engleski

The Bonnet View: Images of Power or Disempowerment

The problem of gaze has been central for the feminist film theory ever since the 1975 seminal essay by the film critic Laura Mulvey Visual pleasure and narrative cinema coined the notion of the „male gaze“ as gendered, using it to dissect dominant film practice and its treatment of female characters as objects of heterosexual male desire. The paper will further explore one strain of this theoretical tradition, focusing on the concept of the bonnet view to re-examine the power of media image as a vehicle of female empowerment, that is the tension between empowerment and disempowerment. A type of a gaze or a more marginalized glance, the bonnet view was first used by the director Kelly Reichardt to describe her feminist western Meek’s Cutoff (2010), and has since been circulating in interpretations of period pieces ranging from The Handmaid's Tale to the films by Carl Theodor Dreyer. This paper will extend previous research to focus on the films by the latter author, which has been the subject of such diverse readings as „one of the greatest writer-directors of female characters in cinema“ (British Film Institute), or, on the other hand, a landmark of A Tradition of Torturing Women (Linda Haverty Rugg, 2016).

gaze, bonnet view, Jessica Hausner, Kelly Reichardt, Carl Th. Dreyer, Scandinavian cinema, Balkan cinema

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