Where are the women?
Last week I felt unwell. I consoled myself with lemon and honey and once I could progress from bed to sofa I caught up on some film viewing.
I watched Chantal Akerman’s 1975 film, “Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.”
This film might not be for everyone. It’s 3 and a half hours long, includes very little plot (aside from a memorable penultimate scene) or dialogue. It largely consists of perfectly composed static long shots observing the small everyday domestic rituals performed by the eponymous heroine over three days.
I was transfixed by what the NY Times called ‘it’s revelatory tedium’. This film, which was recently voted the greatest film of all time by Sight and Sound Magazine, was made in the year of my birth by a woman director working with a female cinematographer detailing the monotonous, time-consuming and still recognisable work of a woman in the home. Akerman intended ‘to give cinematic life’ to these actions which are so often unseen and undervalued.
I loved it for this. And for the opportunity to watch a depiction of a female experience through a female gaze. This feels unusual now, so it was thrilling to see it from 50 years ago.
When I first began my Yoga Teacher Training and was exposed to more of the history and philosophy of the subject I was perplexed by the absence of women. The early Yoga practitioners in India were almost all men and although it is changing, much of the scholarship has been conducted by men. The evidence for women in yoga is scant to say the least. Sometimes they appeared to be ritual objects used to facilitate male practice. It was hard to understand what my practice as a woman and mother in 21st century London had to do with any of this.
But the lives of ordinary women rarely do show up in the historical record. That’s why Akerman’s film is so brilliant. It shines a cinematic light on this invisible world of women. It doesn’t romanticise the experience at all - it is a bleak film - but it does create a window into a world rarely seen and barely ever thought to matter.
When we are searching for women in history we have to think laterally, search for tangential evidence and also, perhaps, allow ourselves to use a little imagination. Yoga is a set of very compelling ideas and practices that help us make sense of the experience of being a human. That these ideas did not travel beyond the boundaries of male brains and bodies seems unlikely.