Alanis Obomsawin: The Vision of a Native Filmmaker

3. A Gendered Gaze?

Kim — University of Nebraska Press / Page 70 / / ALANIS OBOMSAWIN / Randolph Lewis 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 [First Page] [70], (1) Lines: 0 to 60 ——— 11.5pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [70], (1) 3 A Gendered Gaze? In our language there is no word for he or she. Alanis Obomsawin Is it significant that the cardinal figure in Native filmmaking is female ? Yes, I think so, although in ways that are more complex than I initially expected. I went into this project with some unexamined assumptions about the way gender identity would play out on-screen for Obomsawin, and I fear that this could have overdetermined my reading of her films. Yet, if I have labored under some initial naïveté in asking how her gender position influences her cinematic production , I am not alone: film scholars have debated the meaning of this question, in various forms, for the past three decades.1 In the pages ahead, I hope to explore the challenges of generalizing about the socalled female gaze and about what happens when a woman is calling the shots in documentary production. We might begin by asking if it is even possible for Obomsawin to present a female gaze when she works so often with a maledominated crew of National Film Board (nfb) professionals, from sound recordists to cinematographers to editors? Although her collaborative process would seem to complicate the picture, it is, I think, possible that her filmmaking gaze remains gendered. After all, it was Kim — University of Nebraska Press / Page 71 / / ALANIS OBOMSAWIN / Randolph Lewis A GENDERED GAZE? 71 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 [71], (2) Lines: 60 to 62 ——— 5.19498pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [71], (2) figure 16. Obomsawin during the shooting of Richard Cardinal in 1983. Courtesy of the filmmaker. her controlling intelligence that shaped her film projects from start to finish and made her a nonfiction auteur rather than a mere cog in the nfb machine—after all, among other duties, she conceives, researches, writes, narrates, directs, and coproduces almost all her films. And she brings, I believe, a particular intelligence to all these roles, one that reflects her experience as a gendered—as much as a racialized—neocolonial subject. Her choice of subject, her style of storytelling, and her way of interacting with interviewees all seem to come out of an implicit sense of sisterhood running throughout her work as well as, of course, her commitment to her Abenaki past and her First Nations future. The feminist impulse is most obvious in a film such as Mother of Many Children, although it shapes all Obomsawin’s work to some degree. As the reading of the film in chapter 2 should suggest, Mother of Many Children is a clear tribute to the underappreciated strength and diversity of Native women as well as a call to unity for reasons of sisterhood as much as race. As such, its gender politics are unmistakable. Then why does the filmmaker seem hesitant to talk about gender with the same passion and effusion that she brings to discussions of race? I suspect that her reluctance is less a failure of Kim — University of Nebraska Press / Page 72 / / ALANIS OBOMSAWIN / Randolph Lewis 72 A GENDERED GAZE? 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 [72], (3) Lines: 62 to 65 ——— 14.0pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [72], (3) political commitment than a product of her generational and class background. As an Abenaki woman who grew up in an impoverished small town during the Depression and the Second World War,she did not come of age when feminist was a common term, nor did she have a chance to attend a university, where feminist theory or women’s studies might have been taught. This lack of exposure may explain why she views a feminist position as a potential limitation, as if...