Yesterday in class we watched a French film called La Jetee (there’s an accent over that first e but I can’t figure out how to get it there).

I’ve already been thinking quite a lot about the interaction between words, sounds, image, and meaning, so in that respect, this was just fuel for the fire.  I’ve been thinking about maybe trying out some photocomics for my second project (which is actually our first big project), and the film was interesting because you could sort of think of it as a cinematic photocomic — instead of words on a page, there was voiceover and a little bit of dialogue.

In class, before we even started watching the film, Sandy warned us in pretty blunt language that it was “sexist.”  I’m gradually moving into the kind of viewer who doesn’t like to know anything about what I watch before I watch it, no trailers, no hype, nothing (although that’s admittedly nearly impossible).  But she wasn’t wrong – I just wish I’d been able to come to that conclusion on my own, a little.

So watching the film, of course its sexism — or at least its lack of feminism — was pretty easy to observe.  And I started to wonder if it was the fan in me or the feminist, who wanted to rewrite the film’s entire voiceover from the mysterious young woman’s perspective and record it with a female voice.  Or who wanted, even further, to somehow excavate all the images that must have been created in the process of making this film and make a new film entirely.  Is that what I think Jenkins called the “fannish impulse,” or is it the feminist impulse of going after the overlooked and dismissed female artist/writer/whatever and bringing it to light?  It’s a blurry distinction, perhaps a lot more blurry than either camp realizes.