Self-Portrait: The Abstraction of Women is an experimental documentary that explores a woman’s relationship with her image through art and film. It chronicles a personal journey of identity, femininity, embodied experience, and art that exists in a larger cultural context.
Created as part of Denison University's Summer Scholars program under the Lisska Scholars summer of 2024
From Muse to Artist And Back Again:
Self Portrait: The Abstraction of Woman
Leah Jackson
Michael Morris
Department of Cinema
Denison University Summer Scholars
2024
“To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men.”- John Berger
Among the most famous paintings in history are works like The Girl With the Pearl Earring, the Mona Lisa, the Birth of Venus, and Portrait of Madame X. Portraits of women, made by men. For hundreds of years women have been the subject of art, but somehow, they are rarely remembered as the creator. Over the course of ten weeks, I sought to explore a woman’s relationship with her own image through self portraiture and film. I attempted to answer the question: Is identity something constructed by the individual or by the people and structures that surround the individual? Additionally , is femininity established by the individual or the patriarchal society in which gender roles exist? In those ten weeks, I dedicated myself to researching and studying women’s presence in film throughout history with a focus primarily on experimental film of the 60’s and 70’s. These films were heavily influenced by the second wave of feminism, which focused on reproductive rights, gender roles, the workplace, and economic equality, all of which have become relevant today in new ways. I analyzed the way in which women’s roles, both on screen and in day to day life, have continued to be determined by others (mainly men) and how their stories have been left out of the cultural record again and again. My research consisted of studying the applications of the male gaze, psychoanalytic theories of identity, postmodernism, and the films of a wide variety of female and/or experimental filmmakers whose work inspired my own. The final result of the project is an experimental documentary film which documents the creation of a self portrait, in which the film itself becomes the self portrait. The film is titled Self Portrait: The Abstraction of Woman.
The Mirror Phase
The Mirror phase refers to psychoanalyst Jaques Lacan’s theory that a child's first recognition of the self, or the “I”, comes from seeing their image in the mirror. The mirror in this case can also refer to the child's mother. The child witnesses the mother witnessing his or her experiences and thus develops an ego. In other words, in order to develop a sense of self we must recognize our existence through the people, places, and objects that surround us. I make reference to this theory in the content of the film, including the places, relationships, and memories which have shaped my identity, as well as the use of mirrors as a metaphor for image.
Throughout the film I repeat versions of the phrase “I am not her” and “I don't know who she is” in relation to my own image. If I am not my image, then who am I? I wrestle with this idea in creating my self portrait, attempting to create an image of myself which I will recognize as me. Presumably if I am the author and owner of my own image, it is me, it is mine. However, any image is still an abstraction of the thing it represents, no matter how close to reality it may be, the image is an illusion of the truth. I am not an image at all; I am a woman, but in our society the two seem to be synonymous. I realize this over and over again and then fail to accept its application because as a woman, I have no route to self actualization without my image. I am imprisoned by it. I have been socialized to accept that I am my image, one that was created through a patriarchal gaze, and when I attempt to reconstruct my image through my own gaze and authorship, the portrait falls flat. It is void of recognition. I cannot find my sense of self outside of my image no matter how hard I try. I flip back and forth from being the cinematographer to being the subject of the film, desperately trying to see myself through my own eyes. I look for my sense of self in a defined ‘otherness’ which Lacan uses to describe how we understand our existence. Before there was a mirror there was a mother. I recognized that she recognized me as her daughter, and I became her daughter. Biologically I was born my mother’s daughter, but from my own consciousness it took this realization for “daughter’ to become a part of my identity. This is true of every important figure in my life. I know I exist because I am witnessing you witness my life. I position my friends as subjects in this way. Through the eyes of the camera I can observe them and they observe me as I create the film.
French post-structuralist Jean-Louis Baudry drew a parallel between the Lacanian mirror stage and the spectator of a film in his essay Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus. Baudry’s argument was that the viewer is condemned to accept a false image as reality. In Ann Kibbey’s book Theory of the Image, she comments on Baudry’s essay. “Its topic was not films, but the consumption of films as generic images, the Lacanian spectator as image consumer.” (Kibbey, 2005) Baudry’s essay critiqued the representational nature of classical cinema as well as how we consume it. By his reasoning, the spectator is rendered helpless in his or her consumption of the image and its acceptance of reality. In the case of women’s image, what we are presented with is what we accept as the reality of her being. Consequently, what she is presented with externally as her image is accepted as her self image.
We can appropriate this concept further in a context of social media, a platform which promotes the hyperconsumption of images. If the spectator of a film is condemned to accept a false image as reality, then the social media user is imprisoned in a false reality. Images can be easily manipulated through digital editing, thus the spectator can be manipulated as well. Not only are images themselves abstractions, but the images we see on social media are often abstractions of other images. I make reference to this in the film through the layered audio clips taken from different social media platforms. Particularly in the section of the film in which I am taking reference photos for my own portrait. I use audio collage to emulate the feeling of being overwhelmed by the trends that surround the aesthetics of a women's image.
Lacan’s theory was also the context of Laura Mulvey’s 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in which she famously coined the term ‘male gaze.’ Mulvey used psychoanalytic theory to explain different viewpoints of cinema.
“(1) that of the camera as it records the profilmic event, (2) that of the audience as it watches the final product, and (3) that of the characters at each other within the screen illusion. The conventions of narrative film deny the first two and subordinate them to the third, the conscious aim being always to eliminate intrusive camera presence and prevent a distancing awareness in the audience. Without these two abscences (the material existence of the recording process, the critical reading of the spectator), fictional drama cannot achieve reality, obviousness, and truth.” (Mulvey, 1975)
In addition to documentary film’s commitment to authenticity I make a conscious attempt to challenge these conventions, each in their own respect. I make no attempt to hide the camera. I often look directly into it, allow it to be visible through mirrors, or include clips acknowledging that I am the one holding the camera. I do, however, deny the viewer certain pieces of information, leaving interactions and pieces of the narrative fragmented as a way of challenging the traditional lens in which we are used to viewing films. I inform the viewer by encouraging their own introspection and asking the viewer to read the film as if it is composed of lines from a poem, sincere each in its own right.
The Male Gaze
In Mulvey’s essay, she begins by referencing Sigmund Freud’s concept of phallocentrism, the idea that the base of masculine identity at its core is the phallus. This theory then supports the idea that the essence of woman in the patriarchal unconscious is the castrated male. She symbolizes the lack of a penis and the threat of castration. As Mulvey states, “Woman’s desire is subjected to her image as bearer of the bleeding wound, she can exist only in relation to castration and cannot transcend it.” (Mulvey, 1975) By this logic, the female only exists as the “other” to the primary gender of the male. This is commonly discussed with reference to Simone de Beauvoir’s book, The Second Sex, in which she rejects Freud’s idea of phallocentrism.
Laura Mulvey applies this concept to film theory, using it as context for the imbalance of gender roles on screen. The roles of women exist only to be tied to those of the men. Mulvey argues that while men are positioned as the active viewers and protagonists of film, women are the passive object displayed for the viewer. (Mulvey, 1975) Traditional Hollywood films perpetuated this dynamic through their structural narratives, editing, camera angles and other cinematic elements that are still used today.
“In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked 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, 1975)
Before the term was coined by Mulvey as the male gaze, it was detailed by John Berger in his collection of essays, Ways of Seeing. In the third essay, he describes the differences of the gendered appearance in traditional art. He describes a man’s appearance as being defined by what he is capable of doing to or for another. It signifies a power which is external to the man. A woman’s presence, however, is expressive of her attitude to herself. She symbolizes what can be done to her. “Her presence is manifest in her gestures, voice, opinions, expressions, clothes, chosen surroundings, taste - indeed there is nothing she can do which does not contribute to her presence.” (Berger, 1971)
In Deborah Tannen’s essay There is no Unmarked Woman, she outlines a similar phenomenon in the way women view other women. Tanen Describes a work conference in which each of the women in attendance sported vastly different hairstyles , makeup, and clothing. As she found herself scrutinizing the women for what each element of her appearance might say about her character, she came to a realization that a man's appearance does not carry so much meaning.“Each of the women at the conference had to make decisions about hair, clothing, makeup and accessories, and each decision carried meaning. Every style available to us was marked. The men in our group had made decisions, too, but the range from which they chose was
incomparably narrower. Men can choose styles that are marked, but they don't have to, and in this group none did. Unlike the women, they had the option of being unmarked.” (Tannen, 1993)
Berger simplifies this by saying “men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves.” (Berger, 1971) From her earliest days on earth she is taught to survey herself through the eyes of men and expected to act accordingly. Everything she does and every element of her appearance becomes a measure of her success in performing gender. “A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping.” (Berger, 1971)
This performance of gender becomes a sort of game. How a woman appears determines how she is treated. Her value is determined through an impossible beauty contest and she is judged and rewarded by image alone. The image of the woman thus becomes an entity entirely separate from the woman herself. The image of the woman is an abstraction of the woman, created by a lifetime of internalized patriarchal rules.
Throughout my own film I use different motifs as metaphors for my own image. This ultimately leads to a confrontation between myself as a filmmaker and myself as the subject. However, it is also a confrontation with the viewer. As the film goes on the viewer develops an idea of my life and personhood through the fragmented images on the screen, representing the sphere where I have learned to exist. Although I’ve selected and edited these clips to my own liking, there is a certain amount of control a filmmaker must give up to the viewer's interpretation. I can have my own image of myself, but no one will see me exactly as I see myself. The image of my identity develops at the predisposition of the viewer, just as the image of femininity develops at the predisposition of the patriarchy. It is a confrontation between myself and the image created externally to me.
Historical Background: Where are the Women’s Stories?
In 1971, as the avant garde film scene was budding in Pittsburg, 19 year old Sharon Green made a film titled “Self Portrait of a Nude Model Turned Cinematographer.” At the time, Green was a nude model for experimental filmmaker Stan Brakage, whose work is widely remembered as influential to the avant garde movement. Green’s film consisted of two sections. The first featured a montage of still photographs, photos of Green by a male photographer. The second features Green filming herself as an active subject, revealing herself as both the cinematographer and the physical body being captured by the camera. She holds the camera as close to her own eye as possible, representing the embodied experience by displaying her body through her own point of view. Self Portrait of a Nude Model Turned Cinematographer was screened in Green’s film class at the University of Pittsburgh among other student films; dramas and comedies that were met with laughter and applause. However, when Green’s film ended, it was met with complete silence. An air of shock and horror filled the room. The film disturbed something within the viewer, some norm of society that the individuals in the room were not ready to question. For Green, the reaction filled her not only with shock, but a sense of shame. Shame that her film must have been so bad it deserved that silence. Shame that her body must have been so disturbing it too, deserved that silence. Green never again attempted to make art. She never put the film into distribution of any kind, assuming no one would want to see it. The film was later preserved by Bob Haller, who took the still photographs featured in the film. Thanks to Haller, it became part of the Crossroads project at Anthology Film Archives, a collection of experimental film from Pittsburgh in the 70’s. However, the film was scarcely written about and was largely lost in history. Sharon Green is remembered as a model, muse, and lover to other, male, filmmakers, but not as an artist and cinematographer herself. Fifty Three years after the film was made, another 19 year old university student came across the single written mention of it in Feminist Media Histories and the idea for this project was born. I was able to find the film courtesy of Green herself, who I had the privilege of speaking with this summer. Today, Green has her own practice in psychoanalytics. Her work in psychoanalysis, film and her refreshing perspectives on the embodied female experience continued to inspire and shape this project.
Before starting the project it was my impression that the film industry has always been dominated by men and that this has not begun to change until fairly recently. It is not the fault of my own ignorance that this impression comes from, but from the emphasis society has always put on the work of men. Men’s stories are the ones that have dominated the narrative of popular culture. Some of the highest grossing films of all time are films of the Star Wars saga and the Marvel cinematic universe, films that mainly feature traditional masculine leads. Films have a higher chance of getting made when they are being made about a man, by a man, for a presumed male audience. Although the audience can be presumed male, the film can still be considered universally appealing. If the presumed audience is female, the film is often cast aside as unserious, silly and womanly; things that male audiences won't care to see. This perpetuates an idea that men’s stories are the important stories and the ones that mass audiences want to see.
A great recent example of this is Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, which came out just last year. Although there were overwhelmingly positive responses to the film, there was still a hesitation from male audiences. The idea of watching a film about a doll that wears pink seemed to threaten the masculinity of some male viewers. I remember hearing someone ask my brother if he had any plans to see the film, and his response was that he would have no reason to watch Barbie unless it was to see Margot Robbie. His pointedly sexist comment, although it was meant as a joke, is a testament to why women's stories tend to be overlooked. In Helen O’hara’s Women Vs. Hollywood: the Rise and Fall of Women in Film, she quotes director Alma Harea, “Our global consciousness is skewed. You can see that women have been constantly written out of history. We can't expect people to fully grasp how biased they are because they have been educated from a young age to believe that men are visionaries and built the world, and they don't know the contributions of women.” (O’Hara, 2022)
Unlike fine arts where women have been confined to the subject of work since the very beginning, the film industry was built by the ambitions of both men and women. Since the silent era, women have been successful writers, actors and directors. The early days of cinema were shaped by women whose stories have since been buried. “In 1917 alone, Universal Studios would credit eight female directors. In 2017, the same studio made just one film with a female director, Pitch Perfect 3.” (O’Hara, 2022) When you google ‘famous directors’ fifty one names appear. Only one of them is a woman. Where are the women’s stories? Mabel Normand was a leading actress and director at Keystone Pictures during the silent era and taught Charlie Chaplin how to direct film. He became a household name and denied her influence. She became remembered as the original damsel in distress, tied to the train tracks and waiting for a man to save her, while her directorial work was forgotten. Dorothy Arzner invented the boom mic on a whim, was one of the sole female directors in Hollywood for over a decade and went on to mentor Francis Ford Coppola at UCLA in the 60’s. O’Hara wrote, “it shows again that behind every great man is a woman hardly anyone has ever heard of.” (O’Hara, 2022)
The odds stacked against women does not end with recognition. Women suffered at the hands of abuse and sexism in Hollywood for far too long. Morality Clauses allowed studios to control everything from an actress's hair color to her reproductive decisions, manipulating her image into “a perpetually available and unfailingly glamorous femme fatale was not compatible with the realities of motherhood.” (O’Hara, 2022) Women were forced into roles poorly written for them by men time and time again and things were worse for other minorities.
People of color’s on screen roles were often limited to racist depictions of servants or maids. Roles for disabled people were also few and far between and often played by able bodied actors. Queer actors were forced to hide their identities and enter lavender marriages. O’Hara summarizes the conditions of old Hollywood by saying “The further you stood from the glamorous center of white, straight stardom, the harder it got.” (O’Hara, 2022) Whether it be the pay gap, the lack of credit, the restrictions of morality clauses, the limited roles, or the flat out abuse and prejudice of the Hollywood system, the playing field has never been fair. It is this very reason that experimental film became so important; it gives people a voice.
Autoethnography / Diary Filmmaking
During the creative research process I became fixated on a specific type of experimental film. Autoethnography refers to a form of filmmaking that combines autobiography’s self representation with the contextual understanding of ethnography. In Catherine Russell's Book, Experimental Ethnography, she emphasizes the importance of autobiography as a tool of cultural criticism that utilizes postmodern theories of contextuality. She makes a distinction between autobiography and autoethnography which announces itself as oxymoronic and destructive of the colonialist precepts of ethnography. It serves as a protection against the tendency of contemporary culture to homogenize belief and perspectives. “Autobiography becomes ethnographic at the point where the film-or videomaker understands his or her personal history to be implicated in larger social formations and historical processes. Identity is no longer a transcendental or essential self that is revealed, but a “staging of subjectivity” -a representation of the self as a performance.” (Russel, 1999). In the case of my own film this means staging not just a performance of the self but a performance of gender that exists within layers of cultural, generational and situational context. Russel also describes autoethnographic films as essayistic. The diary films and personal videos that fall into this category “incorporates the “I” of the writer into a commentary on the world that make no grand scientific or totalizing claims but is uncertain, tentative and speculative. “ (Russel, 1999)
Russel then further breaks down the use of the “I” into similar categories as Laura Mulvey. There is essentially the speaker, the seer, and the seen. These voices can overlap and confront each other, producing a richness which narrative film cannot not achieve. Additionally, Russel mentions that “Much of the new autobiography emanates from queer culture, from film- and videomakers who unfold within a specifically public sphere.” (Russel, 1999) This is important for two reasons. As I mentioned earlier, it gives marginalized groups a voice in an otherwise expensive and inaccessible medium. It also means that this genre of autobiography is established away from the dominant norms of gender and other social constructs which limit the perspectives of the film.
French Filmmaker Dominique Cabrera created a film self portrait composed of images of her everyday life. She puts the images in context with the world around her by including shots of newspapers, landscapes and streets. Her film titled, Demain et encore demain/Tomorrow and Tomorrow, is a diary film that documents a difficult year in her life. It is personal and raw in depicting her struggling relationships and experience with depression. She incorporates first person narration that gives context to the images and the journey she is on at the time of the film. One of the most difficult things about this project was deciding how much of my life I was comfortable putting into the film. It was a fight between my impulse to be as authentic as possible and the discomfort of being open about my struggles. I was inspired by Cabrera's bravery to make art that was so personal, with the goal of making contact with something other than her fear.
The subjectivity of diary film is split in time. There is a lapse between the “I” of the image and the “I” of the filmmaker as he or she edits the film. The nature of this forces the filmmaker to confront themself in different ways. For Jonas Mekas, this means confronting himself as an exile and immigrant, examining a loss of identity through memory. His films are edited many years after the footage is captured, rendering each image a fragment of time. Russell described his films as “the prototypical autoethnographies” which romanticize and mourn the past. Mekas is often quoted describing his motivation to create films as a way of salvaging an identity. Russel summarizes this by saying “The longing for the past that Mekas expresses contrasts a memory as a means of splitting oneself across a number of different axes: child and adult, old world and new, pastoral and metropolitan, natural and cultural.” (Russel, 1999)
In my own film I scraped together home videos taken throughout my childhood. Looking back on a memory, I see everyone frozen in time, exactly as they were to me at that moment. My childhood friends never grew up. My mother of the early 2000s is frozen too. A different person than the one I know now. When I look at my past self, myself as a child I do not see myself at all. I am alienated from her. I do not own the memories she does. We have entirely different consciousness and personhoods which I struggle to grasp. Each place, my childhood home in Ohio, family home in New Jersey and various spaces I've inhabited in college, hold their own memories and specific version of self. I show this through still images, framed and printed, frozen in time. The photos from my childhood home which holds the most unclear and complicated memories are old, sunbleached or wrinkled. Tainted in their relation to the present both physically and metaphorically. This is symbolic of both a personal history and societal subtext which has colored my sense of self since the photos were taken.
Hollis Frampton also uses still photographs in relation to memory in his film Nostalgia. He films himself burning photo after photo while commenting on the photographs both as works of art and as memories. He tells the stories behind them and comments on the compositional elements of the images. However, there is a delay between the narration and the images. The description of the burning image comes before the image is shown. The viewer first experiences the story and then the image as if it is the memory of that story. Another voiceover begins while the photo burns and the cycle repeats itself making it difficult to hold onto the meaning of the images for long. Time, memory and emotion seem to jumble together and overlap, mimicking the feeling of nostalgia.
My father seems to be absent from the film entirely, though all the home videos are taken by him. His image is absent because he does not share the experience of womanhood the film focuses on, although he has undoubtedly and inadvertently shaped mine. Through his eyes and his camera, we see his daughter. A young girl through the eyes of someone who loves her. Of course I do not own these memories. I have never seen or loved myself so easily. The influence, beliefs, approval and disapproval of my parents follow me through the making of the film but is never overtly stated.I am still learning ways which they have affected me. There are major chunks of the film (and chunks of my life) where my parents are not present at all. I have, for better or worse, chosen to push them out of parts of my adult life. They exist in a bubble of my childhood and sense of home which does not often cross through my everyday life. My intention was to put this forgotten version of myself in conversation with the present. The question comes up again of whether or not we are born with a predetermined identity. Are we doomed to become whoever the world shapes us to be or do we have some control over the kind of person we get to embody?
Another filmmaker who became influential to me was Sadie Benning. Benning’s films suggest a sense of sincerity despite being a direct performance of gender. Russel does a great job describing their work. “Benning shoots most of her tapes in her bedroom, incorporating found footage, newspaper and magazine fragments, and written notes that pass in front of the camera like secret messages to the viewer. Each tape is scored by a selection of pop music. Contextualizing the very personal stories within a personal sphere. As a young lesbian, Benning’s persona is constructed against the trappings of youth culture, media culture, and feminism.” (Russel) The handwritten diary entries of my film are a direct reference to Benning’s work. The most performative section of the film, accompanied by the song Just a Girl, sees Bennings Influence as well. The song makes reference to pop culture and the dressing up emulates Benning’s performance of gender in which they often dress up in gendered clothing and wigs. It is melodramatic, ironic and sometimes humorous. Benning also uses the first person voice over to tell stories with a poetic and confessional air. This is often paired with images captured through Pixelvision, a low quality childrens camera. “Her confessional first-person narration may or may not refer to “the truth” but she nevertheless uses autobiography as a domain of referentiality that works with and against the signs of American culture.” (Russel, 1999)
Many autobiographical films use the camera as a metaphor for consciousness. The empty technological gaze of the lens represents the gaze of a hypothetical viewer. However for Beginning the camera is simply the instrument that allows for the film's creation. It is a method of discourse. This is similar to George Kuchar’s video diaries. His work is extensive, cynical and amusing. He documents aspects of everyday life so mundane it creates an impression that the camera goes with him everywhere and mediates his every interaction with the world. In Russell’s words, “His use of the video medium creates a sense of infinite “coverage” potentially breaking down the difference between experience and representation. Like Mekas, Kuchar documents a community of artists and filmmakers, with whom he is “at home.”” (Russel, 1999) Throughout the film I capture images of my own friends and family using the camera to consciously mediate those interactions.
One of the most unique aspects of Kuchar’s work is the aesthetic quality of the images. “The video is ugly, with garish colors that emphasize the tackiness of everyday America.” (Russel, 1999) Instead of making the images appear beautiful or professional, they are deliberately exaggerated as the opposite. There are parts of my own film which are very aesthetically pleasing, curated to feel dreamlike in order to emanate a fantasy of identity. However, they are contrasted starkly with sections that feel highly amateur. Shaky camera work, fast moving fragmented conversations and poor, yellowish lighting that capture the everyday life of a college student living and interacting with friends. I attempt to make the images feel as sincere as possible. In some ways this is inspired by Kuchar’s “ugly” and “tacky” aesthetics, but is applied to a new generation of everyday American life. A generation that largely relies on humor and cynicism to cope with the burdens of the social, economic and environmental sphere of the older generations that will ultimately become ours. There is a sort of sarcastic approach to the condition of the world that I think is often interpreted by older generations as carelessness and a lack of appreciation. Social media has become a huge influence on culture but it has also created a fairly large generational gap. What caters to one audience very rarely makes it to another. The rise of apps like Tik Tok, Vine, Instagram and Youtube have made it possible for anyone to be famous or at least earn a brief stint of internet fame from a viral video. What was fifteen minutes of fame, as coined by Andy Warhol, is now fifteen seconds and people can build entire careers off social media. There is an overwhelming pressure for more and more content to be created and consumed virtually. Despite this generation's instinct to reject capitalistic ideals, we seem to be addicted to them. Media has become our way of relating to each other and existing in the world. If you didn't post it, it didn't happen. There is a compulsive need to consume both products and media content. Each generation has its own virtual sphere saturated with cultural references, jokes and terms that mean nothing to an outside perspective. There are even subgroups within each generation as algorithms become more advanced and can calculate an individual person's interests. However, just as something becomes popular it becomes cringe worthy. This rapid cycle had been difficult to pinpoint or comment on in mainstream film. I have yet to see a film or advertising campaign that emanates social media trends in a way that seems more in touch than out of it. There is a sense of irony to the fragments of conversations with my friends in the films. What was funny in the moment may make me wince as I edit it later. There is humor and self awareness in the absurdity of the things we reference and the language we use. In the shots of my best friend and I getting ready and discussing our makeup, there are references to things we ourselves find absurd from a modern perspective, specifically that women in the 1800s used to rouge their knees. There is a layer of superficiality there as well. Makeup has stood for a symbol of vanity and falsity for a very long time. Often it is something that is weaponized as silly and girly or at the same time overly sexual. A woman should never use too much but never too little, follow the trends but still somehow be unique. It is a paradox that young women are just now beginning to ignore in favor of embracing it as an art form or a form of empowerment. For one, makeup is no longer just for women. Although in Hollywood men have worn makeup for years, the gendered stigma of it being a womens product has only begun to crack. Second, young women have become more interested in the science and politics behind makeup, what is good for your skin and what is not, what is tested on animals or what is ethically sourced, what brands endorse what has become a factor of competition. It is no longer simply a facet of performing for men and very few women are sneaking out of bed with curlers in to put lipstick on before their husband wakes up. However, it can still be seen as a performance of self, identity, and femininity. Makeup has become a symbol of expression and oppression at the same time.
Romanticism
Experimental film of the 60s and 70s was heavily influenced by the free love movement and the counterculture of the time. Many women's films fit into this era of romanticism, producing work that was dream like and utopian. Filmmakers like Barbara Hammer and Maya Deren created films that focused on expression. Some of Hammer’s most well known films, Dyketactics and Superdyke, focus particularly on lesbian expression. Dyketactics views femininity through a romanticized free love lens, utilizing collage film and overlays of nature and color. The film is a dreamy exploration of sexuality and bodily autonomy. Dyketactics and Superdyke were performative displays of gender, even if ironic. Superdyke is also humorous in its use of phrases. For example “74’ year of the whore” and “my ass is mine” emphasize the message of the film.
Carolee Schneemann also used film as a way of exploring female sexuality, particularly in her 1967 film Fuses. Fuses captures Schneemann’s domestic life and sexual relationship with her lover James Tenney. The film was made in response to Stan Brakage’s films about her relationship with Tenny, whose representation of Schneemann’s sexuality she found dissatisfying. In an article on Fuses published in the Millenium Film Journal, David E. James called the film an “intimate and graphic representation of sexual intercoure” (James, 2010) which was “historically anomalous” (James, 2010) The film is shot from both the female and male perspective. It began to dismantle the dominant narrative of phallocentrism in sexual intimacy that hadn't really been addressed outside of queer art and pornography.
The representation of women’s sexuality has been stereotyped as passive and submissive to men; in binary opposition of men’s sexuality. Rather than understanding women’s desires and expression through their own terms, we understand ‘woman’ in opposition to ‘man’ and ‘femininity’ in opposition to ‘masculinity.’Thank you Freud. Not only do we understand it as such but we critique the feminine through a male gaze, much more harshly than we critique the masculine. This is reflected in all areas of art and film. For example, the Motion Picture Association’s history of framing women’s sexuality as pornagraphic and unfit for audiences while men's sexuality remains normalized. As Helen O’hara puts it “ The MPAA’s is a rating system that reflexively judges female sexuality more strictly than male. For years, even non graphic descriptions of a female orgasm resulted in an NC-17 rating while a male one would attract only an R.” (O’Hara, 2022) She goes on to say that it is not only women, but anyone who seems to deviate from the straight white heterosexual norm. This is part of why independent filmmaking is so important, O’Hara quotes filmmaker Jill Soloway as she states that “By their nature, indie films disseminate the voices of people who are not commonly heard: women, queer people, people of color. These are pieces of our culture that attempt to dismantle the straight white male perspective, but because they don't have the political muscle of the studio backing or the consigliere to walk them through the MPAA process- the likelihood that they’ll have to cut out what's “uncomfortable” is much higher.” (O’Hara, 2022) O’Hara summarizes this ancient double standard saying “The desire for male bodies is, in this world view, perverse, weird, niche. The desire for women’s bodies is normal and profitable, but should be policed because women’s very bodies are responsible for all sin, even that committed by men.” (O’Hara, 2022) Films like those of Hammer and Schneemann sought to deconstruct this system of viewing.
Another film of Schneemann’s which became influential to me was Kitch’s Last Meal, a film diary which recounts the final days of Schneemann’s beloved cat Kitch. The film is yet another who seems to be largely absent from the cultural record. Kitch's Last Meal is a beautiful, kinetic, work of art; both thoughtful and dreamlike. It offers a window into the self and the domestic life of Schneemann’s day to day. We watch her perform daily tasks and household chores as the emotions of the film build toward Kitch’s anticipated death. The film uses sound as a way of bringing the feminism of the 1970’s into the conversation. Fragmented voiceovers combine the images of the film with Schneemann's thoughts and emotions of the time. Schneemann’s work was inspired partly by that of Maya Deren, another female filmmaker whose work was important to the avant garde movement.
Meshes of the Afternoon was made by Maya Deren and her husband Alexander Hammid, who served as more of a technical assistant than a filmmaker. Uniquely, the authorship of the film is attributed to Deren alone. It possesses a strong visual style and a spiral structure, relying on beautiful images and repetition rather than narrative. The images in the film follow surrealist principles with no logical or rational connection to each other. Deren is quoted describing her film in P. Adam Sitney’s book, Visionary Film. “This film is concerned with the interior experiences of the individual. It does not record an event which could be witnessed by other persons. Rather, it reproduces the way in which the sub-conscious of an individual will develop, interpret and elaborate an apparently simple and casual incident into a critical emotional experience.” (Sitney, 1979) I was drawn to this film for a number of reasons. One of them being it is more of an artistic meditation than a story, similar to that of a poem or painting. With my own film I was inspired to recreate an embodied experience of gender which the viewer could themself feel and relate to instead of reading the film as a story of a character or person estranged from themself. In “Meshes of the Afternoon", Deren’s character embarks on what Sitney calls “an interior quest” into the erotic mystery of the self. (Sitney, 1979) The earliest sections of my own film emulate this era of romanticism andI use overlays of nature in conjunction with images of feminine objects; makeup, jewelry, shoes, and diaries which elicit a certain ideal of my own identity. The sequence is colorful, smooth and wistful, but it ends abruptly to jump to the next section.
Postmodernism came as a stark contrast to the wave of romanticism in the 60s and 70s. It shattered the idea of a utopia or collective idealistic truth. Even Hammer's work took a turn during the 80s and 90s as the AIDS crisis put a stop to the free love movement. It was a goal of mine to structure the film in a way that alludes to this. I placed contrasting sections of the film next to each other so that the viewer can feel the impact of the switch from one visual style to the next. I attempted to set up an expectation for the audience and quickly break it as I moved on to the next thing.
Postmodernism
The term postmodernism, also referred to as poststructuralism, has always been a difficult word to define, as it is made up of such complex and contradicting ideologies. Modernism is a style and school of thought characterized by universal truths and understandings that developed as an effect of industrialization following World War 1. It focused on shared history, culture and identity and put an emphasis on idealism, especially in western culture.
The rise of postmodernism came during the rise of technology. Suddenly it became much easier to make and distribute film and art because of access to technology and the internet. By the 70’s and 80’s it was possible for just about anyone to have a highly portable camera and by the 2000s there was social media blogs, myspace and early forms of video forums. This means that people now have access to all sorts of different perspectives. Ideals and beliefs that contrast and contradict each other. This leads to an era that values individualism and subjectivity. Unlike modernism's concentration on shared truth and acceptance, postmodernism focuses on skepticism. It utilizes intertextuality, parody and self awareness. Postmodern art acknowledges the viewer as well as itself as being an abstraction. As David harvey Sumerizes in The Condition of Postmodernity, it is a shift from an epistemological to an ontological dominant, or a “shift from the kind of perspectivism that allowed the modernist to bet a better bearing on the meaning of a complex but never the less singular reality, to the foregrounding of questions as to how radically different realities may coexist, collide, and interpenetrate.” (Harvey, 1990) In other words, modernists were typically just trying to understand their singular existence, postmodernists attempt to understand the possibility of a multiplicity of existences or a single existence in context with everything that exists outside of it. This results in both an ideology and era of art which combines the old and new, aspects of all different perspectives, styles, and art periods. Part of postmodernism's sense of chaos comes from combining things that seem to make no sense together in order to put concepts in conversation with each other across time and space. Think of how our language has developed from other languages and cultures and how our cities are a jumble of architecture styles from all different places and decades, existing at the same time. We see this combining of different stylistic facets in contemporary fashion, design, art and film. For example, Manet’s “olympia” was modeled after Titan’s “The Venus d’Urbino” but makes a break in the tradition, rendering the subject more self-consciously and with an active presence of the artist. David Harvey makes a distinction between the artist who simply produces, and he who reproduces. “The modernist ‘aura’ of the artist as producer is dispensed with. The fiction of creating subject gives way to frank confiscation, quotation, excerption, accumulation and repetition of already existing images.” (Harvey, 1990) In describing the same two paintings, John Berger called Manet’s image a “turning point”, explaining that in comparison “with Titian's original, one sees a woman, cast in the traditional role, beginning to question that role, somewhat defiantly. The ideal was broken.” (Berger, 1972)
Harvey also points out that with postmodernism's rejection of collective memory and meta-narratives, the role of history is confined to a sort of archeology of the past. Much like how Mekas dug up remnants of the past and organized them in conversation with his present knowledge of the narrator. I attempted to do this with my own film, putting the old and new in conversation with each other and drawing meaning from a timeline of the self. Each image captured is a fragment of time and a version of me memorialized, whether I remember her or not. Unlike Mekas’ films, I do not romanticize the past. Nor do I long for it. I have forgotten it. I do not remember what it was like to embody the girl I see, and I do not know what kind of girl I embody now. She is always just out of reach and just out of focus. This sense of uncertainty is symbolized in the shots that seem to always be just out of focus. I can never fully seem to get a crisp image of myself. She is always changing, always in motion, even when she is still. I am simultaneously mourning the loss of self and celebrating the transcendence of a need for identity.
Where modernism has a sense for romanticism and symbolism, postmodernism is rooted in dadaism, or an ideology that rejects the prestige and aesthetics of capitalism and emphasizes irrationality. It begins to question the hierarchy of value we assign to art and film and the dominant narratives and perspectives which we have always accepted. Postmodern films make an attempt to challenge binary oppositions through disjointed narrative structures and an often dark view of the human condition. Dystopian postmodern films like Inception and Bladerunner often utilize a sense of hyperreality. They create altered states of time and consciousness that explore the human condition. They often also dismantle the idea of a hero or virtuous protagonist, instead featuring a complicated and highly flawed main character that may come across as unlikable. The stories these films tell are less of a structured narrative and more of a cynical mirror of society and a future we may be headed towards. There is no utopia or grand vision that these films romanticize. Harvey also described postmodernism as the mirror of mirrors. It shows us what human society is capable of. In Blade Runner specifically, class stratification is used as a quaint backdrop for a larger social critique on the aesthetics of the lower class. “When Poverty and homelessness are served up for aesthetic pleasure, then ethics is indeed submerged by aesthetics, inviting, thereby, the bitter harvest of charismatic politics and ideological extremism.” (Harvey, 1990) More and more it feels like elements of the human experience are reduced to an aesthetic that can be recreated as a trend online or on screen.
Contemporary Film
Although there have been major strides towards better representation in contemporary cinema, the mark is still being missed. The same characters and stories seem to keep being repackaged and recycled. Helen O’Hara comments on this as well. “It's a new Die Hard, a new Top Gun, a new Batman. It's the same old names, over and over. Bond and Bourne and Batman and Boba Fett. You might get a new Alien or a Terminator, too - but note that the original female leads in those films appear to be negotiable presences in a way that Bruce Willis or Tom Cruise or Arnold Schwarzenegger are not.” (O’Hara, 2022) Things have changed, yes, but still not enough for mainstream films to cater to an audience that is not the straight white man. O’Hara contextualizes this by using superhero films as an example. “Superhero movies offer a perfect demonstration of whose fantasies get to take precedence. They're made by (mostly) men who grew up reading comics that had been written for boys like them. These directors want to transmit the giddy feeling they had, reading these stories of daring and heroism, to a new generation, This is not a bad thing - but it has created an imbalance” (O’Hara, 2022) Superheroes are an embodiment of American ideals- typically a strong, brave, and individualistic man who fights evil and saves the world. When attempts were made to put a woman into the same role the issue became that women traditionally play submissive, peaceful, weak roles. So, female heroines ended up with half the power their male counterparts were given. They wear skimpy, oversexual costumes and have powers that don’t threaten men. It wasn’t until the success of Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel that people started to believe women’s stories could be successful. Even in the case of Wonder Woman, “at her best, she fought for workers' rights and against polluted milk” (O’Hara, 2022) The roles of these superheroes are too often about building a power fantasy for male viewers than inspiring female ones.
Often we see female characters portrayed in one of two ways. First there is the helpless damsel in distress whose only role in the film is dependent on the male characters. Second, in an effort to radically counter the first, is the strong independent woman or the “girl boss” of female characters. Although this could be a step in the right direction, it's gone too far in becoming another polarizing trope. The strong female character often embodies traits that are traditionally associated with masculinity, such as bravery, physical strength, emotional detachment, and even aggression. The strong female character often seems to be trying to prove that a female protagonist can do the same things male protagonists do. Shouldn’t it be obvious by now, after decades of fighting for gender equality, that women can do the same things men can? Why do we need to keep creating characters whose entire identity revolves around proving that women too, can be strong. These characters have become a stereotype themselves and now continue to perpetuate the flattening of a female identity into an archetype. We continue to be put into boxes both in our daily lives and on screen. Boxes that were made by, you guessed it, men. A woman must always fit into a category. She is good or evil. A girl next door or a femme fatale. A wife or a secretary. If it's a romance she's the cool girl. She’s different. She loves beer and football and everything her man likes but she's fuckable and never argues with him. Or she might be the manic pixie dream girl, ready to change her grumpy love interests life with all her quirks and wisdom. No, she must be the quiet nerdy girl he didn't know he wanted all along. If it's horror she is the final girl, forced to confront the killer face to face. Or maybe she is pure temptation to man, a bombshell, a sex symbol. Maybe she is all that but evil, a witch, a vampire, a siren. She might not be a female lead at all but the classic comedic relief of the dumb blonde. Or worse, the best friend or sidekick character reserved for the single minority member of the cast. Over and over again we recycle characters in a way that tokenizes not just women, but people of color, disabled people, the LGBTQ+ community, and other marginalized groups. It's about time we start telling stories with complex characters rather than ones whose identity is stripped down to their race, gender, sexuality, ect. Woman is not a personality trait. Strong women and weak women are not the only two things a woman can be.
I can’t help but think of ways this has been addressed in recent films. Especially the Barbie movie, which depicts the perfect metaphor for a woman’s image. Barbie is a doll. She is a metaphor for a woman's image, a representation of woman, not the experience of being one. Over the course of the film Barbie becomes a “real woman” by experiencing the patriarchy, which constructs gender roles. However, she also experiences something else, a shared experience with other women, a sense of womanhood.
I remember talking to friends about the movie after it first came out and realizing not all women enjoyed it and felt that it was too “in your face feminist” and too obvious with its messages. In America Ferrera’s monologue about how it is impossible to be a woman she describes the standards women are held to that are often unrealistic and contradictory. I agree this might come as obvious to some, however, I also think there are plenty of women who have never had that feeling put into words. The thing I find the most striking about the monologue is how it ends, “I'm just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so that people will like us. And if all of that is also true for a doll just representing women, then I don't even know.” Even Barbie, a character that quite literally represents “woman” cannot be the thing which she represents.
These concepts have been further normalized by social media and its tendency to aestheticize different identities. For example, trends like the “clean girl” who wakes up at 5am to go to the gym and write in her gratitude journal or the “sad girl” who smokes cigarettes and listens to lana del ray vinyls. These aesthetics romanticize a version of femininity and package it up to sell to social media consumers, and girls are buying into it younger and younger. These trends rely on digital content that romanticizes not just femininity but often eating disorders and mental illness, linking them to other objects and pop culture references that can be part of the aesthetic. These trends can also limit who participates in them by race, class and economic status based on who “fits” the aesthetic. People, and women, are not aesthetics just as they are not character tropes.
I can think of no better artist whose work embodies this than the work of Cindy Sherman. Sherman’s photography combines elements of postmodernism, self portraiture, and feminism into a critique on the aesthetics of women’s fashion. In her work she experiments with identity, dressing up as female stereotypes and using cinematic conventions to create self portraits. The Museum of Modern Art summarizes her work well.“For four decades, Cindy Sherman has probed the construction of identity, playing with the visual and cultural codes of art, celebrity, gender, and photography.” (MoMA, 2016) Sherman’s various embodied identities are theatrical and imaginative. They announce their falsity through messy wigs and peeling prosthetics. The influence of Sherman’s work mainly comes into my film in the section where I embody a hyper feminized character of myself, bearing messy curlers, tacky makeup, and jewelry. The editing style in this section is also oversaturated, garish, and eccentric. My goal in this was similar to Sherman’s, “She highlights the artificiality of these fabrications, a metaphor for the artificiality of all identity construction.” (MoMA, 2016)
I can tell you it is all of these things which have inspired the film, the films, work and research of so many others who’ve inspired me, but I also hope it is a message that can stand on its own. I’ve come to a similar consensus on the concept of identity. Although I’ve selected and edited these clips to my own liking, portraying a version of myself which I see as authentic, there is a certain amount of control I must give up to the viewer's interpretation. My image continues to develop at the predisposition of the viewer, just as the image of femininity develops at the hands of the patriarchy. At its core, the film is a confrontation between myself as a filmmaker and myself as the subject of the film. A confrontation between self and image, player and pawn, artist and muse.
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