unknown how far The Light Blue Puppy influenced this. To those who interpret his “hymn to tolerance” as a satire of homosexuals, Yuri Entin responds, “It’s literally hitting below the belt. I have a huge amount of acquaintances of non-traditional orientation, they are wonderful people that I have the very tenderest relations with. And so I would never have allowed myself to mock them.” (Russian-language source) By transforming the puppy’s stigma from race to male femininity, if not homosexuality (the male puppy is voiced by actress Alisa Freyndlikh, and rescued by a frankly feminized sailor), Entin converted anti-American propaganda into an edgier metaphor for Soviet oppressions. His pink sailor attacks with flowers, recalling Portugal’s pacifist, pro-democracy Carnation Revolution.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=To2csb4eK-o”]

Children’s entertainment became a vehicle for subversion in Russian culture, not only because it wasn’t taken seriously, but because it was permitted fantasy and symbolism. The avant-garde surrealist Daniil Kharms, blacklisted for bitterly surreal satires of Stalinist dehumanization, found refuge in writing twisted children’s literature like a Russian Roald Dahl, before finally starving to death on a psychiatric ward. In the 1970s, when Vladimir Vysotsky circulated tapes of songs about the Stalinist purges and gulags, authorities regularly banned his concerts and film appearances. The heterosexual Vysotsky’s reunion with Parajanov, after his friend’s eventual release from prison, was reportedly tearful. Popular children’s cartoon Nu, Pogodi! (“just you wait!”) features an anti-authoritarian wolf that whistles a Vysotsky tune and is clearly based on his “bandit” persona, in a nod to Vysotsky’s individualist anthem “Wolf Hunt.” The Light Blue Puppy must be read as part of this tradition of coded cartoon subversion. In 2004, Russia produced its first openly queer romcom, You I Love, but current laws against gay propaganda look like a setback toward symbolism. Life, uh, finds a way.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROmlFJamIuY”]

Individualists of the world, unite! Or don’t. Up to you.

Brigit McCone studied for a year in Moscow State University, writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and melodramatically declaiming Lermontov.

In Which I Attempt to Convince the World to Watch All Things Tig Notaro

I had never heard anything like this sketch; I was enthralled. The timing. The repetition. The silence. Such gorgeous pauses. In a world where it feels like we need to fill every space with some yammering, to hear someone on stage using silence–to be brave enough to use it–made me take notice of this person Tig. And not just me. ‘The New York Times’ ran a piece about her 13-minute paean to Taylor Dane.

Tig Notaro needs your attention. I fell in love with her work in 2012 when I heard a This American Life sketch while driving down a highway.

[youtube_sc url=”https://youtu.be/jSwzYB545hY”]

I had never heard anything like this sketch; I was enthralled. The timing. The repetition. The silence. Such gorgeous pauses. In a world where it feels like we need to fill every space with some yammering, to hear someone on stage using silence–to be brave enough to use it–made me take notice of this person Tig. And not just me. The New York Times ran a piece about her 13-minute paean to Taylor Dane.

Then a barrage of sadness and struggle came for her. Tig had a life-threatening infection. Her mother died suddenly. Then Tig was diagnosed with breast cancer.

And this all became material for her standup. And the basis for the Netflix documentary Tig.

The set she did after her diagnosis is already the stuff of comedy legend. Comedians in the room that night began to bow at her feet.

Louis C.K. was there and he ended up selling her set on his site.

Directors Kristina Goolsby and Ashley York follow Tig through the aftermath of illness and grief. I particularly appreciate two elements of the documentary: the focus on writing as a craft and the attention to the struggle of fertility issues. Neither seems to get much good attention in films, and Tig offers the reader a look inside the mind of a female writer who wants to mother a child.

It shouldn’t be surprising that Notaro allows the filmmakers to go so deep into her world; she has come to be known a confessional comic after the set heard round the world. The film is heartbreaking and funny, just like Notaro’s standup. At times we flinch with her as she hears a verdict on her one shot at in vitro, the next moment we are cheering for her as she finds love.

Viewers watch her workshopping a bit, practicing it in front of audiences with different rhythms and wording. Rarely do we get to see the hard work of writing in a film (the closest I have seen such work happening is when I watched Fun Home on Broadway). The awareness that writing is hard, that Notaro is producing work that requires time, honesty, attention, and a little bit of bravado reminds viewers that art is hard. Even though on stage Notaro makes it look easy.

So it was satisfying to me to see that one joke–about her breasts revolting against her body–come to fruition in her HBO special Boyish Girl Interrupted. The special serves as a climax to the story of Tig in that it finishes the joke. When Notaro takes on the persona of her grumpy breasts, she nails the timing and the wording in front of the sold out theater.

And she happens to do half of the set without her shirt on, her smooth chest an affront to all constricting ideas about what “woman” means.

I questioned whether I should even post a still from the HBO special since in many ways it is like stealing one of her punchlines. Should I have offered you, dear reader, a spoiler alert? Am I taking something from her by using this picture to represent her text?

Is taking off her shirt salacious? Provocative? Evocative? Confessional? All of the above. I implore you to watch the set and answer that question for yourself. I can tell you this: you haven’t seen anything like what Notaro is doing in the mainstream media.

I thank her for it.

On Breathing, Not Breathing, and Forms of Abuse That We Don’t Have the Words to Express

‘Breathe,’ the second feature-length film from French actor and director Mélanie Laurent, offers an unusually nuanced portrait of abusive relationships – specifically through the lens of a toxic friendship between two teenage girls.

Written by Katherine Murray.

Breathe, the second feature-length film from French actor and director Mélanie Laurent, offers an unusually nuanced portrait of abusive relationships – specifically through the lens of a toxic friendship between two teenage girls.

Based on a YA novel of the same name, Breathe (also known by its French title, Respire) follows an average, decently popular girl named Charlie as she is befriended and then betrayed by the exciting new girl at her school, Sarah. Sarah at first seems to be the perfect companion – her attention makes Charlie feel special, and they become close friends very quickly. As time goes on, though, and Sarah gets bored, her easy-going always-affable mask starts to slip, revealing an angry, demanding, hypercritical face underneath. Charlie, shocked by these changes, scared and uncomfortable, tries to figure out what she did wrong, why Sarah is acting this way, and what she can do to repair their relationship. When her efforts fail, Sarah gets more and more hostile, until their relationship reaches a jarring conclusion.

What makes Breathe so fascinating to watch is that it gets the nuances of abusive relationships right. Sarah honestly believes herself to be the victim in this friendship, and her confidence and sense of entitlement are enough to make Charlie question her own judgement. It isn’t that Sarah’s cold and calculating – she’s not the smooth-talking criminal mastermind that sociopaths are often portrayed to be – she’s just so self-absorbed that whether or not she hurts someone else isn’t a blip on her radar. She gets closer to Charlie whenever she wants something, and callously disregards her feelings again once she has it.

In the film’s most notable sub-plot, Charlie’s mother is facing a similar situation with her estranged husband. Outside observers keep telling her he’s just an asshole, but she argues that he’s never hit her, so she can forgive him for all the emotional abuse. Charlie finds herself acting out the same scenario with Sarah – forgiving her, even once Sarah’s made it clear that she isn’t a friend, trying to explain why Sarah is this way – feeling pity and compassion for her, because of her terrible home life – trying to be the bigger person and move on. In both cases, it’s clear to the audience that these relationships should end, but the question Breathe holds out to us is “Why don’t they?” Why are Charlie and her mother so unwilling to cut these ties; why don’t they just walk away? Why don’t we have the right words to talk about abuse when it doesn’t involve physical violence?

The performances from Joséphine Japy and Lou De Laâge as Charlie and Sarah are what make the movie. Breathe is, for the most part, about subtle forms of emotional abuse – about how the way you say something carries a message; the way Sarah teaches Charlie not to have boundaries by turning a few degrees cooler every time she encounters one; the way she uses a condescending tone to say things that aren’t true. I wouldn’t go so far as to call the movie understated, but it’s patient and careful in the work it’s trying to do, and so are its actors. Even though the story moves forward quite slowly, we’re drawn in by the characters – we want to understand what’s going on between them almost just as much as Charlie does.

Laurent’s similarly patient direction creates an effectively dark mood, like storm clouds gathering on the horizon – something that’s also captured in the international trailer. It’s not accurate to say that this is a world you want to live inside, as you’re watching, but it’s a world that’s interesting enough that you’ll want to sit with it and watch events play out.

One of the issues the film grapples with well is what constitutes bad behaviour – at what point you can accuse someone of having wronged you – and its subtlety and ambiguity plays into that. Often, our standard for whether someone has done something wrong lies in whether they’ve done something they didn’t have the legal right to do, but so much of human interaction is subjective that it isn’t (and can’t be) a crime to be mean to someone. It would be very hard for Charlie to objectively demonstrate that Sarah’s behaviour is harmful – that all the little things Sarah does have damaged her in some way – but we can see very plainly, watching this friendship play out, that Sarah is slowly destroying Charlie’s entire life. We can see very plainly that she’s doing something wrong, though it may be hard to say what it is.

There’s also a sense in which, watching this film as an adult, you want to say, “OK, she’s not your friend. Move on,” but that would be missing the point. Breathe is about exploring relational dynamics that we don’t have a framework for talking about – it’s about following the characters into a murky area full of confused and conflicted emotions, and watching how that confusion works against Charlie to stop her from just dumping Sarah and walking away. If I’m honest, there was certainly a time in my life when I also believed – as Charlie seems to believe – that someone had to do something objectively wrong in order for me to decide we weren’t friends. It couldn’t just be because I felt bad when we were together.

Breathe, like many YA stories, is a bit like watching someone wrestle with life problems I’ve already solved, but it’s also an important attempt to articulate those problems in an understandable way – to bring them out into the open and give us a new lens to see them through, and a new touchstone that we can use to discuss them.

If you want to feel uncomfortable in a good way and sink inside this insightful, carefully-constructed film, Breathe opens in New York on Friday, Sept. 11, and in Los Angeles on Sept. 18.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV (both real and made up) on her blog.

The Female Gaze: Dido and Noni, Two of a Kind

Directors Amma Asante and Gina Prince-Bythewood illustrate that when a story is told through the eyes of the second sex, themes, such as romance, self-worth, and identity are fully fleshed out. By examining an 18th century British aristocrat and a 21st century pop superstar, it proves that in the span of three centuries, women still face adversity in establishing a firm identity, apart from the façade, amongst the white noise of societal expectations.

This guest post by Rachel Wortherley appears as part of our theme week on The Female Gaze.

In 2015, the film industry continues to designate female characters to the roles of wives, mothers, girlfriends, mistresses, the clever side-kick, or the sassy best friend. While a form of these categories may exist in reality, a three-dimensional approach allows women to be recognizable human beings. They are conflicted, in love, in hate, trying to find their identities, attempting to cling to self-worth. Women are more than the figures who stand ring-side, cheering and watching their husbands become bloodied and bruised. Women are more than the sex kittens who await their lovers in the bedroom, eager to stimulate him after a difficult day at work. It is rare that those images on film, realistic or not, are funneled through the female gaze.

The films Belle (2014) and Beyond the Lights (2014) demonstrate that women are more than objects for consumption. Directors Amma Asante and Gina Prince-Bythewood illustrate that when a story is told through the eyes of the second sex, themes, such as romance, self-worth, and identity are fully fleshed out. By examining an 18th century British aristocrat and a 21st century pop superstar, it proves that in the span of three centuries, women still face adversity in establishing a firm identity, apart from the façade, amongst the white noise of societal expectations.

Belle and Beyond the Lights share a similar narrative: a young woman, who happens to be mixed race, is plucked from obscurity and in time, gains a better way of life. However, to reduce the dramas to a single line discredits their significance within feminine literature in film. Generally speaking, British-born Gugu Mbatha-Raw is the thread that links both movies. After a few false starts on the small screen, specifically the J.J. Abrams-produced NBC spy drama, Undercovers (2010) and the FOX drama, Touch (2012-13), Mbatha-Raw found her place as the leading lady in two revolutionary films of 2014. Mbatha-Raw, who is a RADA graduate (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art), joins the ranks of several English actors and actresses who continue to penetrate North America with their diverse talent. Within a year, Gugu, who, as Ophelia, shared the Broadway stage in 2006 with Jude Law in Hamlet, transformed from an 18th century, aristocratic historical figure to a sexy, fledgling popstar. Mbatha-Raw offers sheer strength and vulnerability behind the eyes of Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay and Noni Jean.

Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay is the illegitimate daughter of British naval officer, Sir John Lindsay (Matthew Goode) and African slave mother, Maria Belle. Upon her mother’s death, Sir John rescues a young Dido from the squalor of the slums and is in turn raised by her great-uncle, Lord Mansfield (Tom Wilkinson) and his wife, Lady Mansfield (Emily Watson). Sir John legitimizes his daughter by bequeathing her the name of Lindsay, as well as, demanding that she be raised with her cousin, Elizabeth Murray (Sarah Gadon). In the 18th century, when colonization and slavery is the norm, Sir John makes a brave and radical decision.

Here, writers and producers could have taken advantage of this rich story by constructing it from the male perspective. Through the male gaze it would read as the story of a single father who fights through tempestuous, natural elements to find his mixed race daughter. Upon finding her, Sir John Lindsay has to deal with the pain of leaving his newfound kin for a voyage, and remain stoic amongst the ridicule from his peers. The narrative would then end with his sad demise, never having known Dido. However, audiences watch the 10-year-old curiously gazing at the portraits of her new family. As her aunt and uncle discuss how they will rear Dido, Lady Mansfield questions, where Dido’s race should be placed, “above, or below her bloodline?” The director cuts to an adult Dido who is deliriously giggling with her cousin, Elizabeth. They are inseparable and equals, until the question of marriage emerges.

Dido is at an impasse in society; with her new fortune (2,000 pounds a year left by her deceased father), her aunt and uncle surmise that no aristocratic family will welcome a mulatto and if she marries a man with no title, she risks her rank. While Dido is too high in rank to dine with the servants and too low in rank to dine with members of aristocracy (outside of the family), she continues to carry herself with great dignity. When her future suitor, John Davinier (Sam Reid), addresses her informally, Dido asserts that Davinier speak through the house servant since they have not been formally introduced. To not do so, would compromise social decorum.

Throughout the film, Dido manages to stand up for her self-worth in front of others who threaten to destroy it. Upon Lady Elizabeth’s coming out in London, Lord and Lady Mansfield decide that Dido should stay behind and maintain the house while they are away. There is a striking close up of Lord Mansfield unfastening his keys and Dido with horror on her face as she exclaims, “I am not an old maid!”—their aunt, Lady Mary (Penelope Wilton) is too old to continue to keep watch. The frantic nature in which Lord Mansfield unhooks the charcoaled keys from his hip, paired with Dido’s reaction evokes the images of a slave being punished by their master. Dido cries, “Why are you punishing me?” This softens Lord Mansfield who reassures her that she is most loved. Dido is also concerned that her dignity will be compromised in the portrait of her and Lady Elizabeth. Adult Dido is worried that her image will be reduced to that of a subordinate depicted in all the family portraits along the walls of the house. In the end, Dido is depicted beside Elizabeth, as her equal.

Beyond the Lights begins similarly to Belle, where audiences are introduced to the main character as a child. It is significant that Asante and Prince-Bythewood choose to begin at childhood—our formative years. Noni Jean, who is around 10-12 years of age, is placed on the stage of a talent show and she sings Nina Simone’s “Blackbird.” She settles for the runner-up trophy that her mother, Macy Jean (Minnie Driver), immediately commands her to trash because Noni should never settle for second place.

The camera cuts to a young woman, scantily clad in rubber, with a bare midriff, and sky-high boots as she sings and gyrates in the midst of studio produced hip-hop beats. A rapper, Kid Culprit (Machine Gun Kelly), fondles her. It is adult Noni, who has transformed from the little girl with pigtails to a sexy songstress. She is wildly popular in the music industry and has a hit record before her debut album has been released. However, she finds herself dangling from her hotel terrace with a tear-stained face whispering, “You still can’t see me,” to which Officer Kaz Nicol (Nate Parker) replies, “I see you,” as he grasps her hand and pulls her to safety.

The aftermath of Noni’s suicide attempt does not evoke concern from the parties who hold stock in her image. Her mother reminds her that she has the luxury of fame and fortune. Her record label reprimands Noni for the “accident” and threatens to drop her from the company. She has to maintain the image of the girl who men want and who women want to become. The night of Noni’s suicide attempt, her self-worth was at a low. She is the girl whose image is produced by her inner circle and the media consumes it. Instead of looking at her, they look through her.

Noni’s lack of self-worth is surmounted during her BET performance. As her dancers and Kid Culprit try to open her trench coat to reveal her half-naked body, Noni fights to keep it on. Kid Culprit roughly throws Noni on the staged-bed, attempts to shove her face into his crotch, and violently yanks Noni trench coat, revealing what she tried to conceal. Kid’s act of revenge culminates by his declaration that he dumped Noni. No one dumps Kid Culprit for another man. This moment is comparable to James Ashford’s assault of Dido as a form of degradation and assertion of power. In 2015, women continue to face assault from men when their advances are rebuffed.

In many ways, Dido is looked at as an object for consumption. Dido’s first suitor, Oliver Ashford, sees her as “rare and exotic,” while his brother, James, who is disgusted by Dido, stresses that “one does not make a wife of the rare and exotic. One samples it on the cotton fields of the Indies.” When Dido chooses not to wed Oliver, her family supports her decision, rather than reprimanding the choice. The only suitor who looks beyond Dido’s race is John Davinier—he is the reverend’s son and Lord Mansfield’s pupil. He presents the question of whether she would reduce herself for the sake of rank. The Zong Ship case, the assault, and John’s question helps her decide that she cannot marry into a family who will see her skin color as a burden, or affliction.

Kaz’s heroic action momentarily positions him as Noni’s savior. After their encounter, Noni has the choice to cut ties with him—even after he appears outside her hotel the following night to check on her—but she chooses to leave with him. With Kaz, Noni is able to eat chicken and fries, share her hidden box of songs, and in the most beautiful part of the film, she literally lets her hair down. Noni’s removal of her acrylic nails and extensions is her realization that she is more than the sexy images mounted on the walls. When he softly touches her face, reaches out and “boings” her natural curls, and kisses every inch of her face, audiences see her inner beauty. When she approaches Kid Culprit or walks on stage, it is always, shoulders back, boobs out, with a sultry look on her face. This is the first time Noni’s eyes are free of conflicting thoughts; constantly strategizing how she will present herself.

Beyond the Lights can be vaguely compared to the Richard Curtis film, Notting Hill (1999), in which an ordinary man’s life is changed when a beautiful actress walks into his bookstore. They fall in love, live happily ever after, and she abandons fame and fortune. Yet Notting Hill is written from the perspective of Will Thacker (Hugh Grant). It depicts how his dull life is changed when meets Anna (Julia Roberts) and how empty he is in her absence. As in Prince-Bythewood’s debut romantic drama, Love and Basketball, women are proactive in seeking romance. Monica (Sanaa Lathan) challenges Quincy (Omar Epps) to a game of one and one for his heart. Dido and Noni dictate which relationship they deem appropriate to pursue. Dido chooses John Davinier, while Noni chooses Kaz over Kid Culprit. They choose partners who will respect their newfound sense of self-worth and identity.

Ultimately, Dido and Noni’s suitors help them realize their new selves. However, it is exactly that, help. Dido does not reject Oliver’s marriage proposal because she is in love with John. She rejects it because she is comfortable in her skin and realizes her worth. It is a far cry from the Dido, who at the beginning of the film, gazes upon her image in the mirror and in tears, claws and beats at her breast. Though she must carry the burden of being looked down upon by members within her society, one that Dido is willing to undertake. At the end of Beyond the Lights, Noni stands up to her record label and pushy “momager,” and returns to England, where she presents her true identity on stage. She is wide-eyed, curly-haired, and sings, not underneath suggestive lyrics or studio produced beats, but with a live band and lyrics that come from her heart. As she stage dives into the pit of screaming fans, Noni beams with pride. Kaz showing up to support Noni, elevates her decision to follow her heart personally and professionally. Dido and Noni decide to follow through with the advice employed by their respective suitors. Again, choice is the key idea.

Belle and Beyond the Lights are films that are for women because they truly capture what it is like to be marginalized by society while working through personal growth. What is seen through the gaze of Dido and Noni’s narratives is that in order to function as a rich and diverse character, society must learn to be comfortable with women forming identities independent of two-dimensional categories.

Rachel Wortherley earned a Master of Arts degree at Iona College in New Rochelle, New York. Her downtime consists of devouring copious amounts of literature, films, and Netflix. She hopes earn an MFA and become a professional screenwriter.

How Catherine Breillat Uses Her Own Painful Story to Discuss the Female Gaze in ‘Abuse of Weakness’

The female gaze is more than simply “reversing” the male gaze; it allows for a questioning of why the male gaze is so inherently built into cinema and why women are aggressively sexualised within cinema. With ‘Abuse of Weakness,’ Breillat attacks both of these concerns whilst also actively encouraging identification with Maud – our female protagonist.

This guest post by Becky Kukla appears as part of our theme week on The Female Gaze.

The name Catherine Breillat is almost synonymous with the concept of the female gaze.

Her works and the female gaze go hand in hand, many of her films providing a platform on which to explore and challenge ideas about sexuality, body image and sexual desire. Romance, A Ma Soeur and Anatomy Of Hell are amongst the most discussed; each film considers our preconceived notions of female sexuality and seeks to question stereotypes about it. Breillat is probably most renowned for this exploration, and the female-centric narratives that her films have. More importantly, her works talk openly from a distinctly female perspective – which is why they lend themselves so well to the concept of the female gaze.

All of this is nothing new, of course. Breillat has earned her title of “porn-auteur” a thousand times over (however ignorant that title is). However, it’s Breillat’s most recent film, Abuse of Weakness (2014), which I think actually pushes our ideas about the female gaze in relation to power and control in onscreen relationships. I was actually lucky enough to (accidentally) buy tickets to a Q & A screening of Abuse of Weakness at the London Film Festival in 2013 (accidentally because I didn’t realize Breillat would actually be there), and she spoke at great length about the biographical nature of Abuse of Weakness. The film itself has a surprising lack of explicitness in terms of nudity or sex. It stands out some way from Romance or Anatomy of Hell, but I genuinely believe it delivers a discourse about the female gaze which is just as interesting, if not more so.

Abuse of Weakness tells the story of Maud Shainberg (the incredibly talented Isabelle Huppert), a director/writer recovering from a stroke. She casts notorious con-man Vilko Piran (Kool Shen) in her new film, and a strange, manipulative relationship begins between the two of them. Somewhere between lovers and colleagues, Vilko begins to exploit Maud–emotionally and financially. Maud, desperate for affection and frustrated by her physical condition, doesn’t stop the exploitation – even though she is completely aware of what is happening to her. It’s an intricate look at relationships and abuse and an autobiographical representation of Breillat herself on making Bad Love. It’s an incredibly uncomfortable film to watch, not only because we know it’s Breillat. Throughout Abuse of Weakness we are aligned with Maud and we not only understand her desires, but can also feel ourselves becoming exploited too.

So where does the elusive female gaze come in? The female gaze is a relatively new cinematic term; traditionally the vast majority of mainstream cinema is aligned with the male gaze. To view and engage with a film, the audience must read the work as a straight, heterosexual male – identifying with the male protagonist and objectifying the women on-screen. Active male, passive female. The female gaze, especially in Breillat’s work, not only allows us to identify with the female protagonist but also allows us to objectify the male characters within the film. As Metz states, cinema is predominantly concerned with pleasure – “The spectator is seen as both the voyeur and viewer who is distanced from the object viewed and who has control over what he sees (and desires).” Breillat’s female gaze enables viewers to actively engage with the female protagonist, and derive pleasure from our identification with her. The female gaze is more than simply “reversing” the male gaze; it allows for a questioning of why the male gaze is so inherently built into cinema and why women are aggressively sexualised within cinema. With Abuse of Weakness, Breillat attacks both of these concerns whilst also actively encouraging identification with Maud – our female protagonist.

The opening sequence of Abuse of Weakness is actually a pretty neat summation of the way in which Breillat exposes the male gaze and actively rejects it. The film begins with a slow pan upward and gradually Maud is revealed lying naked within a large bed. The sheets are white (virginal) and before Maud appears onscreen, there is a familiarity to this type of scene. We expect to see a young, beautiful girl asleep on the pillows – yet we are met with Isabelle Huppert. Huppert is, of course, incredibly beautiful but at 62 she is (by Western standards) far too old to be naked in bed in your local cinema screen. Breillat, naturally, does not care. As we focus on Maud’s face, it is immediately apparent that something is wrong. Maud is having a stroke. As she falls out of the bed onto the floor, she is focused in the foreground of the shot whilst a painting of a naked woman is positioned behind her. This is no mistake; the audience are invited to gaze upon both naked bodies – not to sexualise or fetishisize but as two peieces of art. One is oil, the other is film. As we see in the opening scene of Abuse of Weakness, the audience is invited to view Maud as more than a naked body, or a sexualised piece of flesh, completely contrary to how cinema frequently presents women onscreen. Maud is naked, yes, but it is fear and death which we see in this sequence, not desire or sex. Maud can be naked without being objectified – a feat rarely achieved by women in most films.

Though Maud and Vilko’s struggle for power is they key theme of Abuse of Weakness, it’s actually Maud’s battle for autonomy that wins out as what the film is actually about. This, even more so, solidifies the film as a product of the female gaze. Although Maud is manipulated and abused, it is through her struggles with her own body – a feeling that most women can probably identify with. On the surface, Maud’s biggest turmoil is the moment where she must admit to her family what has been happening. She seems confused, vulnerable: “It was me…and it wasn’t.” Vilko’s manipulations (the “abuse of weakness”) meant that Maud was unable to have autonomy and live her life the way she desired. However, it was Maud’s stroke that initially took away her autonomy. Breillat often explores female body image within her works (A Ma Soeur instantly springs to mind) and Abuse of Weakness is no exception. Maud’s body has literally failed her, with no warning. The stroke takes away her freedom and her autonomy. Maud’s struggle with her body can easily be read as a comment on body image/representation in modern society. Women are expected to be younger, thinner, more beautiful than ever before – what happens when you can’t be? You lose autonomy and freedom striving to be perfect. Maud proves this in Abuse of Weakness and the question is asked; what can women amount to if their body is not good enough?

Although Abuse of Weakness is certainly the least “sexual” of all of Breillat’s films (physically, I mean), the film still places Maud’s desire for sex as an incredibly important concept. Whilst it’s never clear whether Maud and Vilko have a sexual relationship, there are many sequences where Vilko is topless or nearly nude. He is an attractive man, younger than Maud, and the viewer is invited to share in Maud’s objectification of him. To quote Penley, “Feminist film theory [seeks to] look at ways in which roles are gendered…looking is gendered masculine and ‘being looked at is gendered feminine.'” Breillat encourages the audience to place Vilko in a feminine position of objectification, and forces us to reevaluate the way we gender passivity as female and take a traditionally masculine position when we objectify Vilko.

All of these aspects – sexuality, body image, passive/active engagement and the power struggle throughout the film – combine to create a piece of cinema completely devoted to the female gaze. Viewers can easily identify with Maud and reject the notion of the male gaze. Due to Breillat’s influence as a female director and her rejection of the male gaze, the female (and male) audience are able to establish a relationship with Maud as a woman, a person and not a passive object to be lusted over or desired. Whilst it won’t stir up as much controversy as Anatomy of Hell or Romance (I mean, what can?), Abuse of Weakness is still highly valuable as a text which explores femininity and power – and well worth a watch.

Recommended Reading: France on Film: Reflections on Popular French Cinema by Lucy Mazdon

Becky Kukla is a 20-something living in London, working in the TV industry (mostly making excellent cups of tea). She spends her spare time watching everything Netflix has to offer and then ranting about it on her blog.

The Male Gaze, LOL: How Comedies Are Changing the Way We Look

The body is no longer a Lacanian reflected ideal, it is a biological mess that often exists beyond anyone’s control. The effect of this convention is two-fold–a bait and switch of expectations but also the creation of a sense of biological sameness: man or woman, everybody poops. By placing the body in a biological space instead of a symbolic one, physical comedy is questioning the visual tendencies of subconscious desire.

This guest post by Donna K. appears as part of our theme week on The Female Gaze.

When I was taught the definitions of comedy and tragedy as an angst-y teen, I remember being struck by the way in which they were generalized. In tragedy, everyone dies. In comedy, everyone gets married. I remember thinking, “Yes, marriage IS hilarious!” But in fact, marriage was comic in the sense that everything worked out for everybody–everybody often being defined as the white male with power. Over the last decade, the male gaze has quietly been averted through a new wave of female-driven comedies. Television shows like 30 Rock, Broad City, Orange is the New Black, The Mindy Project, Inside Amy Schumer , and films like Bridesmaids and Appropriate Behavior have paved the way for comedy, specifically the role of women in it, to be re-defined: comedy is a choice. Comedy is not who will marry whom it is the choice to marry or not, to tell one’s individual story, to laugh in the face of the controlling patriarchy until there is nothing left to laugh about.

One of the hallmarks of the new class of female comedies is to subvert the “to-be-looked-at-ness” of the female form, begging an audience to gaze upon woman but then exposing the gawkers to the truths below the surface in a physical- almost biological- comedy; Julie (Julie Klausner) publically wets herself in the very first episode of the new series Difficult People; Amy Schumer’s skit “Milk Milk Lemonade” reminds audiences that the sexy booty fetishized in music videos is, in reality, “where your poop comes out”; the explosive diarrhea of food poisoning ruins the extravagant rite of wedding dress shopping in Bridesmaids. The body is no longer a Lacanian reflected ideal, it is a biological mess that often exists beyond anyone’s control. The effect of this convention is two-fold–a bait and switch of expectations but also the creation of a sense of biological sameness: man or woman, everybody poops. By placing the body in a biological space instead of a symbolic one, physical comedy is questioning the visual tendencies of subconscious desire. No longer do audiences expect to walk into a theater or turn on a TV and be greeted with a vision of feminine perfection; now they might be subjected to blood, sweat, tears, and all other kinds of bodily fluids of not just the female form but the human one. The body is an object but not one strictly made for pleasure (yet pleasure is nice too, of course).

In Broad City the character of Ilana (Ilana Glazer) sets the mood propping up mirrors, putting on make-up, prepping herself to be a vision of desire (Season 2 Ep. 8, ““Kirk Steele””). She turns on her vibrator, and some porn, and is ready for some self love: she is not here to please anyone but herself. When Danny (Chris Messina) opens the drawer of Mindy Lahiri’s (Mindy Kahling) nightstand in The Mindy Project and proclaims “Mindy has the same neck massager as Ma,” (Season 3, Ep. 8 ““Diary of a Mad Indian Woman””) not everyone might understand the implication (pssst, pharmacies sell vibrators in disguise). New female comedy isn’t presenting sex as a males want toward females; it is showing sex as a thing all genders desire, even to the point they make it happen alone. Self-love in female comedy could potentially feed into the male gaze, making him even more afraid of castration or exciting him through pleasurable moans, but what is also occurring is a normalization of female sexual pleasure. Sex and the City led the way and now movies like Appropriate Behavior (full of bi-sexuality, threesomes, and a strap on!) and Trainwreck (even if Apatow is undeniably a slut shamer!) are reminding audiences that women use their vaginas for things other than birthing and male satisfaction. These comedies are creating what Laura Mulvey calls a “new language of desire” (where the controlled and the controller are interchangeable between genders, quietly inserting the fact that this dynamic has, in actuality, always existed).

Much like the voice-over in 90s comedies that presented a personal and omniscient guide to female protagonists (Sex and the City, Mean Girls, Clueless, and Election), flashbacks are now the go-to convention used to expose the inner and past lives of women. Desiree Akhavan’s Appropriate Behavior is a flashback in its entirety, slowly showing the steps that led to the opening break-up between Shirin (Akhavan) and Maxine (Rebecca Henderson), a slow methodical break-down of motivations and personal histories. In 30 Rock, a nerdy child Liz Lemon (Tina Fey) speaks German in a short moment of memory, a happening common in the series with the young Liz sometimes played by Fey’s real life daughter. The characters of OITNB have constant, harrowing flashbacks that connect their present to a long receding past, in Sophia’s (Laverne Cox) pre-transition flashback her character is played by Cox’s real life twin brother. How can one see a character as a hollow, empty image when they are created with an entire life? A life that sometimes even edges into their fictional world? Women are not, as Mulvey says, “Freez[ing] the flow of action.” They are, and have always been, part of the action, whether recognized or not. The stories of women remain untold and the reminder that lives exist beyond their simple image, even in a fiction, is an enormous step forward in terms of making an active female figure rather than a passive one. Herstory isn’t a joke, it is a thing that roots woman in the world, it makes women makers of meaning and not strictly bearers of it.

And then come our good, old friends satire and parody! Comediennes are taking the unattainable expectations and fears of the male gaze, pointing at them and laughing as hard as possible, exposing the ridiculousness in objectification and shaming the power struggle into submission- it is almost like an S&M relationship with the status quo. When Liz Lemon does promos for her show “Dealbreakers” (Season 4 Episode 7, “Dealbreakers Talk Show,” a show that points out the faults in men that make them un-marriable: yas!), she ends up becoming so nervous about her appearance she is reduced to crying from her mouth after off-brand eye surgery. When Amy Schumer consults every possible man in her life, from doctor to mailman to boy scout, on whether she should go on birth control, it is hilarious but it is also not too far from the truth. When Annie (Kristen Wiig) wakes up early to apply make-up and return to bed before her sex friend wakes to give the illusion of flawlessness, it is a joke, and it is also, unfortunately, not a joke. Satire is a powerful way of exposing questionable societal norms, ridiculous attitudes, and insane standards; it is a socially acceptable way to challenge the patriarchy and air our grievances. If we collectively confront the male gaze through satire those in power can no longer turn a blind eye to the true absurdity that exists.

By choosing how we are looked at and creating comical stories beyond the marriage plot, we are making an enormous reclamation of our bodies and ourselves: power lies in choice. Alternative ways of seeing and being seen are created with each new story told, a visibility that is only just starting to be explored as we struggle to be better represented in mainstream media. Contemporary comedies with female leads are now ruled by countless types of desires as we are stick out our tongues at the gazing males frozen in the audience. Raising our laughter is just another form of raising our voices for change.

References

Mulvey (1975). “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen, 16.3 Autumn, pp. 6-18

Donna K. is a cultural critic, film festival consultant and creative producer based in Southern Vermont. She is a member of the Women Film Critics Circle and a writer for Hammer to Nail. You can follow her musings about visual storytelling on her blog Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then.