Chapter Three
Seeing the Invisible - Towards a Lesbian Gaze
Copyright (c) 2002 Shannon Starr
'How does one formulate an understanding of a structure that insists on our absence even in the face of our presence?' - B. Ruby Rich, 1
In the past, the majority of films featuring lesbian characters were made by men and as such they were generally from a male, heterosexual point of view. This is especially clear in films such as Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1991), where the gaze is clearly male and heterosexual, with the lesbian character as object, and never possessor, of that gaze. However, with the increase of lesbian films, made by lesbian filmmakers for their own community, an opportunity has arisen to take possession of the gaze, while at the same time being its object.
Traditionally in cinema, the gaze was male, with the female only able to occupy the position of object. According to Laura Mulvey, in her paper on 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', 'Woman then stands in patriarchal culture as a signifier for the male other ... as bearer, not maker, of meaning.' 2 However, in recent lesbian cinema, this is complicated by the absence of men. These rules cannot apply, as woman is not the 'other' in relation to man, but is maker of her own meaning and in possession of the gaze.
What has complicated this further is the feminist politics surrounding representation, and the belief that the gaze in cinema is intrinsically male. Alison Butler has argued that within feminism, 'historical diagnoses have tended to harden into proscriptive dogma (for instance, that the gaze is inevitably voyeuristic, exploitative, and male, and that these terms are, to some extent, interchangeable.' 3
By regarding the gaze as intrinsically male, feminists have shut out any possibility for it to take on a different meaning by being appropriated by women. And it is here in which the difficulty for lesbian filmmakers lies, to quote De Lauretis, 'how to represent a female, lesbian desire that is neither masculine, a usurpation of male heterosexual desire, nor a feminine, narcissistic identification with the other woman.'4
Several lesbian filmmakers have attempted to find a way to appropriate the gaze, making it female and lesbian, rather than male and heterosexual. Sheila McLaughlin, with her film She Must Be Seeing Things (1987), played with the concept of voyeurism, and placed her female characters in the position of being both in control of, and object of the gaze. McLaughlin attempted to break down the perceived heterosexual rules which cinema is meant to follow. She has said of her film, 'what I wanted to do in the film was to make a voyeuristic female and constantly put her in the position of taking on the look'.5 At the same time, the object of the gaze is not fixed into that position, but also allowed to take on an active role of looking. 'Jo at times appears as a sex object, but that is also undermined by showing her in an active role, working on her film.'6
In attempting to break down the perceived cinematic rules regarding the gaze and women, McLaughlin has set an example many more recent lesbian filmmakers have followed. The most original aspect of McLaughlin's film according to DeLauretis, as well as it's greatest contribution to lesbian cinema, is its ability 'to create a space for questioning not only what they, the two women protagonists, see but also what we, spectators, see in the film; enough to let us see ourselves seeing, and with what eyes.'7
Go Fish (Rose Troche, 1994) has attempted to engage with the female gaze in a number of ways, primarily through the use of avant-garde techniques. According to Mulvey, 'feminists have come... to see the modernist avant-garde as relevant to their own struggle to develop a radical approach to art.'8 By using a film form that removes itself from the understood and traditionally male construction of Hollywood cinema, and attempting to find their own film language, feminist filmmakers have formed a cinema of their own, which moves 'beyond woman unspeaking, a signifier of the 'other' of patriarchy, to a point where women can speak themselves.' 9 In the avant-garde 'bridges' of Go Fish, Troche expresses the personalised voice of the community, looking at their desires and anxieties in an abstract, non-verbal way. The emphasis on hands, something which is repeated over and over again, is a personal and powerful image for women, and particularly lesbians, representing intimacy, affection and pleasure. I would argue that the emotion of the film is expressed through its hands - during moments of anxiety, the hands are wrung or clenched, impatient moments are indicated by fingers tapping, tenderness is expressed through hands touching, joining.
Another technique Troche uses to explore the female gaze is a large number of close-ups, which are repeated throughout the film. Faces, hands, feet, small details of the characters bodies are all shot in close-up. This emphasises intimacy, whether the growing intimacy between Max and Ely, or the already well established intimacy between Kia and Evy. This style of cinematography is an extremely personal one, connecting the audience with the characters, and allowing them to view the action the way the characters do, concentrating on the small details, and giving the film a very feminine feel. In particular the love making scenes are shot in close-up, personalising them, rather than making them feel detached and voyeuristic.
The use of glasses in Go Fish is another interesting engagement with the female gaze. Kia, as well as several other lesser female characters, wear glasses throughout the film. Glasses worn by women in the cinema have great significance according to Doane:
'Glasses worn by a woman in the cinema do not generally signify a deficiency in seeing but an active looking, or simply the fact of seeing as opposed to being seen. The intellectual woman looks and analyses, and in usurping the gaze she poses a threat to the entire system of representation. It is as if the woman had forcefully moved to the other side of the specular.'10
Glasses, along with the blazer she always wears, are described in the script of Go Fish as Kia's 'signature article of clothing'11. In Kia's case, glasses signal that she is in control of the gaze throughout the film. She is the first to see that Ely would be the perfect partner for Max, and she then watches the lovers' progression.
As a teacher, in the classroom scene that opens the film, Kia also encourages her students to see, to look beyond the obvious in attempting to identify women they know (or think) are lesbians. Kia explains that:
'Throughout lesbian history there has been a serious lack of evidence that'll tell us what these women's lives were truly about. I mean lesbian lives and lesbian relationships - they barely exist on paper, and it is with that in mind and understanding the power of history .... that we begin to want to change history.' 12
This seeing what is unseen is what lesbian audiences have had to do throughout the history of cinema, to read between the lines in order to identify with and find pleasure in a film. In engaging with this, Go Fish has attempted to break down the walls of invisibility that surrounds lesbian lives, and make them visible on screen.
According to Christine Gledhill, the traditional view of the feminine as 'lack' in cinema has led to the assumption that all female representation is nothing more than 'figures cut to the measure of the patriarchal Unconscious ... [with] the 'look' of the camera ... identified as male.'13 However, as is clear in films such as Go Fish, the 'look' of the camera is not intrinsically male, particularly when controlled by a female (and lesbian) director and cinematographer. It is possible for lesbians to take control of the gaze and as such, make their own meaning within films.
Like Go Fish, All Over Me (Alex Sichel, 1996) has also tried to deal with the female gaze. Claude has possession of the gaze throughout the film, first with Ellen, and later Lucy as object. The film is punctuated with long moments of Claude looking at Ellen. The first of these is early in the film while they play guitar in Claude's room. Claude becomes so caught up in looking at Ellen, that she stops playing her guitar. A moment later, Ellen looks up and catches her gaze. This is the first indication in the film of Claude's true feelings for Ellen. A short time later, when Ellen has left to meet her boyfriend Mark, Claude watches them from her bedroom window. At other times, lingering close-ups are used to show the intensity of Claude's feeling toward Ellen. Joe DeSalvo, the film's cinematographer, says of these shots:
'When you're at that age, and you have this best friend, a lot of what you look at is the other person's skin. ... We wanted the up-close intensity of that age. The visuals were of this one girl looking so closely at the other one [that she] is trying to figure out whether she wants to be her, or is in love with her.' 14
About half way through the film, the subject of Claude's gaze begins to change. In a scene in a music store, Claude sees Lucy for the first time, and she watches her much in the same way that she has watched Ellen previously. Later, at the lesbian bar which Luke suggests to her, Claude sees Lucy performing on stage. Initially Claude stands towards the back of the room, until she spots Lucy. The camera from Claude's point of view lingers on Lucy, and then follows Claude as she moves forward, towards the stage, where she watches in closer detail. After a few moments, Lucy looks up and sees Claude watching her and smiles. These scenes, where Claude's gaze is directed elsewhere, mark the beginning of the end of her relationship with Ellen. With an alternate subject of her gaze, Claude slowly comes to realise that she is not as dependent upon Ellen as she thought, but is free to direct her attention elsewhere.
Mirrors are used numerous time in All Over Me, with several conversations taking place between Ellen and Claude in front of one. In a sense, Claude is looking at Ellen's reflection, what Ellen wants her to see, not the real girl, but her image distorted, in reverse. This is made especially clear in a scene in front of a fun house mirror in Claude's kitchen. With their images distorted, Claude and Ellen engage in their first sexual interplay of the film. They role-play as strangers, with Ellen gendering Claude as male, and Claude accepting this. However, Ellen soon grows tired of the game, and dismissing it as 'stupid' she goes back into Claude's room to call the real man in her life, Mark.
In contrast, mirrors are never present in scenes with Lucy. Claude is always looking at her directly, and Lucy looks at her, not her own reflection. In a sense, their relationship is more direct, and thus more honest, and it is not mediated through role-play.
Gaze is also suggested by the cinematographer's choice of lighting. Colours were assigned to both Claude and Ellen, and how they see and are affected by each other is often suggested through these colours. Claude was assigned shades of red, while Ellen is associated with colder blue tones. One scene in which these colours are used effectively is immediately after Ellen has brought Mark to Claude's room. Claude returns, and the room (usually light shades of red) is lit with a cold blue light. The room has become Ellen's for the evening, and the colour suggests that Claude sees this.
The transformation of the girls' relationship from friendship to a romance is also shown through lighting. Again role playing (in this case the girls act out what has just transpired between Ellen and Mark) Ellen leans over Claude to kiss her, and her blonde hair cast a warm light over her friend's face. In this moment, Claude's gaze changes from a somewhat ambiguous one - of either desire to be or desire to possess - to one of love. DeSalvo says of his decision to use Ellen's hair in this way, 'The blonde hair sort of warmed the light that was falling on Claude's face, and it was really a beautiful moment; it really transforms the bond between them.' 15 In this subtle way, the way the girls see the world, and the effect each girl has on the other's gaze is shown.
Similarly to She Must Be Seeing Things, High Art (Lisa Cholodenko, 1998) is a film about looking and image, and like it's predecessor, it attempts 'to pose the formal problem of lesbian representation in cinema by working through the cinematic equivalence of look and desire, and to reclaim them ... by rearticulating [them] in lesbian terms.'16 The audience's first glimpse of the character of Syd is that of her looking - she is using a view finder to look at photographic negatives. The camera examines Syd examining, shooting her in close-up, showing only small details initially. As assistant editor of a photographic magazine, Syd's job is to look, and she spends the entire film doing just that - first the negatives, then the photographs that cover Lucy's apartment, and then at Lucy herself. Like Kia in Go Fish, Syd wears glasses, which serve to suggest her possession of the gaze.
Despite the fact that Lucy is a photographer, she is not in soul possession of the gaze for the majority of the film, but shares this with Syd, and in fact, Lucy herself becomes the focus of that gaze. Lucy's own view of the world is seen through the photographs that fill her apartment. Syd describes these photographs as, 'mostly portraiture, but it's almost documentary. No, it's more personal than that.' 17 The portraits are of Lucy's friends, many of them out of focus. This is exactly how Lucy sees them - both because they spend their days unfocused, taking drugs in her apartment, and because she is seeing them through the haze of the drugs she herself takes. Many of the photographs Lucy has taken of her lover, Greta, are underwater. In these pictures she acknowledges that Greta is drowning, both in her addition to drugs, and her addiction to Lucy.
Syd's possession of the gaze during the film is shown, not only through her job and her analysis of Lucy's photographs, but through a series of lingering looks she pays Lucy as her attraction to the photographer grows. However, later in the film the gaze is shifted when Lucy photographs her during a weekend away. When Lucy decides to use these shots, and not the pictures of Greta, for the piece she is doing for Syd's magazine Frame, Syd is uncomfortable. She initially does not want to be the subject of the gaze, and feels out of control. Instead of Lucy's preferred piece, she gives her editor the photographs of Greta underwater, which her boss rejects as flat and uninspired, as stagnant as Lucy and Greta's relationship has become. Eventually, Syd is able to accept being the subject of Lucy's gaze, and presents her shots for publishing. In a sense, Syd comes to see herself more clearly through Lucy's pictures, and accepts what she sees.
The entire film is shot very much like a photograph, in its framing and use of soft focus. Long shots are kept to a minimum, and the proliferation of close-ups throughout the film gives it a sense of intimacy, which grows as Syd and Lucy become closer. This style of cinematography adds to the growth of their relationship, and draws the audience into the romance and seduction, without seeming voyeuristic. In this sense, the gaze is firmly fixed as female and like Go Fish, the emphasis is on seeing the small details that the female characters themselves are seeing, rather than watching from a detached position. Like McLaughlin's She Must Be Seeing Things, the characters of High Art are 'set in an investigative frame whose subject is the heroine and whose object, the 'mystery' investigated, is also 'woman' ... [with] both of the protagonists ... perceived to be at once subject and object of a female desire.' 18
According to Tamsin Wilton:
'Saturated as it is in patriarchal, heterosexist signs, codes and ideologies, privileging as it does the sexual and erotic sites of scopophilic pleasure, film by and large obliges its lesbian spectators to engage with an undiluted reflection of mainstream cultural hostility to lesbian existence.' 19
However, films like Go Fish, All Over Me and High Art are proof that a lesbian cinema exists that allows lesbians control of a female, rather than male, gaze. By creating this space in which lesbian lives may be represented on screen from a specifically lesbian perspective, rather than mediated through the heterosexual mainstream, these filmmakers have given a cinema to lesbian audiences that is truly their own. This is perhaps the greatest achievement of the recent wave of independent lesbian film, an achievement that could not have been made under the auspices of the (predominantly male) 'new queer cinema'.
Footnotes:
1)B. Ruby Rich, cited in Teresa De Lauretis, Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (London & Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984) p. 29.
2) Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989) p. 15.
3) Alison Butler, 'She Must Be Seeing Things: An Interview With Sheila McLaughlin', in M. Gever, J. Greyson and P. Parmar (eds.), Queer Looks: Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Film and Video, (London & New York: Routledge, 1993) p. 368
4) Teresa De Lauretis, 'Guerrilla in the Midst: Women's Cinema in the 80s', Screen, vol. 31. no. 1. (1990), p. 22.
5) Sheila McLaughlin, cited in Alison Butler, 'She Must Be Seeing Things: An Interview With Sheila McLaughlin', in M. Gever, J. Greyson and P. Parmar (eds.), Queer Looks: Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Film and Video, (London & New York: Routledge, 1993) p. 375.
6) Ibid. p. 372.
7) Teresa De Lauretis, 'Guerrilla in the Midst: Women's Cinema in the 80s', Screen, vol. 31. no. 1. (1990), p. 24.
8) Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989) p. 112.
9) Ibid. p. 121.
10) M.A. Doane, 'Film and the masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator', Screen, vol. 23. (1982), p. 83.
11) Guinevere Turner, and Rose Troche, Go Fish: The Full Original Screenplay (Woodstock & New York: Overlook Press, 1995) p. 36.
12) Kia, Go Fish
13) Christine Gledhill, 'Pleasurable Negotiations', in E. Deidre Pribram (ed.), Female Spectators: Looking at Film and Television, (London and New York: Verso, 1988) p. 66.
14) Joe DeSalvo, cited in Michael X. Ferraro, 'All Over Me', American Cinematographer, vol. 78. no. 3. (1997), p. 24.
15) Ibid. p. 24.
16) Teresa De Lauretis, 'Guerrilla in the Midst: Women's Cinema in the 80s', Screen, vol. 31. no. 1. (1990), p. 23.
17) Syd, High Art
18) Teresa De Lauretis, 'Guerrilla in the Midst: Women's Cinema in the 80s', Screen, vol. 31. no. 1. (1990), p. 22.
19) Tamsin Wilton (ed), Immortal, Invisible: Lesbians and the Moving Image (London & New York: Routledge, 1995) p. 158.
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