Gaze Regimes. Tsitsi Dangarembga

In the early days of the cinema, the eye of the camera continually unveiled women and thus subjected them to the desire of the ‘armed eye’. It is not by chance that simultaneously with the invention of photography and cinema, the phenomenon of anorexia nervosa emerged. Anorexia is the refusal to offer one’s own flesh to be devoured by the ‘voracious’ eye. Women withdraw from this gaze regime or ways of looking by attempting to become invisible. Today female cinematographers frequently deconstruct this system of looking through their own films as a matter of course.

      INES: Is unveiling always negative? Especially in Western cultures, we enjoy putting the female body on display, being able to reveal and celebrate it.

      CHRISTINA: Our ‘veil’ is called the pressure towards nudity. Think of the bikini. Since its invention women [have been] becoming increasingly thinner ... The freedom to be naked is always accompanied by a compulsion to conform to stereotypes and to assume a different body. We should proceed very carefully with this assumption that Western women are freer because they are dressed more revealingly. Of course, one can walk better with flat shoes and a life without a corset is also a better one, but freedom has not yet been achieved by an exposed navel.

      INES [TO TAGHREED]: Do you agree with that?

      TAGHREED: Of course. I’m also a victim of the Western ideal of beauty and would be glad to have a flat stomach and legs free of cellulite. But here in Johannesburg when I look at my colleagues who come from all over Africa, I think, so what, my figure is quite okay. The women here are all very proud of their bellies and they aren’t all flat! Even in the Sudan, the women are more relaxed with regard to their figures than the women in London, but without doubt the veil does have a repressive side.

      CHRISTINA: Of course.

      TAGHREED: For me, the veil symbolises compromise above all. I wear it as a courtesy to others or as a protective precaution against aggression to the extent that both the compulsion to reveal and that to conceal are instruments for the oppression of women. They serve exactly the same purpose, namely to force a feminine ideal onto the individual woman.

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      As is evident from this interview, the lived experiences of Christina von Braun and Taghreed Elsanhouri inform how each expresses her political positioning in relation to feminism. Their social contexts shape how the term is understood and, whether or not, it is enabling or disabling, depending on the filmmaker’s political and artistic agendas – which are informed by the geo-political places they occupy. While they may differ on the matter of feminism as a term and its multiple interpretations, they are unambiguous and unanimous on the subject of the ‘power of the camera’. Both celebrate its value as an instrument for social commentary. Both harness its power to subvert hegemonic gender dispositives. And both use the camera as an instrument to challenge acts of looking and ways of seeing to counter the historical construction of the gaze.