Late in the noughties I took post graduate papers in Feminist Studies and Sex in Film at The University of Auckland. During this time I wrote some slight pieces about the works I was reading and from time to time I’ll publish them here. This is one of them.
John Phillips recognizes the traditional interpretation of the female gaze as being ‘essentially phallocentric’ and suggests that the structure of ‘Romance’, in creating a plethora of viewing locations for both female and male spectator, supports Laura Kipnis position that ‘identification is mobile and unpredictable’ and Linda Williams view that it is important not to perceive power in sexual representations as being fixed.
In making distinctions between female viewing positions or point of view as presented in’ Romance’ and the traditional view of the female gaze Phillip’s identifies the disembodied and contrapuntal voiceover as a significant system that serves this end.
Phillip’s sees the film’s focus on male genitalia as facilitating a heterosexual female gaze and generating a point of view that heterosexual women might relate to. He suggests that this POV is unambiguously feminine. Phillips goes on to propose that this is facilitated by camera shots determined by the female director and seen through the eyes of Maria, the female protagonist. Contrary to a male position Maria shows no enthusiasm for looking.
Phillips goes further and suggests that ‘Romance’ exists also as a generic ‘metatextual’ commentary on the problem of the gaze and that, while the film represents a complicity with the gaze of the male spectator, it also represents Maria’s search for sexual fulfilment as a metaphor for the search for the missing phallus. The final act resolution of this is, as is the rest of the film, both stereotypical and perverse.
dykiegirl 