53 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. French, The Female Gaze in Documentary Film, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68094-7_3 CHAPTER 3 The ‘Female Gaze’ The question of what might constitute a ‘female gaze’ has had a long his- tory in flmmaking, flm theory and women’s art. In the early 1970s, there was a desire to invent a female gaze with women shooting flms for and by women, with an aim to discover whether a new and different language to that of ‘fathers or lovers’ could be established (Babette Mangolte in Tefer 2018). In feminist flm theory, Laura Mulvey’s exploration of the fetishis- tic, voyeuristic and controlling ‘male gaze’ shone a light on power rela- tions and the gaze in classic Hollywood cinema. She distinguished pleasures of looking (scopophilia) in three kinds of look that split ‘active/ male’ and ‘passive/female’ relations: from camera to event; from spectator to screen action; and between characters in the flm. She theorised that men were bearers of the look, women were spectacle, and the look of the spectator was aligned with the non-eroticised male character (Mulvey 1975). 1 Mulvey’s seminal work is important to the history of theorising the gaze and as such is background to the female gaze. However, it is not what is being explored in this book that is specifcally concerned with how women directors look, and not with the gaze in classical Hollywood flms, or with the gaze as Mulvey theorised it. As it is explored here, the female gaze is not the inverse of Mulvey’s male gaze; it is centred on female sub- jectivities as expressed in flm. This chapter examines the concept of the female gaze in documentary flm with specifc reference to women directors. The female gaze is not homogeneous, singular or monolithic, and it will necessarily take many