The Indirect Sex: The Sociocultural Significance of Eye Contact in Lesbian Cinema

Modern queer media is known for its commitment to the use of implicit methods to portray affection within sapphic and lesbian relationships. From the reevaluation of the relationship dynamics between English authors Vita Sackville-West and Viriginia Woolf in the 2018 film “Vita and Virginia,” to the use of close-shot techniques to highlight the developing scene between Alike and Bina in Dee Rees’ “Pariah,” one of the most effective methods used is the gaze shot. The gaze shot — a technique that attempts to depict one character staring at a subject outside of the general frame — acts as something of a training bra for the art of lesbian filmmaking. Directors of queer and sapphic films often utilize close and wide shots of intimate body parts of lesbian characters to highlight the pressures of compulsory heterosexuality and the forced ambiguity sapphic relationships in popular culture must take on as a result. 

When one thinks of sapphic film, there is imagery of a gaze. The technique of narrative storytelling and the procession of romantic union manifest in the way two characters look at each other, with the transcendence of these gazes becoming something of a plot device in its own right. Portrayals of change in the mutual gaze act as a developing agent to foreshadow the nature of that character’s relationship at a particular point in time. Zoom and angular shots of eyes highlight irises and sub-hues within the eye itself. This conveys the complexities of sapphic relationships and evokes an impressionistic quality in the characters. This is projected onto the viewer to further create an artistically erotic experience.  

The technique of gaze shooting in lesbian filmmaking resembles the mirror stage, a psychoanalytic phenomenon coined by French psychiatrist Jacques Lacan. The mirror stage refers to the stage of infancy between six to eighteen months where a child begins to develop a sense and context of the self and identity. Individuals become in charge of their images and portrayals both as subjects and objects. The concept of sapphic characters closely looking at themselves and each other allows for the camera to become a narrator who possesses their own identity — one that is capable of envisioning the selfhood of the subject character, an object character, and the viewers as spectators of a created reality. 

 Celine Sciamma’s “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” Hiroshi Ando’s “Blue,” and Todd Haynes’ “Carol” all utilize covert shared perception and the use of anatomical close-shooting techniques to reconstruct the nature of female desire from a physical and psycho-cultural standpoint. Each of these works emphasizes the covert, comparative and personally significant nature of sapphic relationships in print and digital media portrayals.

The versatile filmography of French director Céline Sciamma ultimately dictates the manner and significance of camera work as used to paint the narrative and set the scene. Her 2019 film “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” integrates Sciamma’s signature close shots as well as multifaceted gaze shots, an homage to 18th-century still life portraiture. This technique creates an outline of the personally erotic nature of an affair between an artist and her muse. Marianne, the film’s protagonist and aforementioned artist, acts not as a dynamic narrative entity, but rather as a motif for the female artists gone unrecognized throughout the period. 

The clean lines and rawness present in the close shots taken of Marianne’s eyes allow for a deeper sense of the viewer’s imagination in the broader context of Marianne and Heloise, the subject she is commissioned to paint a wedding portrait of in secret. Conversely, the portrait and close-up shots of the two women feature hyper-naturalistic imagery with vivid rendering of each character’s facial features with very little interpretation present when referring to the gazes of the respective characters themselves, conveying both closeness and distance between the two simultaneously.

As opposed to one-off shots of a character recognizing feelings through a singular gaze shot, it is the gazes between each other that underscore the intricate nature of Marianne and Heloise as individuals in relation to one another. The deeply descriptive and physical nature of both the film’s characters creates a removal between the viewer and the internal consciousness of Marianne and Heloise through intensifying the emphasis on the way the women look at each other — with eye contact speaking for itself in its own right. The strength and power of Marianne and Heloise’s gazes could convey both shock and impulse — both their commitment to each other and apprehension to forbidden desire. The film’s cinematographer, Thomas Grézaud, utilizes still images of the two women, shot separately and together, to create naturalistic yet subjective perceptions of both physical and emotional indicators of the love between them.  

Although the significance of eye contact is crucial in depicting and discussing love, the deeply political nature of female-on-female attraction is affirmed with the use of close shots of women falling in love. British film theorist Laura Mulvey attributes the practice of gaze shooting in woman-centered films to the subversion of patriarchal culture. The use of silent images, distant silhouette-focused shots of women or the female figure as the object of the camera’s gaze imposes on the female sphere, evoking meaning in another character rather than allowing her to create meaning for herself or the larger narrative. The use of naturalistic, gaze-focused point-of-view shots in sapphic film actively introduces and develops integral aspects of the plot and general themes of stigmatized manifestations of affection and desire.  

In “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” gaze shooting complements the film’s setting of an isolated island and its restrained use of wide shots, creating an intimate language. In contrast, Hiroshi Ando’s “Blue,” filmed in 2002, takes on gaze shooting with a much more slow-acted and subjective approach. 

The film, based on a manga by Kiriko Nananan, follows the love story of two Japanese high school students, Kayako Krishima and Masami Endo, as they navigate their lives after high school. Like Sciammas’ piece, the use of gaze shooting in this film follows the traditional technique of a character staring at an off-screen subject, but Ando also features mostly two-shot gaze images that highlight the conflicting gazes and subject–object perspective of the relationship between Kayako and Endo. The central marker for the efficacy of gaze shots in the film is a testament to Ando’s strong establishment of distance and reclusion. While “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” is set on a remote island off the coast of France, “Blue” is set in a town outside Tokyo, with most of the scenes between the leads taking place in three central locations: their all-girls high school in flashback scenes, Endo’s home and various remote locations within Tokyo’s supposed boundaries. These gaze shots are typically still shots of one character focusing on another in a busier background, with Kayako primarily serving as the eye and Endo taking a more objective role in the significance of the scene. Towards the end of the film, there are a few two-shot gaze images where Kayako and Endo mutually confess their feelings predominantly through eye contact. 

Although the film takes place in a major city — a setting considered by many to be a source of possibility and promise — the distance and dissonance in the gazes between Kayako and Endo portray the possibilities of teenage romance in an alternative sense. The strong subtlety of Ando’s close shots brings light and awareness to the boundary between who can and cannot express love in a specific circumstance. 

The development of their love emerges from Kayako’s willingness to take Endo in as the object of the gaze, with Ando giving very few opportunities for Endo to optically declare her love for Kayako herself. This, in turn, depicts her as the bearer of desire, creating a subject–object relationship between the two young women from the spectators’ point of view. While the ending of the film, when Kayako and Endo share their first kiss, could be considered cliché for films that depict young love, it is the only occurrence allotted for an overt fruition of their mutual attraction; an act that serves as a deeply profound commentary on the mutual and contextual gaze that purports underrepresented manifestations of love and desire. 

From a female viewer’s perspective, the act of watching a mutual gaze between two female characters is considered to be psychosexually pleasing from a gyno-scopophilic perspective. Freudian psychoanalytic terminology refers to scopophilia as the pleasure of seeing, viewing and perceiving. Freud explains scopophilia as an immediately and innately affirming and gratifying behavior, and as one that people are innately drawn to the familiarity and curiosity that emerges when we subconsciously accept others as objects and dictate and control their perceptions through our own eyes. Scopophilia is a known pleasure that has a strong presence in cinema and television. Sapphic filmmaking, through the lens of Western feminist film theory as well as in a broader context, revolves heavily around the depiction and perception of women as both makers and carriers of desire, repositioning the sexualization of women in film to be redirected to female spectators themselves. 

Aspects of gaze shooting can be utilized both structurally and reconstructively to establish the external subtlety and internal intensity that is often associated with sapphic relationships. In Todd Haynes’ 2015 film “Carol” — the film’s title a play on the British edition of Patricia Highsmith’s “The Price of Salt” (1952) — centers a love story in 1950s New York between Therese, an aspiring photographer, and Carol, an older married woman, which comes with a reemergence of traditionalist social structures for women in economically stimulated environments. 

Unlike the work of Sciamma and Ando, where gaze shooting is used in tandem with standard conventions of plot development, gaze shooting is the dominant medium of plot development within Haynes’ film, with the two women making eye contact in standard gaze shots moving between their affections. The opening scene, in which Therese and Carol first meet, Therese is the dominant subject of eye contact, with more one-shots panned to Therese’s fixed gazes made towards Carol as the latter shops for her daughter’s Christmas present. The viewer is fixated on Therese’s gaze at this point in the film, which is how eye contact is utilized between the two for the first few scenes. This mirrors the risks for each woman, as they question whether they are to pursue their relationship further. 

As the film progresses, Haynes begins to shift the dominant subject of the film between both women, with the power of their particular gazes becoming more and more apparent in scenes of conflict. Almost all of the gaze images are one-shot, with Therese initiating most scenes of eye contact within the rising aspects of the movie. The lack of strong gazes on Carol’s end at the beginning of the film reflects how her desire to stay with her child hinders Carol from loving Therese freely, while the initiating shots from Therese reference how her youth and creative goals create intrigue, driving Therese’s desire to remain close to Carol. 

The progression of the film constantly reinforces why such gazes are needed. The two women stand in something of a societal crisis in terms of their lives for various reasons — Therese is on the verge of getting married to a man named Richard, while Carol is in the process of ending her marriage as a result of her husband, Harge, finding out about her affair. Both Richard and Harge find out separately that the two women love each other, with their gazes meeting more frequently as their love begins to bleed into different aspects of their lives. The discovery of Carol’s relationship with Therese causes Carol to become prohibited from seeing her daughter on the grounds of a “morality clause” legal argument from the counsel of her former husband, with the gazes in previous shots emphasizing how heteronormativity impacts one woman’s personal acknowledgement of her love for the other. 

The articulation and overall conception as to how sapphic films use gaze shooting illustrate the power of looking for the opposing and others from a sociocultural perspective can be best explained by American sociologist bell hooks’ sociological theory of the oppositional gaze. As stated by hooks’ theory, an individual in a marginalized position within a society is innately conditioned to be afraid of looking. When one is afraid to look, there is increased emphasis on the gaze. This suppression of seeing from hooks’ perspective encourages optical rebellion, stating that the repression of marginalized people’s right to gaze produces an intense desire to look, creating the concept we now know as the oppositional gaze. 

Sapphic relationships have the capability of acknowledging and pursuing a dualistic framework on who possesses the right to gaze. Heteronormative society has the privilege of viewing lesbianism through an oppositional lens, while lesbian women throughout time have largely been denied the right to gaze at one another. The use of the gaze shooting technique both affirms and subverts the impact heteronormativity has over lesbian thought and practice, as the nature of lesbian film invites and provides agency to sapphic film viewers. The emphasis on eye contact in queer and sapphic media gives its audience the power to become both the bearers and makers of the gaze, embracing perception as a form of resistance and endowing the sapphic gaze with the power to reconstruct what we know as reality.