Screen Queens. Book Review: Women vs Hollywood (original) (raw)
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Historical contexts and contributions of women pioneers in film: How women were part of the creation of the cinematographic language and narrative, 2021
In the film production industry women are underrepresented in almost all production areas around the globe. Numbers show that female directors are similarly marginalized in Europe (films directed by women reached 19% in 2017 1) and in the United states (14% of the directors that worked in the 500 top movies of 2019 were women 2). This shortage of women in audiovisual production occurs not only in large industries, but also in the most emerging ones, remote places like Chile have numbers as low as only 5.7% of women directed films between 2011-2016 3. The marginalization of women in creative production spaces is not a new and it has had social consequences that affect the perception of women in their societies, perpetuating stereotypes and restricting the creative diversity that would be undeniably beneficial to the film and audiovisual industry worldwide. From this statement, I ask the following questions: Why do women occupy such a limited space in industries such as film? What would be the impact on society if more female voices were made known and recognized in the same way as their male counterparts? If we review the history of cinema, women have been part of its evolution from the very beginning. Unfortunately, there is not much information about their participation in general, but especially after the first two decades of its existence. It is as if they were never written into history, but they were there. Prejudices, responsibilities, social and cultural pressures could be attributed to this absence in books and classrooms. It was probably a process of segregation that relegated them to the limited and caring space in which they remain majority to this day (this happened not only in the cinema, but in many other male dominated work environments ).
Women in Film: Treading Water but Fit for the Marathon (Women Filmmakers in the West)
Challenging Images of Women in the Media: Reinventing Women’s Lives, 2012
This chapter examines the current (2012) status of Western women in film, beginning with a perspective on the participation of women in film industries in a selection of Western industrialized countries (the United States, Australia, United Kingdom, Canada, Denmark, and New Zealand). Following this is a particular case study, proffering an outline of the current participation of women in the Australian film industry. The chapter concludes with observations of what women filmmakers bring and offers strategies for improving the participation and status of women. Throughout there is reflection on the effects of the decline of women’s representation in major creative areas of film, including what it means for Australian and global film industries, and the textures and sensibilities women bring to filmmaking.
Researching Women's Film History
International Encyclopedia of Gender, Media, and Communication, 2020
Co-authored with Melanie Bell, Christine Gledhill, Shelley Cobb, Rashmi Sawhney, Laraine Porter, Ulrike Sieglohr. While 1970s/1980s feminist film theory questioned the representability of women within a male-dominated industry, renewed interest in early film history revealed unexpected numbers of women film makers. The international Women Film Pioneers Project (WFPP), an ever-growing database housed at Columbia University, New York, documents research into the pioneering work of women in cinema's first crucial decades as it became a mass and transnational medium. A surge of monographs has followed, focusing on women's diverse careers, the gendering of film studio organization and practices, and the cultural impacts of female audiences, campaigners, journalists, and critics. These discoveries are emerging in festival and film theater programming, film education, and local cultural activity. In Britain, the Women's Film & Television History Network-UK/Ireland, encourages research across the barriers between silence and sound, cinema and television. In what follows, the Network records key issues and figures emerging from the project of women's film history.
Not so Silent: Women in Cinema Before Sound
2010
"The work of the Women and the Silent Screen Conferences [...] is to collectively create a new realm of cinema history, neither 'the' history, nor 'a' history, but a strange double world." These words are from Jane Gaines in her keynote address for the fifth Women and the Silent Screen Conference, held at the Stockholm University in 2008. This proceedings volume gives a representative picture of the breadth of the conference. The rich and varied contributions address theoretical issues around this double world of "cinematification" and feminist historiography, advancing questions on the authorship of pioneering female filmmakers and the role of female stars in early cinema. Other topics explored include transnationalism, the performance of femininity, fandom and fashioning, and branding within the studio system. The diversity of subjects in this volume reveals both the complexity and the problems of the field of research that the Women and the Silent Screen Conferences represent. Not only do these papers deal with well-known, concrete issues within feminist scholarship, but they also consider a more fundamental question: that of the medium as such in its early years, and its conceptualisation within a feminist scholarly framework."
Screen Dossier: The Ladies Take Over: Female-centred Film Series in Studio-era Hollywood
Screen, 2020
This dossier examines a set of four Hollywood ‘B’ film series of the 1930s and 1940s – anchored by the figures of Hildegarde Withers (six films between 1932 and 1937), Torchy Blane (nine films between 1937 and 1939), Nancy Drew (four films from 1938 and 1939) and Blondie (28 films between 1938 and 1950) – which have come to be understood as an ‘empowered women’ cycle. In looking back at this relatively marginalized cycle from a point in time nearly 90 years after the first film appeared, this dossier gives some productive historical perspective to two contested themes that the discursive practices of popular online media commentary tend to present as unique to the current cultural moment. The first is the practice of media serialization, which visibly underpins American popular culture’s preferred formatting choices of serials, sequels, remakes, reboots and other ‘multiplicities’ at the end of the 21st century’s second decade. The practice is popularly regarded with some ambivalence, from a straightforward perception of creative exhaustion to more nuanced reflections that consider the cultural function of nostalgia and revisionism in this historical period. The second theme, contextualized in important ways by the mainstreaming of sexual politics that has developed out of the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements, is focused on the increased number of female protagonists acting with heightened agency in Hollywood films of the past few years, and debates whether this represents the triumph or the mere commodification of feminism. Looking back to a set of films from the studio era that are simultaneously defined by seriality and female agency provides an opportunity not only to show that these themes are far from new production strategies for Hollywood, but to demonstrate how the two might productively be thought together – that is, to investigate how seriality actually enables the gender politics of the historical cycle.
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
Historiographies of Women in Early Cinema
NECSUS Journal, 2019
In the recent decades, academic research on early cinema has grown remarkably. At the intersection of early cinema studies and feminist history, significant new research has revealed the hitherto overlooked presence of women, and the rich diversity of positions they held, in the first decades of film production. It is possible to see "Pink-Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries?" and "Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes" as products of a visionary investigative potential that currently characterises feminist film historiography of early cinema.
Looking Back and Forward: A Conversation about Women Make Movies
Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, 2013
In the summer of 1984 I interned at Women Make Movies, working closely with Debra Zimmerman, the organization's relatively new director and then sole employee. When I returned in 1988 to work in distribution, the organization had moved to Soho and taken on significantly more films and staff. I eventually joined the board in 2001 and currently serve as chair. As a teacher and scholar, I owe much of my perspective on feminist film to what I have learned from the staff, board members, filmmakers, consultants, funders, programmers, and nonprofit film professionals with whom I have come into contact through WMM-no one more than Zimmerman. An intense presence with a seductive voice and an infectious laugh, she taught me how to hail a New York City cab, read a budget, see more festival films in one day than would seem humanly possible, and turn a passionate commitment to women and film into a vocation. This is a distillation of our conversations in late summer 2012, as Zimmerman juggled real-estate issues, negotiations with a