Today we will delve into the cinema of the 20th century, particularly that developed between the decades of the 1960s and 1970s. However, to be precise, we will call it «cinema of man». It cannot be called anything else.
Today and always it seems that we prefer to call it traditional cinema or cine «of conventions». Nevertheless, there was –and still is, with greater subtlety– a dominant sector directing it. A situation that assured for a long time the exile of other types of gaze that were not its own.
The cinema of man was founded and structured by him, leaving, without remedy, adapted to his way of thinking and, therefore, of seeing. It is a systematically conditioned production (Berger, 2000).
But, how is the man's gaze?
According to Laura Mulvey and Linda Williams, we can extract a key factor: the behavior of the voyeur. A gaze founded on libido, immersed in the search for sexual pleasure, an excitement that involves objectifying the Other (Mulvey, 2001). The subject or voyeur recreates himself through the Other and with his gaze makes this one the object of his desire (Williams, 1984).
This foundation of cinema by and for cisgender heterosexual normative men paved the way for clearly dichotomous gender roles. The man, benefiting from a privileged position, reinforced by the patriarchal sociocultural context, occupied the active role. Women, who were understood as the Other with respect to men (De Beauvoir, 2015), had to embody the passive role, acting as their antithesis.
This led to the consolidation of certain ideas by association: that it was always the man who could execute from an active gaze his cinematographic production –producing from a biased perspective of the world– and thus projecting his fantasies onto women, resulting in them always playing a role as "entertainment" –women were reduced to a spectacle worthy of being watched. Consequently, this repetition induced the assumption that the active was necessarily masculine as something belonging to men and, conversely, the passive as necessarily feminine as something belonging to women.
None of which is remotely true.
The image and discourse of cinema had become entrenched with force, making the foundations a custom difficult to tear down. And it is that men have been able, for years, to control the image projected of women on screens (Zecchi, 2014).
For analysis purposes, we will delve into Claude Chabrol and his film Les bonnes femmes (1960), making a comparison a posteriori, between what was typically the man's gaze and the feminine perspective through Agnès Varda, director and contemporary of the first.
Let us begin by recognizing in the translation, the decidedly sarcastic nuance of the title that Claude Chabrol gave to his film: The Good Girls.
While we might expect the main plot to revolve around female characters, far from it, all protagonism is given to male characters who will use women as complements. Furthermore, the roles to which they are relegated have little to do with being "good?" And indeed, the only adjectives that can be used to describe each of the girls in the greatest simplicity are undoubtedly negative: stupid, naive, clumsy, ?Bad?
A dizzying irony interpreted as Chabrol's aim for comedy. In fact, there are those who include this film within that genre -we can check it on popular streaming platforms such as Prime Video, or databases about cinema like Filmaffinity.-. Questionable when we discover that all attempts at humor are based on the fun of witnessing how girls are violated, in every conceivable way. In other words, in hoping that it will be funny for the viewer to see how men torment, control, humiliate, objectify and assault young women.
Just as the supposed humorous pretext of the film reveals itself as an unrestrained wave of gratuitous machismo violence, we find that the development of female characters is null. They lack depth. There is no human factor. The director reproduces on screen a series of stereotyped archetypes, where girls act as opposite poles, among which we can place the shy and reserved girl (Jacqueline) or the sinner and party girl (Jane). A constant in patriarchal thought, classifying women with force: you are either saintly or a prostitute.
On the other hand, differences between young women will not affect their objectification. For this, Chabrol employs intrusive approaches, close-ups that mimic the gaze of a voyeur, as Laura Mulvey explains in Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. The viewer is transformed into a peeping Tom who gets excited watching them. They will be sexualized, even during violent scenes where it is evident they are not trying to excite anyone (Sangro & Plaza, 2010).
Let us comment on the moment I called «Dolly Bell» (Figure 2. b), a scene completely out of place without justification for the plot. It consists in an erotic-festive exhibition by a beautiful young blonde, who undresses to music. Her only function is to appear so as to be observed. As Mulvey says:
"In her traditional role of object of display, women are looked at and displayed simultaneously with an appearance coded for maximum visual and erotic impact, so that their look connotes to-be-looked-at-ness. The woman exposed as a sexual object is the leitmotif of the erotic spectacle: from pin-ups to striptease, […] she signifies male desire, endures its gaze, and acts for it." (Mulvey, 2001, p. 370)
And continues:
"[…] the presence of women is an indispensable element in the spectacle in conventional narrative cinema, although her visual presence tends to operate against the development of the plot by freezing action at moments of erotic contemplation." (Mulvey, 2001, p. 370)
It will be easy to detect that the film itself is a display of the male universe woven by Chabrol and in which everything revolves around them without exception. Women are exposed as fragile, beautiful, and young bodies out of control. Empty bodies yearning to be reprogrammed: the perfect justification for men to dominate women.
Through female existence, he reaffirms himself by embodying what is opposite to "femininity". For him, woman is in harmony with the wild and the mysterious. Since feminine essence forms part of nature, it lacks rationality (De Beauvoir, 2015). Her proximity to the natural makes her an inferior being. And it is from this perspective that the twisted excuse for Jacqueline's murder will be generated.
Chabrol was able to reproduce from a chilling normalization an entire compendium of elements inherent to patriarchal society. Among these, stands out the culture of rape and the phenomenon today known as blaming the victim, which in the film is highlighted in the murder: the stalker manages to take Jacqueline into the woods and suffocates her with his own hands. A brutal scene where once again the gaze of the voyeur is emulated. Jacqueline is sexualized at the moment of her death, showing her face in extreme close-up when she exhales her last breath.
Jacqueline is reduced to a naive girl who committed an unforgivable stupidity and, therefore, precipitates towards what «she deserves». Her murder becomes an exemplary punishment that points to the lack of rationality in women as the cause of what happens to them. Chabrol manages to symbolically eradicate the danger posed by women and their flaws with her death. A happy ending ?
On the contrary, production from a feminine perspective in 20th-century cinema will reveal the abyss between cinematic gazes... A disparity necessary that we need to compare, to elucidate how this world has been built.
However, we will analyze it shortly, in the second part.
Bibliography
Berger, J. (2000). Ways of Seeing. GG.
De Beauvoir, S. (2015). The Second Sex. Cátedra.
M. A. Doane P. Mellencamp and L. Williams (Eds.). (1984). Re-Vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism. The American Film Institute.
Mulvey, L. (2001). Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. In B. Wallis (ed.), Art after Modernism: New Perspectives on Representation (pp. 365-377). Akal.
Sangro, P., & Plaza, J. F. (Eds.). (2010). The Representation of Women in Contemporary Cinema and Television. Laertes.
Zecchi, B. (2014). Sexed Screen. Cátedra.
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