Another Gaze Journal

Luis Buñuel’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights, Abismos de pasión (1954) opens with a declaration of fidelity: ‘Above all, this picture tries to remain true to the spirit of Emily Brontë’s novel.’ By contrast,“Wuthering Heights”, written and directed by Emerald Fennell, refuses such constraints. Referring to those quotation marks in the title, and the detachment and looseness they imply, Fennell has said in an interview that ‘you can’t adapt a book as dense and complicated and difficult as this’.

A selection of Paula Gaitàn's films will be available to watch on Another Screen later in the week. In 2023, Maria Chiaretti and I ran into each other as I was walking home from a cinema in São Paulo where I’d watched Paula Gaitán’s Luz nos trópicos (Light in the Tropics, 2020). She hadn’t yet read the message I’d sent as I was leaving the cinema: ‘WTF. Just saw Luz nos Trópicos.

Another Gaze was founded in 2016 by two recent graduates who were motivated by an enthusiasm for women’s films and feminist theory. Unexpectedly to us, the journal took off – but, in retrospect, this reflected the times. With the newly politicised publics that multiplied in the 2010s (Me Too, of course, was one movement among them), there was an appetite for more than shallow appropriations of feminism, an appetite for more nuanced engagement with the cultural sphere.

Niki de Saint Phalle hated laundry. When she was twelve years old, there was a decisive moment in the linen closet with her mother. ‘She was counting out the sheets and the towels,’ the artist later recalled. ‘I will never do that, I told her… Never will I spend time doing anything like that.’Niki de Saint Phalle, ‘Feminism’ [undated] in Nicole Rudick, What Is Now Known Was Once Only Imagined: An (Auto)biography by Niki de Saint Phalle (New York: Siglio Press, 2022), 128.

Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt begins with the non-diegetic sound of a ticking clock. In the context of this sleek campus drama, that menacing sound might represent the ‘tenure clock’. Whether Yale will grant tenure—protected, permanent employment at the university—to either Alma Imhoff (Julia Roberts) or Hank Gibson (Andrew Garfield) will structure the events that follow.

“An intense battle has begun to do away with that great relic of the past, the latifundium.” The line is delivered over a trembling shot of a densely forested path during a small scene in El primer año (The First Year, 1972), a film made by Patricio Guzmán the year Salvador Allende was elected the president of Chile. This particular latifundium, an agricultural estate in Cautín Province, has long been abandoned.

Lynn Hershman Leeson defies categorisation. Her artworks are sketched, photocopied, filmed, sculpted, broadcast, cut and pasted. They are encased in glass, tucked beneath blankets, animated by sound. They visit the California Department of Motor Vehicles and submit application forms for driving licences. They meet suitors for dates in San Francisco’s Union Square, wearing blonde wigs and Revlon blush.

Nothing has been as persistent as the universal sense of grief we have experienced over the last few years. A grief that cannot be pushed away or remade into fuel for something else and whose collective nature ensures no escape. Two films by the promising visual artist Leena Habiballa transform this affect into a historical and political question, grounding it in a genealogy and ecology of social relations.

In the beginning, there is fog and there is thunder. The Gods are enraged. It is a struggle to see the mountains and their trees. After some time, darkness comes; a night that would render the two figures in the landscape almost imperceptible if it weren’t for their cries. As dawn arrives, a man in red emerges, clambering up a steep incline. So far, so arduous—and seemingly doomed.

The idea that femininity is a performance that alienates the subject from herself has gained even greater ground in the age of reality television, the infinite scroll and the self as a brand, with all the blurring between the ‘artificial’ and the ‘real’ that such endeavours entail. At the same time, our world is in ever-greater thrall to the seductions of the image, and the rewards of a successful femme performance – if reports of influencer earnings are to be trusted – are astronomically high.