Auteure d鈥檜ne Inversion Politique
Inside LIT 302 with Professor Catherine Witt.
Alice Guy’s 1906 short film Les Résultats du féminisme [The Consequences of Feminism], which we watch in LIT 302: French Connections: The Intertwined Histories of French and American Cinema, imagines a world in which the gender roles of her time—a period in France known as la Belle Époque—have been inverted. A sense of tenderness and possibility dominates the film, not ridicule. Yet the few film historians who have paid attention to this work have tended to dismiss it as a shallow and ultimately conservative parody of what French society might look like if the suffragettes had their way. Such a reading improbably assumes that Alice Guy—an unmarried stenographer turned self-made film director—lacked political consciousness.
The mise-en-scène in this frame captures something of the understated and highly relatable humor with which Alice Guy questioned contemporary gender norms. The action takes place in a typical turn-of-the-century French salon, a space that exudes a strong sense of ownership and propriety. The fact that everything looks in its place signals to the viewer that everything has a place.
Les Résultats du féminisme is perhaps one of the first filmic attempts to depict sexual difference in terms of gender—that is, as a social and cultural construct entailing modes of self-expression, kinds of sociability, and power dynamics. Although Alice Guy does not evaluate the masculine–feminine binary contained in this frame, the film taken as a whole hints at the possibility of breaking down gendered divides and reconciling the idea of social order with that of care.