“Yes, simply put, Protagonism is Propaganda.
Protagonism is Propaganda that protects and perpetuates privilege.
You would think the way I keep saying that I’m getting paid by the P’s. Jill, Tiff just called, can you do a master class, please use a lot of Ps. I said yes, I said yes I CAN do that.
If Protagonism is Propaganda that protects and perpetuates privilege, then my plan today is to inspire more women to grab hold of the gaze. Okay. Here we go. Jill just get to it already JESUS.
Now. In three parts. I wanna shoot something out of the center of this triangle by the time we’re done. Three parts, Like Mulvey’s.
Numero uno, I think the Female Gaze is a way of “feeling seeing”.
It could be thought of as a subjective camera that attempts to get inside the protagonist, especially when the protagonist is not a Chismale. It uses the frame to share and evoke a feeling of being in feeling, rather than seeing – the characters.
I take the camera and I say, hey, audience, I’m not just showing you this thing, I want you to really feel with me. I have my particular methods, our cinematographer, Jim Frohna, when he is holding the camera, his body is IN FEELING, not capturing but playing an action, like melting or oozing or allowing, he plays a feeling action…
Maybe you notice when you see this kind of filmmaking you FELL MORE. You get the FEELS when you watch, as the young people say.
Some examples of this version of the Female Gaze include Transparent, I Love Dick those are things I made – and many movies that are made by women —-
Things maybe that you watch where you say, I can tell a woman wrote and directed it
because I feel held but something that is invested in my FEELING in my body, the emotions are being prioritized over the action.
As a director I help make this happen by staying in my body as the actors work, by prioritizing all of the bodies on the set over the equipment or the money or the time.
This was written by Hannah Wilke in 1976, about her art making, but her words help me get this across, she said:
“I am concerned with the creation of a formal imagery that is specifically female, a language that fuses mind and body into erotic objects that are name-able and at the same time, quite abstract. The content is always related to my own body and feelings, reflecting pleasure as well as pain, the ambiguity and complexity of emotions. Human gestures, multi-layered metaphysical symbols below the gut level translated into an art close to laughter.”
The Female Gaze. Part One. Reclaiming the body, using it with intention to communicate Feeling Seeing.
Part Two. I also think the Female Gaze is also using the camera to take on the very nuanced, occasionally impossible task of showing us how it feels to be THE OBJECT of the Gaze.
The camera talks out at you from its position as the receiver of the gaze. This piece of the triangle reps the Gazed gaze. This is how it feels to be seen.
I think Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank did that, and Kenny Lonergan’s Margaret, Eliza Hittman’s IT FELT LIKE LOVE – yes, the female gaze can be made by anyone, male or female, cis or trans —
These films use a kind of heroines journey structure – a looping around the inside of the body – now this is not just about a feeling but about a story shape where we revel in an ever more intense awareness of a protagonist’s power – I’d even say King of Comedy is a Heroine’s Journey in this way, we fall backwards with Rupert Pupkin, spiraling in an ever illuminated self-punishing story of having enraged or engaged the male gaze. In that case it was Jerry Lewis or fame.
In those other three cases though, we were more specifically in coming of age tales – come feel with me specifically how I become as I become what men see. It’s about what I’m doing by being seen — my effect — this is what it causes in the world.
The gazed gaze.
This third thing involves the way THE FEMALE GAZE DARES to return the gaze. It’s not the gazed gaze. It’s the gaze on the gazers. It’s about how it feels to stand here in the world HAVING BEEN SEEN our entire lives.
Or, in a line I heard in a web series today, we don’t write culture, we’re written by it.
It says WE SEE YOU, SEEING US.
It says, I don’t want to be the OBJECT any longer, I would like to be the SUBJECT, and with that SUBJECTIVITY I can name you as the OBJECT.”
The Female Gaze by Jill Soloway
in Habitats