Adrienne Martyn began her career as part of the Women’s Liberation Movement in the 1970s. Living in Sydney, Martyn worked primarily within a vocabulary of social documentary, producing photographs for feminist periodicals including Broadsheet, Me Jane and Refractory Girl, among others. She became a member of the Sydney Women’s Film Group in 1972, contributing to collectively authored films that chronicled the polemic of women’s experience. Home (1973), in particular, recorded the toll of institutional violence on individuals through first-person testimony, reconstructions and still images by Martyn. Alongside filmmaking and distribution, the group advocated for and held workshops to empower women as filmmakers. After receiving a grant from the Australian Film Institute’s Experimental Film & Television Fund, Martyn’s first moving image work, The Object, was filmed in Ōtautahi Christchurch in 1975. That same year, British film theorist Laura Mulvey published her formative dissection of visual pleasure in cinema, and its deference to the male gaze. As Mulvey writes:
“In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure which is styled accordingly. … women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness”.2
In service to this dynamic, the camera becomes, “a mechanism for producing an illusion of Renaissance space, flowing movements compatible with the human eye, an ideology of representation that revolves around the perception of the subject.”3 Mulvey’s eloquent analysis was widely disseminated, and Martyn’s own film critically articulates the ways in which woman’s desire is “still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.”4
A self-professed Hollywood fanatic, Martyn looked to the artifice of costume and glamour to outfit Eve, her femme fatale, whose performance is constrained as much by the camera as by the expectations of femininity of the time. The lens remains fixed as Eve slowly turns on the spot, its gaze traversing an almost abstract territory of skin and fabric, rendered in grainy celluloid. Martyn traces Eve’s arch expression, her shiny red lips; an air of exposure persists, at odds with this knowing masquerade. The camera’s close scrutiny evokes several lines by poet Eileen Myles: “her awesome / neck so sensitive / her ear, no ear has ever been less constructed to hear but to allow / the midgets of myth to tickle, to bite and gnaw / if you can extrapolate some meanings from / this.” 5 In both Martyn’s film and Myles’ poem, fantasy is amplified to an extreme, an exaggeration that is all-engulfing; the body’s physicality and functionality, along with the subject’s autonomy, arguably recedes.
In The Object, however, the camera’s implicit invitation to objectification does not preclude the subject’s agency; Eve is a participant in this act of representation.6 A choreography of surface and depth, opacity and reflection oscillates throughout the work, akin to the quality that writer Shola von Reinhold describes as “the shimmer of glamour-knowing.”7 She circles haltingly, her chair manipulated by unseen hands. Eve’s subjectivity is distilled into a sequence of minute gestures; the shuddering image cracks the illusory space as a construction.
Jess Clifford, Things are, they do not happen, 2025, Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery, Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University of Wellington.
2. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen, 16, no. 3, Autumn 1975, p. 11.
3. Mulvey, ibid., p. 18.
4. Mulvey, ibid., p. 7.
5. Eileen Myles, “Walter Myles”, in Evolution, Grove Press, New York 2028, p. 33.
6. Eve Durning worked as and actor and costume designer with the Globe Theatre in Otepoti Dunedin. She made her costume and supplied the jewellery she wears in The Object
7. Shola con Reinhold, "A Collaboration," in Pippa Garner: Act Like You Know Me" ed. Fiona Alison Duncan and Maurin Dietrich, Bierke Verlag, Berlin, 2023, p. 112.
The Object, 1975.