THE FEMALE GAZE
Iris Brey
(Editions de l’Olivier, 252 pages, 2020)
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Iris Brey is an accomplished critic and academic, and is considered a prominent feminist thinker. She was one of the leading voices that broke the Adèle Haenel story and the subsequent Roman Polanski Césars scandal, which has since become a reference point for female representation in film and TV. Her previous book, Sex and the Series, also published by Editions de l’Olivier in 2018, was very well received and adapted into a documentary series.
The Female Gaze: A Revolution Onscreen is the first book to define the female gaze through a feminist and phenomenological approach. The only other book published in English titled The Female Gaze (subtitled Essential Movies Made by Women and edited by Alicia Malone) never defines the term, and is a compilation of essays on fifty-two films directed by women. Iris Brey’s book provides a framework that widens the scope of how we understand the female gaze, while also offering a more precise way to describe how it operates.
Iris Brey argues that the female gaze in film can be created by a male or female director. The female gaze moves away from an unconscious way of seeing and taking pleasure in women as objects. It places the spectator within the woman’s point of view, making it possible to share what she is feeling. Pleasure no longer comes from the spectator’s or hero’s voyeuristic viewing, but from a gaze that sees women as equals, as subjects. Eroticism is no longer built on domination but through a gaze that circulates horizontally.
Iris Brey draws on examples from both Anglo-American and French cinema, ranging from the blockbuster Wonder Woman to the indie darling Portrait of a Lady on Fire as well as television: Fleabag, The Deuce, and The Handmaid’s Tale. She includes works directed by males, such as Titanic and Thelma and Louise, as well as movies directed by women that have disappeared from our history, such as Wanda, Simone Barbes, and many others. Brey explores how the female gaze is not part of a recent trend; it has existed since the beginning of cinema, in the films of Alice Guy even, the first director to understand that cinema can be used to tell stories and who shot the first fiction film in 1896.
The book received the Causette prize for “Best Feminist Essay” (it was nominated alongside Soraya Chemaly’s Rage Becomes Her and Sarah Barmak’s Closer, among others).
The Female Gaze will be adapted into a documentary directed by Iris herself and produced by Totem Films (www.totem-films.com/documentaire/the-female-gaze/).
Iris Brey is a French-American writer, journalist, and TV host for Le cercle des séries, a show that analyzes what’s on TV. She also teaches at the Université de Californie in Paris. She is a member of the “Collectif 50/50,” an organization whose purpose is to implement equality and diversity in the film industry.