Undoing phallocentrism in cinema
As David Laderman says in Driving Visions, "Vagabond's moving camera becomes the central expression of the film's theme of mobility" (265). This cinematic technique is one of the most important disruption to the power of the male gaze because Mona is rarely captured/objectified by the camera. The camera is constantly sweeping by, thereby decentering Mona and focusing more on the rest of the mise-en-scène. Thus Mona is rarely subjected to the male gaze and as the object to-be-looked at. She is becomes progressivly filthier thereby unfetishizing her, unlike other movies which fetishize and stylize women to the point of "perfection." The narrative structure too disrupts the power of phallocentrism simply by having a female as the protaginist of a road film and beyond that, that she drives the narrative, not men like Girl on a Motorcycle. She is a drifter, but she has no one completely dictate where she goes next. For example, when the sheep farmer gave her land to stay and plant potatos, Mona decided that that wasn't what she wanted after all and did not follow the farmer's advice. In some ways the film could be critiqued as a quasi-feminist film because of all of the violence done upon Mona, but the cinematic techniques and the narrative structure features discussed above embrace the feminist counter-cinema.