Introduction: The Pleasure and Politics of Looking
A Blank Slate (2014) Sara Eliassen
How does the medium of film create subjects who look, desire and identify in certain ways? How and when is our gaze on film gendered? And what roles do aesthetics, media and technology play in such a process?
These questions formed a starting point for the conference and screening series The Pleasure and Politics of Looking – Film, Gender and Aesthetics, held at the UKS gallery and Cinemateket in Oslo in 2015. As organizers of this event, we took the opportunity to extend this important conversation to another discursive form – the written word – and Wuxia 1-2, 2015 presents a collection of essays by artists and scholars that contributed to the conference.
The seeds to the Pleasure and Politics symposium were sown during a spring evening in 2014, when filmmaker Sara Eliassen screened her novella film A Blank Slate at Cinemateket in Oslo, a film that plays with the relations between filmic language, sound and cinematic references in order to highlight the gendered gaze and look of/at/in film. Following the screening, Eliassen and media scholar Sara Rundgren Yazdani held a public conversation about the film, which opened up a treasure trove of questions about desire, identification and looking. Both the film and the subsequent conversation became the starting point for an enthusiastic exchange of ideas, as well as a wish to create an arena in Oslo to stimulate the discourse around the politics and pleasure implied in film aesthetics. One thing we agreed on was that we wanted to bridge the fields of film, academia, and art, and encourage conversations across disciplinary lines that sometimes seem unnecessarily firm.
A natural starting point for the conversation was the legacy of the debates in Anglo-American feminist film theory and art practice of the 1970s and 80s. These were formative in directing the focus towards identification, spectatorship and structures for desire, embodied in texts such as Laura Mulvey’s by now legendary essay on the male gaze, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), Mary Ann Doane’s The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s (1987) and Teresa de Lauretis’ Technologies of Gender (1987), amongst others. Artists and filmmakers explored similar themes in the same period, such as Lynn Hershman Leeson, Chantal Akerman, Babette Mangolte and Harun Farocki, as well as by Laura Mulvey in collaboration with Peter Wollen.
Today, one of the most pressing issues in public discussions on gender and film in Norway seems to be numerical representation. A popular measuring tool has been the Bechdel test, which has four requirements: 1. There must be more than one woman in a film, 2. They must have names, 3. They must talk to each other, 4. About something else than a man. This is a great conversation starter and important consciousness-raiser when it comes to the lack of women – and, when the conversation is taken a step further, can easily be transferred to issues of race, gender and nationality – in film. However, we wished to shine a spotlight on less formulaic and measured ways of thinking of gender and sexuality in film, linking these to aesthetics and technology. A guiding idea for this project was thus that film forms us in fundamental ways. Film professor and conference contributor Patricia White, whose term “retro-spectatorship” captures so well that mix of embodied memories, experiences, and fantasies that shape the way we see film, writes:
Cinema is public fantasy that engages spectators’ particular, private scripts of desire and identification. Equally at stake in spectatorship are the way organized images and sounds physically imprint on us and the way they mediate social identities and histories.[1]
This is why the visual arts, including film, are crucial sites through which we become desiring subjects; through recognizing – or feeling the lack of – representations of who we are, whom we desire, and how we are gendered. Looking and being looked at are integral to this process, and film is the perfect medium to explore that. In the following, Patricia White explores the figure of the horizon and what it can represent when put into play within an aesthetics of global women’s cinema, in her article “The Horizon of Women’s Cinema.” She argues that although neither feminism nor theatrical film exhibition of women’s cinema is imagined in the form of a counter-cinema anymore, the utopian dimensions of feminism and cinema, as public and global phenomena, remain important. In “Crusing as another way of looking?” Gary Needham proposes to think with the concept of cruising, borrowed from gay cultural and sexual practice, as a crucial gesture in shaping a number of ways of looking in film, art, and popular culture. Susanne Winterling, herself an artist working in photography and new media, directs her attention to how contemporary forms of media and technology can reshape our concepts of identity altogether, and suggests an ecological perspective on the reformulation of difference and diversity in this context. Artist Knut Åsdam discusses both his own practice, and filmic practice in general, in relation to the challenges posed by cinematic bodies and how we identify with – or desire them – with a particular attentiveness to the performative aspect of subjectivity.
The ambition that inspired the conference and subsequently this dossier – considering looking and desiring as something political – have not been to return per se to the discourses and debates of the seventies and eighties. Rather, with the qualified help of our contributors, we have aspired to re-think the profound legacy of certain films and theories in order to shed light on contemporary discussions of identity and gender politics, as well as to examine how film, the avant-garde, technologies, and the visual arts more generally form and challenge ideas of queer and straight sexuality, gender and identity.
The film and video works shown during The Pleasure and Politics event were: Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai de Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975, Chantal Akerman), Teknolust (2002, Lynn Hershman Leeson), Dirty Young Loose, (Lene Berg, 2013), Olympic Variations (Michel Auder, 1984), Abyss (Knut Åsdam, 2010), Lovely Andrea (Hito Steyerl, 2007), Scorpio Rising (Kenneth Anger, 1963), All That Heaven Allows (1955, Douglas Sirk), Peeping Tom (1960, Michael Powell) and Anatomy of Hell (2004, Catherine Breillat).
A collaboration between Wuxia, UKS, Cinemateket, and the University of Oslo, the event was organized and curated by Sara Eliassen, Maria Moseng, Sara Orning, and Sara R. Yazdani. It was supported by Fritt Ord, Imag(in)ing Technologies at the Department of Media and Communications, University of Oslo, the Centre for Gender Research, University of Oslo and NFI Filmkulturelle tiltak.
Notes
[1]. Patricia White, Uninvited. Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.