Masculinity/Femininity is Russell Shaeffer’s 2014 documentary film which explores the impasses and paradoxes of gender identity and performance through a series of interviews with artists, film critics and filmmakers including Thomas Waugh, Jack Halberstam and Linda Williams among others. Based on Sheaffer’s and James Franco’s short film Masculinity and Me (2010) in which the duo attempt to express their unease about questions asked to Franco by a popular men’s magazine, Shaeffer endeavors to broaden and problematize the encounter with gender in Masculinity/Femininity, asking interviewees a series of what Sheaffer refers to as “equally egregious” questions about women. The questions include, “when did you realize you were a woman?” “what’s the greatest example you know or have witnessed of someone achieving what is means to be a woman?” what about womanhood do you know now that you wished you’d known when you were younger?” and, “what’s your favorite thing about being a woman?”
To these questions the interviewees respond in variety of ways; some simply discuss their experiences in an impromptu manner, while others stage performances or read through scripts they have written for the documentary. The spectrum thus generated thereby is broad as far as performance and gender practice are concerned; subjects not only give their accounts of gender identity, but as well display the medium through which their accounts are delivered, making the interview process a richly intertextual viewing experience. Surely, this is one of the more successful features of the film.
One of the key aspects of Masculinity/Femininity is Sheaffer’s stylistic decision to shoot the film and the making of the film with three different cameras, High Definition, Digital Video, and Super 8. By interleaving shots between the three different cameras, and as well interspersing the behind-the-scenes aspects of the production with the actual interviews, Sheaffer’s project is able to comment on both the visuality and narratological elements of gender performance; the different cameras play with the viewers’ perceptions of the interviewees’ bodies, providing a visual commentary on the politics and phenomenology of gender. As well, the behind-the-scenes aspect of the film calls performativity into question, as Sheaffer and his crew discuss whether or not the film is scripted, an obvious commentary on the “scriptedness” of gender performance.
These features are noteworthy, as not only do they give the film an emphasis on how the practice of gender identity is always already located at the matrix of documentary and fiction — producing a theory of subjectivity as an ambiguous complex of fictive as well as documentary practices — but as well, these choices showcase the unique propensity of the cinema as a medium that is almost ready-made for an exploration of this kind; the shifting gaze between different imagistic surfaces (HD, DV, and Super 8) causes a wonderfully vertiginous effect. Furthermore, the film does not shy away from the production process, at times focalizing the boom mic operator, the camera operator, and, most intriguingly, including the whirring machinations of the Super 8 camera auditorily superimposed with the interviewees’ monologues — the effect of which is almost Brechtian in quality.
Although these stylistic choices are certainly striking, the film is unfortunately limited in certain aspects: first among these being the variety of subjects interviewed, which rarely feature non-white perspectives on gender, and when they do (as with Pratibha Parmar for example), the interview comes across as abridged. In this way, the film reads as an exercise in white gender anxiety, rarely deviating from the rigid, midline racial perspective that it examines. Through this omission, Sheaffer unfortunately misses the opportunity to mine from a variety of perspectives rather than those localized to the greater New York academic and artistic community.
Another limitation is the film’s association with James Franco, as today, in the era of #MeToo, it is perhaps a fated misstep that Sheaffer makes sure that the viewer is aware of film’s association with Franco, at one point showing a clip from their 2010 film in which Franco blathers on about his parents, mathematics and Richard Diebenkorn. Franco, who has faced a number of allegations of sexual misconduct by several women recently, is thus centered as an integral part of the film’s ethos, and therefore the film loses some of its credibility; for the viewing subject in the wake of the #MeToo movement, the film seems to to garner its credibility through an array of academic and artistic voices including Franco’s, but rather than find a stable purchase, the film suffers as a result. Sheaffer attempts to smuggle in a universal critique of gender through the film’s avant garde style and array of characters, however the film’s subject matter is stunted given that the interviewees are in large part a regionally and racially homogenous stock of New York-based academics and artists. Despite Sheaffer’s attempt to unravel the discursive Gordian knot of gender identity, the film unconsciously imposes its own discursive definitions of gender within its regional and racial confines. For these reasons, although the film and supplemental booklet (which contains extended interviews from the film and the source material for Masculinity and Me) are only about four years old, they already appear dated and perhaps even irrelevant for today.
— Reviewed by Anthony Ballas
Anthony Ballas studied English, film and philosophy at the University of Colorado at Denver. As an independent researcher he has contributed to multiple volumes on film, racism and sexism, and most recently to a volume entitled Critical Essays on Twin Peaks: The Return forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan. He is currently editing a collection on Liberation Theology and cinema.
