The female gaze in interactive documentary
Harmke Heezen and Mike Robbins are Berlin-based digital creators and storytellers. In the spring of 2017 they conducted a series of interviews with leading female producers, directors, writers and curators around the question of how interactive storytelling—from online to VR and beyond—might be uniquely suited to women’s perspectives, or expressing the “female gaze.” The interviews and writing below are excerpted from the resulting presentation delivered at the 2017 SXSW Experiential Storytelling Track.
“Art is propaganda for the self. Protagonism is propaganda.” says writer/director Jill Soloway, creator of the series Transparent and I Love Dick. She points out that artists tend to write and make art about themselves: It’s what you know best, it’s your world view, and ultimately it’s what you want recognition for.
Transparent
by Jill Soloway (Amazon)Who looks at who?
Film theorist Laura Mulvey kickstarted the academic debate on gender representation in film in the early seventies. She coined the phrase “‘male gaze” in her seminal essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in which she combined semiotics and Freudian psychoanalysis to analyze classic Hollywood films (such as Vertigo and River of No Return).
Mulvey noticed that in these films the male is mostly the active character, whereas the female remains passive. She is the spectacle: What she does herself is not important, her importance lies in what she represents to the male protagonist. The woman is presented as an erotic object for the characters within the story, and for the audience watching the film. In order to enjoy the film, a female viewer has to take on the perspective of a heterosexual man. Although this theory has been much debated and criticized since, it sparked a prolific discussion about visual culture that still goes on today.
As interactive documentary filmmakers, we investigate the notion of the male gaze with the development of our project A Field Guide to Male Muses. The project aims to subvert the male gaze — it’s about women looking at men. We want to gather and curate stories by people who identify as female, and capture how they look at the men in their lives. By doing this, we investigate the environmental and sociological clichés we are served, and perhaps even live with every day, begging the question: “What does the act of looking give the person who looks?”
In the process, we’ve been asking ourselves if there is a specific female gaze. How does a woman see the world differently from a man? Can we define that? However, a woman is not only a woman — she also has a sexuality, an ethnical background, a nationality, and other characteristics that can shape her in all kinds of ways. Every individual is a part of several different communities. Everybody’s perspective is colored by the circumstances in which they live. We realized it’s not necessarily important to define what the gaze is, or bestow a particular gravitas on a particular gaze, but to acknowledge the fact that it will be different in a shifting context.
Interactive storytelling: more women-friendly?
Laura Mulvey said recently: “In the seventies, we thought that by now, there would be 50 percent women filmmakers.” As we know now, this is not exactly the case. We looked at the results of research conducted by two major film festivals, Sundance and IDFA, regarding their own programming. These numbers are obviously not conclusive for the whole film industry, but give an impression of the situation.
Between 2002 and 2014, only one quarter of the films in Sundance’s American competition was directed by women. Films directed by men are more likely to feature male leads, whereas female-directed films were more likely to feature female leads. An examination of ocumentary festival IDFA (DocLab, the interactive section, is not included in this research) reveals that 33.2 percent of all films selected between 2003–2013 were made by female directors. The festival also noticed that when their award juries had a male majority, they were more likely to pick male winners.
What’s the situation in interactive documentary? We looked at two places where interactive documentaries are catalogued now, the MIT Docubase and the IDFA DocLab website, and simply counted how many projects with female directors were listed in the period 2014–2016.
MIT had 67 projects listed in this period, 44.8 percent of which had female directors.
IDFA Doclab had 171 projects listed in this period, 49.1 percent of which had female directors.
The Conversations
From this, you could conclude that compared to linear film, interactive documentary is a relatively friendly place for women to work. In the conversations below, we decided to discuss this with some colleagues whose work we find inspiring, pictured above.
One thing all of these conversations had in common is that they went beyond the topic of gender diversity and into the arena of ethnic, geographic, and socio-economic diversity. It is clear that you can’t just focus on the aspect of gender diversity—there is a network of deeply intertwined factors, and all these areas need work.
So… Are women just naturally good at interactive documentary?
Perhaps generally speaking women are conditioned in a way that works well with non-linear storytelling. But to be an active creator, many have to overcome other things they are conditioned to feel, for instance, the evil monster of self-doubt that arises from our society’s ingrained gender perceptions. How to slay the monster?
Apparently there are no experts. It’s Ground Zero. This should mean equal opportunities for everyone. But if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Where’s the catch?
There are some traps and hurdles we have to watch out for. What can we do to overcome these in the future?
Perhaps the key could be for to all learn to speak the language of code. But even if we work with diverse teams, will the audience even notice or care? What are the benefits?
If we consider these conversations as a whole, we don’t see one homogenous vision, rather a diverse array of perspectives. But while points of view might differ, they do form a cohesive body of thought.
Conclusions
There are certain things we can all try to do to make this field gender balanced. An obvious one is to create more diversity in decision-making positions. Who is distributing money and how? When there is real money to be made, the white men come in. This is why we should strive to keep the internet open for everyone and not let it be dominated by the wealthy.
Barriers between tech and creative should be kicked down. Many film directors are looking for tech nerds (who are traditionally predominantly male) to execute their ideas. And on the other hand, coders may not always be aware of their creative skills. Not everyone needs to know code, but programmers and storytellers should break down the walls between the disciplines and adopt a holistic approach. To achieve this in the future, everyone should be offered the opportunity to code and work with technology more from a young age.
Everybody needs a role model, somebody from a community they identify with, to prove that it’s possible to do the same. If you are from a community that is not traditionally at the top of the food chain, be a role model to others like you and help them get there, too.
Ultimately, a diversity of perspectives is not just something we should strive for because it’s fair and morally right, but also because our field depends on it. As MIT’s Sarah Wolozin said: “If documentary is about truth, why would we want one truth?”
Immerse is an initiative of Tribeca Film Institute, MIT Open DocLab and The Fledgling Fund. Learn more about our vision for the project here.