Doane, Shirin, and the Female Body

Mary Ann Doane explains that the female body is one that is "inherently lacking"and thus "ontologically frail" (532). In this sense, I am assuming that she means the female body is lacking because it is void of a phallus. One cannot give agency to female characters in film, because they do not possess the power tools, literally and metaphorically, necessary to establish indisputable presence. I appreciated Doane's discussion of the cinema as inherently violent towards the female body. She explains that the cinema represents a body that is "preeminently masculine" (531) - modernity assaults the female body and forces upon it an anxiety of underperformance. She consistently brings up the idea of photographic realism, which in itself to me seems very contradictory, especially in regard to present-day film. In order for a film audience to be at ease with female characters onscreen, the creators of the film must be certain to "repetitively demonstrate the principle of spectatorial distance." What I consistently noticed with Dreyer's Joan of Arc was that Joan was never actually portrayed looking straight at the camera - instead, it appeared as if she was always looking off into the distance. Additionally, one of the reasons that Shirin was slightly difficult to watch was because the audience was forced to look at the "characters" head-on, and in a way, it appeared as if they were looking straight at us, too. I was personally uncomfortable with how honest the representation of each woman was - I experienced anxiety for each of them being so vulnerable. The spectatorial distance guidelines that the classical narrative preaches were definitely not applied in this film, although I definitely appreciated the fresh outlook. I think this also applies to Doane's explanation that the cinema acts as an assault on the spectator. Shirin particularly disrupted the senses that one usually experiences when watching a film - in this sense, it attacked modernity and actually served to be quite an aggressive approach. Doane goes on to explain that "identity is the permanence of the person, it is the personality looked at from the point of view of its duration" (538). Because the audience essentially "gazed" at the female spectators on-screen for such long durations, I at least felt that I was able to gain some sense of an identity from each of the women. Additionally, because the audience is so taken aback by the directness of the filmmaker's approach, we were not able to "wait before reacting," as is referenced by Bergson in Doane's piece. I also found it significant that all bodies represented were racial "others" in the scope of the classical narrative. I would accidentally find myself scoping out the rest of the audience to identify any male spectators - I realized that this is something the cinema has trained me to do, and it actually created a great deal of anxiety on my part. I think I was especially curious to see if any male spectators would produce the same immense amount of emotion as the female spectators did.