The Changed and Unchanged Situation in the Representation of Women in Contemporary Cinema (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Representation of Women in Feminist Cinema
2020
In the art of cinema, which fulfills the function of a “dream factory” with its male-dominated narrative structure, men are represented in active roles with their actions, while women in passive roles that do not or cannot interfere with the flow of events with their inactions. This perception, which dominates the cinema, showed a change with the reflection of intellectual context of the Second Wave Feminism to the films. In this sense, in the study, Fried Green Tomatoes, regarded as a feminist film example by movie critics and directed by Jon Avnet in 1991, was chosen as a sample. In the study, structuralist narrative codes that construct meaning in the film are analyzed in the context of feminist thought and film theory paradigms. In the film, the “strong female character representations,” which are placed in the center of narrative and positioned to advance the story, are subjected in the foreground; these characters also stand against the known stereotyped roles imposed on women...
Part of the project: "Cinema and sexual and gender identities" Part 1 and Part 2 are also available at Academia.edu and at https://www.cinemafocus.eu Since the early days of cinema, gender roles have been portrayed in films according to the prevailing traditional and patriarchal stereotypes that have for a long time assigned more or less fixed social and psychological attributes to women and men. However, cinema's history has also inevitably reflected major political, economic and sociocultural changes, which have affected the roles of women and men within their societies and their cultures. This series of Dossiers explores how female and male gender roles have evolved and how films continue to reflect, but also consolidate or challenge, the representations of women and men on the screen.
The German Cinema Book , 2020
In 2001, the feminist director Jutta Brückner wrote that films by women were the product of an often arduous "quest for traces. " 1 Her comment echoed an interview three decades earlier, when Brückner had spoken of film as a means to "reconstruct symbolically" the "disrupted physical integrity" of women in history. 2 The reference in both instances was not only to her own work but in general to filmmaking by women who seek new forms of articulation for feminine subjectivity and experience. Brückner's observations have resonance too for a different cultural practice of retrieval, that of history-writing in respect of women's film. This chapter attempts a reconstruction of key moments in German women's filmmaking, which we explore in particular, but not solely, in its relation to feminism. Like Brückner's film narratives, our history-which for reasons of space is necessarily partial-starts from an assumption of "disrupted integrity, " though not, as for Brückner, in the physical or symbolic body of woman, but in the similarly fractured cinematic body of work by women over twelve decades of German film. It is, moreover, not only Brückner's understanding of film as a medium capable of lending tangible presence to an otherwise invisible or fragmented gendered experience that is useful for this chapter. Her filmmaking method offers further helpful insights for approaches to women's cinema history. Early in her filmmaking career, in films including the experimental documentary Tue recht und scheue niemand (Do right and fear nobody, 1975) and the semi-autobiographical Hungerjahre (Years of Hunger, 1979), Brückner used newsreel inserts, still photographs, voice-over, and found sound to "suggest the complexity of a whole period": in Tue recht, five decades of one woman's mid-twentieth-century petit bourgeois existence; in Hungerjahre, the 1950s as viewed from the perspective of a bulimic adolescent. Brückner's juxtapositions of archive image and sound with memory fragments and fictional narrative revealed female subjectivities in a state of emergence, developing as "the result of a long cultural process" that is "constituted by … history. " 3 Analogously, the history of women's filmmaking-of the moments, then, in which women become the active subjects of cinematic perception as well as social actors in film production and circulation-demands an approach that registers traces of feminine subjectivity and agency as the products of specific conditions of historical emergence: conditions that may at one moment facilitate women's filmmaking and at others suppress female participation in the film industry or cinematic practice. Examples from early film history should serve to illustrate the point. Three women who would later move into production and directing-Henny Porten, Asta Nielsen (see Chapter 5), and Leontine Sagan-began careers in acting at a historical moment in which film performance and stardom belonged to, indeed were significantly shaping an early twentieth-century culture of public visibility for women. In Emilie Altenloh's pioneering sociological study of early cinema audiences, Asta Nielsen in particular figures not merely as an audience magnet for a cross-class community of female fans. 4 Feminist historians including Miriam Hansen, Heide Schlüpmann, and Andrea Haller have also shown how the mass presence of women in the film audience may be understood as part of a broader early twentieth-century challenge to the "dominant organization of public experience" around masculine norms. 5 That challenge was rooted in socio-historical developments including the expansion of women's education, the advance of 31 FEMINISM AND WOMEN'S CINEMA
Feminist Films between Theory and Practice
Feminist film theorists continue to question the minimized image of women on the screen. They do so by analyzing the relationship between films, the ideological and dominating position of men, the audience's perception, and women's reactions. Although feminism now operates within the postmodernist era, highlighting the plurality of culture in general and arts in particular, feminist film theory continues to adhere to its Marxist and psychoanalytic roots. In practice, however, today feminist filmmakers choose the avant-garde method of filmmaking. Nevertheless, both the ideological background and the avant-garde alternative are limited in reaching women consuming films, and thus fail to adequately challenge the negative representations of women worldwide.
Representation of Women in Realistic Cinema
The proposed study is an attempt to examine the representation of women in realistic cinema. The study will focus on how women were presented and misrepresented in cinema. Based on feminist film theoretician, Claire Johnston, further analysis is developed on the idea of how feminist theories like counter cinema can be related to realistic films. This study will explore on how with changing times, women-centric movies started gaining popularity. Realistic films helped portray women to play strong and challenging roles and in addition to this, they have been able to make a mark in the mainstream cinema. This study will also briefly discuss how realistic cinema is different from popular cinema or popular cinema.
Feminist Discourse in Animated Films, 2020
Animation in cinema, which appeals not only to children but also adults, is one of the most important film genres that has existed since the birth of cinema. As in the other genres of cinema, feminist discourse formed through female characters is remarkable in animated cinema. This study aimed to present the feminist narratives in animated films, one of the most popular film genres today. In this context, computer-animated fantasy film Brave, regarded as one of the feminist films in animation cinema, was included in the scope of the study and was investigated in line with feminist film theory. The study revealed, as opposed to the powerless and passive woman image imposed by the patriarchal structure in society, the female characters in this film were represented as strong, brave, and free as designed by feminist ideology.
Part 1 and Part 3 are also available at Academia.edu and at https://www.cinemafocus.eu Since the early days of cinema, gender roles have been portrayed in films according to the prevailing traditional and patriarchal stereotypes that have for a long time assigned more or less fixed social and psychological attributes to women and men. However, cinema's history has also inevitably reflected major political, economic and sociocultural changes, which have affected the roles of women and men within their societies and their cultures. This series of Dossiers explores how female and male gender roles have evolved and how films continue to reflect, but also consolidate or challenge, the representations of women and men on the screen.
The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Gender
Routledge, 2017
Comprised of 43 innovative contributions, this companion is both an overview of, and intervention into the field of cinema and gender. The essays included here address a variety of geographical contexts, from an analysis of cinema. Islam and women and television under Eastern European socialism, to female audience reception in Nigeria, to changing class and race norms in Bollywood dance sequences. A special focus is on women directors in a global context that includes films and filmmakers from Asia, Africa, Australia, Europe, North and South America. The collection also offers a solid overview of feminist contributions to thinking on genre from the "chick flick" to the action or Western film, to film noir and the slasher. Readers will find contributions on a variety of approaches to spectatorship, reception studies and fandom, as well as transnational approaches to star studies and essays addressing the relationship between feminist film theory and new media. Other topics include queer and trans* cinema, eco-cinema and the post-human. Finally, readers interested in the history of film will find essays addressing the methodological dimensions of feminist film history, essays on silent and studio era women in film, and histories of female filmmakers in a variety of non-Western contexts.
IJCRT , 2023
With the advancement of technology and mass media it seems that the patriarchal system is growing stronger and the objectification of women is more rapidly being promoted and propagated than ever. Cinema, since its inception, has drastically evolved with the help of many technical innovations but its portrayal of the female characters still does not seem to have undergone any revolutionary change. Instead of reflecting the actual reality, it still continues to be a medium of representing and reinforcing patriarchal desires and ideologies. In most of the films, while the male characters are placed at the centre of the narrative, the female characters are positioned at the centre of visual attraction for the gratification of the "male gaze". This is how the female characters are presented as erotic objects whose only significance lies in their ability to provoke and pacify the male sexual desire. In this paper, I aim to analyze how the male audience derives pleasure by watching the female characters in films with the help of Laura Mulvey's theories which she has formed on the basis of Freudian 'scopophilia' and Lacanian 'Mirror Stage' in her essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Here, I also intend to interpret instances of how the objectification and stereotyping of the female characters take place in The Blue Angel, The Seven Year Itch, Basic Instinct, and L.A. Confidential, some of the popular Hollywood films in different decades of the 20 th century.