and in 2006 you made your first documentary film, All About Darfur. What meaning does ‘own culture’ have for you?
TAGHREED: I haven’t any ‘own culture’. I live in a state of continuous psychological stress and tension. As an adolescent I felt this hybridity to be burdensome, but today I experience it as a source of creativity.
CHRISTINA: You mentioned that in All About Darfur many women didn’t want to express an opinion in front of the camera. Why is this?
TAGHREED: There are many reasons. For a start, I am a city woman and many of my interview partners in the Sudan came from the countryside and had never been to school. For that reason, there was an enormous gap in education. In addition, I was working with a cameraman. But, interestingly, the women always immediately understood that I was the boss and not the cameraman. Most Sudanese women aren’t used to being asked for their opinion or advice, especially not where political topics are concerned. My question as to how they experienced the partition of the Sudan was probably too political, and because of their insecurity in being invited to express an opinion, the women then hid behind their veils. The younger ones started to giggle while the older ones become pointedly quiet. In the end I needed a week to gain their confidence, but I learnt my lesson. If I wanted the voices of women, especially in remote regions, then I had to plan in production to spend more time with the women and gain their confidence. This additional time also costs more money.
CHRISTINA: What does it mean to be a woman with a camera and to be filming in a culture that prefers to avoid direct eye contact? Isn’t that almost obscene?
TAGHREED: In some ways it is brutal, to say the least, but it’s very important to me. In fact, I insist on direct eye contact. Perhaps this is where my Western education comes into play or perhaps I’m too hard on my culture. But no, I don’t think that I should have to apologise only because I’m demanding something.
CHRISTINA: But couldn’t the avoidance of eye contact between the sexes also be a sign of respect?
TAGHREED: It does involve respect, but it is a double-edged respect. I interpret men’s looking away from me particularly as a lack of attention to me. It is as if they don’t believe I could be capable of understanding their words and deliberations.
INES: If you were a man, do you believe you would have been addressed directly?
TAGHREED: Yes, of course. Men address each other directly and women address each other directly. Men to men and women to women.
INES: According to this, the camera does assist in adopting a male subject position as women therefore garner more respect?
TAGHREED: As a documentary filmmaker the camera unconditionally is subject to my control and I can ask the questions, and in this context one can’t just ignore me. For me, the averted gaze is a metaphor for the majority of people in the Sudan who don’t want to confront reality. They want to look away and they don’t want to take any responsibility. This is what makes me very angry. But with the camera – my camera can confront people with their averted gaze and it relentlessly demands attention. If I speak in front of the camera, I am then always challenged to reflect on my words and this requires self-reflection from both the filmmaker and the conversation partner.
CHRISTINA: What a wonderful description of the work of a female cinematographer!
INES [TO CHRISTINA]: At the same time, this intimacy with the camera eye, connoted as masculine, diverges clearly from your interpretation. You rather saw the camera as an instrument of repression that transformed women into objects of the male gaze.
CHRISTINA: Yes, certainly; historically, this analysis is correct. 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.
•
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.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
