Vagabond
“With the alienated and alienating Mona, the film disrupts the classical structure of the look and narrative because she refuses that place culturally assigned to the women� (Hottell 18)
The male gaze, as we understand it in its traditional form, was disrupted time after, after time in the film “Vagabond�. For example, scenes with Mona being dirty and spitting; picking her nose causes that male gaze to be disrupted. She is not raised to a platform of sexuality, to the rawness of animalistic sexuality. She wears clothes that are baggie, ripped and torn. Her body becomes ambiguous, non-definable as male or female. In tracking shots she becomes a passerby not the main focus of the shot. Almost like we, as the viewer, don’t even notice her, she is that invisible. One thing I thought most challenged the male gaze was Mona’s food consumption. Serving and being served food holds power and significance. In the whole film whenever food is being served the women brings the food out to the man; the woman (server) never eats what she has prepared. The only woman who eats in this film is Mona, except when her and the professor eat some flat bread in the car. Mona, through the act of eating, puts on a male dominant role and sheds the woman submissive role. Time and time again the male gaze is being challenged in the film “Vagabond�.