Avant-garde film as a subvertive mode of the look

Reading Mulvey’s essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” along with watching the films of avant-garde filmmaker and reading Su Friedrich’s article is interesting as the films and the articles create a multifaceted conversation about the issue of pleasure, a topic that we have been talking about in class. Focusing on Hollywood cinema, Mulvey suggests the mode of seeing and being seen in narrative films in which women are always the “objects of the look”; and men are “the subjects of the look.” This means women are presented offering scopophilic pleasures for men. 

The lesbian films we saw last week subvert the modes of the look that Mulvey suggests. The avant-garde films are not about the heterosexual relationship but homosexual one – between woman and woman. Hence, taking homosexual desire as a useful device, they deconstruct the binary of the look based on gender. The avant-garde filmmakers thereby contribute an alternative mode of production beside that of the Hollywood. What I found interesting here is the question that whether avant-garde cinema which aims at the alternative mode needs an alternative form. More particularly, Su Friedrich raises the question “ Does radical content deserve radical form?” The filmmaker seems to state that she has attended to pursue an innovative way to tell her film story. However, she has to accept that the film has its own life and her film about the lesbian nun is inclined to narrative tradition rather than provocative way of avant-garde tradition. Her article is useful for me as I am used to assume that avant-garde cinema is radical form-oriented.