Between Reviews: The Female Gaze
THE FEMALE GAZE
Before you start hyperventilating about the hoopla at Goa, here’s a nudge towards a different kind of film festival.
DEC 20, 2009 – BY THE TIME YOU READ THIS, I’ll be in Goa, savouring my last few hours of sunshine and fresh air before the International Film Festival of India gets going and I descend into darkened movie-hall after darkened movie-hall, communing with fellow movie-vampires and surfacing only for a quite, uh, bite. But I’m here to talk about an entirely different event – The 3rd Women’s Film Festival, which will take place in Chennai, March 1-8, 2010. Okay, don’t roll your eyes – not yet. With film festivals sprouting like magic mushrooms after a spring shower – in Mumbai, in Chennai, in Trivandrum, in Kolkata, in Delhi – what’s so special about another one, right? But this one’s different. I know this for a fact because I spent a couple of days at The Indo-Korean Cultural and Information Centre – with curator Dr. Vasanthi Sankaranarayanan and film-writer Gautaman Bhaskaran – shortlisting films for the festival.
Take, for instance, the superb Malayalam short, Charulatayude Baki. It’s not just the fact that the film takes a few cues (and more than a few images) from one of Satyajit Ray’s most exquisitely feminine films. (I realise this isn’t a technically valid distinction, but to get to where I’m coming from, Pratidwandi would be a masculine movie.) It’s also the heroine wondering aloud (to her lover) about the man she’s going to marry, someone arranged by her family. She asks how she can make up her mind about someone she has to live with for the rest of her life after spending just an hour with him. She goes on to philosophise that her body is going to end up in fire one day, so why safeguard it? Why love only once? Why not love many men, kiss many men?
That’s what’s different about the films at the WFI. According to Sankaranarayanan, who has curated the festival from its inception, the (obvious) difference between a film festival and a women’s film festival is that “ideology plays a part.” But what exactly is this ideology? Or to put it differently, what kind of metaphorical bras are going to be burned here? That’s something Sankaranarayanan and Rathi Jafer (Director of InKo Centre, which presents the festival) are still grappling with, the question of what exactly constitutes “women’s film.” They solved the problem in the first edition of the festival by featuring films made by women filmmakers, regardless of quality – but towards the close, Ritwik Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara was screened, a statement that gender alone couldn’t be the deciding factor. Many men have made fantastic films about women.
So the next year, the festival showcased films that dealt with a “woman’s perspective,” regardless of the gender of the director. Thus Saeed Mirza (Naseem), Ketan Mehta (Mirch Masala), John Abraham (Amma Ariyan) and Mani Kaul (Uski Roti) rubbed shoulders with Kavitha Lankesh (Avva), Paromita Vohra (Morality TV and the Loving Jehad: Ek Manohar Kahani), Leena Manimekalai (Goddesses) and Prema Karanth (Bandh Jharoka). In the third edition of the festival, behind-the-scenes gender will play no part – at least in the sense of a film having been made by a man or a woman. The questions instead will be whether women, when they make films, use the medium differently, in form and content. Do women use technology differently than men? The issue of gender is thus routed through investigative channels – searching, seeking – rather than baldly categorical and definitive ones.
Of course, some of the basic principles will remain constant – for instance, the attempt to build awareness about women filmmakers in a nation all-too-attuned to the male gaze. The WFI will not screen films that are anti-women in intent, as the aim is to showcase an alternative to the patriarchal film. (Sankaranarayanan defines the patriarchal film as one where the public space is more important than the personal, and which revels in, among other things, the objectification of the female form.) And the underlying quest remains the same: Is there something called the “women’s film?” If so, what is it? Left to me, I’d venture that a film is a film and that there are only good films and bad films, and yet, I see the need to shepherd films for, by and about women, especially when distaff directors are mere blips on the mainstream-movie radar.
Some of the films we viewed cleanly slotted themselves as women’s films – or, at least, films that celebrate women. The approximately hour-long Ella es el Matador was one such – it painted a picture of both the happiness and the heartbreak that ensue when a woman decides to take up a spectacularly male-dominated profession. Where a Hollywood production would have mined this material for you-go-girl empowerment-clichés, this independent film treats its subjects as ordinary people who, at work, just happen to face enraged bulls instead of, say, angry customers. My one great regret was that the film titled 7 Blind Women Filmmakers refused to play. With that title, it all but automatically includes itself in a festival lineup. Who wouldn’t want to see this septet of shorts made by visually impaired women who put themselves through a yearlong filmmaking workshop? Now that’s real girl power.
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