Emma Johnson, Sleeping Jutta (Lost in Translation), 2026. Digital Video, 27min, 28sec.
Emma Johnson, Sleeping Jutta (Lost in Translation) [opaquely-clothed torso], 2026. Digital C-Print, 13 x 19 in.
Emma Johnson, Sleeping Jutta (Lost in Translation) [blurry], 2026. Digital C-Print, 13 x 19 in.
Emma Johnson, Sleeping Jutta (Lost in Translation) [with hand], 2026. Digital C-Print, 13 x 19 in.
Sleeping Jutta (Lost in Translation) is a video and photograph based on Sofia Coppola’s opening film shot in Lost in Translation (2003), which she based on the painter John Kacere’s Jutta (1973). The images created by Kacere and Coppola are medium shots of a woman laying on her side on a bed with sheer underwear, facing away from the viewer. The composition abstracts and commodifies the body by discluding the head and feet. Coppola’s sleeping subject reminds me of the French version of Beauty and the Beast, the 1946 La Belle et la Bête. The film is creepy because a man watches a woman in a vulnerable state, sleeping and unconscious, and preys on her. Unsettling to watch before the Me Too Movement, it seems more antiquated now.
I reference the Kacere/Coppola image to create commentary through difference with my version. Instead of wearing sheer underwear that renders the woman an object of the camera’s gaze, or as feminist scholar Laura Mulvey would put it, “the male gaze,” the woman in my version wears conservative clothing. The frame isolates the torso from the rest of the body, commodifying the body, positioning the viewer to embody the male gaze. However, the opaque clothing denies viewers access to seeing the naked female body.
Neoliberalism and postfeminism are inextricably linked, as postfeminism co-opted feminism to support a neoliberal agenda. The torso imagery comments on the tension between feminism and postfeminism. Subscribers of postfeminism would embrace the idea of a woman, empowered through advantages gained through patriarchial neoliberalism, to dress in a sexy fashion acquired through conspicuous luxury spending. A figure in sweatpants (or, silk pajama bottoms in the image) does not deny the gaze, but obstructs the sexualization of looking. This mitigates, but does not completely stop, the gaze from hoarding an asymmetry in power. But mitigating is still powerful resistance. The woman in my image cannot control that she is being looked at, but she can control what she displays herself in, partially (though not wholly) denying the male gaze.
Both Kacere and Coppola meant their images to depict women who do not expect to be looked at. According to Kacere and Coppola, their figures believe that they are alone. However, I’m skeptical. When humans are alone they choose comfortable clothing over something that would look sexy were that potential gazer around. Wearing realistic clothing denies the fantasy of the male gaze, e.g., the clothing is opaque and non-revealing. The body whom I depict faces the camera so that she might still be gazed upon but there is also confrontation in that the object is looking at the viewer. Even though the face is offscreen, the orientation of the body positions it in a more confrontational rather than passive relationship with the viewer.
Works referenced
Coppola, Sofia. Lost in Translation. Focus Features, 2003.
Kacere, John. Jutta. 1973, https://www.meiselgallery.com/artwork/jutta/
La Belle et la Bête. Directed by Jean Cocteau. New York: Janus Films: Criterion Collection, 1946/2006.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no.3 (1975): 6-18. https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/16.3.6
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