Film Analysis Notes
The Female Gaze in Pelin Esmer’s Something Useful (2017)
Film Overview:
Original Title: İşe Yarar Bir Şey
Director: Pelin Esmer
Year: 2017
Main Characters:
Leyla: A middle-aged lawyer-poet, emotionally distant but intellectually sharp.
Canan: A young, timid nursing student with dreams of acting, carrying the emotional burden of an assisted euthanasia request.
Director Background: Pelin Esmer
Born in Istanbul in 1972.
Studied sociology at Boğaziçi University, informing her films with insights into social systems, gender roles, and emotional dynamics.
Early career in documentaries, known for capturing intimate moments and personal stories.
Common themes: female solitude, moral complexity, memory, artistic expression, bodily presence.
What Is the Female Gaze?
A feminist response to the “male gaze” (Laura Mulvey, 1975), which sexualizes and objectifies women on screen.
The female gaze centers:
Women as complete, feeling subjects.
Sensory detail and emotional presence.
Interpersonal care and ethical intimacy.
Reciprocal looking: women looking at each other with empathy, not control.
How the Female Gaze Operates in Something Useful
Mutual Female Intimacy Without Voyeurism
The relationship between Leyla and Canan develops gradually through conversation, glances, and shared silence.
Extended takes of them on the train without cuts or angles that eroticize their bodies.
They observe each other as subjects, not objects.
Emotion as a Narrative Force
Emotions are not performed but simmer and build internally.
The pacing reflects the unfolding of emotional labor and ethical decisions through pauses, unspoken words, and inner struggle.
Poetic Voice = Female Subjectivity
Leyla’s poetry (spoken and written) provides insight into her inner life.
Female authorship becomes visible, literary, and reflective, offering a feminist articulation of voice.
Assisted Death as Female Ethical Agency
Canan’s involvement in euthanasia is not portrayed as inherently negative or tragic.
It’s depicted as a complex, deeply personal decision—a moral act driven by a young woman and not judged by patriarchal norms.
Visual Stillness Mirrors Inner World
Static camera, natural lighting, and real-time dialogue underscore the quiet significance of daily female existence.
The film's pace slows the viewer down, encouraging reflection rather than mere consumption.
Key Scene: Train conversation at night, dimly lit with shadows, emphasizing eyes, breathing, and emotional withdrawal over physical exposure.
Feminist Film Theories in Action
Laura Mulvey: The film subverts the active male/passive female dichotomy.
bell hooks: The gaze is returned, allowing women to see and listen to each other, dismantling power hierarchies in looking.
Teresa de Lauretis: Women in the film are not symbolic but serve as narrators of their own ambiguities and conflicts.
Conclusion
The female gaze in Something Useful is a cinematic ethic centered on seeing women as subjects with emotional power, moral depth, and quiet strength rather than visual surfaces. Esmer creates a space where women think, care, act, and observe without objectification.
Classifications of Chantal Akerman’s Cinema
About Chantal Akerman
Born in 1950 in Brussels, Belgium.
Jewish; her mother was a survivor of Auschwitz, which deeply influenced Akerman's work.
Lesbian, fiercely independent, and emotionally raw.
Committed suicide in 2015, shortly after completing No Home Movie about her mother's death.
Her films are personal, minimalist, and emotionally rigorous.
Classification 1: Women’s Cinema/Feminist Cinema
Example: Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)
A 3.5-hour film depicting a single mother’s domestic routine: cooking, cleaning, and prostitution.
Features no soundtrack, long static takes, and real-time pacing.
Radical because:
Everyday domesticity becomes monumental.
The film exposes how patriarchy reduces women to rituals and how those rituals can implode.
Why It Fits:
Centers female time and labor.
Dismantles the idea of women as sexualized figures.
Uses form (repetition, stasis) as feminist expression.
Classification 2: National Cinema (Belgian/European)
Born in Belgium, many early films are Belgian/French productions.
However, Akerman resisted being defined as “Belgian,” as her work critiques bourgeois European values.
Example: Golden Eighties (1986)
A musical set in a Brussels shopping mall, using pop culture to satirize post-war optimism and female containment.
Classification 3: Transnational/Diasporic Cinema
Akerman moved between Belgium, New York, Paris, and Eastern Europe.
Films are filled with travel, alienation, and displacement.
Jewish identity is central, though often implicit.
Examples:
News from Home (1977): Akerman reads letters from her mother while showing images of NYC.
From the East (1993): A documentary on post-Soviet migration.
No Home Movie (2015): Her last film, focused on her mother in her final days—personal and post-traumatic.
Classification 4: Auteur Cinema
Her work is instantly recognizable:
Minimal dialogue
Long static shots
Emphasis on silence, routine, architecture
Her signature themes:
Jewish identity
Mother-daughter relationships
Queerness and female solitude
Alienation in the modern world
Feminist and Film Theory Anchors
Laura Mulvey: Akerman opposes voyeuristic film language.
Judith Butler: Queer temporality and performative identity.
Toby Miller: Transnational cinema that defies state borders and fixed identities.
Conclusion
Akerman’s cinema is feminist, transnational, diasporic, and deeply personal. Her refusal to conform—to form, genre, or identity—makes her a filmmaker whose work exists in-between borders, bodies, and histories.
How Margarethe von Trotta’s Marianne and Juliane Promotes Female Subjectivity
Film Overview
Original Title: Die bleierne Zeit (The Leaden Time)
Year: 1981
Based on the real-life Ensslin sisters: Gudrun (terrorist) and Christiane (journalist).
Fictionalized as Marianne (radical leftist, joins RAF) and Juliane (feminist journalist).
After Marianne’s death in prison (possible state violence), Juliane reconstructs her sister’s truth through memory.
About Margarethe von Trotta
Born in 1942 in Berlin during WWII.
Key figure in New German Cinema.
One of the first German women directors to gain critical and commercial success.
Recurring themes: female memory, sisterhood, politics, historical trauma, and resistance.
Former actress, deeply attuned to emotional performance and psychological realism.
How the Film Promotes Female Subjectivity
Narrative Through Juliane’s POV
The story is told from Juliane’s emotional perspective.
The audience experiences her confusion, guilt, loyalty, and fear.
Use of Flashbacks = Memory as Form
Non-linear time mimics how trauma works—not logically but emotionally.
Marianne appears as an echo, a haunting presence woven into Juliane’s present.
Sisterhood > Romance
Male characters are marginal.
Primary emotional relationships are between women, through conflict, love, and mourning.
Female bonds become the foundation for political and personal truth.
Grief as a Political Act
Juliane refuses to forget or sanitize her sister’s memory.
She reclaims female rage, grief, and political history in a public space dominated by men.
Archives of the Body
Marianne’s body (post-death) becomes contested, with questions of suicide versus murder.
Juliane fights for the truth of her sister’s body and life, a metaphor for reclaiming female narratives.
Feminist Film Theory Links
Teresa de Lauretis: The female subject as one who remakes memory and identity.
bell hooks: Grieving woman as political agent, not a silent victim.
Claire Johnston: Counter-cinema that disrupts linear, patriarchal storytelling.
Conclusion
Marianne and Juliane promote female subjectivity by placing female grief, memory, and history at the center. Juliane is not a witness to history but a maker of counter-history, retelling the lives of women through emotion, memory, and resistance.