Sportswomen in Cinema

Film and the Frailty Myth

Nicholas Chare

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781784530129
• eBook ISBN: 9780857738455
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Sportswomen in Cinema considers both documentary and fiction films from a variety of periods and cultures, by directors including Kathryn Bigelow, Gurinder Chadha, Im Soon-rye, George Kukor, Ida Lupino, and Leni Riefenstahl. Drawing from psychoanalytic and phenomenological theories, the book presents a series of landmark close readings of films featuring a variety of different forms of athletic activity, including baseball, basketball, bodybuilding, boxing, climbing, football, rollerderby, surfing, tennis and track and field. In focusing on themes such as gesture, screen space and sound, it moves beyond a purely narrative analysis of sports films. What's more, as well as building on existing scholarship in sports studies to argue that sport should always be conceived of as more than simply competitive, the book also contributes to ongoing efforts in film theory to foster new feminist discourses on sexual difference.
The ideas of thinkers such as Judith Butler, Bracha Ettinger, Griselda Pollock and Michel Serres are employed to explore how films featuring female athletes reflect changing perspectives on femininity and sexuality and also, potentially, contribute to transforming our perceptions about sportswomen and cinema. Sportswomen in Cinema is an important addition to the literature of film studies, gender studies and sports studies.

1

The Ascent of Woman: Climbing Films

In Vertical Limit (Dir. Martin Campbell, USA, 2000), an action film about alpine climbing, a failed attempt to climb the Himalayan Mountain K2 forms the film’s central story. An expedition led by experienced alpinist Tom McLaren and funded by entrepreneur Elliot Vaughn, who is a participant in the climb, becomes stranded on the peak in a storm. Before disaster strikes in the form of an avalanche, Vaughn berates McLaren for wanting to turn back because of an adverse weather warning. He says to his lead climber: ‘What did you think? That she was just going to lift up her skirt and pull her panties down for us?’ K2 is here figured as a woman, a potential sexual conquest. This choice of metaphor, this gendering, is not uncommon in climbing as will become clear. Mountains are part of ‘our natural Mother, the Earth’.¹ Climbing is described by Sally Ann Ness in terms of ‘a competitive interest in conquering nature’.² Climbing comprises ‘of masterful relation to natural environments as an expression of Western masculinity’.³ Peaks are therefore culturally coded as feminine. In Vertical Limit, however, whilst the mountain may be figured as female it is gendered as a masculine space. K2 is associated with the death of a woman climber, the character Montgomery Wick’s wife. It is not a space depicted as suited to the female sex. This reflects the reality that climbing of all types is still popularly conceived of as a masculine pursuit. In free climbing, routes are characterised by Dianne Chisholm, drawing on earlier work by Susan Frohlick, as ‘hypermasculine spaces’.⁴ The remarkable feats of contemporary women climbers such as Josune Bereziartu and Monique Forestier have not yet altered common perceptions about the activity.

1.1 Vertical Limit (2000): Annie’s lack of reach

Vertical Limit features two female characters portrayed as climbers. One, Annie Garrett, is described by Vaughn as his ‘leading lady’ on the K2 expedition. He therefore casts her as a secondary lead. Annie ends up trapped in a crevasse along with McLaren and Vaughn, awaiting rescue. She is rapidly pacified as far as the main action goes. At the start of the film her low status is already signalled when her lack of reach during a climb is framed as a contributing factor in her father’s death. She is unable to insert a camming device in a nearby rock fissure as her father and brother dangle helplessly, repeating ‘I can get it in, I can get it in’ yet continually failing to do so (1.1). It is also possible to hear in this phrase a secondary meaning, an admission of her desire, yet inability, to penetrate the cliff face, an acknowledgment of her phallic lack. The other female climber, Monique Aubertine, is a member of the rescue party sent after the initial expedition. She is depicted as a courageous and skilful climber yet only has a supporting role. The main climber in the film is Annie’s brother, Peter. He has a combative attitude towards mountains describing them as something to be ‘laid siege to’.

Vertical Limit therefore minimises the roles of women as driving forces in the story. Annie’s character, for example, is designed to provide a way for her brother to overcome the trauma of the climbing incident in which their father was killed. She facilitates her brother’s redemption through requiring him to rescue her. The mother of the bereaved siblings is never mentioned. Climbing is a male universe into which Annie trespasses. Wick’s wife is punished for infringing on male terrain by her death in the mountains. Aubertine is, perhaps, the point of resistance to the negative depiction of women in the film yet her role in the narrative is minimal. The way Vertical Limit marginalises, and punishes, female characters is also common to other climbing films.

In Cliffhanger (Dir. Renny Harlin, USA, 1993), for instance, the solo-climber Gabe Walker suffers intense guilt because he was unable to save his best friend’s lover Sarah in a climbing accident. The role of Walker’s girlfriend, Jessie Deighan, is similar to that of Annie in Vertical Limit. She is present to encourage Walker to overcome his sense of culpability and provides him with the means to do so when she requires him to save her from falling off a cliff towards the end of the film. Women in climbing films are often given little more than walk on parts. There are, however, exceptions. The film Snowman’s Pass (Dir. Rex Piano, Canada, 2004) effects a role reversal. The central character is a woman, Diana Pennington, who must overcome the trauma of losing her fiancé in a climbing accident. There are also documentaries, such as Au-dèla des cimes, which focus on the achievements of women climbers. These films give women the appearance of greater narrative motility.

This chapter explores freedom of movement in climbing films in relation to gender. It draws on recent scholarship that examines climbing phenomenologically and also on the writings of noted free climber Lynn Hill to examine how some films, particularly the documentary Hard Grit (Dir. Richard Heap, UK, 1998), show how the sport provides a means by which to transcend gender categories. This requires approaching climbing with an alternative logic to the one advanced in films such as Vertical Limit, constructing mountains as entities to be conquered. Climbing figured as the subjugation of nature forms a reinforcement of patriarchal ideology. The chapter, however, explores a different attitude to the sport. It is one focussed not on conquest but on an alliance between bodies, a physical contract between the animate and inanimate, flesh and rock.

Orienteering

The phenomenological philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty informs how climbing is understood here. At the centre of phenomenology, as conceived of by Merleau-Ponty, is the lived body. For Merleau-Ponty human beings both have a body and are a body. For him the body that is us, and also that which we possess, is bound up with the world. This sounds counter-intuitive. We know there is a clear boundary between our bodies and the world around us. The body appears as a well-defined entity when looked at it in a mirror or, usually, when encountered on screen. This view of the body, however, occurs from a third-person perspective. In such instances, we see the body outside of ourselves. The contours of the body are less apparent when we consider it from a first-person perspective. It is also less easy to see it as an object. Its boundaries are indistinct. The body seen from a first-person perspective is more mobile. It changes location.

Our usual experience is not of the body as a distinct entity but of some aspect of the world that has caught our attention. Our body possesses intentionality. Intentionality is not like intention. Intention indicates a plan that is to be carried out. Intentionality describes a vital aspect of human existence. It is the fact that human beings are fundamentally related to the contexts in which they live. This means that consciousness is always consciousness of an object that is distinct from, but always present to, consciousness. In phenomenology therefore, the sense of self results from a palimpsest of encounters with the world, orientations towards it. Being-in-the-world is a continual process of becoming. If consciousness, our sense of ourselves, emerges from out of encounters with the world then what we notice in that encounter reveals what we are like in terms of what is significant for and to us.

The way we perceive is never separate from our cultural background. If encounters with phenomena are never separable from culture then this has significant implications for the study of gender. There are, however, moments when individuals do not seem to draw on the resources of culture, of language, to make sense of physical experiences. One of the best examples of this way of being in the world is provided by professional sportspeople. Players of ball sports such as water polo, for example, sometimes suggest that when they throw a ball they are aware of nothing. It is just them and the ball. The act of throwing the ball becomes the player’s world. The player does all that is necessary to achieve that aim. Body, will and outcome are experienced as a singular and unified event. In this un-thought experience ‘throwing the ball’ gender seems to cease to be a concern.

Phenomenology, at times, appears to encourage a way of perceiving the world, of being mindful of bodily experience, that looks past gender. It moves beyond the compass of cultural differences. In her highly influential essay ‘Throwing Like a Girl’, however, Iris Marion Young demonstrates that gender differences inform human lived body experiences.⁵ This essay forcefully contends that the lived body is acculturated. Sara Ahmed has suggested that ‘phenomenology helps us to explore how bodies are shaped by histories, which they perform in their comportment, their posture, and their gestures’.⁶ Young attends to this reality yet her focus is only on how gender as a form of cultural difference informs the body. She fails to address, for example, how ethnicity or geographical context might intersect with sex. Young is interested in a general tendency in feminine physical comportment in a given cultural context, the United States, in 1980. Despite these limitations, however, it is still valuable for its careful elucidation of how patriarchal values insinuate the very sinews of women.

Young combines insights from Simone de Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty in order to focus on the ways in which the feminine body typically conducts itself in motion. She draws on de Beauvoir’s understanding of femininity not as an essence possessed by all women but as a set of conditions that delimit the typical situation of being a woman in a particular society. Young’s arguments about feminine existence are grounded in research carried out into the differing ways in which men and women move their bodies. This research shows that in childhood girls do not bring their whole bodies into motion as much as boys do: ‘[girls] do not reach back, twist, move backward, step, and lean forward. Rather, [. . . ] girls tend to remain relatively immobile except for their arms, and even the arms are not extended as far as they could be’.⁷ This corporeal restraint persists into adulthood.

Young argues that in many physical activities, feminine comportment, the ways in which women move their bodies, displays a failure to make use of the body’s spatial potential. She suggests that even in simple actions such as sitting, standing, and walking, women differ in their style of using their bodies. In walking and jogging, for example, women are generally not as open with their bodies as men in terms of their bearing and stride. Men often swing their arms in a more expansive way while many women have more up and down rhythm in their step. Women also frequently sit differently to men. Men keep their feet further apart than women do whilst women sit with their legs relatively close together and their arms across their bodies. This tends to be the case whether women are wearing a dress or trousers.

Young also suggests that men and women approach tasks that require force and strength in dissimilar ways. Women often do not perceive themselves as capable of lifting and carrying heavy objects or grasping or twisting with force. The perception a woman holds that she cannot accomplish particular tasks will sometimes lead her to fail to summon the full possibilities of her musculature and capacity for movement. Young writes: ‘For many women as they move in sport, a space surrounds us in imagination that we are not free to move beyond; the space available to our movement is a constricted space.’⁸ The idea that the capacity to move within space is potentially gendered has implications for the study of cinema as will be discussed in the next chapter.

Young states that there are three modalities or manners that characterise feminine movement. These are that women typically exhibit an ambiguous transcendence, an inhibited intentionality and a discontinuous unity with their surroundings. Transcendence refers to that which transcends our own consciousness. It is something objective rather than only a phenomenon of consciousness. The transcendent is usually opposed in phenomenology to the immanent. Immanence relates to our internal world. A person’s impressions of an object are immanent. The object, however, cannot be reduced to a series of impressions. There is something of the object that transcends. Merleau-Ponty, however, troubles this distinction between transcendence and immanence. For him, the body is both transcendent and imman...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Ascent of Woman: Climbing Films
• 2. Sexing the Canvas: Boxing Films
• 3. Athletic Gestures: Women’s Team Sports Films
• 4. Venus in Spikes: Track and Field Films
• 5. Muscle Pictures: Bodybuilding Films
• 6. Shaping the Self: Martina Navratilova and the Tennis Film
• 7. Surfing Aesthetics: Towards a Matrixial Reading of Sports Films
• 8. Conclusion: Raging Whippet
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Filmography
• Index
• eCopyright