A controversy over how female authors portray male idols in their works, triggered by a fandom storm, has continued from the end of last month to the present, and there is no possibility for the tit-for-tat two sides to reach a consensus. This escalating online debate has given this year's Women's Day a different sense of ceremony, throwing out a number of topics that have been repeatedly discussed in the humanities and sciences community, and the public is likely not to actively think about: What does it mean to be female or secondary? Is gender a physiological phenomenon or the result of socialization? Are there untouchable and insurmountable boundaries between genders?
Perhaps by chance, at the same time as the Chinese Internet launched a debate on gender issues, the Barbican Art Centre in London curated a two-week film festival with the theme of "Her Lens, His Story: Male Subjects under the Lens of Female Directors", from February 26 to March 10, showing the works of 7 female directors, spanning from 1949 to the present, prism refracting the "he" seen by "them".
Larissa Shepichchenko directs "Rise"
The University of Southern California did a survey last year, and of the 113 directors involved in the top 100 films in the global box office revenue in 2019, only 12 were female directors; in 2018, the number was even lower, and only 5 female directors had the opportunity to participate in the top 100 films in terms of revenue. This is the gender pattern of the current film industry, at least the British and American film industry: the overall number of female directors is very small, the number of female directors who have the opportunity to participate in large projects is even more scarce, and the women who can win independent directing opportunities are in most cases who are tacitly believed to shoot female theme works that are small and medium-sized and will not be screened on a large scale.
"Mulan" and "Black Widow", which will be released this year, are both directed by female directors, and for Hollywood, it is a very difficult decision for Hollywood to let women lead the big production of the superhero genre, and even so, both films revolve around the "big heroine".
In the film industry, there is a strange unspoken rule, that is, men's drama is a forbidden area for female directors.
Laura Murvie
Feminist film theorist Laura Murvie summed up a very connotative custom in Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, peeking into the stubborn sexism of sociology: women dressed as men are considered rebellious, brave, and handsome, while men dressing up as women is usually a joke.
The film industry further complicates this gender politics. Since the middle of the last century, the awareness that male directors can have a female perspective in their works will become a good story that has been well received by the whole industry. For example, Hou Mai, who has been described as "a woman who likes women deep down", is a heartfelt compliment, not a joke.
Hou Mai directed "The Story of Spring"
However, spreading from within the creators to the wider comment community, men seem to think they have the privilege of knowing women, but the reverse arrow is non-existent.
In 1998, Australian director Anna Kukinnos's "Going Forward" was shortlisted for the Cannes Film Festival, and the protagonist of the film is the second generation of Greek immigrants, a cowardly and repressed boy who is deeply confused on the level of race, love, body and gender. It's a young female director with unusual courage and vigor to confront a sensitive topic within the male population: the fragility and decay of male hormones.
After the film premiered in Cannes, Kukinos found herself facing a brawl-style interview, and some rude reporters even asked her on the spot: "Did you have sex reassignment surgery?" How can a woman possibly understand a man's psychology? How can a female director be competent in subjects other than women and children? ”
Female directors shoot female subjects out of a natural sense of mission. When a woman develops the consciousness of "seeing", she cannot help but take the initiative to find and gaze at "she", because in the male-dominated discourse system, "she" as a collective or an individual has been ignored for too long. The new film "Portrait of a Burning Woman", released in Europe by French director Celine Sienma, is a work that deserves special attention in French cinema at the moment, because Sienma's video language is particularly precious to capture the gaze of women on women, and they have a clear and strong consciousness of the body and the self in the process of seeing each other. In the film, three girls read aloud the passages of the legends of Orpheus and Eurydice by the fireside, and the girls keenly inject a kind of vitality into the Greek legend of Eurydice, who is no longer a passive, saved object, but she takes the initiative to ask Orpheus: "Please turn back, please see me, remember me." ”
"Please see me." This is the wildfire-like cry that has been suppressed in the depths of women's hearts for thousands of years. However, the female perspective does not mean that the vision of female creators can only be confined to self-observation and sisterhood. When a woman's "look" of initiative awakens, how can she not cast a counter-attacking gaze toward the male world.
"Her Lens, His Story" Although the film festival is small and the curatorial ideas are sharp, Mary Harlan's "American Psycho" is a work that has caused an "apocalypse" effect on many new generation of female directors. Based on the controversial novel of the same name, the film is a black humor drama that is extremely ironic to contemporary America, and is set in Wall Street and Manhattan in the late 1980s, where Kristen Bell plays a diamond king-like stockbroker, dominated by a dual personality, busy between making money and killing people. At the age of 26, Bell, who was as fit as an ancient Greek sculpture, is the most important passage in the film, the camera stays coldly on Bell's flesh, conveying the viewer's naked demand, which is undisguised visual violence.
The same shots and lines of sight—men's gaze at women—have long dominated movies since the classic Hollywood era.
In his 1970s article, Murvie proposed that in the face of such a mechanism of work, female audiences can either be content with masochism or subconsciously cross into men. And director Harlan blasted a thunderbolt with her blatant audiovisual language: women can hit back at men with the same gaze.
This partly explains men's resistance to female directors shooting male subjects— they are afraid of this recoil. Of course, the gaze of female directors on the male group is not all as strong as that of "American Psycho".
They consciously "watch" him, dating back to Edith Kalmar's 1949 film Death is a Caress, the first female-directed film in Norway, and the following year, Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard became famous, the same young and unambitious man being possessed by an old and wealthy woman, Wilder filming the hysterical destruction of an old woman abandoned by the times, and Kalmar seeing men gambling and despairing to cross the class divide.
Tanaka is best known as the heroine of Kenji Mizoguchi's long-term collaboration, her attempts and achievements in directing were overlooked, in fact she was the second female director in Japan, and her first feature film "Love" completed in 1953 was shortlisted for the main competition section of the Cannes Film Festival.
Tanaka's directing ability, Keisuke Kinoshita's script, and actor Masayuki Senno's performance form a stable triangle. The cowardly man played by Masayuki Sen is a metaphor for the decadence of Japan's entire patriarchal social structure after the war.
Russian female director Lalisha Shepichchenko, who died young at the age of 41, won the Golden Bear award at the Berlin Film Festival for "Rise" two years before her death, starring two lone red army guerrillas.
The director uses the extremely peaceful mirror language to unfold the violent level of human nature in war like peeling an onion, and she creates a barren audio-visual aesthetic, from which the inner wavering and betrayal of people are penetrated, and there is no gender difference in these psychological levels of trembling.
The protagonist created by Kukinos in "Go Forward" is a teenager who is full of uncertainty about his socialized role, and in the Argentine female director Annecy Beni's "Year without Love", the protagonist is a poet who takes the initiative to break with the rules of society, who abandons the definition and requirements of the world for men, and then is abandoned by the world, in the desperate loneliness of being seriously ill and dying, he almost uses a tragic way to try to find and rebuild the effective connection between people.
In these works, female directors break down the stereotype of male characters, and after the burden of "heroes" and "tough guys" is removed, the face of this gender group is broadened. Men will be weak and out of control, and when they fall to their knees under the iron fist of fate, they will be even more helpless than women. His story reaches her lens, and men are no longer a gifted, natural concept, and gender is likely to be a constructed and disciplined role-playing behavior.
Catherine Bigelow
Regarding the male world, female directors have a strong desire to express themselves. They may enter the male perspective without any obstacles, such as the consistent masculin Bigelow of the only woman to win the Oscar for best director in "Detroit", "Bomb Disposal Unit", "Breaking Point", etc.; they may also dissolve male authority from the female position, and perceive the fringe experience that men deliberately suppress or do not want to admit, the crisis of masculinity and gender identity.
Either way, the starting point of the female director's representation of the male theme is not hostility, derogatory and negation, and the feminist philosopher Judy Butler's theory of "gender rebellion" is appropriate here: the director and their creative objects double question people's conventional gender propositions, they and the film they work together to change the way the audience thinks about gender, and the female directors change themselves through creative practice, thus subverting the identity of identity and gender.