Representation of Women in Realistic Cinema (original) (raw)
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The Changed and Unchanged Situation in the Representation of Women in Contemporary Cinema
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000
Gerakan pembebasan wanita gelombang kedua pada tahun 1960-an telah memberi pengaruh terhadap para aktivis perempuan dalam mengampanyekan perlawanan terhadap budaya patriarkat hampir di semua bidang. Salah satu area yang diyakini membuat perempuan rentan adalah isu perempuan dalam layar lebar. Artikel ini menganalisis perubahan representasi perempuan dalam layar lebar melalui pembandingan empat film, yaitu Stepford Wives (1975), Orlando (1992), When Night Is Falling (1995), and Stepford Wives (2004. Penelitian ini dilakukan dengan menggunakan metode modern hermeneutics. Dari hasil analisis yang telah dilakukan, film-film ini menunjukkan tiga aspek perubahan pada perempuan, seperti kesetaraan dalam pekerjaan, ekspresi identitas seksual, dan imej 'wanita pendidikan tinggi'. Film-film tersebut juga menunjukkan beberapa aspek yang tidak berubah terkait representasi perempuan, yaitu aspek keibuan, mitos seksualitas, dan posisi perempuan sebagai korban.
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...
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.
A Feminine Language in Cinema, 2011
A Feminine Language in Cinema is a creative-work or practice-led Master of Philosophy project. The creative component is a feature film screenplay, En Abyme, developed for mainstream audience reception in such a way that key aspects of a feminine sensibility are fore-grounded. As a woman screenwriter and director who has been engaged in the New Zealand film industry since the 1970s, I am acutely aware of the marginalised conditions of women in the production of feature films, as well as the marginal reception within the financing arms of the industry when projects concerning women protagonists in everyday sensibilities of being a woman are broached. My aim with this research was to develop a feature script that engages women’s sensibilities. That development was to be undertaken in conjunction with the assaying of the history of feminist struggle in filmmaking and film theorising since the 1970s. In the course of this research and screen writing, I developed what I have termed a “Feminine Manifesto” that serves to establish some guiding principles for my own approaches to filmmaking and, hopefully, approaches by other women in the industry. Like the Dogma 95 Manifesto, developed by the Danish filmmaker, Lars von Trier, the manifesto establishes a series of propositions or guides for how to act in approaching contexts of ‘re-visioning’ cinematic practice. Unlike the Danish model, my Feminist Manifesto is more allusive, abstract and interpretative, offering more an ethical opening to practice than a defined knowhow to mechanically engage film apparatus. The exegesis is not the ‘thesis’ of my research. As practice-led, my research outcomes are constituted in the creative work. This exegesis establishes contexts for this research and offers a close analysis of scenes from the film script in order to show, or manifest, how each of the six principles of the Feminist Manifesto are to be understood and deployed. My ‘explanations’ are neither ideal nor exemplary instances of the demonstration of the manifesto principles. Nor are they a mechanical ‘translation’ of the manifesto as if it was an instrument or mechanism for producing feminine cinema. My best hope is that we recognise a resonance between aspiration, promise and invention, such that a realist narrative, a fairly conventional film can show how women’s cinema can function. My engagement with feminist film theory traces an historical trajectory principally spanning the Atlantic. We find that in both the United States and the U.K. in the early 1970s feminist concerns with equality and questions of the representation of women turned to the medium of mainstream cinema. Feminist film theory made its strongest developments in the UK’s cultural theory adoptions of French Marxist and psychoanalytic theory, along with the reappraisal of popular cultural cinema with the French New Wave analyses of ‘auteur’ cinema. The result with a powerful critique of (particularly) Hollywood cinema for its constitution of an essentialist ‘male gaze’ that erased the ‘presence’ of women as anything other than an object for masculine pleasure. The exegesis engages with the ongoing debates around the scopic pleasure, and the shifts in theoretical investments from the 1970s to the present, as it establishes a critical context for understanding the impetus for the screenplay, and offers modes for that work’s reception.
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.
COM 491: Feminism in Cinematic Art
This independent study is designed to offer students the opportunity to place critical research and textual analysis into creative action. The course presents an expansive introduction to feminist film history, with particular focus on historical achievements – technically, politically, culturally, and artistically. Through the duration of this course, we will investigate the milestones that shaped women’s role in moving-images and the impact their work had on social and economic frameworks. The aim of this course is to examine feminist cinema as a cultural text from the vantage point of feminist criticisms and concepts, feminist films (directed by females and/or strong female leads). In doing so, we will discuss how to read a film as a document – with attention paid to the text’s functionality – and identify the text’s preoccupations and influence on the historical and sociological climate in society.
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.