克莱尔的相机

《克莱尔的相机》邀请了两个重量级演员：一个韩国大美女金敏喜，一个法国国宝级演员于佩尔，作为陪衬，讲述了一个极具现实意义的故事：导演怎么去寻找灵感？是否需要为艺术献身？献身后的羞耻感怎么破？

不过这个导演非常幸运，周围有个从生活和情感上都给予无微不至照顾的制片人。导演为了艺术献身，她自然应该为导演扫平障碍，哪怕是一丁点的心理阴影。缪斯重要么？重要，但为了导演的未来，缪斯也可以成为随意牺牲的陪葬品。

于是，我们曾经腹黑、心计深沉大《小姐》金敏喜诱受，成功的变成了被随意牺牲的傻白甜缪斯。而且本片导演打破电影常规，用了几乎超越纪录片的超现实主义模式，采用家庭DV的拍摄手法，以毫不了解情况的外人——客观第三者的视角来展示这个复杂而深沉的主题。

几位主角的演技自是无可挑剔，因为作为客观第三者视角，我们大部分时间其实根本也看不到演员的表情，自是无可挑剔也无法挑剔的。

只有大师级导演才会成就这么先锋试验性的电影：完全打破一切电影镜头语言的常规要求，长时间两人对话的固定镜头；所有情节都是靠对话推进；时间顺序、逻辑顺序乱而不杂；风景优美的电影胜地戛纳，完全拍出了陈旧腐败、藏污纳垢的衰败感……我们应该为导演的大胆突破和对艺术的讽刺而喝彩！

习惯了精致的电影刚开始会觉得只有看似“小儿科”的推拉拍摄手法、英语书对话式的台词、尴尬的表演…像是戛纳的电影吗？是洪尚秀导演的作品吗？是年代比较久远电影的摄影艺术还在研究吗？慢慢的会发现这部电影是细腻的、直白的，没有过多的技巧，只运用了基本的推拉、变焦、一镜到底，看似尴尬的英文对话，但它确实这部电影里的唯一语言，洪尚秀能在短短的七十分钟内成熟的打造一个环绕结构，将金敏喜得美表达的特别细腻，中间那段无厘头的谩骂高潮其实特别的强，台词里暴露出苏导演对“美女”的刻板印象，女老板对万熙的嫉妒，克莱尔对万熙美的欣赏，以及万熙自己内心的温柔和细腻，与其说是三个人对万熙的美的影响，不如说是洪尚秀对金敏喜美的三种不同幻想吧，化身为中年女老板的嫉妒、男导演的爱而不得、女摄影师将她视为灵感缪斯的模特….三个不同身份的人对万熙的美产生了不同的影响，人物刻画十分成熟。看似儿戏的呈现手法，实则是一部十分成熟的电影，就像是洪尚秀的随笔，最浪漫最令人佩服的是，洪尚秀导演边参加戛纳边花9天时间拍摄出这部属于金敏喜的《克莱尔的相机》。

事实上，我并不觉得这部电影跟洪导演其他几部类似的电影有多少区别，或者它们真的可以被定义为电影吗？在以前我的印象里，电影就是要“隆重”，会有长长的厂商片头，干脆利落的剪辑以及至少跌宕起伏的剧情、对话，看一部电影之前是要有所“期待”的……原来电影也可以这样，就简简单单，甚至都鲜有配乐，看之前也不需要有什么“心理负担”和期待，就只要看就好了，就像要吃饭、喝水、睡觉一样自然，类似翻阅生活的日常片段……另外，只是单纯地觉得，能看到她，能听到她说话，心情就会变得美丽。（题外话，法语并不好听，说话像咯痰一样……）

还是典型洪尚秀，依然生活化，但更加随性。 洪尚秀电影的观感总是看似乏味又尴尬，不带有直观上的目的性。结尾也不常带有主观的升华， 好像是出门走进咖啡店里就能看见的场景 。

克莱尔说“拍下照片的一瞬间，你就不再是刚才的你了” 让我想起梁文道在《我执》里的一段描述：“这一刻的自己和上一刻的自己必然是不同的，现在正在写字的自己要比前一分钟的自己多写了一个句子，所以这前后，有两个人的存在。为了让我们必须实现昨天的承诺，偿还过去负下的罪债，而不是以“当日的我和现在的我不是同一个人”来推搪回避。”

克莱尔这番哲学意味的话对万熙和导演都说了，是刻意还是巧合？她手中的相机亦或是观众的眼睛，捕捉到这个故事， 完整的呈出，等待着评判。动机、道德、底线，这些因素都来不及思考之时，最先浮现的还是人性，可她究竟是万熙还是金敏喜好像都变得不再重要，她就像水，透明纯真，实则却又虚无，只隐约存在于映射水波的光线中。

洪的电影记录着大多是发生中的，正被遗忘的，或想要掩盖的。大众道德里的批判性，讽刺的对话设计，推拉镜头中放大的真实性情，让人无法抽离自我。小餐馆的烧酒与寿司，海边的踱步，窗边吐出的烟圈。全都裹满情绪的外衣在言语中流淌。那落下的每一滴，都是孤独的宣泄，欲望的本性。某刻，你也许会真实的为过去感到羞耻，但那只是上一刻的你我，没有必要去掩盖的过去。

爱看洪尚秀的人，我想大概是生活中多愁善感，善于品尝人生细微滋味的人。电影里尴尬美学流露的温情，观看时甚至产生倦意，过后也许会淡忘，或是逐渐消失殆尽，但那一刻还是会泪流满面。

在电影中捡拾记忆碎片，在湖面下寻着目的。试图发现或选择坦诚这些奥秘，通过电影放出那些隐藏的自己，虚幻的自己，对立的自己。又或许可以去尝试游走在其中，享受着虚无，放弃故事性的辩证，抛弃对立面的存在，不要再寻找所谓的好和坏。面对湖泊时，享受着波光粼粼或是索性闭上双眼，仅仅靠声响去探寻丢入的石子，然后幻想着涟漪的模样。

生活化的洪尚秀电影 我想应该是梦境里出现的最接近生活的湖泊了。

clit2014, jan 2, 晚交了20天，我再也不想上gender studies了我要吐了，写这篇paper不知道经历了多少mental breakdown

Women’s Experience Matters: Redefining Feminist Cinema through Claire’s Camera

As Laura Mulvey points out in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, traditional narrative cinema largely relies upon the practice of a gendered “gaze”, specifically, male’s unconscious objectification of female as erotic spectacle from which visual pleasure is derived. Her account draws attention to the prevailing feminist-unfriendly phenomena in contemporary cinema, one that resides in the language of patriarchy, privileging man’s experience while making woman the passive object deprived of autonomy. Many feminist filmmakers and theorists including Mulvey herself urge a radical strategy that dismantles patriarchal practice and frees woman from the state of being suppressed by the male-centered cinematic language.To conceptualize a mode of cinema that speakswoman’s language, or authentic feminist cinema, this essay interrogates the validity of Mulvey’s destruction approach in pursuing a feminist aesthetic. By making reference to Hong Sang-soo’s film, Claire’s Camera, I argue that feminist cinema needs to be redefined by neither the immediate rejection of gender hierarchy nor the postmodern notion of fluidity, but by perspectives that transcend the gendered metanarrative of subject vs. object, and that primarily represent and serve woman’s experience on both sides of the Camera.

Earlier waves of feminism strived to call attention to, if not, eliminate the unbalanced power relation between men and women in the society, namely the dichotomy between domination and submission, superiority and inferiority, and self and other (Lauretis 115). Feminists such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Simone de Beauvoir radically interrogated women’s rights in the political arena as well as women’s relative position to men in the society at large. However, the approaches of the earlier waves cannot prove themselves sufficient in pursuit of a female autonomy, owing to the fact that they are constantly caught in the power-oriented metalanguage which inherently privileges one over another. While it is argued that the objectification of the “second sex” is oppressive in nature, for example, the assertion already marks the subject-object dynamics between men and women by default. It fails to propose non-power based gender narratives, while obliquely acknowledging that the language spoken in this context is inevitably characterized by phallocentric symbols, ones that prioritize self over other, subject over object, male over female. In thisregard, rather than rendering a perspective that exposes and dismantles patriarchy, the outcome of earlier feminist approaches inclines towards “replicating male ideology” (Mackinnon 59), reifying the omnipresence of the patriarchal language and reproducing the effects of patriarchy.

A similar notion applies to defining feminist cinema. In terms of visual representation, feminist idealists encourage women to present their bodily spectacles, inviting interpretations free of erotic objectification. Despite the favorable receptions from the sex-positive side of the discourse, it is indiscernible as to whether these attempts truly free women from the dome of sex-negativism or reinforce the effect of the patriarchal language even more. This polarized debate, I believe, is due to the fact that the discourse is held captive by the language of patriarchy too powerful for one to extricate from, and that any rebellious gesture would appear to be an insufficient, passive rejection of the predominant ideology. To illustrate this point, Lauretis notes that Mulvey’s and other avant-garde filmmakers’ conceptualization of women’s cinema often associates with the prefix of “de-” with regards to “the destruction… of the very thing to be represented, …the deaestheticization of the female body, the desexualization of violence, the deoedipalization of narrative, and so forth” (175). The “de-” act does not necessarily configure a new set of attributes for feminist representation, but merely displays a negative reaction to a preexisting entity. It is important to be skeptical of its effectiveness in defining feminist cinema, as it implies certain extent of negotiation instead of spot-on confrontation with the previous value. A destructive feminist cinema can never provide a distinctive set of aesthetic attributes without having to seek to problematize and obscure the reality of a patriarchal cinema. In that regard, it is passive, dependent and depressed. More importantly, the question – how the destruction of visual and narrative pleasure immediately benefits women within the narrative and directly addresses female spectators – remains unanswered.

TakingClaire’s Cameraas an example, the film destructs the notion of a gendered visual pleasure by presenting the camera as a reinvented gazing apparatus, one that differs from the gendered gaze, and instead brings novel perception into being. Normally, when characters are being photographed, mainstream filmmakers tend to introduce a viewpoint in alignment with the photographer’s position, enabling spectator’s identification; that is, the shot usually shifts to a first-person perspective so that spectators identify with the photographer gazing at the object who is in front of the camera. Claire’s Camera, however, abandons this first-person perspective while generating new meanings of the gaze. Claire ambiguously explains to So and Yanghye the abstract idea that taking photographs of people changes the photographer’s perception of the photographed object, and that the object is not the same person before their photograph was taken. The spectacle, although objectifiable in nature, is not so passive as being the object constructed upon, but rather constructs new signification upon the subject. The notion of the gaze is therefore re-presented with alternative insights.

That being said, as I argued earlier, the destructive approach is not so sufficient an attempt at defining feminist cinema, because the way it functions nevertheless indulges feminist ideology in the role of passivity, deprived of autonomy and always a discourse dependent on and relative to the prepotency of patriarchy. In the conversation scene between So and Manhee, So, who is almost the age of Manhee’s father, criticizes her for wearing revealing shorts and heavy makeup. In a typically phallocentric manner, he insists that she has insulted her beautiful face and soul by self-sexualizing and turning into men’s erotic object. Despite the fact that the preceding scenes have no intention to eroticize the female body or sexualize her acts such that the visual pleasure is deliberately unfulfilled and almost completely excluded from the diegesis, So inevitably finds Manhee’s physical features provocative and without a second thought, naturally assumes that her bodily spectacle primarily serves man’s interest. This scene demonstrates that regardless of feminists’ radical destruction of visual pleasure, practitioners of patriarchal beliefs will not be affected at all; if any, the femininity enunciation only intensifies the social effects of patriarchy. The conversation between the two characters embodies the self-reflexive style of Hong Sang-soo’s filmmaking, in a sense that it fosters debates within the theoretical framework upon which it is constructed, and constantly counters itself in search of a deeper meaning, contemplating questions such as do we believe in what we practice, whether it is patriarchy or its opposite? And is anti-patriarchy feminism determined enough to prove itself a destructive force against patriarchy rather than a sub-deviant of a predominant ideology? The scene proves the drawback of a destructive strategy, that the way it operates nonetheless subscribes to a patriarchal manner, and that in order to escape the secondary position with respect to the phallocentric subject, more needs to be done other than problematizing the subject.

To supplement the insufficiency of destruction, postmodern feminists such as Judith Butler proposes theoretical alternative to approach the discourse. Butler argues that gender is performative and fluid instead of a set of essential attributes. The notion of performativity indeed precludes the social effects of essentialism by introducing the idea of an identity continuum into gender politics, in ways that empower the socially perceived non-normative. On top of that, Butler believes that the categorization of sex “maintain[s] reproductive sexuality as a compulsory order”, and that the category of woman is an exclusive and oppressive “material violence” (17). Acknowledging the harms that essentialist perception of gender and sexuality entails, Butler bluntly negates the very categorization of woman. This radical negation, however, evades the reality that our whole understanding of the human race is based on gender categories, despite the corresponding inequalities generated from the instinctual categorization. In fact, it is when women as a collective community have come to the realization that the female gender is socially suppressed, that they start to strive for equality through the apparatus of feminism. Butler’s rejection of the gender categorization withdraws the sense of collectivism in the feminist community, which is “an important source of unity” for the marginalized (Digeser 668). Moreover, it deprives the feminist cinema of the necessity of delineating an authentic female representation, because within the notion of performativity there is no such thing as a fixed set of female representations but only distinctive individuals that conform to gender fluidity. Since identifying with a certain form of representation means to live up to a socially perceived norm from which one deviates, a performative cinema does not encourage spectator’s identification. The failed identification will not only drastically shift the spectator’s self-understanding but also cause more identity crises. Therefore, performativity is too ideal a theoretical concept to have actual real-life applications.

Whether it is her body or her social function, woman has become the commodity of patriarchy. As Lauretis puts it, “she is the economic machine that reproduces the human species, and she is the Mother, an equivalent more universal than money, the most abstract measure ever invented by patriarchal ideology” (158). Woman’s experience has been portrayed in the cinematic realm nothing more than being the (m)other and the provocative body. Historical debates have proved that articulating the problematic tendencies within gender differences only results in skepticism rather than new solutions. Thus, in order to negotiate a feminist cinema, filmmakers need to abandon the patriarchal meta-language completely, and reconstruct new texts that represent and treasure woman’s experience more than just being the other, that “[address] its spectator as a woman, regardless of the gender of the viewers” (Lauretis 161).

Similarly, what needs to be done in feminist cinema is more than just interrogating the gender difference between woman and man, but interpreting such difference in unconventional ways that liberate women from being compared to men and invite them to possibilities of having narratives dedicated to themselves. One of the ways, Lauretis suggests, is to regard woman as the site of differences (168). This signifies that the cinema needs to stop generalizing woman’s role based on her universal functions; rather, it needs to articulate her unique features, what makes her herself but not other women, from the way she looks to the trivial details of her daily life. In Claire’s Camera, the function of the camera conveniently transcends the diegetic space. In the narrative, it demarcatesthe “site of differences”, that is, how someone changes right after their photograph is taken, as well as how Manhee is presented differently each of the three times being photographed. The camera also magnifies her experience as a woman for spectator’s identification, mundane as it could be. In the last scene, the camera smoothly tracks Manhee organizing her belongings, packing box after box, casually talking to a colleague passing by, and so forth. Long takes like this fulfill what Lauretis would call “the ‘pre-aesthetic’ [that] isaestheticrather than aestheticized” in feminist cinema (159). Without commodifying or fetishizing woman and her acts, the film authentically represents a woman’s vision, her perception, her routines, and all the insignificant daily events which female spectators can immediately relate to. When a film no longer solely portrays woman as the “economic machine” that labors, entices men, and commits to social roles, it has confidently overwritten the patriarchal narrative with a female language. It fully addresses its spectator as a woman, appreciating and celebrating the female sex, not for what she does as a woman but for what she experiences.

In conclusion, the essay first challenges the destructive approach in feminist cinema regarding its sufficiency in pursuit of woman’s autonomy and its indestructible destiny to fall back into patriarchy. The essay then argues that the rejection of gender categorization in performativity theory frustrates the mission of defining a female representation. Hong Sang-soo’s self-reflexive film, Claire’s Camera, offers an apparatus to delve into the drawbacks of destructive feminist cinema and simultaneously renders a new feminist code, abandoning the patriarchal metanarrative and constructing a new narrative that truly prioritizes woman’s experience.

Works Cited

Butler, Judith. “Contingent Foundations: Feminist and the Questions of ‘Postmodernism.’”Feminists Theorize the Political, edited by Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott, Routledge, 1992, pp. 3–21.

Digeser, Peter. “Performativity Trouble: Postmodern Feminism and Essential Subjects.” Political Research Quarterly, vol. 47, no. 3, 1994, pp. 655-673.

Lauretis, Teresa de. “Aesthetic and Feminist Theory: Rethinking Women's Cinema.”New German Critique, no. 34, 1985, pp. 154–175.

Lauretis, Teresa de. “Eccentric Subjects: Feminist Theory and Historical Consciousness.”Feminist Studies, vol. 16, no. 1, 1990, pp. 115–150.

Mackinnon, Catherine A. “Desire and Power.”Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law, Harvard University Press, 1987, pp. 46–62.

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.”The Norton Anthology and Theory and Criticism, edited by Vincent B Leitch, W. W. Norton, 2001, pp. 2181–2192.