Gaze Theory and the Female Experience: A Deep-dive Into the Looking Relations of Cléo from 5 to 7 and Black Girl
In a world heavily dominated by patriarchal standards, the role and perception of women are incessantly mutated under the masculine order. Men are afforded the authority to determine how women should literally and figuratively exist in shared space. The bounds of this “male gaze” are limitless, its influence seeping into every aspect of human life—politics, religion, and even entertainment. This is especially true in film, where the male gaze commonly leads to the objectification, dehumanization, and trivialization of female characters. Though prepotent, the male gaze has been subverted by the emergence of more progressive looking relations in film: the female gaze and the oppositional gaze. Agnès Varda’s 1962 film Cléo from 5 to 7 exemplifies how the female gaze disrupts the male gaze’s tendency to create a spectacle of the feminine; however, Ousmane Sembène’s 1966 film Black Girl employs the oppositional gaze to expose the erasure of Black femininity by the white-centered feminist gaze. By using both films as a case study into each theory, one can grasp the power of looking relations in shaping the filmic representation of the female experience.
Film is, at its core, collaborative. In order for the phenomenon of the cinematic experience to work, the medium requires a mutualistic relationship between film, director, and the audience. Often in cinematic history, however, the assumed or target audience is men. This inherently leads to a dichotomy in viewing experiences between women and men. Traditionally when films are made by men for men their portrayals of women are lackluster and superficial, mostly serving heteronormative, sexualized purposes. This is the male gaze. The term male gaze was coined by Laura Mulvey, a pioneering British film theorist. She introduced the phrase in her 1973 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in which she details the psychoanalytic origins of gazing and how this translates into the “pleasurable looking” at female characters in film. “The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously located at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness” (Mulvey 19). This is carried out through lingering shots of a female character’s breast. Or the occasional female character with little to no lines and no character arc. Or the female characters who fulfill glamorized tropes such as the femme fatale. The oversimplification of female characters highlights their disposable status in male-centric films. As Mulvey suggests, through the male gaze “the man controls the film fantasy” (20) and actively progresses the story. In contrast, female characters are used as embellishments, spectacles secondary to the male narrative.
It is important to note that, like previously mentioned, the cinematic experience has three main players. Not only is this male gaze accepted by the characters in the film (who are molded around these values) and the audience (who consumes and pays for the content), but most importantly the director (who makes the intentional choices to objectify female characters in a film’s narrative and technical structure). Nevertheless, as more women began to break into the field of film theory and the film industry, many criticized these depictions with their own work including Laura Mulvey. In response to Mulvey’s coinage of the term male gaze, the phrase “feminist gaze” was added to the realm of looking relations. Women directors, fueled by the feminist gaze, reclaimed female narratives by producing films that centered and offered a more complex view of the feminine.
Male cinephiles can always relate to the standard of masculinity found in most films. Whether or not they support the omnipresence of the male gaze is moot because men still have the privilege of choice: choosing to accept these displays of the masculine or rejecting them as many women do. The feminist gaze aims to offer women the same opportunity to experience film. To be able to be comforted by pure displays of femininity as men are awarded with masculinity. Generally, female characters are presented to audiences in a voyeuristic manner. The use of point of view shots from the perspective of male characters to observe unaware female characters is an example. By centering the feminine, female filmmakers reject this to-be-looked-at-ness Mulvey defines and transforms female characters from spectacle to spectator. This is achieved by positioning women as the bearer of story, creating multidimensional female characters, and giving women agency in their own narratives. As the prolific French New Wave auteur Agnès Varda has stated, the first step in welcoming the feminist gaze is deciding to look. She explores this decision and its impact as an agent of the feminist gaze in her film Cléo from 5 to 7.
Cléo from 5 to 7 follows Cléo, a young self-absorbed pop singer. After being faced with the potential of her own death, Cléo rediscovers her personhood devoid of others’ perception of her and more specifically the male gaze. Cléo is presented to the audience as an exhibitionist, with most of her happiness and self-identity tied to how she is perceived by men. Throughout the film, we see how her hyper-awareness of being a spectacle manifests. The film shows Cléo constantly being faced with mirrors and never being able to resist looking into them. People gawk at her on the street. She decorates her body in dramatic clothes, wigs, and makeup. Her pseudo-personality is rooted in sensuality. Cléo obscures her self-identity with a costume of desirability. This all changes when Cléo realizes she has lost her true self in a life oversaturated by to-be-looked-at-ness. In her essay “From Déesse to Idée: Cléo from 5 to 7,” Sandy Flitterman-Lewis explains how Cléo “undergoes ‘a profound transformation of [her] entire being,’ mainly through learning that looking is just as important as being looked at. Cléo “becomes transformed into an active social participant, rupturing the oppressive unity of identity and vision and appropriating the gaze for herself in a new appreciation of others in the world around her” (268). This is especially true in a scene where she visits her friend Dorothée, a nude model. We are introduced to Dorothée as she poses, completely nude, amongst a group of male and female sculptors. Though she is nude, the atmosphere in which Dorothée exists is not objectifying. One can even argue that she is empowered by having agency over her femininity and being the decider of how sexuality serves in her life, a complete juxtaposition of Cléo’s experience. Having many iterations of herself sculpted symbolizes that Dorothée’s identity is boundless, defined by no one but herself.
In this scene and film as a whole, Varda effectively communicates that femininity does not require the male gaze to exist. Women in film can instead lean into the feminist gaze and accept the illustrations of feminity it engenders. Though the feminist gaze’s intention is to create authentic space for women in film, the theory has been built around white femininity. It forgets the fact that Black women exist in a suspended grey area in society, unable to identify with the masculinity of the male gaze or the whiteness of the feminist gaze. When the nuances of Black femininity are overlooked, Black women are subjected to stereotypical representation in film. Two of the most famous tropes being the Mammy figure (an undesirable, submissive woman) and the Jezebel (a hyper-sexualized, sexually promiscuous woman). In response to this lack of attention, race and film theorist bell hooks coined the term “oppositional gaze” in her essay “Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectatorship” to refer specifically to the looking relations of Black women. hooks states “Every black woman I spoke with…testified that to experience fully the pleasure of that cinema they had to close down critique, analysis; they had to forget racism, And mostly they did not think about sexism” (120). In his film Black Girl, Senegalese director Ousmane Sembène challenges this oxymoron of blind looking.
Black Girl recounts the story of Diouana, a young Senegalese woman who is offered a job to work for a white family in France. Diouana quickly learns that her role is likened more to a slave. The Madam of the family relentlessly belittles, berates, and dehumanizes Diouana. In its essence, the film is a social commentary about the horrors and fatalistic nature of neocolonialism, but it is hard to ignore the hints of the oppositional gaze. The gaze is seen most prominently in the scene where Diouana serves the family during their dinner party. The Monsieur of the white family works in the French government and invites colleagues and their wives to the house for dinner. Diouana serves them traditional Sengalese food (that they exotify), and she is tokenized and objectified over the course of the meal. The dinner attendees talk about Diouana in her presence as if she is an inanimate object. This scene is effective in unveiling both the Mammy and Jezebel stereotypes white people assign to Black women. Diouana quietly and submissively serves them as a Mammy. She is also highly sexualized when one of the guests grabs her and kisses her, without her permission, because he has “never kissed a Black before.” After this encounter, the whole table stares at Diouana’s backside as she walks away. The white male characters obviously drive the racist misogyny in this scene, but the white female characters fortify the oppression by sitting quietly or participating in this niche white masculine discrimination. Diouana is simultaneously ostracized by masculinity and whiteness. Sembène forces the audience to reckon with the seemingly “harmless” effects of this neocolonialist racism and misogyny with Diouana’s suicide. Black Girl aims to discomfort. It does not allow the audience to participate in the pacifying forgetfulness of racism and misogyny that hooks describes.
Gaze theory is not perfect, as it is often the beginning of a conversation and not its end. It is necessary to realize the role of intersectionality in strengthening and limiting the characteristics of looking relations. The feminist gaze, in theory, is constructive; yet, it takes some finesse to truly apply to all women. White feminism, as we see in Cléo, ends with a solution, and Cléo’s loose ends are all tied up by the end of the film. Diouana’s story ends in death, serving as a warning. Black feminism has no positive solution, begging audiences to consider the oppositional gaze. Gaze theory should be used as a guide to subvert and not an answer to the oppressive looking practices we exercise in the art of film.
Bibliography
Flitterman-Lewis, Sandy. “From Déesse to Idée: Cléo from 5 to 7.” To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cinema. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990. Internet resource.
hooks, bell. “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators.” Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1992, pp. 115-131.
Mulvey, L. "Visual Pleasure And Narrative Cinema". Screen, vol 16, no. 3, 1975, pp. 6-18.Oxford University Press (OUP), doi:10.1093/screen/16.3.6.