Not too many people in the art scene, at least in India,
remember a 1969 film titled ‘Rape’ by Yoko Ono and John Lennon, two legends of
conceptual art and music respectively. During 1960s Yoko Ono had written a few
scripts to produce movies. Out of those scripts, Ono finally chose to produce ‘Rape’.
Funded by her husband, John Lennon, she hired four film technicians and asked
to follow a girl and record her day’s activities, importantly without her
permission. The seventy five minute long film when released had generated
heated discussions amongst the art loving public and critics who accused the
artists-duo of violating the privacy of a hapless individual and subjecting her
to the same tribulations against which the film was intended to produce effects.
The girl who was followed by the filming team was Eva Majlata, an Austrian girl
whose work permit in London had been over by the time the filming was taking
place. The girl was set up for the shooting in agreement with her sister who
had even given access to the filming team to Majlata’s rented room in London.
(Eva Majlata first becoming aware of the camera men following her)
The film ‘Rape’ opens with Majlata getting caught by the
film crew at cemetery where she goes to spend her idle time. Initially she is
very flattered. Though she knows that she is not a film star or a celebrity,
the sudden appearance of the filming crew before her makes her a bit elated.
She plays up to the situation acting quite casually while trying to tell them
that she is not a star. She does not speak English. Her working English fails
after a few minutes of them following her with the camera. Slowly the tension
mounts. Her elation gives way to anxiety and then to fear. She walks fast,
hides and whenever the crew reappears before her she tries to reason with the
men in French, German and a little bit of Italian. But the crew is determined
to follow. The scene grows eerie as the viewers see not many people around in
the locality. The cemetery is completely abandoned. Majlata searches for some
names on the plaques and collects some flowers to hide her embarrassment and
fear. But she is not able to do that. The stalking becomes relentless and the
presence of camera though we are not privy to see the people behind the camera,
becomes quite apparent. At one stage to make a deal with the filming crew she
asks for light for her cigarette. They give light to her. Some people appear in
the scene looks at her and the team with a fair amount of coldness and walk
off. She walks out of the cemetery and hits the road. The gaze of camera
follows her. She jumps into a taxi and reaches her apartment and even there she
sees the filming crew behind her. She is now visibly tired and horrified. She
makes a phone call to her sister and finally coils herself up and moves into
the corner of her living room. The film ends there.
(a still from Rape)
Laura Mulvey in her pivotal essay titled ‘Visual Pleasure
and Narrative Cinema’ which became a bench mark for film criticism of the 20th
century, says that cinema is basically a medium of male gaze. In the darkness
of a movie hall, each person becomes a peeping Tom and possesses the male gaze.
Even when there are other people around, the darkness and the visual engagement
with the projected visuals and narrative makes the person identify with the
male subject who holds the ‘perspective’ of that narrative. The female
subjection and turning them into the objects of desire exclude the women
audience from the dominant male gaze and render them uncomfortable. Going by
Mulvey’s theorizing on male gaze and cinema, one could clearly see how Yoko Ono
intends to collapse by highlighting the omnipresence of the male gaze in her
film ‘Rape’. The initial pleasure of becoming an object of desire and attention
by a male or female gaze turns into horror and violence as the object under scrutiny
becomes absolutely helpless in that visual exchange and engagement. Though Yoko
Ono if a female subject, her tools of filming (including the crew members) are
male subjects. The power is absolutely in their hands as they decide how to ‘track’
this young woman down, capture her in her unguarded moments and subject her
under the might of the camera, the male gaze.
(a harassed Majlata making a call to her sister from her room- still from Rape)
Feminists have disputed the artistic intention of Yoko Ono’s
‘Rape’. March Richardson in his essay, ‘You Say You Want a Revolution: How Yoko
Ono’s Rape Could Have Changed the World’, says that Majlata has been rendered
absolutely helpless like a rape victim as she is not only confronted by four
men but also with cameras and recording equipment. Women were still not
liberated in 1960s England. Majlata knows for sure that her current status is
that of an illegal migrant and with camera being a very powerful medium of the
state the very engagement brings her in direct confrontation with the state.
The filming them becomes an interrogation from which she flees with all her
might. She uses her femininity in the beginning as she charms the camera crew
with smiles and darting of eyes. But she knows that her position is that of a
migrant with invalid papers who is supposed to evade the eyes of the state. Her
status as an illegal migrant is immediately collapsed into her gender status.
Hence she becomes doubly ill equipped to handle the situation. What she could
do at this moment is to flee. But the more she flees the aggression of the
pursuers becomes intense. They leave no space for her to stand and breathe or
take a proper decision.
(Yoko Ono and John Lennon)
One could ask a question: had she been a migrant with valid
papers and work permit to live in London, would she have reacted like a victim?
The possible answer could be that still her gender would have made her to flee
from the camera men. If she was intelligent enough she would have sought the
help of the policemen or the people around. Or if she was arrogant and bold she
would have smashed the camera and beaten up the men who were following her. She
does not do either. Instead she flees from the spot as if her gender and social
status were two crimes committed by her. Even in her illegal migrant status she
could use her gender position to counter these camera men. But she fears that
her gender itself is detrimental for her as it could bring her stringent
punishment from the authorities. Yoko Ono calls the film, quite succinctly and
metaphorically, Rape. In her film the protagonist is ensnared by the camera,
the male gaze and is raped by it till she resigns to her fate of utter
surrender.
(The peace people- Ono and Lennon)
The film is thrilling like any stalker film. Notwithstanding
the critique of feminists, the film underlines how the male gaze (even if it is
scripted by a woman) visually rapes a woman who is not in a position to react.
It happens even today in party circuits. Someone who is familiar with a woman
in the party or becomes friends with a woman by chance, utters something that
is offensive to that woman who in a guarded moment would have reacted to such
utterance violently. But she is rendered helpless and shocked, bruised and
scarred by the male utterances. This kind of flashing by males is quite rampant
in public and private spaces to which most of the women fail to react
aggressively not because they are afraid of the consequences but because of the
momentary stunning of reflexive faculties. It is like a shock treatment given
to violent protestors and hysteric people. They are subjected by the shock
given in a flash. Here in Rape, Majlata too is subjected to continuous flashing
of gaze which makes her a victim devoid of reactive faculties and reflexes. Initially
she believes that she could respond positively as she is curious about their
intentions like any other young woman would do in a public space. Admiration
could be through a soft gaze (of the camera) but here the filming happens
without her permission and her level of accepting such intrusion is raised by
her illegal migrant status. She tolerates it for a while though she feels it a
bit odd. But then the real aggression happens in the stalking.
The backlashes that Rape had amassed while screening and
later on were shrill and strong mainly because the critics thought that Yoko
Ono was subjecting herself to the male ideology pertaining to gaze. She was
letting the males to follow Majlata. Had it been Ono herself would things have
been different is a worth pondering question. But during the debates that ensued
the screening of this movie Ono took an aggressive stance and cancelled most of
the criticism as ideological rubbish. To save the artistic merit of the movie
or for not getting into the feminist debates, she said the film should have
been seen as an artistic output and its ideological merit should have been seen
in the context of artistic intention. Almost four decades later another artist
from Austria, Fiona Rukschcio, decided to revisit the film, Rape and do what
Yoko Ono did not want to do: to become the gaze itself.
Fiona Rukschcio makes the revisit of Rape in her project
called ‘Retaped Rape’. Once she came to know that the woman, Majlata was an Austrian
citizen, Fiona decided to go to the same places the Rape filming had happened.
She contacted the camera man who filmed Ono’s Rape and asked whether he could
do it for her again. But he refused. Fiona also contacted the Majlata’s sister
who had set up Majlata as the protagonist of Ono’s Cinema Verite experiment.
Majlata’s sister helped Fiona to find the locations. In Retaped Rape what Fiona
does is simulating the camera movements of the original Rape. But here the
difference is Fiona does not position a woman in front of her camera. She
follows an invisible person who could have been the erstwhile Majlata. Fiona
follows an erasure and absence, which in fact had been registered by four male
member camera crew decades back under the insistence of a powerful artist like
Yoko Ono. Besides, Fiona herself handles the camera. So the gaze in Retaped
Rape is that of a woman and this woman’s gaze is re-enacting the gaze of four
men/one camera without subjecting anyone into the status of a victim.
(Fiona reaches Majlata's flat)
The whole film, Retaped Rape is a re-reading of the
original. It is a narrative re-written with locations in place but without its
protagonists and characters. The very absence of Majlata in Fiona’s movie evokes
the kind of violence that the male gaze had generated in Rape. The absence then
becomes more than a presence as Fiona intercuts her narrative back to the
original film clippings and comes back to the actual locations again and again.
The project Retaped Rape as an exhibition consists of the stills of Fiona
making Retaped Rape and the locations from where Fiona’s presence has been
erased. Fiona underlines two absences, one the decimation of Majlata’s
subjectivity in the actual Rape through powerful male gaze and two, the absence
of Fiona herself from the frames. There is a rupture between these two absences
and it is in this rupture the meaning of Retape Rape exists. This rupture is
created by the replacing of male gaze by female gaze. The simulation of male
gaze works in the plane of residual memories; the memories of a film that had subjected
a woman to male gaze. And each time the viewer is tend to ask about Majlata in
Retaped Rape and she occupies the maximum space as she keeps looking back at
the viewers through memories and remembrance and pushes the dominant gaze out
of the narrative. Hence, Fiona’s film becomes a counter gaze at the movie Rape.
(From Retaped Rape project exhibition at Secession 2012)
As a conclusion of this essay I would like to quote Doris
Krumpl, a cultural critic from Vienna. In the catalogue for the project Retaped
Rape Krumps writes: “The beauty and innocence of the woman stalked in Rape
exert a spell over the viewer, who, captivated and turning increasingly into an
accomplice, follows the camera that follows the woman right up until her
breakdown. The public ‘ravishing’ of celebrities culminated in the antics of a
Britney Spears, the tantrums thrown by Amy Winehouse and the death in a car
accident of Lady Diana, another goddess of hunt. To what extent are the
consumers of such stories themselves the victims of their accompliceship? This
is precisely where Fiona Ruckschcio’s intervention gets its purchase from; by
eliminating the attractive object of the hunt she brings about a reversal of
roles, sacrificing on her media altar the viewers participating in this increasingly
frustrating hunt for clues. A belated act or reparation.”
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