Jenn Thảo Nguyễn

This week’s readings and class discussions collided at the conversation of homogeneity and difference. It seems that the theories surrounding gendered cinematic gaze and participation fall short in its ability to include without homogenizing such differences. Is it productive to demand applicability of theory to all critical discussions, a question that feels to me analogous to that of if it’s even possible to ask for one’s perfect identification in cinema. Perhaps preserving difference in film theory is at the risk of exclusion, and the carving out this terrain is determining which of these exclusions create larger inequities. Though there are hopeful examples of filmmakers who create films that exist in this liminal space — of including the male spectator whilst female subjects are brought to the forefront — I find that the success of filmmakers like Varda may not be in the primacy of femininity (though such is pertinent), and safety of masculinity, but rather in the removal of answers, of didactics.

Celebrating aesthetics in the enunciation then, seems to me a very tactful way of enveloping the mainstream audience into the dialectical world, and away from the comfort of answers for viewers that deserves equal chance at creating their own resolutions to cinematic provocation. In my post last week, I discussed films that I find very enjoyable but feel perhaps guilty about: Malena, Anora, Parthenope, Betty Blue. I like these films, I’ve learned from this week’s readings, because they do not overtly tell me who she is, though they may elude to how she may be perceived. They ask many questions of me, uncomfortable (unsuture) and comfortable (suture), that are interesting to navigate. In class we spoke of how some visuals are too overpowering to be dialectical, that certain images and sequences land as a ‘statement’ rather than as ‘question’. This introduced an interesting aperture to my critical lens. It asks me where the line is drawn between concessions I make in my engagement with a film, and how overpowering this image must be that I renounce my ability to participate — whether this escape velocity may be evaluated by theory at all without also homogenizing too pertinent a difference.