Superbride and Postmodern Femininity (original) (raw)
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Superbride, or a little about Modern Uzbek Cinema
The Journal of Central Asian Studies, Vol. 26/27, 2020
The female image in cinema has always been a reflection of socio-political transformation, thus, changes in the social status of women are directly related to their artistic representation. The image of a modern Uzbek woman in cinema combines traditionalism peculiar to the Central Asian region and glamorous femininity inspired by the West. Although the female image has undergone diversification in commercial film production, the willingness to build a family remains an integral part of women's aspirations and desires. The search for personal happiness as a wife and mother is an obligatory element of the plot narrative, and success in personal life despite various circumstances is almost the only possible happy ending for a female protagonist. In the latest art cinema, there is a general trend toward the reverse evolution of the female image-from a modern woman to a traditional one. In these movies, spiritual values, morality, and traditions as the principal factor of society's well-being are brought to the foreground, while female characters are mostly depicted in a traditional environment and within an ethnographic context. This paper mainly focuses on Bakhrom Yakubov's film Superbride (2008), which became a national hit and box-office sensation in the domestic market. Superbride is a particularly successful example of a fiction film that through the prism of youth comedy promotes an ideal and frankly banal female image based on patriarchal mentality.
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New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film, 2002
One of the paradoxes of mainstream Soviet cinema was that it tended to 'make a spectacle' of masculine physicality without (for the most part) drawing attention to it in any explicit sense. The male hero's body was mythologized in patriarchal structures that imposed themselves as neutral. This paper examines the different ways in which the director Kira Muratova challenges this cultural paradigm, by explicitly foregrounding the male body, and destabilizing the male perspective. In this respect, Muratova's films pose a challenge to the archetypal image of masculinity (and femininity) prevalent not just in the Soviet Union, or in mainstream cinema, but in many other places besides.
ANALYSIS OF THE THEME OF MOTHERHOOD IN CONTEMPORARY UZBEK CINEMA
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Russian Science Fiction Literature and Cinema: A Critical Reader (Sampler)
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The relationship between on-screen and off-screen inequality in film industries and the relative impact of these on movie attendance is widely discussed but not necessarily empirically demonstrated. This article examines the binary gender composition of film project teams and the gendered representation of film characters as factors for cinema attendance. We collected a unique dataset (N=1285) of all films released during the pre-pandemic decade (2008-2019) in Russia-at that time the largest European cinema market. A marked-up subset of 243 films was used to calculate a novel version of the Bechdel-Wallace test that accounts for the proportion of all non-stereotypical dialogues in the film narration, as opposed to the classical binary test. Our test proves very informative, revealing a strikingly high proportion of dialogues with stereotypical portrayals of women even among the films that pass the Bechdel-Wallace binary threshold. We also undertook a social network analysis (SNA) of the characters' communications. This analysis demonstrate that women predominantly occupy a peripheral position in film plots. Both stereotyping and marginalization of women are positively related to the proportion of men in the film crew, especially in the role of screenwriter. Simultaneously, having more men in key positions is also correlated with access to larger budgets and better distribution, thus effectively impeding films with stronger women characters from wider audiences. These audiences, however, show no prejudice towards films with such characters: after 2015, films featuring central women protagonists have the same level of attendance as movies without them. Although Russia exemplifies a large non-Western cinema market, the trends we identify, particularly the "gatekeeping" effect of male filmmakers, is notably in line with those observed in Western democracies. Gender (im)balance in the Russian cinema: on the screen and behind the camera Journal of Cultural Analytics Gender (im)balance in the Russian cinema: on the screen and behind the camera
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