Do gender, genre and the gaze still matter? Toward a feminine road movie in women’s experimental film

Abstract

ABSTRACT Seen as historically masculine, the road movie has privileged the white heterosexual male and thus perpetuated its traditional patriarchal configuration. To counteract the genre’s gendered nature, some scholars have pointed to the growing need to study women’s road movies, yet never in the context of experimental filmmaking, which was institutionalized as thoroughly masculine with women’s work dismissed as peripheral or excessively lyrical. To fill this gap, I build on feminist geography and automobilities research to discuss the “feminine” road movie aesthetics in contemporary experimental films, Sophie Calle’s No Sex Last Night (1992), Su Friedrich’s Rules of the Road (1993), Michaela Grill’s Carte Noir (2014) and Faith Arazi and Madeleine Mori’s Through a Field (2019). While Carte Noir and Through a Field construct a lone female nomadic story and Double Blind and Rules of the Road embrace the couple road movie format, all works contest the road as a masculine space and question the genderedness of mobility through a strong emphasis on the (female) self and embodied practices of driving. This signals the cinematic transformation of women from a desired object to a creative subject, consequently denying the spectator the usual pleasures associated with voyeurism, fetishism and the (patriarchal) spectacle.