Women Filming Children

Abstract

In their volume, Cinema and the Second Sex, Carrie Tarr and Brigitte Rollet comment, 'One of the most frequently recurring topics of films directed by women in France, from the 1970s through to the 1990s, is the representation of childhood and adolescence'. 1 They remark on this choice of subject matter, on this linking of women with children. On the one hand, '[b]y focusing on childhood and adolescence, women directors are drawing on material which has conventionally been considered appropriate for women's filmmaking';2 yet, they argue too that women filmmakers' 'foregrounding of the perceptions of child or adult protagonists whose experiences are normally marginal and marginalized has the potential to challenge hegemonic adult modes of seeing and displace the fetishistic male gaze of dominant cinema'.3 I am concerned here with the ways in which that displacement is effected. This article focuses on the work of two contemporary French women filmmakers, Martine Dugowson and Sandrine Veysset, who have foregrounded the subjectivity and bodily experience of child protagonists. Dugowson's and Veysset's work has been particularly remarkable in this field. In a broader study, it might be compared with representations of childhood and adolescence in the work of Diane Kurys (for example, Diabolo menthe, 1977, Coup defoudre, 1983) and Noemie Lvovsky (La Vie ne mefail pas peur, 1999) (explored already by Tarr and Rollet), or more recently of Patricia Mazuy (Saint-Cyr, 2000) and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi (Il est plus facile pour un chameau ... , 2003). My concern here, however, is to consider such French cinematic representations of children within a broader optic, looking at questions of the politics and aesthetics of child representation in (first world) visual culture. It is this context which affords insight into the displacement of the fetishistic gaze of dominant cinema identified by Tarr and Rollet. In this regard, representations of children by contemporary French women filmmakers may usefully be compared with those of other contemporary women directors such as Jane Campion, Agnieszka Holland or Lynne Ramsay. This article proceeds, then, with a brief critical and cultural overview, before offering a particular focus on Dugowson and Veysset.