In her 1992 essay “The Oppositional Gaze,” bell hooks examines classical cinema’s “negation” of the black female subject (686), arguing that intersections of racial and gender oppression set the black female spectator’s experience apart from the black male spectator, who can assume the “phallocentric gaze” and (within the context of the theater) resist a system of white supremacy[1] invested in guarding “White womanhood” (683).

Foucault’s theory of discipline and Mulvey’s work on the gaze are instrumental to this portion of her argument, as she begins her analysis of black spectatorship by noting the white slaveholder’s injunction against the black gaze – the recognition that looking constitutes an act of resistance. In his discussion of the panopticon and spectatorship, Foucault locates power both externally and within the subject, arguing that “in all relations of power ‘there is necessarily the possibility of resistance,’” and enjoining the reader to “search those margins, gaps, locations on and through the body, where agency can be found” (682). Thus, the act of gazing confers power, as it allows the viewer to exercise agency and engages the viewed in a process of self-surveillance. For hooks, the act of “look[ing] back” – of reversing the direction of the gaze – provides this “possibility of resistance” (682).

Mulvey’s work in addressing the gender dynamics of the disciplinary gaze gestures toward this “possibility of resistance,” but like much other feminist criticism, it does not recognize race as integral to representations of gender in cinema. For hooks, Mulvey charts a viewing experience ending at the point of “disaffectation” that the black female spectator assumes from the beginning (689).

hooks answers Foucault’s invitation and conventional feminism’s failure to recognize the black female subject with “critical spectatorship,” an analytical framework interrogating cinema that occludes the black female spectator (684). In this way, “critical spectatorship” not only opposes the “White male gaze that seeks to reinscribe the Black female body in a narrative of voyeuristic pleasure” (692), but also resists a mainstream feminist narrative that only recognizes the female subject as white. Thus, the critical spectator resists both the “phallocentric gaze” and “the construction of White womanhood as lack” (689-90), imagining “alternative[s]” to this conventional cinematic model (691). hooks’ alternative is a hermeneutic that “[creates] space for the construction of radical Black female subjectivity” (692), and her examples of this subject formation focus upon pairs of women engaging in acts of “mirrored recognition” and “affirmation” (692-93).[2]

Since these examples emphasize subject formation in the context of pair relationships, Tangerine’s final scene seems especially relevant to the hermeneutic outlined in “The Oppositional Gaze.” (We might therefore consider whether hooks’ essay addresses the cisgender subject or whether it also addresses the transgender subject.) This scene (1:24:16) highlights the film’s main pair relationship, excluding the passers-by that occupy many of the earlier street shots. Sin-Dee and Alexandra’s mutual gaze seems to constitute an instance of “mirrored recognition” and “affirmation” – the audience momentarily distanced from the scene with a brief shot from outside the coin laundry. Their gazes, as well as the exchange of the wig, not only signal the primacy of their friendship within the film, but also represent “recognition of their common struggle for subjectivity” (292).

[1] In the 1992 version of this article, hooks capitalizes the terms “Black” and “White,” but later versions of this essay render these terms in lowercase. I follow the later convention within my own analysis of the 1992 version, but the difference warrants further discussion.

[2] She draws her examples from Julie Dash’s Illusions and Sankofa’s A Passion of Remembrance.

Women are comparatively scarce in the first half of October, acting most frequently in relation to the counter-revolution, and often committing acts of violence against people or culture when in groups. If we consider July’s counter-revolution sequence (16:24-17:40) in light of Eisenstein’s revision of the dialectic in “Beyond the Shot” (as we should, since he is the creator of both the theory and the film), it represents an instance of “collision,” a concept opposed to the idea that montage always constitutes “a series of fragments […] Bricks that expound an idea serially” (19). The sequence literally presents a collision of symbols, with the Bolshevik’s banner in opposition to the women’s parasols, as well as a collision of shots focusing upon the women’s mouths and feet.

Perhaps more importantly, it represents one of those instances in which Eisenstein “attempts” to “[emancipate] closed action from its conditioning by time and space,” thereby circumventing the demands of “plot [….] to achieve purely physiological effects” (38-39).[1] The swarms of fleeing workers are not directly reacting to the women brandishing their parasols, but the sequence nonetheless renders them the most memorable perpetrators, their malice heightened by their concern with trivialities (e.g. their feathered hats and lacy parasols). Through this contrast between the women and the fleeing crowd, the audience understands the counter-revolution as feminized – embodying the symbols of excessive consumption. (Or at the very least, the audience understands that this is how Eisenstein presents the counter-revolution.)

Although these collisions of spatially dissociated elements work to produce a specific “physiological [effect]” (39) – sympathy for the massacred Bolsheviks and disgust for their murderers – their effect breaks down when viewed in light of later scenes with similar patterns of imagery. Eisenstein posits the “series” effect as only one outcome of editing (19), but audience members must contend with their expectation that the entire narrative represents a “series” – the later sequences revising earlier related scenes.

For instance, when Eisenstein introduces the “Women’s Death Battalion” later in October, his imagery plainly recalls the July sequence, further feminizing the Provisional Government. The female soldiers’ romp on the billiard table – bobbed hair and toothy grins turned upward – continues the film’s association of women with vulgar consumption, in one sense building upon the counter-revolution scene, but simultaneously undermining that scene’s spectacular violence. Although both scenes emphasize the women’s teeth and apparel, their tones are obviously different, as the sequence staged on “The billiard table of Nicholas II” represents the battalion’s comic assault upon the government’s tenuous dignity. Their banal activities – applying cosmetics and removing their uniforms to reveal lacy undergarments – supersede the women’s subversive potential in the earlier scene.

In locating the Winter Palace’s loss of dignity in the billiard room sequence, Eisenstein ultimately complicates the apparent political ideology of his film, with the narrative timeline disrupting his construction of the Provisional Government as already illegitimate and feminized in the July scene. The billiard room scene in turn suggests that the regime still possesses a sliver of legitimacy – authority that the female soldiers debauch.

[1] Eisenstein uses several other October examples of his “first attempts” to achieve this “emancipation” in “The Dramaturgy of Film Form” (38-40).