The film program Titanium Daisies explores the female gaze in cinema.
The term «female gaze» was first used by the British film theorist Laura Mulvey in the essay «Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.»
This optic describes and critiques the dominant position of the male narrator, which is a direct continuation of patriarchal culture and, accordingly, inequality. The main feature of this position is the objectification of female characters and their use as functions and tools for revealing the main character, a man. The female gaze overcomes the objectification and vulnerability of the female character on the screen and demonstrates her subjectivity and ability to turn her gaze on the viewer. This turns the female gaze into a tool for political expression and the struggle for equal rights. There is no common female gaze, in the same way that there is no experience that is common to all women and can form the basis of works of art. The seven films in this program present various facets of this optic. The cinematographic approach of the female gaze foregrounds the internal world and position of the female characters, underlining their past and their cultural and social background, which makes each expression unique. The industry reacts in various ways to this type of film.
In a number of cases, films with a female optic that were successful at festivals became classics of contemporary cinema. Claire Denis, one of the main figures of contemporary auteur cinema, was born into a diplomatic family and spent her childhood in former French colonies in Africa. Her drama Beau Travail, about the Foreign Legion in Djibouti, is an artistic exploration of the body and feelings, which are interlaced with the militaristic and postcolonial context of the action. Fellow French director Alice Diop, who is of Senegalese origin, looks at questions of migration in France, contrasting the story of her family with those of other migrants and inhabitants of the outskirts of Paris in the documentary We. Festival hit, Naomi Kawase’s The Mourning Forest, is a fable about overcoming grief together. Ildikó Enyedi’s On Body and Soul, which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival, demonstrates closeness using the human qualities of cruelty, love, and mercy.
Bold expression and experimental artistic form often come up against the conservatism of the film industry. Natalya Meshchaninova’s stunning drama My Little Night-Time Secret is a cry for help about the violence in urban high-rises that is hidden from most viewers. Uzbek artist Saodat Ismailova, whose films and videos can often be seen in museum spaces, tells the story of four women of different generations, each of whom finds her own way within the boundaries of traditional society. Canadian Métis Rhayne Vermette, who debuted with the autobiographical experimental film Ste. Anne, invented a new artistic language for the traditional culture of Canadian Métis people.
The program is named after two important European films, separated by decades, that show the revolutionary potential of the female gaze. These are Daisies (1966) by the Czech director Vera Chytilová, which tells the story of two girls who have cast off society’s rules, and Titane (2021) by Julie Ducournau, a radical body horror film that won the Palme d’Or at the 74th Cannes Film Festival. Both films radically influenced world cinema and opened up new horizons in the cinematographic struggle for women’s representation in art.