Western Representations of the Muslim woman (Part Six)

To demonstrate further, as the camera follows the Saudi physician Zaynab who walks in a hospital corridor, we see a woman deny the camera even a glimpse of her eyes. When she discovers the camera’s presence, she covers her face with a notebook. In this sense, Saudi women see the documentary’s camera as intrusive and therefore, resist and deny it the ability to gaze at them.

 

Figure 5:  A Saudi woman puts a notebook on her eyes, resisting the gaze of the Western camera.

           Thus, whilst the women’s voices are silenced by the film language, their agency and resistance to the film’s Orientalist ideology cannot be canceled. The filmmaker and her crew are quite controlled by the veiled Saudi women. Their desires and demands are denied. Therefore, their role or freedom of representation is limited and bounded by the veiled Saudi women. In this situation, the documentarist’s position in representation is not all powerful. Rather, the veiled Saudi women here have agency and a power that enables them to exert some control over how they are represented. Indeed, this reflects the slippage of imperial authority and problematizes the strategy of representation. This also reflects the paradoxical nature of the documentary’s imperial discourse which produces an ‘Other’ that fractures and dismantles its unity. Mary Louis Pratt points to this mode of representation when she writes, “while the imperial metropolis tends to understand itself as determining the periphery […] it habitually blinds itself to the ways in which the periphery determines the metropolis […].”^[29]

          Although veiled Muslim women are presented as occupying a subservient position in the film’s narrative space where their voices are muted by the filmmaker’s loud and strong voice, they can resist the film’s preoccupation that they are oppressed by the imposed veil. As a result, they are able to achieve control over the film’s narrative structure and representation. It is hard, therefore, to simply argue that the imperialist discourse of this documentary is unified and coherent, but one can trace a counter discourse that emerges from within the dominant discourse that attempts to ‘Other’ and diminish these veiled women. Such inconsistencies help to disclose the documentary’s subjectivity. In addition, when considering the two positions of the filmmaker’s panoptic vision and the counteraction of the veiled women it is manifest that power relations are complex. It is clear how the filmmaker exerts her panoptic power on the veiled Saudi women, and how the latter affirm their own agency and resistance to that power. Indeed, power does not flow only from the more to the less powerful, but also “comes from below.”[30]

conclusion

In short, the above demonstrated contradictions help in showing that the film, Saudi Solutions, does not fulfill its claims of objectively reflecting the “reality” of Saudi working women and of exploring their changing position on the basis of their perspectives. The film strives instead to impose the documentarist’s Orientalist imaging of the Saudi working women as the true “reality” of these women. Further, it falsifies these women’s perceptions of their own reality and shows them as ignorant of their reality. That is to say, the film does not reflect the different ways of seeing, but imposes the documentarist’s way of seeing as the reality of these women. However, contradictions and inconsistencies upset the serenity of the documentary’s Orientalist discourse and enable viewers to trace the track of subjectivity in the documentary. Certainly, the closer one looks at Orientalism in film the more likely one is to find contradictions as its basic characteristic;^[31] and thus “like all representational texts, Orientalist films sustain a measure of ideological contradiction and incoherence.”^[32]

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[29]  Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 6.

[30] Sergiu Bălan, “M. Foucault's View on Power Relations,” accessed May 20, 2014, http://cogito.ucdc.ro/nr_2v2/M.%20FOUCAULT'S%20VIEW%20ON%20POWER%20RELATIONS.pdf.

[31] Matthew Bernstein, “Introduction,” in Vision of the East: Orientalism in Films (London: I. B. Tauris Publishers, 1997), p. 11.

[32] Ibid.

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