Since Plato, images have often been seen as imitations of reality. In his famous allegory of the cave, watching images becomes a symbol of ignorance: those who gaze only at the shadows cast by flickering firelight cannot withstand the blinding truth of sunlight, and thus retreat back into the cave, continuing to watch the false reflections. This view, however, was radically overturned by Henri Bergson. With his declaration that “the aggregate of images is matter,” he rehabilitated the status of the image. No longer conceived as a mere imitation or reflection of materiality, the image is understood as matter itself—what the eye sees is not a copy, but the image as substance. Gilles Deleuze carried this line of thought further, not only laying out a systematic philosophy of the image but also constructing a pure theoretical foundation for the nascent art of cinema. This essay does not intend to follow that lineage in examining image typologies. Rather, it responds to the flourishing wave of contemporary feminism, and asks: What makes feminist images possible in the wake of the “Me Too” movement?

Since Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto in 1985, the concept of the cyborg has become a central motif in image-making. For many women creators, the cyborg opened up an entirely new feminist terrain—a means of carving out space in the imagination that was neither entirely human nor entirely machine. Yet, through frequent misreadings, the cyborg has often been appropriated by male creators to produce sexualized assemblages of bodily fragments, reducing Haraway’s original vision to fetishistic spectacle. In doing so, the cyborg became not a feminist figure of liberation, but yet another tool of the male gaze. Contemporary image-making, then, must return to the core of the cyborg idea—not as mechanical limb, but as a site of structural reconfiguration. Julia Ducournau’s brutally transgressive Titane is one such frenzied interpretation of the cyborg: through violence and carnage, it stages a grotesque revenge against patriarchal society. Yet even in its excess, it culminates in a mechanical nativity—the merging of woman and machine to produce a sacred child—sacrificing the maternal body to birth a cyborg lifeform. The film oscillates between radicality and tradition, affirming feminine strength while still situating the future within the machinery of male-coded continuity. Today, much of feminist cinema functions as a form of gendered politics. Its messages are often entangled with leftist political discourse, leading to ambiguous aesthetics and the risk of instrumentalization—of the film being reduced to mere rhetoric. The key question for contemporary image-makers is: How can we create spiritually resonant feminist images without being subsumed by ideology?

Alice Diop’s extraordinary feature debut, Saint Omer, offers a radically different interpretation of the cyborg. Here, the cyborg is no longer a patchwork of mechanized limbs—a modern-day Ship of Theseus—but a physiological entanglement between mother and child. How should we understand the chimera? In pregnancy, the cells of the mother and daughter intermingle, forming a hybrid body that carries the shared memory of womanhood. This is a cyborg not of prosthetics, but of continuity—a lineage carried within the body itself. Diop’s creation is not merely an attempt to redefine the cyborg, but a profound act of conjuring a female memory-space. She harnesses the inherent qualities of cinema as a medium to craft a memory that is both shared among characters and collectively held by all women. Images of gestation, pain, and tears—these become the keys to emotional resonance among women. From the rhythmic rise and fall of breath and waves, a memory-mass takes shape: a crystalline cluster of feminine remembrance. This aligns with Deleuze’s concept of the crystal-image—yet Diop urges us to go further. Memory should not remain fixed as a watchable form; it should unfold as a latent potential, a force capable of breaking rigid structures. In Saint Omer, the courtroom is one such structure—a tableau of lifeless formality where women are pinned into male-drawn frames. Though women dominate the visual frame, they are burdened with the sole weight of memory. It is through literary and philosophical expression that the potential of memory erupts, offering a way out of false judgments. Thus, woman and image become coupled in a topological system of memory. The cyborg here is not built through grafted metal but arises from the flesh—a new, organic structure of radical sisterhood.

Another crucial layer of signification in Saint Omer lies in its dialogue with Marguerite Duras. In an early scene, archival footage shows the public humiliation of French women who had relationships with German soldiers after World War II—paraded through the streets and condemned by their compatriots. These are the very images evoked by Duras’s screenplay for Hiroshima mon amour, where memory fuses the female protagonist with the city of Hiroshima. This essay does not aim to reanalyze the memoryscape Duras and Alain Resnais constructed around the trauma of war. Rather, it recognizes Hiroshima mon amour as a film of profound tactile sensitivity. When the eye touches flesh trembling beneath the gravel, it also touches the soul’s raw pain. It is not only the pain of war, but of the women sacrificed by war—those condemned for love, for survival, or for nothing at all. In the male-dominated narrative of warfare, women emerge as the only losers after victory, as the ones most brutally displaced. Women rarely gain anything from war. They are made casualties, whether as participants, bystanders, or unwilling conscripts into its violence. In this context, “war” transcends its narrow military meaning. It becomes the persistent state of conflict embedded in life itself. We could trace the history of female imagery in wartime cinema, but first we must clarify what “female image” even means. In early cinema—overwhelmingly shaped by male creators—women were often absent altogether, or appeared only as passive counterparts to male protagonists. These women were not truly “present,” but were defined by a hollow, visual absence—figures to be filled in, or caricatured in exaggerated gestures. In the blurred grain of silent film, we see women’s bodies in motion, mouths agape, voiceless—eerily like mermaids stripped of their speech. Even though men in silent film were also mute, their silence was counterbalanced by dominant subjectivity and nuanced performance. Women, by contrast, became mere objects of male observation and desire. This is what Laura Mulvey identified as the male gaze: the cinematic apparatus reproducing woman as spectacle, as source of erotic laughter or desire, never as subject. Following this initial phase of absence or exaggeration, the next stage gave rise to what we might call female imagery: women were still the objects of observation, but no longer in grotesque pantomime. They were granted voices, and their presence began to engage more directly with the viewer through the medium itself. This dual recognition—by the audience and by themselves—allowed female characters to assume a kind of subjectivity, yet their stories often unfolded along tragic lines. In these narratives, women suffered, were destroyed, and thus offered a mirror for reflecting patriarchal brutality. Their resistance remained reactive, shaped by the violence of the male world around them. Eventually, a new form emerged: the woman as image. This represents a turning point, and it comes in two divergent forms—each embodying a different politics of gender. On one side, we find the likes of Joi in Blade Runner 2049, a holographic projection designed purely to fulfill male sexual desire. She is image in its most literal and servile form: translucent, pliant, ever-present, and ever-erased. On the other side is the urban drifter: the anonymous, image-woman wandering through patriarchal societies, neither eroticized nor empowered, but lingering, haunting, almost spectral. Yet both forms remain tethered to tragedy. The image of woman in cinema is too often confined to a grammar of loss. Her narrative serves not to express agency but to warn, to mourn, to dissolve. These female-centered films become modern-day Greek tragedies, where catharsis is achieved through the heroine’s destruction. But this destruction, while affecting, rarely gives rise to a distinct cinematic language of women. Instead, it reinforces an old one—one where deus ex machina arrives not to rescue the woman, but to enshrine her ruin.

Yet it is only with Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc that we truly witness the emergence of the female as subject in cinema. Dreyer did not simply recount a historical moment; he seized upon its symbolic force—the trial of Joan as a woman, and as a singular consciousness. In the film’s courtroom scenes, what we see is not justice, but a grotesque performance orchestrated by a male ecclesiastical order. The trial is not a process of truth but a ritual of political domination. What Dreyer achieved, perhaps for the first time in cinema, was a deeply moving close-up—not of theatrical gesture or overwrought motion, but of trembling faces, of tears, of muscle spasms across a cheek. The camera draws close to emotion itself. It is this proximity, this reverent attention to feeling, that marks the film as a genuine creation of female-centered cinema. For men, society has long taught that strength lies in stoicism, in the hardening of expression. But in women’s faces, we see a different kind of knowledge: one that pulses, that trembles, that leaks. In the close-up of Joan’s tearful face, we witness not performance, but something akin to revelation. Perhaps this moment—this tear—marks the true beginning of female imagery in cinema: the first time a woman could weep on screen, not as an object of ridicule or titillation, but as a subject facing the gaze of the patriarchal world.

We encounter such a searing image again in Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre sa vie, when Nana, the film’s protagonist, steps into a movie theatre. On screen plays The Passion of Joan of Arc. As Joan weeps under interrogation, Nana, too, begins to cry. Here, a layered mirroring takes shape: two women separated by centuries, yet bound by the camera’s gaze and the violence of their lives. Though their fates differ, both are ensnared in the whirls of their respective realities. Both suffer under a persistent state of war—not only the literal wars of history, but the war of life, of existence, of being a woman. Nana, trapped by economic necessity, spirals toward destruction. In Vivre sa vie, there is no crystalline memory, no hope of redemption. Nana is not granted a moment of introspective reflection or escape. She must face reality with unbearable clarity and fall into it, step by step. In the end, she is killed and discarded in the street. As Harun Farocki noted, in the original cut of the film, the camera lingers on Nana’s corpse for nearly three full minutes—a rare and devastating attention offered by Godard to this lost woman. But in the American version, that shot was ruthlessly trimmed to mere seconds. Her death—her entire tragedy—is reduced to a passing glimpse, her story flattened into a flash of flesh on the screen.

This forms a trajectory—from Joan to Nana, and then to contemporary figures like Laurence Coly. Joan and Laurence are subjected to trials, while Nana is killed without one. Women, in all three cases, are placed under scrutiny; they are looked at, judged, disposed of. And yet, their tears gather together—not as isolated droplets of suffering, but as a collective reservoir of memory. This is what we earlier called a memory-mass: a psychic topography shared among women, built from their pain, their resistance, and their witnessing. Countless women have been sacrificed into this memory field. And because memory is humanity’s only preservable gift, the task of the image is to retain it. In the dialectic between truth and illusion, it is the conjunction of memory and image that unleashes the greatest power. Through images that narrate memory, we can re-enter history. And though history cannot be changed, it remains the best guide for shaping the future. The correction of conceptual errors—especially those regarding gender and representation—must come through history. This is feminism’s fate and function. Contemporary women creators, regardless of their medium, inevitably draw upon history—whether through testimony, reenactment, or reclamation. To retell history, be it through self-narration or embodied performance, is to reconstruct the dialectic between the real and the fictive. Deleuze once spoke of the power of the false: the radical force of the counterfeit, which breaks ossified structures not from within, but from without. Such a force exists beyond the sanctioned logic of gendered systems. Only the extrasystemic can dismantle the system. Any effort operating from within the frame—though perhaps valuable—can only soften its boundaries, not dissolve them. That said, these efforts remain necessary. As auxiliaries to the power of falsification, they too may challenge the architecture from its edges.

In the wake of the Me Too movement, the trajectory of feminist image-making appears to have shifted. No longer centered on individual women’s lived experience, it now gravitates toward grand narratives—toward images of collective female resistance against patriarchal institutions. Politically, this movement is undeniably powerful and necessary. But when translated into cinematic creation, it warrants caution. By aligning too closely with large-scale political gestures, female creators risk losing sight of the singular. These works, in their solidarity, may unintentionally overshadow the intimate textures of a woman’s life—her specific desires, griefs, and memories. We must ask: Do we truly need grand narratives to tell women’s stories? Or has the emphasis on the collective drowned out the voice of the individual? In the aftermath of Me Too, the challenge becomes whether anti-narrative is still possible—whether a return to the granular, the inward, the irreducibly personal can still be achieved. What would it take to narrate the singular experience of being a woman, without sacrificing it to allegory or ideological abstraction? Here we might recall Bergson’s assertion: the totality of images is matter. And we may go further: image is not only material—it is subject. Every subjectivity is framed through images, much like Dziga Vertov’s “kino-eye.” To look is to gaze into the image of another; and we ourselves are composed of overlapping images. We dwell in a world made of images, constructing our identities through what we see and are seen to be. Thus, the act of feminist image-making becomes not only an aesthetic task, but an ontological one. It is about asserting subjectivity through the image—not as a passive body to be viewed, but as a force that returns the gaze. The question is not only how women are seen, but whether the image of woman can look back—whether it can return that gaze with a heat that burns through the screen, challenging the one who dares to look.