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Interview

In my EYE film, the controlling gaze is mainly seen in the subtitles, which is the director. Every move is underlined by the subtitle.

I wanted to convey a feeling of voyeurism, so that you feel you are not allowed to see what you see. I used night vision and film in the dark. To play with curiosity and voyeurism.

In the film in the first part when she is moving by herself, her hands are moving slowly.

The first part is aimed to portray seduction. My friend who was being filmed wanted to present herself in a honest way. But I felt it was artificial as if she was acting it out for someone else. In the edit, for the first part I tried to emphasize this seduction.

Because of the Diobedient Narrative theme I wanted to disrupt the timeline. So I used the hands of someone else to intrude the image. At that moment the film turned from a male gaze/perspective to a female gaze/perspective. During filming, the hands made it physically harder for her to pose.

Why is it a female gaze?

I am thinking about this in non-binary terms. I struggle with it. But by male/female, I mean: the male gaze is a violating gaze but this might not be noticeable at first when we view images where this is the case. These terms are ingrained in film theory. I want to use them to make myself aware of what has happened in cinema and film theory. I mean the gazes as a switching perspective.

The way I presented the actress was in an artificial way. It's something I notice in cinema, when a woman is represented as an object or spectacle. I wanted to put an emphasis on this de-humanizing factor. The night vision gives her an artificial look (eyes, teeth, hair). It helps me to convey that she is a mechanism, a formula, an object of the violating gaze.

The woman becomes a fetish: an object serving seduction and beauty, serving only for aesthetic purposes in the film.

The subtitles could be the director, her mind or maybe a computer generated program. This is something I want to leave open for interpretation.

What gaze does the subtitle represent?

The subtitles are demanding they either tell her what to do or they describe what happens in the current moment. In the end the images become more violated and the subtitles become more confusing, because of the added pair of hands. How is being directed then? The person touching her or she herself? This all adds up to the power structure but never in the film is the woman in control until the last few seconds.

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