Representations of Femininity

While looking at Godard's films I became interested in the portrayal of women in these movies. The sequence in "British Sounds" that deals with womens' representation in particular aroused my curiosity in work that explores the creation of images of femininity. To analyse this issue I will look at three women artists working in this area; Cindy Sherman (b.1954), Francesca Woodman (1958-1981) and Vanessa Beecroft (b.1969). Through their work I will examine representations of femininity in art. However, I will look first at some of the history and theory surrounding representation and in particular that of women.

Before one can look at art that attempts to deal with portrayals of femininity one must be clear what femininity is and how it functions. The work of psychoanalysts Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) is of particular interest in this area. Lacan followed on from the writings of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and Joan Riviere (author of Womanliness as Mascarade 1929) who both argued that femininity is 'masquerade'.1 Lacan claimed that the female persona is constructed in direct opposition to the male or in other words, femininity is constructed within a phallocentric framework. This theory seems to enforce the idea that a woman not only acts the role of 'female' but also fetishises herself.

It is useful here to also consider Lacan's account of the mirror stage in relation to the idea of a fiction. The mirror stage is the time when the child first perceives it's own reflection and takes that mirror image as the model for it's future identifications. The child perceives itself in the mirror as a uniform being. However, this perception is an illusion because it disguises the fragmentary nature of the child's inner experience and drives. The sense of unity the child achieves from recognising it's own image is in itself a cause of fragmentation. The child must then deal with the difference of it's
experience of it's internal self experience and the external appearance of themselves, (as they are seen by others).2 The fracturing of this self image between experience and appearance seems to result in a kind of existential angst where we can never reconcile our inner selves to our outward appearances. This results in the fetishisation of our representations, particularly our representations of the 'other' woman. Melanie Kline (1882-1960) wrote of how the function of creativity is to restore the child to it's mother, but could creativity not also be an attempt to unify ourselves? It seems entirely possible that art is trying to bring together our outer and inner worlds. For example, I think the aesthetics of film are directly related to the mirror image in Lacan's theory. At first film appears to be the perfect looking glass, showing the viewer unified images. However the mechanics of film hide the same fragmentation that the mirror does, for example, the method of film projection hides the twenty-four frames of celluloid that accounts for one second of film.

Cindy Sherman's 1977 work Untitled Film Stills, (New York) consists of different constructed stills each appearing to be some important moment within a narrative. However, there is nothing of the decisive moment in the work; there are only the women waiting to be absorbed into their own femininity where they are unaware of any viewer. Fredrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) said: "Reflect on the whole history of women, do they not have to be first and above all else actresses, ....... they put on something even when they take off everything, women are so artistic."3 This statement perfectly illustrates Sherman's work. Both Nietzsche's statement and Sherman's photographs highlight the artifice of women's self presentation which seems to owe more to cultural ideals and media images rather than to anything women naturally are.

Sherman who is both photographer and model in her work sets up an interesting mechanism within her pictures. She is alone, acting only for her camera, in which she builds images that at the same time both reinforce the filmic reality, whilst simultaneously render it uncanny. In the photographs the illusion is duplicated, the female subject echoes the surface of the print and in the photographic process, they are fused into one. Therefore, in transferring elements of the life of the subject, the
woman, to the photograph and elements of the photograph to the woman, a kind of fusion between the surface and the representation occurs.

Sherman's Film Stills also deal with the idea of femininity as 'masquerade'. By dressing up and mimicking the already heightened image of womanhood which emanated from the 1950's, as in the films of Hitchcock (as Laura Mulvey has pointed out), Sherman alludes to a masochistic representation of woman as 'victim'.4 This is again reinforced in the voyeuristic nature of photography accentuated by Sherman, where we often seem to be peering into the private space of the female subject. However, we are granted access to this space by Sherman herself, so that it is not a truly voyeuristic experience as the viewer is constrained by what the artist/model wishes them to see. This emphasises the fact that these images are constructions and that femininity often
articulates itself on the same terms as movie genre, via performance and mise en scene etc., thus narrowing the gap between woman and cinema. Sherman offers the viewer a specified performance. As she is also the photographer she is aware of the external vanishing point that is her audience and is able to manipulate their vision. The artist is aware that her sex is merely a role that she must play; all women must be familiar with that sensation of watching themselves being watched, and of course regarding their own reflections in the bedroom mirror with a male gaze. This means that femininity in the individual is constructed not only by internalised representations of women, but also by an appropriated male gaze. For example in Angela Carter's (1940-1992) The
Magic Toyshop (1967)5, the teenage heroine Melanie spends her summer admiring her perfection in the mirror, modelling herself on the women in paintings by Rossetti and Toulouse-Lautrec. Carter's heroine is at the age where she is becoming conscious of the male gaze. She conjures from her imagination lovers so that she is never alone. In other words, she is always escorted by her looking glass sister, her own appearance. The work of Vanessa Beecroft offers some interesting contrasts and similarities to that of Cindy Sherman. They both work with representations of femininity but unlike Sherman, Beecroft does not indulge in a variety of disguises, instead she imposes her own image or aesthetic on to others, in her performances in which the artist herself never appears. Beecroft selects models which she calls 'live material'6 and regards as purely visual. Beecroft's selection criteria for her models is "that they resemble her
physically and have a knowing, understanding demeanour"7 For the actual performances Beecroft further establishes the homogeneous appearance of the women by issuing them with clothes to wear, often her own and then restricts their actions for the duration of the Happening.

In one such performance entitled "A Blond Dream" (Cologne1994), thirty girls were brought into the gallery space and given the artist's clothes to wear and instructed to move about within the gallery but not to speak or make any direct contact with the public. These girls acted as Beecroft's dopplegangers symbolising our need to witness a unified image of ourselves. This work allows the artist and the audience to explore the idea of the self as other. This, as Simone de Beavoir (1908-) argues in "The Second Sex" is impossible without some device for projection;

"It is impossible to be for one's self actually an other and to recognise oneself consciously as an object. The duality is merely dreamed. For the child this dream is materialised in the doll. She sees herself more concretely in the doll than in her own body, because she and the doll are actually separated from each other."8

Beecroft's models are like dolls and they represent the ability of the female to see herself, her appearance as other as is dictated by patriarchal society. It is almost as if the bodies of the women in the performance were not real and in a sense they are not, because they are constructions analogous to the art of Sherman and Beecroft. There is a photograph by the artist Francesca Woodman which I feel closely corresponds to Beecroft's work. In this image we see three naked women holding a print of Woodman's face in front of their own faces. It appears to me that it is easy for women to objectify themselves as they have often been treated as objects since childhood and easily take on the identity of others, because they are never themselves. Woodman's identity in this photograph is an image held by an image and we find the picture although uncanny almost strangely believable. This makes the viewer aware of how easy it is to transfer an identity on to women where the identity is subjugated to the body in the eyes of the male.

Another interesting thing that Beecroft's performances do is to create a kind of filmic deconstruction, as if the Beecroft multiples were each individual frames of a piece of film that have been exposed in the same place so that one can see the fragmentation that the technology of cinema hides and smoothes over. This is similar to the fragmentation within ourselves that is again smoothed over during the misrecognition of the mirror stage. A touching sequence of photographs by Francesca Woodman, entitled A Woman/A Mirror/A Woman is a Mirror for a Man, (Providence, Rhode Island,1975-1978) shows the artist enacting the mirror stage. First she tries to hold her reflection, expressing the joy the child feels on it's first experience of it's reflection.
In the other photographs we see the artist trying to place herself within her own reflection having failed to make that unity a part of her real self. Woodman sits awkwardly sandwiched between the mirror and a sheet of glass she holds to her body in an attempt to make her 'real' body a mere representation so that she might achieve that unity which has haunted her since she/we first misconceived of it's existence. To return to the initial question in which I considered Godard's investigation into representations of women, I must say that in my opinion Godard is perhaps less successful that the likes of Sherman and Beecroft in establishing a new deconstructed image of femininity. What is interesting about the work of the women artists I have looked at is that they bring that element of masquerade that is usually confined to the privacy of one's bedroom mirror to their photographs and art works. Godard is a man who must see woman as the symbol of existential otherness, he is not privy to our bedroom masquerades that are so clearly a part of the work of Sherman, Woodman and Beecroft. Godard's attempt to demystify women, deconstruct their cinematic surfaces by questioning, even interrogating them on screen, such as we see in "Masculine/Feminine" (Paris, 1965). In "Masculine/Feminine" Godard titles an interview with a young woman "Dialogue with a Consumer Product", asking questions like 'Would you rather have a car than your baccalaureate? Do you know what birth controls means? Do you often fall in love? etc.,. In this film it seems that Paul, the main male character struggles to understand and penetrate what is presented in the film as a large collective of femininity. At the end of the film Paul dies still trying to understand the 'masculine/feminine' equation. In this film Godard has established
something of where women stand to men, but not of what women really are. A role that Godard often places women in is that of the prostitute, their faces, their bodies, their surfaces are commodified and objectified by the male desire that they seek. This male desire establishes a route to the security the need in order to exist in a patriarchal society. This concept of woman as prostitute is explored in "Deux ou Trois Choses Que Je Sais D'elle" (Paris, 1966), in which the female protagonist takes to prostitution in order to buy various consumer goods including the clothes and make-up that contribute to her perfected surface, so that she in turn as a consumer product will continue to inspire male desire.9 It was that reflective consumer surface that Godard
in his 1969 film "British Sounds" attempted to defetishise and return the autonomy of her body to the woman.

However in 1985 with his film "Je Vous Salue Marie", which tell the story of a modern day virgin birth, Godard returns to a point of reverence for the mysterious female body, made more strange by Marie's virgin pregnancy.10 In her essay on Cindy Sherman, Elizabeth Bronfen writes of the "traditional images of femininity, aesthetic idealisation and the concept of an intact body of plenitude."11 This intact plenitude one could argue is in a sense alluding to the virgin birth (pregnancy) because the woman by being both virginal and pregnant has done the impossible. She has gained the complete fullness in being with child and yet remains intact. She has not yet
destroyed the surface of her image and so her unknowable and possibly disgusting insides need not bother us.

The manufacture of our images of women and cinema are similar as both go to great lengths in hiding the false image of plenitude they project. Cinema reinforces the deferment of femininity to the surface of the screen. When woman is merely an image illuminated in the light of the projector, men need not fear her bodily depths. It is not surprising that Godard, a man who worked all his life to expose the mechanism of cinema should attempt to deconstruct representations of women. However, when we leave him in 1985 with his film "Je Vous Salue Marie" (France, 1985), he has thrown up his hands and admitted the mystery of woman as something perhaps sacred and
therefore untransgressible.12 His failure may be that he carries out his dismantling of images of femininity in the same cold analytical, rigorously questioning manner that he used in attacking cinema, mistaking woman and cinema for each other. It is perhaps more productive to conduct such a deconstruction from the inside, which I feel makes the work of women artists like Sherman, Beecroft and Woodman more successful in this area. They approach the problem with less fear and distrust. In her 1974 short story, "Flesh and the Mirror", Angela Carter writes, "Women and mirrors are in complicity with one another to evade the action I/she performs that she /I cannot
watch, the action with which I break out of the mirror, with which I assume my appearance."13 Women can be aware of the potential power that lies in such a masquerade, drawing on the existential credo that existence precedes essence, that in reality we are all acting, constructing personas, governed by the conditions of our existence.

Footnotes

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