Think You’re a Filmmaker, Not a Film Theorist? Think Again by Raffey Cassidy

Film theory can be a hard sell. Its ideas are often abstract, dense, and may seem far removed from the practical realities of making films. But the danger is that the contribution and impact theory has on filmmaking is overlooked in favor of film practice – making films.  Making films is obviously the goal, but having some awareness and understanding of why we do the things we do, not just how we do them, gives us broader and deeper insight into filmmaking practice so that we can challenge the way we make films and create new, original, and progressive approaches to filmmaking. Theory gives us the tools to question established practices. 

Now I certainly wouldn't claim to fully understand every corner of film theory, but after years of grappling with abstract concepts, I can at least share some insight into the more prevalent ones I’ve encountered that stand out for the impact they've had on how we talk about cinema. One of these is the ‘male gaze’, a concept originally introduced, or at least formalized, by Laura Mulvey, British feminist and film theorist, in her seminal essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, first published in 1975. Definitions of the concept commonly reference an unequal power dynamic, where the heterosexual male perspective (pleasure) dominates all aspects of filmmaking and spectatorship, positioning women primarily as objects of male desire. The essence of the concept is captured by art critic John Berger in his 1972 book Ways of Seeing, where ‘men act, and women appear’. 

Why does the male gaze matter, you ask? The male gaze marks a revelation in critical film theory, where a practice that formed the foundations of ‘Hollywood’ filmmaking without previous scrutiny was now under the microscope. The concept provided the language to challenge the practice and recognize its negative impact on how women were depicted and represented in film. One example of such a challenge is French filmmaker and artist Agnès Varda’s eight-minute documentary short Réponse de Femmes (Women Reply: Our Bodies, Our Sex). Released in 1975, the short actively confronts and dismantles the objectified, eroticised, and silenced representations of women in film. Through the documentary, Varda, like Mulvey, sought to undermine traditional forms of visual satisfaction and pleasure that she argued dominated in cinema.  

Mulvey had made it clear that it is possible to dismantle the ‘ideal’ that the camera must identify with a male protagonist, and Varda’s contribution to this idea was significant. Rather than rejecting the notion of ‘perspective’, Réponse de Femmes actively embraces it by adopting the female perspective while at the same time rejecting the male gaze. 

Heralding the ‘female gaze ’, Varda challenges the notion of women as passive, silent images by building the film around a simple question: What is it to be a woman? The women interviewed [in 1975] answer that to be a woman is to be born with a female body, a response that reveals the extent to which women are often defined, both by society and sometimes by themselves, through their sex and physical anatomy. The film repeatedly pushes back against this narrow definition. In one memorable sequence, women dance naked alongside children. Rather than framing the women as objects to be looked at, Varda films the scene as though we are sharing their perspective. Crucially, the scene is presented in a non-sexualized way that resists voyeurism and denies the audience the kind of visual gratification traditionally associated with the male gaze. 

Within the same sequence, Varda also engages with Mulvey's concept of castration anxiety. Mulvey describes this as the perceived threat posed by the female body to the male unconscious, a fear that she argued shaped many of cinema's representations of women. By presenting female nudity without transforming it into a fetishized spectacle, Varda confronts this anxiety directly while refusing to satisfy what Mulvey saw as the male gaze's desire for control and visual possession.

By stripping away what Varda regarded as the satisfaction and privilege traditionally granted to the spectator, Réponse de Femmes becomes a form of counter-cinema that directly opposes dominant cultural assumptions. Instead of allowing the camera to adopt the perspective of the male protagonist, it restores a perspective that had so often been denied. For perhaps the first time in modern cinema, audiences are invited to consider what a female gaze might look like.

More than simply an abstract concept discussed in film theory classes, the male gaze remains a powerful framework for understanding inequality in cinema. It challenged a long-standing tradition that positioned men as active agents and women as passive spectacles as the norm in cinema. Contemporary examples demonstrating the continued influence of gaze theory on even mainstream filmmaking include films such as Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman and Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, where satire is used as a device to critique how women are perceived in male-dominated spaces, or Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike, which flips the power dynamic by exploring the male body and adopting the female gaze. Even the recent mandatory introduction of intimacy coordinators on film sets can arguably be attributed to an extension of gaze theory and its influence on production ethics, protecting actors from exploitation that might involve traditional male gaze framing during intimate scenes. 

The male gaze serves as just one example of how film theory and filmmaking are inextricably connected, and how film theory can, and does, influence filmmaking and reshape cinema.