Original subtitles

As a filmmaker and as a woman,

I found myself drowning in a powerful vortex

of visual language,

from which it is very difficult to escape.

Yeah, Lara, are you there?

I'm just sitting here hoping to hear from you,

I don't care if it's three o'clock in the morning

because, I've been thinking about all the things

that could possibly happen to you because of this,

and I don't want you to ruin

your whole acting career over it.

You know, all they have to do is call sag

and pull your card and from now on,

for the rest of your life,

you'll come up not cleared for work and that's the end.

This visual language, this cinematic visual language,

dictates to us ways of seeing

that are so specific, it almost feels like a law.

The great writer James Baldwin once said,

"not everything can be changed,

but nothing can be changed until it is faced."

What we're gonna do today is look at a series of film clips

from a list movies,

the ones that win cannes and the academy awards,

as well as cult classics, and other notable works.

And what we're looking at is how shot design is gendered.

That means that male lead actors and female actresses

are filmed very differently,

consistently differently and consistently in a certain way

that can be labeled and tracked and named.

Now, I personally see a very clear connection

between this visual language of cinema,

employment discrimination against women,

particularly in the film industry,

and an environment of pervasive sexual harassment, abuse,

and assault.

I had the chance to meet Laura mulvey last year,

the "original gangster" film theorist

who identified the male gaze for all of us.

I only actually used the male gaze once in the essay,

I think, but it's become its dominant memory.

The essay really came out of my love of cinema.

Well, having left university in 1963,

I really spent a lot of my time just going to the movies.

Only retrospectively realizing that part of my pleasure

in this film going was that I was watching these movies

as a male spectator.

Almost all of us are familiar with the phrase

the objectification of women,

but it's worth taking a moment to break that down.

What exactly is an object and what is a subject?

So let's get back to basic grammar

in like an English sentence for a second.

The cat eats the mouse.

The cat is the subject,

he's eating the mouse,

the object is acted upon.

Similarly, the man sees the woman,

the man is active doing the locking

and the woman is looked at.

Here she comes.

We'd like a statement from you...

This phrase, to-be-looked-at-ness,

was made famous by Laura mulvey back in 1975

and used to describe the basic essential position

of women in cinema.

That dress will be ahead of fashion a hundred years

from today.

You ain't seen nothing yet.

The accessories are even cuter.

J” I can hear the river call j“

j” no return, no return j“

Through time, the woman's body

becomes more and more sexuahzed,

but the basic structure of looking remains the same.

Even though mulvey's foundational work

was written in the '705,

we still totally normalize the male gaze in cinema.

You know, I think the majority of people

don't ever really question that form of looking.

It's so normal it's like the idea of a fish asking

if it's wet.

It's the stuff that I think you thought,

and maybe I thought, well, everybody knows this,

it's in the ether, but it's the ether.

And so to name it and to show it is, you know,

something that I believe can change the world.

The poet philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson

once made a beautiful remark that I feel speaks very well

to the situation.

He said, "perception is not whimsical, but fatal.“

you know, this is something that people like to say,

like they think creative work and films are whimsical.

It's just my vision. It's just my idea. It's whimsical,

but no, it's really serious.

It's fatal, and it impacts us on the deepest possible level.

As filmmakers we have to be courageous

and be willing to be that force.

Willing to speak our minds,

willing to say, "hey, wait a minute,

what's wrong with this picture?

What are you telling me?

What's the visual rhetoric that we're looking at?

It doesn't feel good. It doesn't feel correct.

Let's rethink this."

I think sometimes with films that are considered

part of the canon, part of, you know,

what are the best quote unquote films,

there is a reticence to even question how they were made

and the stories that they tell.

And I think that it's okay to still love and to see a film

and say it's great,

but that it has some issues.

And I think without questioning it,

we're doing a disservice to our own humanity.

Now most of you guys are probably aware

of the idea that there's a sexist element to script,

dialogue, and character.

You know, we know that we'd prefer not to see women

always playing a maid or a sexy babe,

as opposed to being a ceo or something like that.

That's something that we're well acquainted with.

What's less well known is how shot design itself

is perpetuating these different positions of power.

So when we talk about shot design,

what exactly does that mean?

We're talking about subject, object,

the visual relationship,

framing, camera movement, and lighting,

and how all of these techniques

contribute to the narrative position of the characters.

So the first thing is subject, object.

When we see a shape like this,

we know it means that this guy here is looking

at this person over here,

who happens to be a woman.

- Haven't I seen you somewhere before?

This pov shot can be done in one shot, like this.

It's dropping down. We need to get that adjusted.

It's ridiculous.

I should just drop my brushes, and just, fuck it. Oh!

It's amazing what do you think about that, man?

Pretty amazing. Jerry! Jerry!

Or in two separate shots.

- Hey!

I think a lot about how to create points of view.

It's not just optical, it's perceptual,

you know, we are experiencing the...

You're putting the audience in the character's shoes

so that they aren't just seeing directly

what the character sees,

but they are aligned with them emotionally

and in their thought process.

What's interesting about Robert Montgomery's,

"lady in the lake" is that it's an extreme example

of what subjectivity is.

So it becomes this point of view shot

throughout the whole film.

It aligns with my ideas about a male point of view

and what is the male gaze.

And about sort of the image of a certain kind

of Hollywood beauty or Hollywood victim.

Framing of shots.

Women actors are often shot with fragmented body parts.

And that fragmented body can be part of, of course,

a pov situation.

So you have one shot somebody is looking,

second shot, fragmented body.

- What is that noise?

What noise?

Really, sir, there wasn't any noise.

Or it can be in one shot.

And again, repeating the pov structures.

Another thing that's very common is a female body

on direct display for the audience

without a specific person looking.

This is just like general audience display.

I think we have to consider

that it is through the formal visual language

that we are effectively communicating meaning.

And we inherit so much subliminally

that comes from this language

and it has to do with how shots are composed and framed,

how they're assembled and ordered in a sequence of shots.

All of that becomes the grammar and syntax

by which meaning is conveyed to a viewer.

So in a visual culture, such as ours,

in which there's a ravenous appetite

towards the female as object,

if the camera is predatory

then the culture is predatory as well.

Camera movement.

A common thing that we've all seen a million times

is a pan of a female body.

And that can, of course, be a horizontal pan

or a vertical pan.

Furthermore, what you very often see is slow-mo,

as a way to emphasize.

And with men, when do we get slow-mo?

Action, military, right?

- Heel kick to diaphragm.

80 men get slow-mo for action,

and women get slow-mo for sexualization.

The dissemination of these kinds of shots

is actually a sort of global hypnosis

around how masculine power brings satisfaction.

Whether it's objectifying women

or killing or pretending to kill.

This is propaganda for patriarchy.

Lighting. Lighting is a bit more subtle.

Normally a male lead actor gets to have 3D lighting

with shadow and depth,

and he's located somewhere real

in a space that we understand,

whereas Rita Hayworth here,

this is two frames

from Orson welles' "lady from Shanghai,"

Rita Hayworth is shot in this timeless zone

of female beauty.

Women are not allowed to age

and they're not really allowed to have full-on

lives as subjects.

Myself and other directors,

we have been conditioned to present women, actresses,

in the best light possible.

So we put nice soft lights up

and use a nice long lens and, you know,

set it at a high angle, not looking up at something.

And, you know, all the different ways to film women.

I don't worry if a guy has wrinkles,

because that just makes them look rugged as they get older,

but you don't wanna think about that for women.

Can I kiss you?

You know, I got this great movie recently,

it would've moved the needle,

it was very great for me,

and they decided to go younger.

And, what can you say?

So, that happens a lot, that happens a lot.

I have a lot of sadness,

and just even talking about it,

I have a lot of, oh.

'Cause I love to work.

I think this visual language really contributes

to female self hatred and insecurity in a way

that is not insignificant.

What is normalized as beauty is really seen specifically

and dominantly through a male gaze.

I think that really changes how

we relate in the world in general

and not necessarily in the best way.

Shot design is the meta message, right?

It's the aesthetic that is normalized,

and it's very sneaky kind of in that way.

- Priest, let me in.

Here in "super fly"

the cult classic by Gordon parks Jr.,

we can see a number of the techniques

that we've been discussing so far.

We have the man in the subject position.

Although, the two heads are photographed quite the same,

suddenly we get the music,

fuzzy lighting,

slow-mo,

body pan.

One of my students when she saw this clip,

she said, "the minute you see the two heads

in the bathtub, you start waiting for the pan

of the woman's body."

Obviously they're both naked in the tub.

We do not see the male body.

Watching this "superfly" bathtub scene,

yeah, I mean, that's an actor's worst fear.

That, you know, they are given a script

that they've agreed to work on,

and the director totally objectifies her

by the choice of shots, the placement of the camera,

and the editing choices.

All of these techniques that we've just reviewed

contribute to the narrative position of the characters.

And very often in ways that seemed strangely irrelevant

to the story.

- More! - No more.

In an ideal world, we would be able to see a huge amount,

a huge variety of films getting kind of equal amount

of play.

You know, so if you are a heterosexual male,

and you want to photograph some woman's behind,

I am certainly not the sex police.

I am not telling you what to do.

I'm not saying do not do that.

I'm just pointing out the fact that a whole lot

of majorly acclaimed directors through time

have done just that.

And since 96% of the films through time

have done just that,

there isn't a whole lot of wiggle room

for those of us who are sick of seeing these things

and are sick of the result of that kind of attack

on our selfhood.

For women, because you're looking at those films,

for instance, she would like to shape herself

to be that object of the gaze.

But she thinks, some part of me, which is me,

is not matching to that, you know, image.

So I would just, kind of toss it out.

So, in that case, she loses her own self,

she feels empty.

All of her, you know, attention or energy

is spent for the external, you know,

establishment of her image.

But when she sits down, she feels empty.

That's the problem.

So here we have very clearly

the narrative position of the woman

and her to-be-looked-at-ness place delineated,

while we hear on audio,

the names of all the male filmmakers,

and we see the male cinematographer shooting her.

"Our desires," of course, they're not referring to me.

Traditionally the audience has been assumed

to be a cis male heterosexual

lined up with the cis male heterosexual director,

lined up with the director of photography,

who controls all the shots,

lined up with a male subject in the frame.

And they are all looking at the female object.

This is the standard line of identification.

Now, obviously, if you are not a male heterosexual,

you're going to inhabit this process of identification

in somewhat a different way.

And depending on where you're located,

you know, for example, if you are a female heterosexual,

which would be me, how does this play out?

How does this affect us?

When I was a student at the ucla film school,

I was very completely obsessed with my work

and I was surrounded by my films on every level

and I was a complete go-getter.

And if somebody would get in my way

and I needed to get into the mix room or something,

I would just be like, "here's $20 move, go, go.

I need to do my work."

I was a complete subject.

I had no problem with that.

But what happened when I tried to be romantic

or go on a date,

that's when I got into trouble.

I experienced myself as to-be-looked-at-ness.

I experienced myself as an object.

I didn't know how to act.

It was very confusing for me.

And I had a very hard time integrating those things.

So I sort ofjumped from object position

to subject position where I identified

with a male subject as an active mover.

And I had no idea how to be a woman as an active mover

and also be sexy.

And this kind of is just a little tip of the iceberg

about how this stuff affects us personally.

So here's the next scene in “contempt."

I'm aware that this scene is supposedly a comment

on female objectification.

Supposedly the producers forced godard

to show more of brigitte bardot's behind,

but whether he had an intention to be sarcastic or not,

the impact on a gut level of seeing a film like this,

and being told that this is a masterpiece

along with all the other films that we'll be seeing today,

that it's one masterpiece after another,

think about how that affects us deeply, internally as women.

It's pretty intense.

You know, this talk is kind of confrontational

and all this stuff,

but I want people to know,

you know, it's built on my sadness.

I know. It's built on my struggle.

It's built on my sadness.

You know, it's not a beautiful thing

that I'm talking about here.

But Nina, don't you think all women feel that sadness?

All of my own narrative fiction films

have been centrally concerned with expressing

the abject feminine

and the wound that is carried deep inside.

It's really such a sacred place to make cinema.

It is a sacred act.

You are really entering people's imaginations

and their psyches in such a way that

it should be treated with care.

It's a place of magnification,

it's almost like speaking on a microphone.

Whatever you say it's amplified,

so just being aware of that, it's so important.

The researchers green and Brock

coined a term, which is transportation,

transportation is the effect of movies and television

on viewers that moves us from where we are,

when we walk into a theater, into a new world.

It takes us from the familiar along a continuum,

into a new place.

And we go into a state of suspension of disbelief,

and in that state, we have the highest knowledge gains,

the biggest shifts in attitude,

and the greatest changes in behavior

or behavioral intention.

This is the power of storytelling on the screen.

In "lady from Shanghai,"

we can see so many of the basic gendered

shot design techniques

that continue to inform filmmaking today.

Lover, this really concerns you more than anyone else.

J” don't take your arms away j”

so here you can see the men in 3D lighting

and 3D space controlling the story,

controlling the narrative.

Did you know about that, lover?

No I didn't.

Shut up, George.

Rita Hayworth, of course, is in a bikini

while everyone else is fully clothed.

And of course, we have the ever present male subject

looking at the female object.

Rita Hayworth is floating in a strange dislocated space.

Maybe we'll call it male fantasy space.

In this clip and in subsequent clips,

the beauty of the woman can be seen

as having a certain power,

you know, the power to attract the gaze.

This is what we're always told,

like the way to be powerful as a woman is to be beautiful.

But to answer that and to respond to that,

I would like to quote Angela Carter,

who says that women have to be seduced into femininity.

And what does she mean by seduced into femininity?

She really means seduced into powerlessness.

And how are we seduced into powerlessness?

By glamor.

That's it, keep it up.

Lovely.

Love, love, head up. Head up.

Yes. Yes. Yes.

So glamor, in my opinion, is a coverup,

is a veil and is a sort of bait

and switch for powerlessness.

A woman's agency is always interrupted

by the way that we frame her as a spectacle

at the same time.

Whatever action she's doing it's super important

to make sure that she has a certain aesthetic

and a certain look that is specifically sexually attractive

for a heterosexual male gaze.

Who's that girl?

Which one? The one I was talking about?

- Yeah. - The blond? Yeah.

You went with her? You didn't try to fuck her?

I try to fuck anything, you know that.

She didn't go with it?

No, she didn't go for it.

Naturally, she knew better.

What do you mean she knew better?

She knew you were an animal.

She knew it was no good if you go with her.

Her reputation will be ruined.

I thought he was talking to you, Vicky.

- That's the same guy? - Yes, it's the same guy.

- I gotta break his neck. - He was over here yesterday.

- He was here yesterday? - You missed him.

I was at the house yesterday

and he was over here.

So as usual, we have the men in 3D space.

We have the men talking to each other about a woman.

We have her legs fragmented.

We have her legs in slow-mo.

Same old, same old.

There is one interesting thing though about this scene

that I want to dissect.

And that is the way that audio is handled.

When you look at the scene, you notice that,

Robert De Niro is looking at Vicky

and she's far away from him.

So you think that it makes sense

that we hear Robert De Niro and his friend talk,

but you don't hear Vicky talk because she's far away,

but maybe not, okay?

We actually did some research on exactly

how the scene was shot and laid out the dimensions.

Here's Robert De Niro, he's with his friend

on one side of the pool,

and here's Vicky way far away.

That's why we can't hear her talking, right?

But maybe not, because how come the other two guys

who are sitting exactly right near Vicky,

we can hear them perfectly well.

And they are equidistant from Robert De Niro.

So basically what we have here is something

that when we watch the movie,

we would have absolutely no awareness of this.

It infiltrates our consciousness in a subconscious way.

And maybe that's why when a young woman shows up

to pitch a film to a male executive,

he just sees her mouth moving,

but he doesn't hear a single word that she says.

Absolutely objectification of women

impacts hiring practices.

I think for all of us who were exposed

to sexually objectifying media,

we all be embed it a bit in our perception

of how women should be.

It becomes this way of dealing with women

that is primarily around their sexual value,

that if they're attractive to you.

And so absolutely has everything

to do with certainly how you're treated on the job.

The challenge is that employment discrimination in general

in the entertainment industry is not enforced.

Coming out of film school, we have 50/50 gender parity

and we've had that for a while in the top us film schools,

and yet the top 250 films directed by women

back in 1998 was 9%.

And moving up to 2018, we're down to 8%.

People are really happy for women

to be attending film schools 50/50 at parity with men,

as long as they're paying money into the system.

But when we move into the professional playing field,

and we're asking the industry to pay money out to women,

well, that's where the doors get closed.

At the very heart of the issue

and the work that I've been doing is title vii,

which is equal employment opportunity law.

Hollywood has been the worst violator of title vii

of any industry in the United States of America.

Even worse than coal mining.

It wasn't always this way,

in fact, the very first narrative film,

the very first use of film to tell a story

versus just documenting an existing event,

features a woman subject, a woman protagonist

and was created by a woman producer, writer, director,

Alice guy blaché, in 1896.

During early Hollywood, during the silent era,

there was a significant amount of women

working in the new industry

that had a significant amount of power, of artistic agency.

This is a really special moment for women directors.

“The red kimono" by Dorothy Davenport

expresses the inner subjective experience

of the main character,

who was forced into prostitution.

Once the transition to sound takes place,

wall street is brought in because the transition

to sound has significant financial demands

and so the masculinized culture of wall street then begins

to structure Hollywood.

The most pressing need today

is to start the flow of capital

which turns the wheels of industry.

Women are maneuvered out of these positions

of artistic, creative power, and then for 40 years

there were only two women making feature films in Hollywood,

Dorothy arzner and ida lupino.

Go ahead and stare, I'm not ashamed.

Go on, laugh, get your money's worth.

Nobody is going to hurt you.

I know you want me to tear my clothes off

so that you can look your 50 cents worth.

50 cents for the privilege of staring

at a girl the way your wives won't let you.

So that you can go home when the show is over

and strut before your wives and sweethearts

and play at being the stronger sex for a minute?

I'm sure they see through you just like we do.

Dorothy arzner's women defined themselves

and very beautifully so.

Sadly, she was a rare exception

and a male perspective continued to control cinema

for decades.

I think the history of Hollywood often times, you know,

has made it so that the word director is synonymous

with a male director.

You know, that's what it has been for many years

and still is, I think, to this day.

I, you know, I never thought,

oh, I'm going to go to school and be a film director.

You didn't say that back then.

Maybe I could be an editor or a script supervisor

or some other job that girls could do on a movie.

Never occurred to me when I was in school,

went all the way through and got a master's degree,

never occurred to me that I could be a director.

No, actually I wanted to talk to you

about dawn's project, "real life"

it could be exactly what Cyrus is looking for

and I was thinking we get somebody really big to direct,

maybe penny Marshall?

What? Shut up, listen, and learn.

Avoid women directors, they ovulate.

By the time I started prepping to make "daughters of the dust"

I was very much aware I was, you know, a graduate of afi,

a graduate of ucla,

and I was very much aware of point of view camera placement.

So I very much placed my camera within the circle,

within the culture of women.

I wanted to depict something

that had never been seen before.

Once I saw a pink satin case for jewelry for each woman

in a shop window.

I couldn't afford that case for myself.

And I didn't ask nobody to buy it for me, you know.

But in my mind I put all those bad memories

in that case and I locked them there.

I don't let nothing in that case

or nobody outside the case tell me who I am

and how I should feel about me.

Yeah, in 1991, when we did, when we were at Sundance

and I had "daughters of the dust"

and you had "queen of diamonds,"

we were kind of like pushed to the background,

it was like "nice job, girls. See you later."

And all of the other filmmakers who were there

who were male did go on to make, you know,

many, many films after that.

I would've sworn that by the turn of the century

that there will be 50% of people making films

would've been women.

And due to that, the whole way of thinking

about the image and about gender

would've been completely transformed.

And it just seems extraordinary thinking back,

how little progress has actually been made.

You know, when I went to Sundance with my first feature,

I couldn't get an agent and I couldn't get a distributor.

You know, and I would have male agents write me

to see the film and then they would say, "it's not for me

or it's not what I'm looking for."

And then you would look at their rosters,

like this was just 2013,

you know, I would look at their rosters

and their rosters were all male.

Then it's like "okay, well, I know what you're looking for."

You know, what kind of coded language is that?

There's still only 3 women

in competition out of 21 films.

And that's because the director of the film festival said,

"we just look for the best films.

It has nothing to do with gender,

we just look for the best films."

With all due respect,

this comment does not reflect very much understanding

of the concept of diversity

and the way that the idea of good film is created

through identification with what is being shown,

that's how we...

I love this film, I relate to this film

because, because it talks to me, right?

That's how we define what a good film is.

Burn 'em!

Put down the cellphone.

Get out of the way.

I can't get a shot!

So Kathryn Bigelow's film "hurt locker,"

which was the first film where a female ever won

best director, was a film about men, featuring men,

watching men in action blowing things up in slow motion.

It's also quite interesting that every single department head

in this movie was male.

Gender is a huge factor when you look around the sets.

Things haven't changed that much,

I feel like it is mostly white men

and even in my own productions where I've funded myself,

I'd hire a white man and he hires all white men

and I was like, "oh, did I have to communicate with you,

like, to make it inclusive?"

There's no question that,

because so many men are directors of photography, 95%,

the male gaze is definitely normalized in our society.

Even when a woman is the protagonist of a film,

she is still often objectified and exploited.

Here's the opening scene when we are introduced

to Carrie, who's the protagonist of this film.

We're learning about her as a person,

she's klutzy at sports,

you can't win a game with her on the team.

She's bullied a bit.

You eat shit.

Then suddenly, we cut to the interior

of the girls' locker room.

Slow-mo, fuzzy lighting,

naked women.

All while we have the names of the male filmmakers

superimposed over the scene.

You have to wonder, I mean, the last time

I was in a woman's locker room I wasn't prancing around.

- When you see what's happening is completely predatory.

It takes the development of that, as bell hooks says,

oppositional gaze to really kind of like,

not just take things at face value

and to investigate a little further and ask, like,

what is this communicating?

So here we get the girl who was being bullied,

who was the subject of the story

in a completely non-sequitur scene.

This one student told me,

"when I'm in the shower,

I'm imagining how I look.

When I'm alone in the shower."

You can't even have an experience of your own body

without seeing your own body

from this like weird perspective of, you know, that.

So many of the examples, I wanted to watch and just enjoy,

the way that they are supposed to be,

the way that they are supposed to be fun,

the way that they are supposed to be tantalizing or sexy.

My first reaction was to just ingest it that way,

because that was the easiest thing

and I had to consciously decide to lift the veil

of my perception and it brought up anger

and it brought up the way my own mother taught me

to think about my body and the way she thought

about her body.

And I'm thinking about the way I'm being taught

to think about my body on a minute by minute basis.

We've secured the perimeter

but I don't think we should hold it for too much longer.

Well, in watching the avengers movies,

even when I'm watching Scarlet Johansson play "black widow"

and she's taking a very active role, right?

It still makes me feel like women,

even at their most empowered in culture right now

are still subject to this predatory way of looking.

We're seeing this woman maybe as a boss,

but we are seeing, you know,

yes, details of her chest or, you know, boobs, or butt,

or whatever.

So it is working on your brain in a subliminal way,

like, in a subtext.

I think it does have an effect

and we all are susceptible to this.

Communists claim to leadership

can't be upheld much longer

and if rapid change is not forthcoming,

today's relatively calm protests

could be seen as the calm before the storm.

I've had a pretty shitty day so far

but it looks like it just got worse.

Even in Patty Jenkins' "wonder woman"

the actress almost looks like she's walking down

a model's runaway.

It's ridiculous when you have these wonder women,

power women, and yet they are shot

and they're stylized, and they're costumed to look like,

you know, another post modern Barbie.

If that's all we're seeing,

it's invisible, it's the air, you don't notice the air.

So that, it's just as likely for a woman to reproduce

those tropes as it is for a man.

Notice bill Murray, we get his face,

we get his feelings.

He's in 3D light.

He's having an experience, a human experience of his own,

whereas the lead actress is introduced

via see-through underwear, fuzzy lighting,

fragmented body.

And one might wonder if this is supposed to be her face.

"Bombshell" is interesting because the content of the film

is ostensibly feminist.

It's about women who were sexually harassed on the job.

Then they went into a lawsuit against Roger ailes

and they actually won.

There's only one scene where we see

sexual harassment happening in front of the camera.

- Let me see your legs.

So let's watch how that scene was constructed.

- It's a visual medium, Kayla.

Come on.

Higher.

Come on, higher.

That's fine, Kayla.

Needless to say this shot is not from Kayla's point

of view, right?

How would you shoot that scene where you really felt

like we're feeling what margot is feeling,

but not being exploitative about it or objectifying her?

Could it have been better if we just implied it

and stayed on her face?

I mean, that would've been another choice

or if we showed her gaze on the guy

and just watch her watching him more, you know.

There could've been other ways to do it.

As audre lord said,

"the master's tools will never dismantle

the master's house."

We could apply that quote to the male gaze way of filming.

When you use those tools to reinforce, reenact, rekindle

objectifying women, then there's a problem.

Here's another film,

in this case directed by a woman

that has been described as feminist.

It features the objectification of very young girls.

And while your topic such as in "cuties"

can be about the objectification of women and girls,

in the case of "cuties,"

you can still perpetuate a way of shot design

that really appropriates the male way of looking

and really just regurgitates that male gaze,

even though you're a female director.

It's important to remember that the male gaze

onto young girls is not a new phenomenon.

Pretty baby was nominated for the palm d'or

at the cannes film festival.

Leon, I think I'm kind of falling in love with you.

It's the first time for me, you know.

How do you know it's love

if you've never been in love before?

'Cause I feel it.

Where?

In my stomach.

The reversal of desire with younger women

is completely...

It's ubiquitous, it's pervasive and it's so erroneous

and it's so harmful.

I mean, you see it time and again

in the way that, like, courts will rule in favor

of the predator because they'll say, you know,

"it was consensual."

This whole consensual thing, right?

I don't know.

I don't think the 13 year-old even knew what to consent to.

It's difficult to think of any examples

where boys are shot like this.

In fact, boys are recruited into the male gaze

at a very young age.

Hoochie mama.

What does that mean?

I don't know but it feels right.

Nice.

This right here is a long standing

and very popular shot design angle on a woman's body.

Of course, we have many sexy male stars.

How are they shot?

Almost always full body and involved in some sort of action.

In "crazy rich asians" there's a scene

where the woman character looks with desire

on her boyfriend.

- Hubba, hubba!

Notably, his body is full frame and he moves into action.

Her ' e m cuarén's " roma"

there's an unusual case of full frontal nudity

for a male actor.

And yet consistently it's full frame on his body

and he's involved in a military style action.

Here's even a further example

where we have an overt sexualized object of the gaze,

men performing in a club for women.

And yet amazingly their bodies are not fragmented

for an extended sequence.

I do know and I've been told!

Big dick ritchie got a cock of gold.

- Big dick ritchie got a cock of gold.

- Now, let's give it up for the virgin king.

- Let's give it up for the virgin king!

- There's a kind of taboo on the male body

being exposed as the object of the look.

So he has to be protected by having this energetic drive.

Ho, ho, ho, ho!

On the other hand, the female protagonist

takes on this role of spectacle.

General anesthetic?

General anesthetic.

And the male protagonist is often controlling the movement

of the story forward, controlling people,

controlling the woman and subordinating her

to his will and determination.

How's that?

Perfect.

You know, I always think of the sleeping beauty story

where you have, you know, the fairy tale

that we read as children.

The prince is galloping along and he chops down

all the thorns and he reaches the sleeping beauty.

You look back on a movie now, like "sixteen candles"

"oh my god, that was like a date rape drug."

I mean, trying to get people drunk,

I mean, stuff that we've been programmed to just accept

and actually not accept, embrace, you know, emulate.

In fact, the position of the passive object

is so deeply coded as feminine

and the passivity of that feminine object

is seen as highly sexual,

to a point where, for example, in this scene

from "after hours"

the sexy passive object is so passive, she's actually dead.

I'm dead, in bed, and the camera does go slowly down

the stream of my body.

Yeah, and I look back at that now and just like

"wow, what was I...

It was just part of what you did, you know?

It was part of the storytelling.

Stories about very beautiful, unconscious women

continue to exert a certain fascination.

I didn't realize that as a young man,

I was, in a way, trained to objectify women.

What I found in watching this talk was,

if this woman is the object and we're looking at this woman

from this lens,

we will see so many women from that lens,

which makes us think we can just have

whichever one we want, right?

And when that woman doesn't have the speaking roles,

we see her, like in "raging bull" we can't hear her talk.

So we have no idea of her emotion.

You have no idea of who she is as a person,

to what you were saying.

So it's like, of course I can just objectify these women

and just use them and do whatever I want.

Because even in the imagery that I've seen,

I've never had to think about how she feels

about my actions.

Harry Dean Stanton in complete 3D lighting.

His eyes are closed.

We can hear Natasha kinsky's voice

but we can't see her because we're completely

in his point of view.

When he looks up, we get to see the 2d vision

of the young woman.

If there's anything you want to talk about,

I'll just listen, all right?

I'm a real good listener.

The way we look at films will always change

and there will always be a cultural moment

that may allow us to reflect on a film's impact

in different ways.

There's a nostalgia that is dangerous.

That when you're putting a film in a moment of nostalgia

you are saying that everything it says is perfect

and I think that's where we get into trouble.

Take your clothes off.

Mooki, I already told you it's too fucking hot

to make love.

It's too fucking hot? Yeah.

Why are you always cursing?

I don't fucking curse that much.

Of course you fucking curse that much.

What the hell are you talking about, mooki?

- All you do is curse. - I do not.

Anyway, no rawness is jumping off tonight, all right?

And that's it.

No rawness?

Mooki, come on.

I mean it. I'm not playing.

I'm not playing.

Spike Lee is, of course, the director of this film,

as well as being the main character and the subject.

So, controlling the story on multiple levels.

Look, freeze, don't move, I'll be right back, okay?

Just stay there.

Just stay there. Freeze. Don't move.

I'll be right back.

What the hell you got me standing on the bed for?

Where the hell are you going?

Thank god for the neck.

Thank god for the knee caps.

Thank god for elbows.

Thank god for thighs.

Thank god for the right nipple

thank god for the left nipple.

It feels good.

Ah, you likes you likes you likes.

In this clip, first of all, you, of course,

have the male voice describing the female body

while she's silent.

But there's another interesting aspect to this clip.

The beginning of the scene,

spike Lee is trying to convince this woman

to have sex with him and she's pretty strong in saying no,

but by the time we get to the end of the scene,

she's decided to agree.

And she appears at the end of the scene

to be actually very happy that she said, yes.

This kind of scene where a woman says no,

and the man insists and then in the end she's happy,

this kind of scene we could make a 10 hour lecture,

just going from one example to another,

showing kazillion examples of where that kind of behavior

is normalized and even celebrated.

And this too is a very important reason

why we have an epidemic of sexual abuse and sexual assault.

The sudden change in music tells us exactly

how we're supposed to feel about this scene.

Music is a super important element of every film,

but only 5% of film composers are women.

Will you kiss me?

Did you hear me?

"365 days" was one of the top watched films

in 2020 on Netflix and they are now making 2 sequels.

Excuse me, miss.

Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.

Shut up!

You're hurting me.

Shut your mouth or I'll really hurt you.

Remember you promised me you'd come back.

I promise.

I just want you to know

I think

you're the sweetest guy in the world

and the most handsome.

This kind of scene certainly contributed

to Yale fraternity men shouting

this in front of a woman's dorm.

The challenge with media images around sexual assault

and around rape culture and around how women are portrayed,

is that it normalizes those types of behaviors

and so what people absorb is through those images,

then they absorb those behaviors as normal,

which then translates to how they treat people

in the actual world.

Extensive research over decades has shown

that after watching sexually objectifying media,

men are more likely to engage in sexual harassment

and abuse.

If you have systems of representation

that always subjugate certain people and frame them

and shoot them and always makes them the objects

of the gaze rather than self acting agents,

you're more likely to have a culture that is susceptible

to rape myths.

The male protagonist is the subject, he is not the object,

he's the hero, he's who we revere.

That's very hard to dislodge then,

when you're faced with a woman telling her truth

and her story.

80% of the entertainment media content

that is distributed around the world is made in Hollywood.

These images are coming from an industry

that is built on power imbalances,

which results in sexual harassment and abuse

in the work place.

And the cycle goes round and round.

One of the people

who was involved with the studio

asked to meet me for dinner.

He was like, "you could play her roles,

you'll be like the next one."

And I'm thinking, yeah, he's right. I could be like that.

And I do, I love her. She's great.

But you know, he was like, but you have to do this.

I was just thinking like, "oh, I can't wait to get home.

I wish I hadn't had talked to this guy tonight"

because I couldn't see it ending well.

He was still talking the whole way

and he was getting more and more agitated as we drove

because I was still just politely declining his offer.

And he said, "I want you to take a nude jacuzzi with me.

Can you just come right now and take this?"

This is ridiculous.

I started to get out of the car

and he reached across me

and palmed the window

on my side and put it, and blocked me with his arm.

And he said, "look, I can help you or I can fuck you up!"

Through the me too movement, we know that 94%

think about it, 94% of women in Hollywood,

whether they're actresses or behind the camera

experienced sexual harassment or assault.

Because people think the entertainment industry

is magical,

they don't remember that these are workers,

that these are actual human beings who are on your screen.

The thought pattern or the assumption

that the actor's body is fair play,

both within the role and outside of the role,

has been part of, you know,

sort of the industry's mindset.

It absolutely was that if an actor said no,

in any way shape or form,

they were absolutely considered a troublemaker, certainly,

and they would absolutely be in fear of their job.

They were disposable.

Yeah, Lara are you there?

I'm just sitting here, hoping to hear from you.

I don't care if it's three o'clock in the morning.

I can't imagine what would be so important

to cause you to do that to yourself.

Please think very seriously and call me tonight

because I think we can fix this.

If we can get you back to work in time

to not have it destroy your life.

So that is the message I came home to back in 1989

after refusing to do a sex scene that was not in my script.

And it basically, effectively, ended my acting career.

Exactly what she said.

I think there's always gonna be a power dynamic

with people on set unconsciously,

whether they wanna verbalize it or not, intellectually

and I feel it and I've experienced it.

I've been in a couple of situations

where I'm like trying to improvise

and someone, the director, chimes in and says,

"okay, now get down on your knees

and give this man a blowjob."

Which is like non-consensual,

they didn't talk to my representatives,

they didn't talk to me

and so I'm like a deer in the headlights,

that's like pressure,

that's like, the crew is watching,

what are you gonna say?

Cry and go like, "please don't make me do this?"

This problem is not limited to Hollywood.

Léa seydoux, star of "blue is the warmest color"

said that the excessive hours spent naked filming sex scenes

was humiliating and left her feeling like a prostitute.

The film won the top prize at cannes.

Maybe that's why in his next films,

the "mektoub, my love" series,

which premiered at the prestigious

venice international film festival,

director kechiche felt empowered to use

even more coercive methods on set.

Reportedly including the very heavy use of alcohol

in order to obtain his unsimulated sex scenes.

And then the statements from directors

saying "oh, I wanted to get an authentic reaction

from somebody."

Well, that's not the realm of make believe,

that isn't the realm of drama.

That's the realm of actually choosing to assault somebody

for the sake of art, or in the name of art.

How is rape culture normalized?

- Its ok, don't mind me, keep on going.

There are really three key elements

that we see on the screen and in real life.

One is the objectification of women's bodies,

another is the glamorization of sexual assault,

especially on the screen.

And the third is disregard for women's rights and safety.

Even if a hand is not laid on another person,

these are all of the elements that create an environment

that allows one group to gain and maintain power

over another.

I look back at my encounter with Harvey weinstein

at the Beverly Hills hotel.

He was in his white bath robe

and he wanted me to...

His penis was coming out of his robe

and he wanted a massage.

I was like no, but I'll get you a masseuse

and heart racing, how do I get out of here?

And he says I'm making a very big mistake,

"you're making a very big mistake."

And I said "I'll never be that girl."

The me too movement spoke out loud about

what so many of us had experienced privately.

In my own fiction films I often tried to express cinematically

how it really feels to be a sexualized object.

"Magdalena viraga" was my first feature film,

which I made at the ucla film school.

It stars my own sister, actress,

and long time collaborator, tinka menkes.

This is one of 5 films we made together.

Here, she's playing a highly alienated prostitute.

The issues that we are talking about,

they are not just, you know, the images that we see

in films,

you know, they are not just who's behind the camera.

The issue is also in this larger context

of who decides what gets seen.

You know, we have mostly men making decisions

around what gets distributed.

It's what gets out into the world is curated by a male gaze.

- Hello, handsome.

Even in this Sci-Fi vision of the future,

we get the same old male subject,

sexualized female object once again.

- You look lonely.

I can fix that.

This cinematic visual language

which surrounds us on all sides

can really feel like the bedrock language of rape culture.

In fact, the name of the female lead character in this film,

played by Ana de armas, is joy.

But they spelled it interestingly, j-o-i.

In porn culture, j-o-i stands for jerk off instructions.

So just think how women feel when they go see this film,

then they hear about all the academy award nominations

that it's getting or got.

- It's this horrible cycle that Hollywood has,

because it takes in what the population has that's toxic

and then it feeds it right back,

which then energizes it and brings it right back.

So there is this circle of violence.

This is all connected, it's all connected.

- One key principle of feminism was that the female body

was a sight of struggle.

But, it shifted to realizing that the image

of the female body was also a sight of struggle.

The image does not refer to women.

This image is being appropriated and produced

by male consciousness.

All of these techniques,

they're definitely deliberate.

We don't know if they're conscious or unconscious,

but they're deliberate.

Deliberate decisions.

Someone made a decision how to shoot that person.

It's worth taking a moment to consider

that the objectifying camera techniques

we've been discussing can also sometimes be seen

in other types of very telling contexts.

For example, in "silence of the lambs"

the character buffalo bill is in the masculine zone

with the goggles as the murderer

with Jodie foster as the object of his gaze.

But, when he is feminizing himself,

when he's in the so called feminine position,

he is shot just like a woman.

- Watching the scene with buffalo bill

when you have this almost deformation of self

to uphold this white male gaze behind the camera,

it was the internalized sexism and internalized misogyny

that was showing up in that space for that character.

It's not only for cis women,

but also trans folks and other folks

who don't fit the boundaries.

As I was re-watching the scene and just remembering

how much trauma has been caused by a scene like that.

So I'm gonna show you a film now

that is not an a list movie.

In fact, it's probably an f.

It's been called racist trash by Roger ebert.

And I would agree with that.

But I'd like to take a look at the scene today,

as it's quite relevant for our analysis.

We have a white plantation owner who calls a black slave

to come to her room.

She informs him that if he doesn't have sex with her,

that she will report him as a rapist,

which would be a death sentence for him.

So basically she's raping him.

The camera pans up from a fragmented body part.

Notice who's wearing the clothes and who is being undressed.

The woman is in control of the scene on many levels.

-Ah, ah!

And finally we get a long sexy body pan.

The reason I've included this clip as cringe worthy

as it is,

is I feel it's the exception that proves the rule.

And when we're talking about these scenes,

they're not really about sex.

They're about power and the person who is shot like this

is not empowered.

So the example of "mandingo" shows that

shot design systematically perpetuates

these power dynamics that exist within our society.

So in that film you see the same like sweeping pans

of his body, the fragments of him.

The true essence of like what we're talking about here

has to do with power.

And commodification of bodies and how bodies relate

to each other in terms of power.

When you have, as foucault says, webs,

webs of ideology

and they are all interlocking

and they're all reinforcing a certain way of looking

and a certain way of experience that you're locked out of,

it takes a lot of strength to say,

"I don't see things this way

and I'm going to create something that is different."

The sexual predators in amirpour's film

meet a very unexpected avenger.

There's a saying that people say that if people

were to get rid of all the sexual predators

that there would be no film industry.

And they would have to start from the ground up

and they laugh about it.

They're like, "haha you know, we would have

to start from scratch." And I'm like,

then let's fucking start from scratch.

You have to build your own house

and you need your own tools to build your house,

and your tools are your creativity, your work,

your work ethic and your ability to produce above and beyond

what someone else is clamoring for, let's say.

Women directors often depict their characters

as full on subjects with their own intense desires.

Nature, nature, I am your bride.

Take me.

Dunye's "watermelon woman" makes the close ups so close

that we feel the sensation of the experience

and we are blocked from gazing in the traditional way.

Without question, throughout the history of cinema,

sex scenes have been shot with the male gaze appropriating

and objectifying women's bodies.

If that's what we do

then there's a lack of imagination

that we'll have to make up for ourselves.

In this scene, Gus Van sant

shoots male and female bodies

very equally.

Van sant may have been influenced

by Agnes varda's film,

"happiness."

In my own film, "phantom love"

the sex scene tries to focus on the woman's psychic

internal experience.

For tarkovsky lovers, you'll notice my homage.

I think of this poem by Gwendolyn Brooks that,

it's "still do I keep my look, my identity."

And she talks about how each body has its art

and how they're like, whether they're in a state of abject

whatever, or they're in an exalted state,

they still maintain this intrinsic human quality

within them.

In "Juniper tree" nietzchka keene focuses on

the inner life of her characters.

People often feel, you know, I should be freed

from all those things that are unconsciously soaked

into our own mind.

Those emotions are always accumulated somewhere hidden,

so that's the part which is anger or, you know,

the sadness or dissatisfaction,

all these emotions are, I imagine, like cooking,

these things are ingredients of your meal.

So you chop, you know, you cook,

you do all these things,

but, by the end, you'd like to get some nice dish.

So it's a transformation of this raw material.

Which has lots of creative energy in there.

Ugh!

Films about female rage have been made by women

for many, many generations.

So there's a history, there's a legacy,

but today there's something very different in the climate,

social, political climate

that is connected to mainstream media.

And so, it's a really unique moment for filmmakers

for women filmmakers who are interested

in taking on these issues.

What are you doing? It's okay.

What are you doing?

What are you doing?

Hey, I said what are you doing?

When it comes to money and when it comes to opportunity,

things don't change unless you force change.

My having been able to take this issue to the aclu,

who began their campaign for women directors in 2014,

and the eeoc, equal employment opportunity commission,

that began their investigation in 2015,

attacking the pocketbooks of the studios for violation

of title 7, which is equal employment opportunity law.

So right now, in 2021 we are beginning to see

the results of this action.

In a historic sign of real change,

Chloe zhao, a woman of color, won the academy award

for best picture and best director.

Hey, find anything interesting?

Rocks!

Her film features the perspective

of a woman in her 605.

What does desire look like

when it's not about subject and object?

I think we're in a process of discovery, you know.

Each of us obviously is in a process of discovery

for ourselves in our own lives.

So now as a filmmaker, as a non-binary filmmaker,

I'm asking myself, where does the camera go?

These questions that you're asking,

well, where does the camera go?

And who am I looking at?

Am I showing how it feels to be looked at?

And am I showing how it feels to see

while I'm being looked at?

What is the heroine's journey?

"Portrait of a lady on fire"

is concerned with the issue

of subject and object in the case of two women

who seem to desire each other equally.

Here we get the question of, what is a subject,

what is an object?

And how does the object find a way of becoming,

discovering their own subjectivity,

having their own subjectivity and becoming a subject,

which changes the power dynamic.

In my own films, working with tinka,

she often broke through the 4th wall

and confronted the camera,

claiming her own subjective perception

of both herself and the world.

Would you like a ride?

Whether you're a heterosexual man

or you're a woman or you're anything in between

or on the sides or whatever,

you know, how do I actually experience desire?

How do I actually experience my day?

You know, because we've been taught, what is time?

What is sex?

What is a man? What is a woman?

We've been taught all these things

and if we just accept it,

we're trapped in the collective consciousness

which tends to be on a kind of low level.

What happens if you try to listen inward,

if you try to tune in on a very, very, very delicate

and quiet way to what you're actually experiencing

and what would be actually the true expression

of that experience as translated into a shot.