Listen now | Today we look at a 52-year old Christmas movie that’s different from films like 'It’s a Wonderful Life.' It's called My Night at Maud’s and it asks a tantalizing question.
Hé rien de nouveau! Monsieur Rohmer excels at presenting the "male gaze. Au mieux bien sur ...sex leads to love! If only this lined up more with reality! But then in France--seduction is a nationally sanctioned sport: “faire l'amours” are expected, garconnieres a given--and in some ways, mores are more healthy. Bon appetitte! https://snippetsofparis.com/french-and-sex/...
You've had me thinking about the male gaze in cinema for the past few days. I just found a feminist critique of Rohmer's "Six Moral Tales," which may interest you. He can't help be sexist to a point because of the culture he belonged to. But Rohmer's perspective--the so-called "distanced gaze" that characterizes New Wave films may be a bit more complicated. Here's a quote from the article with link below. Thanks again for forcing me to look at all this from a different point of view!
"In her discussion of gender and mass culture in the New Wave, feminist film theorist Genevieve Sellier explains that these films issued a central place to a male protagonist, usually a young man, a ”kind of alter-ego of the New Wave auteur with whom the spectator empathises and identifies,” whose perspective is dominant in the film. (2) She asserts that the focus on the most abstract aspects of Rohmer’s mise-en-scène gave impetus to the “modernist, distanced gaze” of the New Wave. This incorporated masculinist, sexist representations in narratives that embraced women’s newly awakened sexual freedom, but only from within the phallocentric socio-cultural context of 50s France. Sellier criticises the paradoxical approach of Rohmer and his fellow Cahiers film critics: their ‘masculinity’ was in fact invisible to them as a universal part of French culture. These critics were not interested in the social dimensions of cinema, but in its aesthetic and formal dimensions, giving rise to a ubiquitous male subjectivity that looked at women with “sociological distance”. (3) However, a binary gender divide does not account for Rohmer’s complex relationship with the spectator. These films adopt Rohmer’s particular brand of irony and distance, and resituate spectatorship between the narrator’s subjectivity and the filmmaker’s intention."
I enjoy your diaries so much cuz. Love Bink aka Brenda
Thanks so much, Cuz. Your opinion means a great deal to me.
Love your review of the movie. Andrew. We are definitely queued for this. You can count on comments from Kurt and me.
Thanks so much for taking the time to read/listen, Sara. I hope I haven't oversold the film. So grateful to have you and Kurt in my corner.
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Hé rien de nouveau! Monsieur Rohmer excels at presenting the "male gaze. Au mieux bien sur ...sex leads to love! If only this lined up more with reality! But then in France--seduction is a nationally sanctioned sport: “faire l'amours” are expected, garconnieres a given--and in some ways, mores are more healthy. Bon appetitte! https://snippetsofparis.com/french-and-sex/...
You've had me thinking about the male gaze in cinema for the past few days. I just found a feminist critique of Rohmer's "Six Moral Tales," which may interest you. He can't help be sexist to a point because of the culture he belonged to. But Rohmer's perspective--the so-called "distanced gaze" that characterizes New Wave films may be a bit more complicated. Here's a quote from the article with link below. Thanks again for forcing me to look at all this from a different point of view!
"In her discussion of gender and mass culture in the New Wave, feminist film theorist Genevieve Sellier explains that these films issued a central place to a male protagonist, usually a young man, a ”kind of alter-ego of the New Wave auteur with whom the spectator empathises and identifies,” whose perspective is dominant in the film. (2) She asserts that the focus on the most abstract aspects of Rohmer’s mise-en-scène gave impetus to the “modernist, distanced gaze” of the New Wave. This incorporated masculinist, sexist representations in narratives that embraced women’s newly awakened sexual freedom, but only from within the phallocentric socio-cultural context of 50s France. Sellier criticises the paradoxical approach of Rohmer and his fellow Cahiers film critics: their ‘masculinity’ was in fact invisible to them as a universal part of French culture. These critics were not interested in the social dimensions of cinema, but in its aesthetic and formal dimensions, giving rise to a ubiquitous male subjectivity that looked at women with “sociological distance”. (3) However, a binary gender divide does not account for Rohmer’s complex relationship with the spectator. These films adopt Rohmer’s particular brand of irony and distance, and resituate spectatorship between the narrator’s subjectivity and the filmmaker’s intention."
https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2010/feature-articles/the-roving-i-ambiguous-subjectivity-in-eric-rohmers-six-moral-tales/
Thanks reading/listening and for link! I learned plenty I didn’t know before.
It all depends on the reliability of your memory. :-]
Amen! I’ve noticed that theme in your Twitter time line lately, but I can’t remember when exactly.😊 Thanks, as always, for reading and commenting.