Women Looking At Men: Beyond the Female Gaze

When I tell people I’m putting together a programme around ‘female directors who examine men and masculinity’ their first reaction is always: “Oh, like Beau travail by Claire Denis?” And indeed, that is the most well-known, clearest example of such a film, as well as the film that prompted me to compile this programme.

Creating a programme with exclusively female directors can feel a bit like a trap. Am I not – as a woman – now myself participating in the exclusion and categorisation of female directors by locating their ‘gaze’ alongside that of their male colleagues? And are the classifications ‘female’ and ‘male’ not an expression of a far too binary a way of thinking – one no longer appropriate to our time?

There’s a kernel of truth in both suspicions but, looking at the example of Beau travail, I feel that this programme has value, whatever the case. How Claire Denis plays with the exchange of gazes in her film, how she turns the male gaze around... Her gaze as a women is not simply a ‘female gaze’, but a very deliberate commentary on that male gaze.

This awareness is what I have in mind for this programme, which a specific attention to the unique perspective of female makers; the perspective of outsiders looking, from a distance, at the world of men – a world to which they usually have no access. This is made very clear in the short documentaries that open my programme: Vers la tendresse (2017) by Alice Diop and I Want To Go Higher (2023) by Amanda van Hesteren. In both of these films, the female makers infiltrate groups of men and in doing so, show how they deal with relationships and women. They show how they too are sometimes victims of the patriarchy in this area, and of the strict ‘rules’ they have to comply with in order to deserve the designation ‘man’.

Alice Diop does this by interviewing four men from the banlieues of Paris, who behave in accordance with what is expected of them, even though it soon becomes clear that other desires and urges are also in play. Amanda van Hesteren casts her disarming gaze at a number of male models, who go to Thailand to work on themselves. Here too, we learn more about their insecurities through conversations with the filmmaker. In this way, both makers succeed in breaking through the hardened facades of these males.

Two sides of the same coin

The distance from which these female directors look is, in fact, only an apparent distance. Both worlds are two sides of the same coin, which exert an ongoing influence on one another and the boundaries of which – thankfully – are increasingly blurring. The big difference is that the oppressed position of women – in particular of non-white, non-heterosexual women – has obliged them to think much more about what a term such as ‘femininity’ means. Consider for example that famous sentence from Simone de Beauvoir’s Le deuxième sexe: “One is not born, but rather becomes a woman.” Isn’t it then logical that women have also started to look at the implications of terms such as ‘masculinity?’

The Man Who Envied Women (1985) by Yvonne Rainer, the film that closes my programme in Eye’s cinemas, takes a very different look at masculinity. This film principally looks, in a sarcastic, witty, way, at the benefits men derive from the patriarchy; how they use it, for example, to justify their own infidelities. The film is rooted in – misogynist – psychoanalysis, and uses exactly this as a kind of ‘weapon’, just like Laura Mulvey did ten years previously in her famous essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975). In this essay, she used various concepts from Freud and Lacan to demonstrate that classic Hollywood cinema inevitably places the viewer in a male subject position with the woman on screen as an object of desire, thereby giving rise to the both lauded and derided concept of the ‘male gaze’.

Tongue-in-cheek

This sarcasm, this tongue-in-cheek way of looking at this male world, can also be seen in Le bonheur (1965) – the title should above all not be taken literally – by Agnès Varda. This film is part of the online component of the programme, which can be seen from 21 July on the Eye Film Player streaming platform. Once again, we look at infidelity and how few implications this seems to have for the man. The women – consciously – have very little to say, and at the end of the film it becomes painfully clear that the woman’s situation brings anything but ‘happiness’.

The films I refer to above are just a sample of the programme, but even this small sample shows how varied the female gaze can be. The exhibition, which opens on 12 July in MACA in Amsterdam, focuses primarily on how contemporary makers are challenging and redefining this concept, also in other art disciplines such as video art, fashion and photography. In Tracey Moffatt’s work Heaven (1997), for example, we see how the male gaze is brutally turned around when she points her camera at male surfers getting changed by their cars at an Australian beach. We also see probing or tender gazes: for example that of fashion designer Sky Verbeek, who analyses what defines masculinity through fabrics and patterns. Or in the work of photographer Angie Dekker, who focuses her lens on her partner with such intimacy that she presents a vulnerability we seldom get to see.

Through the lenses of female makers, this programme reveals the complexity of masculinity and the impact of the patriarchy, leaving enough space for humour, irony and self-reflection. The works challenge us to think about the social structures that influence masculinity and the consequences of this for both men and women. This is not a simple placing of female makers in a separate category, but a recognition of the seeming outsider who observes the world of men from the periphery, both now and then. In order to liberate female makers from the singular fe/male gaze, and to strive for a film world beyond the gendered gaze.

About Korée Wilrycx

Korée Wilrycx (Antwerp, 1993) graduated with distinction from Luca School of Arts in Brussels, where she made films on a wide range of themes, always from an investigative viewpoint, with a focus on intimacy and an urge to break through the heteronormative, patriarchal framework. She obtained her Master’s in Film Studies and Visual Culture from the University of Antwerp, where her love for film developed further; not only as a maker, but also as a viewer, critic and researcher. Her thesis focused on how bisexuality is portrayed in film, adding further depth to her research into gender and sexuality in the seventh art. She is now building on this passion, this time in the role of programmer in Eye, where she is following the talent development programme Programmers of the Future.

The films I refer to above are just a sample of the programme, but even this small sample shows how varied the female gaze can be. The exhibition, which opens on 12 July in MACA in Amsterdam, focuses primarily on how contemporary makers are challenging and redefining this concept, also in other art disciplines such as video art, fashion and photography. In Tracey Moffatt’s work Heaven (1997), for example, we see how the male gaze is brutally turned around when she points her camera at male surfers getting changed by their cars at an Australian beach. We also see probing or tender gazes: for example that of fashion designer Sky Verbeek, who analyses what defines masculinity through fabrics and patterns. Or in the work of photographer Angie Dekker, who focuses her lens on her partner with such intimacy that she presents a vulnerability we seldom get to see.

Through the lenses of female makers, this programme reveals the complexity of masculinity and the impact of the patriarchy, leaving enough space for humour, irony and self-reflection. The works challenge us to think about the social structures that influence masculinity and the consequences of this for both men and women. This is not a simple placing of female makers in a separate category, but a recognition of the seeming outsider who observes the world of men from the periphery, both now and then. In order to liberate female makers from the singular fe/male gaze, and to strive for a film world beyond the gendered gaze.