Final Doc Paper Spring 2015 Bringing into contact Agnes Varda’s filmmaking and her femaleness, puts forward two aspects of her cinema: her particular insight to the portrayal of a set of geographical locations, and her visual and verbal emphasis on female embodiment within a set space. Making the feminist phenomenological approach to her films particularly tasteful for her viewers. Drawing from the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “it explores haptic imagery and feminist strategy.” In The Gleaners and I, the materialization of space characterizing Varda’s paralleled work of fiction and documentary allows for the relationship of people and their environment to often be observed in cinema. He concludes, “that both Varda’s female protagonists …show more content…
With use of her grey hair and wrinkled hands, she exemplifies a complete auteur. Her paralleled use of personal influence and artistic control throughout her films is playful yet unique in the way it conveys important aspects of the story. Having not gone to film school Varda frames her films in a way that most would take a picture; she captures a space holistically by being aware of the little things happening around every corner of the frame and space she’s working in. Various shots appear that show her caress her own skin with the camera frame. This metaphorical use of aging appears at two key moments in The Gleaners and I: in the first, the camera cuts from a shot of Varda combing the grey roots of her dark chestnut colored hair, to the deeply lined and wrinkled skin of her hands against a car dashboard. As she speaks of a famous line about old age from Corneille’s Le Cid, ‘No, no, it’s not ‘O rage’, not ‘O despair’, not ‘O my enemy old age’, it might even be ‘my friend old age’, but even so, there’s my hair, and there are my hands, which tell me that the end is near.’ We can make relations with how she sees herself among this space in relation to the
Westford, Massachusetts: The Murray Printing Company. Company, 1978 Kulik, Sheila F. Home Page. 17 Feb. 2000 http://www.feminist.com/femfilm.html. Rosenberg, Jan. “Feminism in Film.”
'When you are old and grey and full of sleep, and nodding by the fire' (l.1-2) depicts the woman in her age, needing to nap more frequently. He speaks of a book (l.2) and the 'soft look' of her eyes (l.3-4). This book signifies a photo album that contains pictures of her as young adult.
Wesley, Marilyn C. "Reverence, Rape, Resistance: Joyce Carol Oates and Feminist Film Theory." Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 32.3 (1999): 75-85. Literature Online. 13 July 2002 .
Gender and the portrayal of gender roles in a film is an intriguing topic. It is interesting to uncover the way women have been idealized in our films, which mirrors the sentiments of the society of that period in time. Consequently, the thesis of this essay is a feminist approach that seeks to compare and contrast the gender roles of two films. The selected films are A few Good Men and Some Like it Hot.
Within the Beauty and the Beast inspired ten pages of Angela Carter’s short narrative “The Courtship of Mr. Lyon”, the narrator employs the contradicting nature of the Palladian house prior and succeeding the presence of Beauty to express both the mental and physical deterioration of the Beast. When Beauty first returns to the house after several months hiatus, she notices a rather “doleful groaning of the hinges” as she opens the door (Carter 50). Such a noise is reflective of the fact that they have not been physically oiled for a long duration of time, and that the Beast has ceased to maintain their smooth transition for her return due to an ever weakening state of hope. Similar to the lamenting of the hinges, it is only his desolate cry that plagues the once silent tranquility of the manor.
The camera is presented as a living eye in her work, capable of bending and twisting, contorting reality in its own light. It is at the same time a sensuous device, one that exp...
Williams, Linda. "Film Bodies: Genre, Gender and Excess." Braudy and Cohen (1991 / 2004): 727-41. Print.
In Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Mulvey states that, “Traditionally, the woman displayed has functioned on two levels: as erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium, with a shifting tension between the looks on either side of the screen.” (Mulvey 40). A woman’s role in the narrative is bound to her sexuality or the way she
A man already in decay, having given my best years to feed the hungry dream of knowledge,—what had I to do with youth and beauty like thine own! Misshapen from my birth-hour, how could I delude myself with the idea that intellectual gifts might veil physical deformity in a young girl’s fantasy! … Nay, from the moment when we came down the old church-steps together, a married pair, I might have beheld the bale-...
Hayward, Susan. A. Key Concepts in Cinema Studies. London: Routledge, 1996. http://www. Stokes, Lisa, and Michael Hoover.
Williams, Bruce. "The Reflection of a Blind Gaze: Maria Luisa Bemberg, Filmmaker." A Woman's Gaze: Latin American Women Artists. Ed. Marjorie Agosin. New York; White Pine Press, 1998. 171-90.
The patriarchal cinematic ideology detailed by Laura Mulvey in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” is pervasive in Stanley Kubrick’s film Eyes Wide Shut. The women in the film all eventually become the passive sexual objects that Mulvey has described in her paper. There are times in the film that women attempt to defy these strongly enforced gender roles, but they are always punished and returned to their positions as objects of the male gaze.
... Therefore, instead of losing mental stability because of old memories, one should try to embrace sanity and perpetuate it in life. Moreover, the poem emulates society because people fantasize about looking a certain way and feeling a certain way; however, they are meddling with their natural beauty and sometimes end up looking worse than before. For instance, old men and women inject their faces to resemble those in their youth, but they worsen their mental and physical state by executing such actions. To conclude, one should embrace her appearance because aging is inevitable.
Sofia Coppola’s movie, The Virgin Suicides, 1999, brings to the forefront the reality of what life is like for five oppressed teenage girls living in suburbia in the mid-70’s. After examining numerous articles, a few of them made an impact on my perspective. The first of many articles is Todd Kennedy’s piece, Off with Hollywood’s Head: Sofia Coppola as Feminine Auteur. Kennedy discusses how Coppola has a tendency to lean toward directing films that cater toward females’ interest, either because of the visual imagery or women’s feelings of connectedness with the characters. The author reveals that The Virgin Suicides portrays women as becoming dominated by the environment surrounding them. The author gives an interesting point of view when he claims, “The film tells a story of the five Lisbon sisters whose identities exist only insofar as they are defined as the objects of the masculine desire” (44). Furthermore, the Kennedy asserts how the film serves as a prolonged exploration into the degree to which female characters are idealized, objectified, and defined by the image that the film- and their society- imposes upon them.
By dissecting the film, the director, Jennie Livingston's methodology and the audience's perceived response I believe we can easily ignore a different and more positive way of understanding the film despite the many flaws easy for feminist minds to criticize. This is in no way saying that these critiques are not valid, or that it is not beneficial to look at works of any form through the many and various feminist lenses.