Women's Creative Labor in Film Introduction: Recognizing Women's Contributions to Film (original) (raw)
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Women & Film (1972-75):A History of the First Feminist Film Magazine
2018
Writing'as'a'Marxist'critic'in'the'late'seventies,'Mulhern'was'inevitably'influenced' by# the# work# of# the# French# Marxist# philosopher# Louis# Althusser# (1918Y1990).& In& his& book,$ Althusser:*The*Detour*of*Theory! (1987),(Gregory(Elliott(recounts(that(during(the(late%sixties%and%early%seventies,%the%work%of%Althusser%'help[ed]%renew%Marxism%[…]%and% impart[ed]+ new+ vigour+ and+ greater+ sophistication+ to+ Marxist+ enquiry'+ across+ a+ huge! range& of& disciplines. 31 !Elliott& confirms& that& Mulhern's& historical& enquiry& is& one& 'facilitated*by*Althussarian*analytical*notions.' 32 !Mulhern's*formulation*of*'the*moment'* of#Scrutiny,"which"he"also"referred"to"as"the"'successive"politicoYcultural
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
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
Who's Got the "Reel" Power? The Problem of Female Antagonisms in Blaxploitation Cinema
, Coffy (Jack Hill, 1973) and Foxy Brown (Hill, 1974) introduced leading black women into the predominantly male blaxploitation scene as aggressive action heroines. Within the cinematic spaces of blaxploitation films which featured women as active agents, a racial and sexual divide exists. These films positioned women either inside or outside of gender tolerability by utilising binary constructions of identity based on race, sex and elementary constructions of good and evil, black and white, straight and gay, and feminine and butch. Popular representations of lesbianism and sisterhood within blaxploitation cinema reflect a dominant social view of American lesbianism as white while straight women are consistently represented as black. However, these spaces also constricted black and white female identities by limiting sexuality and morality to racial boundaries. This article seeks to question the unique solitude of these female heroines and interrogate a patriarchal cinematic world where sisterhood is often prohibited and lesbianism demonised. I don't believe in [women's lib] for black people … we're trying to free our black men … I like being a woman. I have been discriminated against, but not because I'm a woman. It's because I am black … before [people] see me as being female, they see me as being black. The stigma that's been placed on you because you're black gives you enough kill to get you through the woman thing … it's much tougher being black than being a woman. (Tamara Dobson 1973) Tamara Dobson, upon the release of Cleopatra Jones (Jack Starrett, 1973), expressed her disinterest with the women's movement, arguing that her action heroine character in the film was "not a women's libber" but was rather "defending an important freedom for her people: the freedom to exist without drugs" (Klemesrud). In contrast, cultural race theorist Michele Wallace wrote in a 1975 article entitled "A Black Feminist's Search for Sisterhood" about her quest for sisterhood and feminism: "the message of the Black Movement was that I was being watched, on probation as a black woman, that any sign of aggressiveness, intelligence, or independence would mean that I'd be denied even the one role still left open for me as 'my man's woman'" (6-7). She argued that "the most popular justification Black women had for not becoming feminists was their hatred of white women", a distinction that pleased black men (7). It is clear that black women identified in varying ways with the Black Power and women's liberation movements. An analysis of 1960s and 1970s blaxploitation productions exemplifies this general male interest in demoting female camaraderie by emphasising difference based on race, moral and sexual preference. Melissa DeAnn Seifert is a second year Masters student in the Department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She also currently works as a teaching assistant for an introductory film history course at the university. Her research interests include non-traditional art forms, visual culture and film media where she specifically aims to understand the politics of domination, subjugation and resistance. Within these frames, she deconstructs representations of women, gender relations and sexuality.
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...
Women in Film and TV productions
2015
Women in Film Productions A closer look at women in film, as directors or as characters, provides a basic understanding of the situation of a society. Within this topic one is able to develop a much greater comprehension of if and how gender equality is represented and understood, through simple application of common sense. Gender role models are constructions, made common and perpetuated by media productions. Movies are reflecting cultural and social relationships in a society, and subsequently have an influence on society as well. Audience, the often-stressed unknown being, also includes women. In cinemas within some particular age groups, women are even the majority. We, the women, are an integral part of society; without us there would be neither society nor civilization. This is truism, but astonishingly enough it nevertheless has to be mention from time to time again. Contemporary movies and TV productions are mostly dominated by male producers, directors, commissioning editors and heads of program, yet tell not only stories from that of a male perspective. Even character design is coined by a male view of the world; among the women represented, female characters are frequently designed in a way that gives an overall impression that women would be unable to act as independent human beings. They could be neither able to act as a director nor as female characters embedded in a story that do more than acting as a secretary, nurse, housewife, shop keeper or sex worker. Those characters often lack a name or intelligent dialogue lines, and can be exploited or tortured and murdered more easily than male characters. Productions like FORBYDELSEN (Dk 2007-2012) or BORGEN (Dk 2010-2013), ARNE DAHL (1 st season, S 2011) still are the exception, not a standard. Having analyzed many movies and TV productions produced during the last decades, one can say about female characters depicted in (especially but not limited to) German productions, that if they are part of the action, they are designed as either bad mothers or cold 'career women'. In other words, female characters can be characterized as that of the 'Weak Woman' or 'Strong Woman'. 'Strong woman' is a term representing the male glance towards women and inheriting dominant conditions of power and the structure of society. This term is corresponding to 'a man from the boys' and is directing towards a peculiarity, which throughout that ironic approach is pointing at a nearly unattainable exception. This is expressing that with either a "Man From the Boys" or a "Strong Woman' a traditional married life will be impossible. Instead, the term is expressing that those kinds of characters are demanding a specific hierarchy and personal freedom. 'Strong Women' in film and TV productions-with the exception of the aforementioned productions-usually have to fail miserably. In terms of dramatic action those women are infringing upon the implicit engraved rules of the society, which in the case of the western German tradition, means women should act firstly as 'good' wives and mothers. Here one can see the long shadow of the gender role models developed and set with that propaganda machinery during 'Third Reich'
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.