UCLA “Film and Feminism” exhibit examines patriarchy in global cinema

A myriad of makeup-laden female eyes stare out from rows of handmade cards, watching every student walk past in Kaufman Hall.

Behind two large glass panes, feminist art in the form of cards and photos fills the viewer’s gaze with bright colors, sharp textures and messages that challenge the normal patriarchal narrative.

From Thursday, Oct. 15, the work of world arts and cultures/dance assistant professor Aparna Sharma’s “Film and Feminism” class will be exhibited in Kaufman Hall until the end of fall quarter. On Monday, Sharma carefully arranged the artwork on the shelves with a couple of her students, making sure no one’s piece went unnoticed or was obscured.

For the “Film and Feminism” class, students look at mainstream movies from across the world, including classic Hollywood, Bollywood and Italian cinema, and analyze them through a feminist lens. Sharma has taught this class several times before, but this year was the first to produce pieces of art and publicly exhibit the students’ personal analyses of the movies.

The exhibits included crayon drawings of stick figures representing a model family dynamic, with the artist commenting on how the male is often seen as the head of the family. Sharma said her students let their creativity run free, and some even decided to decorate the movies’ DVD cases with images and drawings to convey their feminist critiques of the films.

Sharma said she made the goal of the class not just to discuss feminism in general, but to use one particular theme each year to help concentrate the students’ thoughts.

“The theme focuses the thinking of feminist discourse in a very particular container,” Sharma said. “Rather than letting feminism just be everything, and by that token be nothing, I like to anchor it.”

The theme of this year’s class was girlhood, which looked at films like “The Piano” by Jane Campion and “Morvern Callar” by Lynne Ramsay. However, the most prominent film featured in the exhibition is 2007’s “Juno,” starring Ellen Page.

One of the cards from the exhibit is framed as a cut-out of the film’s script, overlaid with the student’s critiques. The artist has circled and underlined in red pen the film lines she finds most problematic from a feminist’s perspective.

For Phoebe Brown, a fourth-year world arts and cultures/dance student whose art is part of the exhibition, the markings show the film wasn’t necessarily as groundbreaking as people thought.

“Juno is portrayed as an imperfect feminine teenager, a lot of times she’s a rebel,” Brown said. “But there’s a lot of her proving herself through men in a male savior context. Her happiness and a lot of her moods come from her interaction with men.”

Isabelle Beausang, a fourth-year world arts and cultures/dance student whose art is also on show, said when the students took an in-depth look at classic and contemporary film, they discovered the male gaze is extremely prominent in mainstream filmmaking.

“The male gaze is influenced by where the camera focuses, what parts of the female body it stares at, how she’s moving, what the lighting is on her, the coloring of the scenery and the way it’s edited.” Beausang said.

Sharma gave classic 1946 film noir movie “Gilda” as an example. In one particular scene, Sharma said Rita Hayworth’s character sings a beautiful song and is then slapped by a male character soon after she finishes. For Beausang, “Gilda” shows how many male directors impose their own view on the film, framing women in ways that goes along with a patriarchal narrative.

Through their projects, Beausang said the class aimed to subvert the classical representations of women and girls in some of the films they’d seen. She said she worked in a group that looked in particular at female phenomenology.

Sharma described phenomenology as branch of philosophy which is interested in thinking in terms of overcoming the observer-observed and the subject-object dichotomy. She said the class used phenomenology as an important tool to analyze female characters in relation to their environments and to determine whether it was a liberatory relationship or an enforced one.

For Brown, looking at films using phenomenology gave her a new perspective on the movies she watches, and she said she hopes the new clarity will rub off on the students walking by the exhibit who stop to take a look.

“A lot of films give you this sealed-off world where there’s one representation,” Brown said. “We wanted to show that you can have a multiplicity of emotions. There’s not just one track to follow.”