In the 1960s, urban interior spaces are beginning to be demonstrated through the “female gaze” in the two prominent genres at the time: melodrama and noir thriller. Instead of positioning women on the periphery of the narrative or filtering their urban experiences through a male protagonist —which was often the case in the predominantly Chinese patriarchal society — these emerging films emphasize on female perspectives in the context of the city, Hong Kong, in the processes of industrialization and modernization. Screen portrayals of urban experience display city as a space of female social and spatial emancipation as it liberates women from their traditional role as housewives who are confined within domestic space.
For example, in “Black Rose”, the lady vigilante with a double identity navigates through a sequence of diverse urban interior spaces to complete her mission of helping the poor. This allows the audience to not only get a comprehensive image of the lives of people with contrasting financial status in the city, but also witness a woman figure as an intelligent, beautiful and physically capable subject as opposed to a sexualized object.
In comparison, in “Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain”, the director employs an interesting exchange of traditional gender associations and of urban space occupation and vulnerability to centralize female perspective in the film. The city of Paris is navigated through the ventures of the young girl, Amélie, she explores a wide range of public spaces of the city while her neighbour, Mr Dufayel, is a fragile old man, stays indoors and voyeuristically watches her through his window.
Jiankai Gong
UID: 3036086373
You have shown good understanding to Seng’s writing and the development of gender roles via modernity and spatial dynamics. I appreciate the provision of an antithesis of Amelie and the reversal of gender and spatial constructs by reversing the occupation of exterior and interior spaces in the film; the example serves as a good foil to the vigilante examples taken from the text.