Overpowering the Voiceover: Female Subjectivity and Sound in Klute

Some critics have called Alan J. Pakula’s neo-noir Klute (1971) progressive and radical in its positive depiction of an independent, sexually liberated woman; others have argued that the construction of the female character is no different than that found in classic noir, and that Klute actually operates in a profoundly anti-feminist way. This essay seeks to explore the reasons behind these diverging interpretations, locating the source of the difficulty in assessing the main female character’s power over the narrative in the disjunctive relationship between sound and image in the film. In marked contrast to the classic noir cycle, in Klute the story is filtered through the subjectivity of the female character, who poses a distinctive challenge to the patriarchal order and the foundation of the heterosexual couple. At the same time, there is a disconnect between the words she speaks in voiceover and the actions we see unfold onscreen that actively works to undermine her point of view. It becomes increasingly difficult, then, to say with any certainty whether the film’s central female protagonist can be considered an active subject or a passive object presented for the male gaze. 

Thelma and Louise (1991) Opening Clip Analysis

The opening of any film is rife with visual and thematic information and clues that anticipate and inform the rest of the movie. With Thelma & Louise (1991), director Ridley Scott puts a new and gendered spin on both the expansive road movie and the intimate buddy film. Teeming with thrilling, life-affirming energy, exuberant comedy, warmth, and wit, the movie focuses on the two title characters, utterly ordinary, working-class women fleeing the monotony of their lives and discovering unexpected, untapped wells of feeling and strength. Not unlike the Western hero of Hollywood classics, these ordinary women encounter situations and conditions that make them extraordinary. The Western is also invoked through Hans Zimmer’s mournful, tough, galvanizing country tinged score. Even before the first scene, over the opening credits, the music creates a poignant mood that is at once earthly and ethereal, like Thelma & Louise itself—or should it be “themselves”?

Antonia's Line (1995) Analysis

“In her tongue is the law of kindness,” one sermon says referring to the title character of Marleen Gorris’ Antonia’s Line. And, indeed, the thriving, cheerful matriarchy Antonia creates is ruled by her own kind of law, removed from formal institutions, a form of justice that is not blind, and which knows only kindness, compassion, acceptance, and love. The film is a zany, fantastical story of warm humanism, forceful feminism, the everyday realities of rural life mixed with the magic realism of Latin America and the dour European philosophies on death and nothingness, all in a lyrical, beautiful, bucolic pastoral fantasy filled with colorful, unforgettable characters. As played by Willeke van Ammelrooy, Antonia is a strong, sturdy, robust woman with a sincere smile, far removed from Hollywood standards of beauty but infused with a natural glow and warmth that make her truly beautiful. The legacy she leaves her daughter Danielle (Els Dottermans), her granddaughter Therese (played at six by Carolien Spoor, at thirteen by Esther Vriesendorp, and as an adult by Veerle van Overloop), and her great-granddaughter Sarah (Thyrza Ravesteijn) will live on long after she has died, carried on from woman to woman down the title’s line.

***This is a brief analysis of some of the film's themes, not a review. It contains only mild spoilers.