Cowl of Feminism and the Cinema of Expertise by Lori Jo Marso (Duke College Press, 2025)
Because the publication of John Berger’s seminal 1972 Methods of Seeing, the specter of the “male gaze” has been on the forefront of a lot feminist artwork and movie criticism. “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at,” he wrote. “This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves.”
However what’s a scopophilic girl (this critic included) imagined to do with that? It’s one factor to withstand a lifetime of lonely objectification; it’s one other to see one’s personal energy to look as inevitably, and irrevocably, mediated by patriarchy.
Lori Jo Marso is the newest feminist movie scholar to redress misconceptions of the gendered gaze — the expertise of girls seeing ladies onscreen, she contends, might be without delay exhilarating, emancipatory, and constructively uncomfortable. In her new guide Feminism and the Cinema of Expertise, Marso prioritizes the competing feelings and concepts provoked particularly by the imagery in movie quite than a set of supposedly feminist storylines or themes. “Feeling like a feminist most often doesn’t feel good,” she asserts in her introduction. “Feeling like a feminist provokes anxiety, summons deep ambivalence to norms of femininity, and triggers worry and confusion about sex, love, marriage, children, and friendship.”
Quite than champion both a valedictory “strong woman” conquering all or a wronged girl in search of vengeance, the movies Marso examines and celebrates are a far cry from these so usually shilled by Hollywood. In centering ladies and nonbinary filmmakers’ cinematography — the artwork of digital camera placement, framing, and motion — Marso makes a compelling case that “the cinematic depiction of experience and the subsequent solicitation of uncomfortable feelings in viewers … is feminist film’s most transgressive political intervention.”
Divided into 4 sections prefaced by Marso’s particular definitions of contested or novel phrases, reminiscent of “feminist,” “ambivalence,” “stasis,” and “plasticity”, Feminism and the Cinema of Expertise attracts our consideration to how the gaze behind the lens directs — and disrupts — conventions of trying. Coining the time period “motherwork camerawork” in her first chapter to affix the apply of filming with the broadly outlined labor of mothering, Marso considers how nonnormative moms “are depicted as both strange and ordinary, never sentimentalized or sanitized.” She cites the late Chantal Akerman’s canonical Jeanne Dielman, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), a couple of single mom who can also be a intercourse employee, by which the digital camera is skilled on actor Delphine Seyrig as she strikes between “three airless rooms.”
Marso argues that, because the static digital camera refuses closeups, specializing in the heroine from a indifferent take away, “Akerman brings to our attention what is invisible because it is too close to us.” Because of this, the ennervation and exasperation of menial home duties are thrown into vivid audiovisual reduction.
Evaluating Jeanne Dielman to Senegalese-French director Alice Diop’s Saint Omer (2022), a couple of mom on trial for killing her child, Marso considers how the static digital camera with lengthy shot length can current a sophisticated Black girl as “opaque, but still legible and even sympathetic.” Throughout lengthy takes of the trial, some as much as 20 minutes, Diop’s pictures resemble images; framing and composition demand persistence of the viewer, refusing to readily hand over the ”motives and emotions” of the lady onscreen. The seemingly ambivalence of the viewer, Marso claims, is of a bit with what it means to “feel like a feminist”; it isn’t straightforward, however it’s the solely manner ahead.
In a chapter on the style of horror, Marso explores how a movie like Julia Ducournau’s Titane (2021) — a couple of mechanophiliac serial killer — might qualify as feminist within the first place. “Ducournau’s images touch our bodies and trigger our emotions,” she claims. “What was hitting my eyes and ears made me cringe, look away, look back … and peek through squinted vision … my emotions veered from ecstasy to deep sorrow.” Ducournau’s lens focuses on how female our bodies “soft and hard … surprise and fail us … are the source of pain and pleasure … leak strange fluids, grow old or ugly; exceed or break the rules of gender; and are just simply never in our control.” In relentlessly exposing the lawlessness of supposedly “natural” femininity, Ducournau’s movies expose — and break by means of — the horrifying boundaries of gendered logic.
Jettisoning distinctions between “highbrow” and “lowbrow” films to honor the digital camera’s energy to catalyze new methods of seeing, Marso extends her evaluation to Greta Gerwig’s Barbie (2023), Emerald Fennell’s A Promising Younger Lady (2020), and Joey Soloway’s tv sequence I Love Dick (2016–17). In her postscript, Marso argues that movie — in addition to her personal guide — is usually a type of “feminist address,” a love letter to “cinematic mechanisms that shift the gaze [and] create a new aesthetic language” onscreen. By extension, the gaze, the very act of trying, additionally turns into the artwork of trying — on one’s personal liberating phrases.
Feminism and the Cinema of Expertise (2025) by Lori Jo Marso is revealed by Duke College Press and is on the market on-line and thru impartial booksellers.
