W e e k 1
- Shaza hafez
- Jan 14, 2024
- 3 min read
I decided I will be working individually this term. However, the decision between a short experimental or documentary was difficult.
I am currently leaning more towards an experimental film. This summer, I wrote a short fiction story about breathing life into the male gaze. I thought the result on screen might be interesting. It is a woman’s stream of consciousness and day to day life being closely watched by a man. I considered the potential of adding a plot twist in the end that reveals the actual presence of this man to confuse the audience. Is it a stalker story or a male gaze story?
Here’s an excerpt:
‘Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it’s all a male fantasy: that you’re strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren’t catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you’re unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.’
-Margaret Atwood
One warm day in June, I’m in Greece, and you’re in South West England. I feel you watching me standing there in my airbnb, swaying to inaudible lyrics while I smoked my ninth cigarette of the day. I tell you that all I want is to stay here on this balcony till I rot peacefully in cosmic insignificance.
I’m underneath you, I try my best to draft down a solid memory: The space between your eyes, the soft dark blue skin around them, the workings of your inner life. I picture myself telling you all about how my city feels like an old friend who let me down, but all the words that come out of my mouth around you are feeble. You suggested that I was merely ‘just another stupid 2003 girl watching sitcoms and shitting on the greats’. So I went home and read every single analysis of Tarantino films ever conceived in history. I still believe he is overrated.
You’re always there, when I write, when I touch myself, when I think, when I raise my hand, you’re at the corner of every street, every room, you’re in my room. Of course I find myself thinking of you, I pray again like a little girl: “Dear Allah, I want a love that unleashes hell upon the minaret. Dear Allah, it’s the wrong kind of prayer, but I’ll sacrifice your heaven for one on earth.”
You’re behind the glass window as I get off my knees and get back into bed: I fear you will interfere with any love I will ever feel towards myself. The way women love is beautiful. It's a great, big sacrifice. If I could stack up all the love women around the world have, it would amount to one grand sacrifice, one woman setting herself on fire. I wish our love was ugly.
This film will offer a radical feminist take on stalking and the male gaze.
I read about the double consciousness theory by Dubois, and realized it can be applied to this topic.
This week, we were also introduced to the scene recreation task. We saw different examples of scene inspirations, such as Todd Haynes' "Far from Heaven" compared to Douglas Sirk's "All heaven allows". By looking at these two time periods, we explored the different ways in which the directors were ahead of their time. Their work with shifting power dynamics through changing spaces is particularly interesting. Scene recreation elements can be found anywhere, from set design to camera work to writing. Analysing films on a microscopic level such as this one helped enhance my film criticism skills, which in turn makes me a better filmmaker, as I begin noticing details we weren't taught to notice before. These details are what makes a film better, even to the untrained mind.
I joined a group of classmates, as I did not want to work individually throughout the whole term. We began discussing different ideas, mainly from french films, as the three of us were french speakers and thought it would be interesting to do something different than what we usually did.
We initially decided on a scene from ‘À bout de souffle’ by Jean Luc Godard:
We said we would give the female character more lines to give her more agency and reverse the gaze. The french nouvelle vague style of editing will also be kept, a modern take on Godard’s jump cuts.
Eventually, our final decision was a scene from Jim Jarmucsh’s ‘coffee and cigarettes’ (2003): https://youtu.be/mM6Mpn0-eyQ?si=O4stju9WVZnwedT8
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