Cork International Film Festival commissioned emerging visual artist and Sample-Studios Graduate Artist in Residence, Elinor O’Donovan to create a unique contemporary artwork in response to our programme at the 66th Cork International Film Festival and our rich Digital Archive.
‘Crashers’ is a new work by Elinor, developed as a response to the ‘Female Visions’ programme of the 66th annual Cork International Film Festival. The work is a digital collage composed of found stock images of crows, superimposed into an image of confetti, set against a blue-sky background. In response to the ‘Female Visions’ programme, ‘Crashers’ was developed considering research on ‘the female gaze’ in cinema.
Theorisation of the ‘female gaze’ evolved from feminist writing about the ‘male gaze’–as first discussed by the theorist Laura Mulvey in her 1973 paper ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ and which describes the way that women are often portrayed as passive objects of male desire in media. Where under the male gaze men are the ‘lookers’1 (this includes the people behind the camera and the audience, by proxy), and women are “the spectacle” or the ‘looked-at’, the ‘female gaze’ however, is not an inversion of this ‘male gaze’. According to the filmmaker Joey Soloway, the female gaze is about ‘looking back’2, returning the gaze of the camera and the audience rather than making men the passive objects of a penetrative gaze. It is about the expression of female subjectivity, and the various forms this expression might take given that female subjectivity is not a monolith. While female subjectivity is unique to each individual and cannot be considered without other intersecting factors (such as an individual’s race, class, or sexuality, among others) the imposition of gender causes an awareness of difference, or being ‘othered’, that, as subjects of patriarchal culture, is shared to some extent by all women.
In ‘Crashers’, three crows float against a blue sky in a swirl of confetti. While sinister creatures in certain contexts (perhaps notably as in Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘The Birds’), crows can be considered ‘outsider’ animals. They are not domesticated birds, like budgies and other pets, nor are they fully wild or exotic like parrots or birds of prey. Crows are ubiquitous in urban settings, yet they are not reviled or considered pests to the same extent that pigeons are. Their absence of categorisation in this way makes them outsiders, inhabiting the liminal space between the urban environment and the natural world and here may be seen as representatives of female subjectivity.
The title of this work ‘Crashers’ evokes the idea of ‘gate crashing’, and is a response to the ‘Female Visions’ programme – a collection of films by female directors who changed the landscape of cinema, whether or not they were invited to do so.
1 French, L., 2021. The Female Gaze in Documentary Film. (p. 53) Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.2 TIFF, 2016. Joey* Soloway on The Female Gaze | MASTER CLASS | TIFF 2016. [online] youtube.com. Available at: <https:/www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnBvppooD9I&ab_ channel=TIFFTalks> [Accessed 24 August 2021].
This project is funded by The Arts Council of Ireland Commissions Award 2021.
