Curated by Alexey Artamonov, Denis Ruzaev e Ines Branco Lopez
Confronting the Gaze is born out of the desire to pay tribute to the films that have interrogated the complex and controversial nature of cinematic images while trying to relieve cinema from its hegemonic gaze and embark on the search for new authentic perspectives.
The purpose of this program can be illustrated with the words of Laura Mulvey when she questioned if cinema, in a patriarchal society, was guilty of adhering to male gaze and whether it could be freed from these repressive mechanisms. But her stand on narrative was later confronted with the not so-ironical question made by bell hooks "Are we really to imagine that feminist theorists writing only about images of white women ... do not 'see' the whiteness of the image?", thus introducing black experience through the concept of oppositional gaze.
While the concept of gaze was primarily introduced in film studies through feminist critique, it has continually been explored through different perspectives – those of gender and race, of class and colonial struggle, etc. –, creating the possibility of confronting the gaze’s infinite.
How can we display this complex tangle of perspectives? By organizing a series of double features, the goal is not to simply posit oppositions, but to stimulate a more diverse and ambiguous conversation.
Double Features:
Double Screening #1
Riddles of the Sphinx (1977) by Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen
The Watermelon Woman (1996) by Cheryl Dunye
Cinematic desire is interrogated, deconstructed and freed from the burden of the male gaze in this double feature devoted to two extraordinary female filmmakers.
Seminal work from feminist film theory pioneer Laura Mulvey, Riddles of the Sphinx uses the language of modernist anti-narrative cinema to find and empower a female voice untethered by patriarchy.
Made twenty years later, The Watermelon Woman by Cheryl Dunye strives to reconsider the idea of femininity on screen by unapologetically positing a black lesbian filmmaker as the protagonist in an alternatingly gleeful and tragic detective intrigue – where the film industry at large is an obvious unpunished perpetrator.
Double Screening #2
Los Olvidados (1950) by Luis Buñuel
The Vampires of Poverty (1978) by Luis Ospina
Revisiting a classical masterpiece through the eyes of a not-so-ironical movie to interrogate about the difficulties and limits of filming social misery.
Buñuel's film depicts the lives of Los Olvidados, the forgotten children of our society. With no appeal to morality or judgment, unnecessary exaggeration or fantasy, the film is as raw and naked as misery, as unbearable as hunger and death, exceeding the limits of the documentary or aesthetic research.
Vampires of Poverty makes a sarcastic picture of the other side of the coin, a reality just as unbearable as Los Olvidados: the use and mise-en-scène of poverty in cinema, the exploitation of poverty by filmmakers for commercial purposes. This simulated-documentary should not be seen as a confrontation to Buñuel’s, but as a tool to better appreciate his social, political, and artistic awareness.
Double Screening #3
Chameleon Street (1989) by Wendell B. Harris Jr.
Free, White and 21 (1980) by Howardena Pindel
Complex perspectives on race and gender arise from this improvised cinematic dialogue between two unique voices of black art.
In her iconic video art work Free, White and 21 Howardena Pindell externalizes the tragedy of blackness through quirky racial cross-dressing that visualizes her confessions of encountering institutional racism as a black woman.
In Chameleon Street, criminally underseen Wendell B. Harris’ Sundance 1990 winner about a real-life impersonating con artist, a black masculinity drama is envisioned as a repressed inner conflict, a constant struggle that manifests in doomed role-playing, in distressed yearning for racial passing.
Double Screening #4
La Zerda ou les chants de l'oubli (1982) by Assia Djebar
Oú en êtes-vous, Yervant Gianikian et Angela Ricci Lucchi? (2015) by Gianikian and Ricci Lucia
Two films-essays that appropriate images from archives, revealing them to be instruments of domination, but also recoating them in order to reconstruct a soiled collective identity.
Assia Djebar in La Zerda et les Chants de l'Oubli reconstructs a collective identity of the Maghreb from colonial images by dressing them up with a soundtrack composed of songs and poems from silenced voices, the voices of those who were subjected to a different gaze, excluded from their self-representation.
Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi revisit the war regions of the 20th century through archival images. Both operate on pre- and post-war footage with their "analytical camera" and specific practice of revealing the violence inscribed into the images.
Double Screening #5
Five Year Diary (1981-1997) by Anne Charlotte Robertson
Me and My Brother (1969) by Robert Frank
Two uncompromising takes on self-image creation, altered mental states and the limits of their representations.
Anne Charlotte Robertson’s unparalleled first-person epic Five Year Diary was born as a pragmatic inquiry into the filmmaker’s struggles with self-image but also captured years of struggling with bipolar disorder. It sprawled into a stunning and heartbreaking visual monument to subjectivity, simultaneously burdened and elevated by the desire to just be seen, on Robertson’s own terms, with love.
Equally prosaic in its inception, Robert Frank’s first feature film Me and My Brother starts as a portrait of a catatonic Julius Orlovsky and morphs into a soulful expressionist collage imagining through all means possible – even inviting an actor stand-in for Orlovsky – the workings of the other’s mind that won’t reveal themselves.
Double Screening #6
Pinochet Porn (2008-2016) by Ellen Cantor
A Song of Love (1950) by Jean Genet
Connections between desire, power and sexuality are playfully reflected in two remarkable works made more than fifty years apart.
Taking the form of a soap opera, at once tragic and comic, and marked by a subversive sexuality, Pinochet Porn, opus magnum of cult New York artist Ellen Cantor, who worked both within camp and feminist avant-garde, produces a series of speculations about the construction of subjectivity and personal experience under a totalitarian regime.
French novelist Jean Genet’s only cinematic work, banned in the 1950’s for its explicit homosexual content, A Song of Love, is one of the most imaginative films about voyeuristic pleasures and power. It had explicitly revealed the Foucauldian idea of panopticon in the sexual context even before Foucault created the concept.
Double Screening #7
My Case / Mon Cas (1986) by Manoel de Oliveira
Film (1966) by Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider
The idea of authorial gaze and powers is questioned, defied and exuberantly killed off by two of the most celebrated and revered authors of the XX century.
Words from Samuel Beckett, Jose Régio and the Book of Job, on the one hand, stylings of theatre staging, silent cinema and early talkies, on the other. In one of his most original films, Manoel de Oliveira keeps switching sources, formal structures and regimes of authorial presence – as if positing a question on how even the creator of cinematic images cannot escape the discomfiting gaze inherent in the medium.
Aforementioned Samuel Beckett in Film, his only work in cinema, tackles the same medium with even more palpable distrust: surrealistic wonders of visual poetry made available by cinema are confronted with a sheer horror of feeling the presence of gaze.