Western Representations of the Muslim woman (Part Four)
A similar example is conspicuous in a scene set in a hospital where
a female Saudi physician, named Zaynab, works. In this scene, before presenting
Zaynab stating that “in a hospital such as this there is no segregation,” the
film shows in a close-up a panel that states “male waiting area” and cuts to
display a close-up of another panel stating “women waiting area.” Then, in a
high angle shot the camera shows Zaynab’s image from behind walking in a
hospital’s passageway before cutting to show another close-up of a panel. This
panel says “males are not allowed to enter without permission.” Here, it is
clear how the director’s Eurocentric eye (camera) attempts to decode Saudi
women’s situation. The director employs the voice of the image to contradict
and undermine Zaynab’s speech. It is important to see, then, how it is the
documentarist’s perspective that is meant to be given an authority contradicting,
therefore, the purpose of the documentary claimed in its opening scene. The
documentarist does not give Zaynab an opportunity to explain, or show how such
segregation is broken down in the hospital where she works. She does not
provide the viewer with important background information that contextualizes
Zaynab’s statement, but she provides images that disprove Zaynab’s statement. In
doing so, the documentarist invokes the Orientalist image of Muslim women as
oppressed and unprogressive which reflects her perspective and undercuts Zaynab’s
perspective that there is a progressive change in her society. The documentarist’s
and Zaynab’s perspectives really do not coalesce into a same synthetic voice; however,
the film does not reflect these differences but only imposes the documentarist’s
one.
Figure 4: The
camera focuses on the panels that show how the hospital where Zaynab works is
gendered, undercutting Zaynab’s words.
In
the above discussed scenes, it is
very obvious that the selected
images do not
faithfully capture “reality”
and that editing
manipulates the meaning of the
presented “reality;”
the ordering of
shots and cutting
is meant by the
documentarist to undercut the very views of the working women that the film
claims to present. For instance, the images of panels are arranged in a way
that serves the documentarist’s intention to create the effect of blatant
denial of these women’s self-portrayals. Through the sequencing of shots, the
documentarist attempts to impose her viewpoint that those women are suffering
from different forms of oppression. It
seems useful here to invoke Andre Bazin when he writes about some
documentarists’ use of montage, “undoubtedly they derived at least the greater
part of the constituent elements from reality they were describing but the
final significance of the film was found to reside in the ordering of these elements
much more than in their objective
content.”[20]
Bazin emphasizes that “through the contents of the image and the resources of
montage, the cinema has at its disposal a whole arsenal of means whereby to
impose its interpretation of an event on the spectator.”[21]
At this point, it becomes clear how through such a process of montage the
documentarist constructs the impression that these women’s self-perceptions do
not correspond to their social reality and how in constructing this impression,
the documentarist implicitly conveys her reflection of her interviewees as
suffering mental subjugation. In other words, that they are so oppressed that
they don’t even realize it. In this
sense, the film seems to echo Carl Marx’s words
“they cannot represent themselves, they must be represented.”[22]
The documentarist’s
self-contradiction also appears in the scenes that portray the working women in
the holding company and the royal palace of the Prince Al-Waleed. The
documentarist highlights her feeling that it is ‘mysterious’ to find that the
rules of sex-segregation are not applied in the royal palace of Al-Waleed, who selects his female employees
personally, as the documentary stresses. When entering the palace, the
documentarist expresses her sense of mystery that is heightened by the dimly
lit atmosphere and the slow movement of the camera. She also comments that when
interrogating why the rules of sex-segregation are not applied in the royal
palace, she does not get any response except the Prince’s female palace manager’s
‘smile’. Such commentary fuels the fantasy of the harem in the Western viewer’s
mind. But, why does she drop this part of the interview that would be more
authentic than merely giving a comment?
What seems worth noting here is that this portrayal also emerges from
the director’s perception instead of Saudi women’s self-perceptions. This shows
how the documentarist is not objective but sees Saudi women through a Western
eye; therefore she is never able to see these women’s “reality” from within
their experiences.
What the
documentary tries to show is that the female employees in Al-Waleed’s holding
company are only a means of propaganda for Al-Waleed who, as the documentarist
says, “presents himself as a bridge between East and West.” The camera captures
different shots of these employees, but they are always pictured in the
foreground of the Prince’s office when he talks about himself as a promoter of
women’s rights. Though the female employees see themselves as free agents,
practicing the jobs they apply for, the documentarist portrays them as merely a
décor or models that are ‘used’ by the Prince as propaganda. There is not a
single shot that shows one of them working in her office. The camera strives to
display them as objects manipulated by Al-Waleed. The camera shows them as an
exhibition in Al-Waleed’s company’s corridors, standing to be captured by the
camera. By projecting them this way, the film tries implicitly to produce the
message that these women are not empowered. Yet, in doing so, the film
replicates the very strategy it strives to expose.
[20] Andre Bazin,
“The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” in Film Theory and Criticism,
p. 42.
[21] Ibid.
[22] Chandra
Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes,”
in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, eds. Chandra Mohanty,
Ann Russo and Lourdes Torres (Bloomington: Indian University Press, 1991), p.
74.
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