The Female Gaze: Women Directors Speak

BACKGROUND: The central preoccupation of this research film is to examine what might constitute a ‘female gaze’, an inquiry that has had a long history in filmmaking, film theory and women’s art. Feminist theorists have for decades debated the complex issues around female-centred, gendered enquiries, and the conflict between essentialist (that men or women have an innate essence) and constructionist views (that humans are produced and constructed through social interaction rather than by genetics or biology). CONTRIBUTION: The film rhetorically responds to the filmmaker by beginning with Nancy Kates’ reply: “It’s an interesting question. Is there a female gaze?” This directly references the documentary form, and the practitioner. It is provocative. The film reflexively exemplifies how practice-led research methodologically enabled discovery about the practice of documentary filmmaking, and the female gaze. It therefore says something about studying documentary through practice, exploring how gender might be inflected within the practice of individual documentarians. Female subjectivity is framed as a point of identification, and as at the heart of the ‘female gaze’. SIGNIFICANCE: The film’s significance, in the context of broad interest in women filmmakers and #Metoo, is to expand the discussion of sex and gender to the documentary form. Evidence of this currency and value is that it was screened, and I was an invited speak, at both ‘The Seoul International Women’s Film Festival’ (2021) and ‘Sunny Side of the Doc’ (2021), prestigious international venues for women’s filmmaking and documentary. The complete interviews appear in a book commissioned by Palgrave. In 2022, it won the 'Best film on women' award at the Bhutan International Short Film Festival.