In Her Skin

Writing about Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7 and its “unsentimental and subjective” tone in the pages of the New Yorker, Pauline Kael called it “one of the few films directed by a woman in which the viewer can sense a difference.” The exact nature of this difference would shortly become a matter of hot debate—in Laura Mulvey’s controversial 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” and Chantal Akerman’s breakthrough Je tu il elle of the previous year—and the definition of “male” and “female” cinematic gazes, and discussion of their implications, continues to this day. Along with Varda and Akerman’s aforementioned films, In Her Skin showcases features—by such artists as Rungano Nyoni, Sebastián Lelio, and Audrey Diwan—which endeavor to create a visual language for their female protagonists’ stories that renders these women as subjects rather than objects, producing films in which, per Kael, you can sense a difference.