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2010 WMW Film Festival
2010-11-01
On Recording Bodily Experience

Fang-Chih Irene YANG (Associate Professor, Department of Taiwanese Literature, National Cheng Kung University)

Bodies age, ache, become sick, and perish. They also provoke infinite pleasant sensations. These sensual feelings, on the one hand, are the physical experience deriving from the materiality of bodies; on the other, they are inseparable from socio-cultural norms and disciplines. The desire for young bodies in our culture brings forth our shame and anxiety about aging bodies. Similarly, when our society regards women as men’s subordinates, men can easily possess and violate women’s bodies. Consequently, the female bodily experience is unavoidably linked with fear. These “norms” discipline and constrain how we interpret our bodily experience and thus lead our bodies to different paths of life among the interlocking mappings of corporeal materiality and social disciplines.

Orgasm Inc. and Picture Me investigate how the standard of female bodies is formed and the different roles that interest groups play in the construction process of the so-called “common sense.” The former reveals the intervention of pharmaceutical industries in the discourse of female bodies with new knowledge of medical science/sexual behaviors: women are diagnosed as having Female Sexual Dysfunction (FSD) if they do not have orgasm or lack interest in sex; the treatment is to take Female Viagra. By constructing FSD as a physical illness and creating new medicine, pharmaceutical industries and renowned doctors go hand in hand to gain massive profits. Nevertheless, as the documentary shows, women’s sexual desire should not be interpreted merely as a physiological problem that can be solved by a pill. The achievement of satisfying sexual experience requires conducive environments, healthy relationships and considerate men. Besides, every woman is a unique individual whose feelings cannot be simplified by a universal measure of sex experience.

Picture Me shows how our culture’s standard of beauty for the female body is constructed by fashion industries and also the confessions from the industry “laborers” (models). Following the director who used to be a top model, we are offered the chance to take a peek into the dark corners under the glamorous surface of modeling lifestyle. Here, models have to endure sexual harassment from photographers, and are just objects to be randomly manipulated. They make good salaries, but at the price of working day and night and shuttling between big cities like London, Milan, Paris and so on. They are also easily replaced by the younger generations for the industry turnover rate is quite high. Interestingly, however, while these models set up the standard of beauty for us, they are still not perfect enough in the eyes of the photographers and designers who only regard the figures of girls aged from 12 to 16 as standard ones. Such surveillance ─ both external and internal ─ generates their anxiety about their appearances as well as figures that never are perfect enough.

Likewise, many women’s anxiety comes from the skinniness of body aesthetics in fashion industries. Lightness describes how a little girl finds her sister’s fasting in order to have a slim, model-like figure through the camera. In the diary her sister writes: “The light body makes me feel incomparably strong.” Yet this light body is going to perish like a butterfly disappearing in the world. Apart from that, how do we find the way of life if our bodies are different from those slim pretty ones exhibited by the mainstream media? Vital Signs is a story about a physically-disabled girl, Simone, who shares the most intimate moments with the dying elderly in the nursing home. Here we see faces full of age and pain, and the poignancy, anger as well as degradation of those elderly after losing their mobility and dignity. We also see Simone’s incomplete body and life: she proves her completeness of being an independent individual by taking care of the elders, yet it is an excuse to escape from her own world. In the end, she realizes the fragility of human bodies and the mutual reliance among people and accepts her boyfriend’s love.

Bodily discourse centered on male subjectivity has constructed skinny and weak female bodies, and degrade those who gain pleasure from heterosexual penetrating sex. Benefiting from such discourse, men consider themselves as having the right to own everything, including women. They rationalize that women’s bodies are theirs to be possessed or violated whenever they want. Ella, Variety Survival Talkshow and Angry Man talk about the bodily violence men have unleashed upon women. Ella is crazy because she lives in the shadow of a childhood gang rape. She drives away all but one social worker from Russia. Ella finds a common language between herself and the young social worker who she can’t communicate with in the beginning. By sharing the same experience ─ being harassed by the same guy and standing against him, their dialogue goes from “I don’t understand” to “I understand.” Living under the same structure of male violence, women of different countries, classes and ages find their own languages to support and understand each other.

Variety Survival Talkshow documents the victims of sexual violence in Korea. Women who have been sexually abused gather together in the feminist group, “Small Talk,” and share their experience to self-heal with each other’s support. Some choose to confess in private space, and some in public. Either way they have challenged the view that sex crimes are a women’s shame. They have declared to their society: “It is not our fault, but the fault of our violence abusers, that we were sexually offended.” Despite the patriarchal statement shown in the documentary that women are responsible for their being raped, we see the power and vitality of these women. Angry Man deals with the impacts of domestic violence upon children. Through the form of animation, it narrates the father’s violence, the mother’s weakness and the child’s trauma which could only be healed by imagination that creates a world without fear and full of love.

Imagination is the route for the films mentioned above to get away from patriarchy. If the aim of all the patriarchal discourses is to domesticate our bodies and bodily experience, the materiality of our bodies overflows the boundary of these discourses. Each film records the formation of patriarchy and its operation. Moreover, with imagination and critique, these films ─ which adopt various cinematic formats and languages ─ have created the cinema aesthetics of intimacy. What is revealed is not only the discipline and harm inflicted on female bodies but also the subversive and collective power of women.