Representations Of Women In Films Research Articles

The economic case for equality in screenplays: The Bechdel test, female dialogue and box office revenue

This article examines the question, ‘Does increased representation of women in screenplays and film lead to greater box office revenue?’ Employing a data set of 2343 films released between 1960 and 2018, we estimate fixed-effects regression models on North American and ‘international’ box office revenue, using two indicators of female representation: the percentage of female dialogue in a film’s screenplay and the Bechdel test. We account for other variables: inflation, film budget, genre and film runtimes. Our results indicate that including just one conversation between two female characters is associated with approximately 23 per cent higher box office revenue in the North American domestic market and 27 per cent higher box office revenue outside of North America. Not all representation is created equal: quality representation (in contrast to a ‘quantity’ measure of representation) has a more significant relationship with the box office. Contrary to often-stated beliefs that increased representation of women in film results in lower economic returns, our findings indicate that there is a significant economic benefit to increasing female on-screen portrayals.

Female lawyers in Egyptian and Lebanese films over the last 75 years: caretakers and anomalies with limited back stories

ABSTRACT Women in the Arab world have never had better access to education and professional careers. Despite this, gender stereotypes are hampering women’s progression towards gender equality. This article considers how the representation of women in film is contributing to the issue. The representation of female lawyers in Lebanese and Egyptian cinema over the last 75 years demonstrates gender disparity. On the scarce occasions when female lawyers are represented, they are confined to a caretaker role and associated with family disputes. By associating female lawyers with the family, they are put into the traditional Arab role of a woman, reinforcing the imbedded stereotypes that hamper the career progression of Arab women. We do not see male family members contributing to family obligations, which would demonstrate a significant move towards gender parity. Female lawyers are often defined by a relationship, romantic or otherwise, with a male protagonist. This perpetuates the patriarchal norm that Arab women are subordinate to their male relatives. There has been a shift towards greater gender equality in the representation of female lawyers in contemporary portrayals in Lebanese cinema. However, female lawyers still most often appear in isolation, giving them the status of an anomaly, the “Other”.

이창동 영화의 여성성과 재현의 정치 비판

본 연구의 목적은 이창동 영화가 여성을 재현하는 과정에서 구성되는 여성성과 그것에 전제된 남성적 이데올로기의 정치성을 씨네페미니즘의 관점에서 비판적으로 검토하는 것이다. 이를 위해 본 연구가 주목하는 것은 영화라는 매체의 재현 체계다. 분석 대상은 여성을 재현하기 위해 이창동 감독이 활용하는 영화언어의 양상과 그것이 선택, 배치, 배열되는 구체적 과정으로서의 영화적 실천과정이다.BR 영화미학과 영화사에 대한 우리의 지향점이 궁극적으로 미래를 향해 열려 있다고 할 때, 특정 과거의 지배적 인식체계에 따라 기울어진채 구성된 이창동 영화 혹은 그것의 권위는 현재의 변화된 관점에 따라 재구축될 수 있으며 재해석되어야 한다는 판단이다. 씨네페미니즘이라는 현재의 생산적 관점을 경유한 과거 정전의 다시 읽기 작업은 영화문화의 미래라는 측면에서 유효할 뿐만 아니라 시급하기 때문이다.BR 이를 효과적으로 실행하기 위해 본 연구는 이창동 감독의 가장 최근 작품인 버닝을 주요 분석 대상으로 삼는다. 이로써 구체적이면서도 집중적인 논의가 가능해진다. 동시에 분석 과정에서 그 외의 이창동 영화를 적극적으로 교차시킨다. 이로써 본 연구의 문제의식을 버닝만이 아니라 이창동 영화 전체로 확장시킬 것이다. 버닝은 내러티브의 절차나 이미지의 재현 모두에서 문제적인 여성성을 전제한다. 영화의 주요인물 중 하나인 해미라는 여성은 서사의 절차에 따라 이중으로 대상화된다. 그는 남성 대결을 위한 매개물 혹은 동기로 존재할 뿐이다. 동시에 카메라 시선에 포착될 때 그는 주체적 시선을 가지기보다는 일방적으로 관찰되는 관음의 대상으로 존재할 뿐이다. 그리하여 버닝에서 해미는 무지상태, 이중의 대상화, 미분화된 자연, 역사적 바깥의 형상으로 구체화된다. 이것은 차별적 성별화에 여성을 가두고 여성을 남성을 위한 향수의 대상으로 타자화하며 진정성이라는 외피로 사실상 여성을 역사에서 배제하는 관념이다. 여성을 비존재로 격하하는 남성중심적 젠더 정치학의 소산인 것이다.BR 본 연구는 이창동 영화의 성과 일체를 전적으로 부정하려는 시도가 아니며 이창동 감독 개인의 인신을 문제 삼는 시도는 더더욱 아니다. 대신 궁극적으로 본 연구는 한국영화사를 넘어 세계영화사에서도 성과를 내고 있는 이창동 영화라는 텍스트에서조차 여성 재현의 이슈에서 다분히 문제적인 성인지 감수성이 산적되어 있다는 사실을 밝힘으로써 한국영화 전체의 편향된 젠더 의식을 환기하려는 의도를 갖는다.

Interrogating Patriarchy: Transgressive Discourses of ‘F-Rated’ Independent Hindi Films

Since its inception at the Bath Film Festival 2014, the ‘F-Rating’ has been adopted as a yardstick to foster equitable representation of women in film. The rise of a new sub-genre of Hindi ‘Indie’ cinema (Devasundaram, 2016, 2018) has been augmented by an array of bona fide Female-rated independent films. These films fulfil the triune criteria for F-Rating, featuring women both behind and in front of the camera – as directors, actors and scriptwriters. I argue that these distinct female voices in new independent Hindi cinema have engendered discursive filmic spaces of resistance – alternative articulations that transgress India’s patriarchal national master narrative. Indian cinema thus far has been presided over by Bollywood’s hegemonic bastion of male-dominated discourses. The mainstream industry continues to propagate gender-based wage disparity and hypersexualised representations of the female body via the serialised song and dance spectacle of the ‘item number’. The increasing presence of F-Rated Hindi films on the international film festival circuit and through wider releases, gestures towards these films’ melding of the global and local. Drawing on my curation work with the UK Asian Film Festival (UKAFF) and discursive analyses of seminal F-Rated films, this essay highlights the pivotal role played by F-Rated Hindi Indie films in opening up transdiscursive dimensions and creating national and global conversations around issues of gender inequities in India.

FEMINIST APPROACH AS AN OPTION IN CONTENDING ECONOMIC RECESSION: HUSBAND FOR HIRE TELENOVELA AS PARADIGM

One of the challenges that has bedevilled today's society, is the total relegation of women to the background in the scheme of things. This is also reflected in films. Feminist scholars, critics and women's movements have relentlessly challenged the stereotypical representations of women in films all over the world, criticizing their depictions as subordinates, emotional cripples, sex-starved spinsters, housewives and psychotics. Despite the efforts to locate a lasting solution, the discrimination still lingers on. The contributions of women towards development in every society if given a more collaborative inclusive environment are immense. This is even so, especially in recent times that call for desperate measures to ending the global economic recession. It is against this backdrop that this study intends to identify how some films are helping or have helped in the redirection and construction of the gender roles of women that will lead to alleviating the economic recession, using the Telenovela, Husband for Hire. The study adopts the qualitative method of research using content analysis to identify how these films have redefined the position and roles of women as well as their capabilities. The findings of the study revealed that films are potent tools for creating and reinforcing images of reality and gender roles that can help in the solutions required for curbing the recent economic recession. Hence, it was recommended that there is the need for reconstruction of content to achieve better portrayals of women and to highlight hard-work as well as the creation of films that reinforce ‘less ego' for men and a more collaborative inclusive environment for women to foster better development.

Feminist Auteurs: Reading Women’s Films (review)

Reviewed by: Feminist Auteurs: Reading Women’s Films Michael Brian Faucette Feminist Auteurs: Reading Women’s Films. Geetha Ramanathan. New York: Wallflower Press, 2006, 239 pp. Geetha Ramanathan’s newest work draws upon the recent movement by scholars such as Tom Gunning and Joe McElhaney to reexamine and rethink the notion of auteurism as a means of theoretical engagement and as an interpretative tool. However, unlike authors of previous auteur studies that simply argue for the greatness or legitimacy of a director or directors and their work, she adapts the theory to analyze female directors and how they use their abilities as filmmakers to acknowledge or attack cultural factors such as race, class, gender, voyeurism, and the repression of female desire. Furthermore, Ramanathan uses auteurism to examine how a lack of nuanced readings of feminist filmmakers and their films has been possible. In order to make this claim, she first lays out the framework of feminist film criticism both historically and methodologically, thus enabling her to argue that feminist film criticism has been bogged down by the need to legitimate the work of women as worthy of study, even as it forgets that the filmmakers are engaged in a conversation with other women and society at large. She notes that what she is attempting to conduct in this study is the synthesis of the terms “feminist auteurship” and “female authority.” This allows her to “confront the history of aesthetics, and visuality in film,” thereby enabling the reader/viewer to witness the means by which “women filmmakers have succeeded in impressing feminist authority in film, not necessarily or exclusively their own, or even that of the protagonist of the film, but over the representation of women in film in ways that counter prior cinematic renditions” (4). Thus, this study is one that, while drawing on the traditions of prior feminist criticism, as Ramanathan acknowledges in her references to Laura Mulvey, Judith Mayne, and Teresa de Lauretis, attempts to illustrate that the notion of the female form and authority onscreen is in fact more complex and contradictory than previously established. In order to support the idea of female authority onscreen she draws from films that have become canonized within feminist film criticism. In the first chapter she explores the notion of aesthetics and the female form through an insightful analysis of Lizzie Borden’s Working Girls, Aparna Sen’s Parama, Nelly Kaplan’s A Very Curious Girl, and Agnes Varda’s Vagabond. Building upon each of these films, Ramanathan makes the case that in the hands of female directors, the weakness or objectification of the female form can in effect become a powerful tool used to critique patriarchal society. In addition to this strategy, she connects the thematics of these films to one another, demonstrating that it is in fact possible for female directors to use their work to converse and argue about the nature of the female form in cinematic discourse. One of the strengths of this chapter lies in her critique and problematization of the notion of females as unwilling or unknowing commodities. This notion of the commodity or objectification is carried over in the second chapter, which looks at how women of color are projected onscreen. Ramanathan begins her analysis with an in-depth exploration of Julie Dash’s Illusions, a short film about the relationship of race to power. In keeping with the spirit of feminist critics who have long since argued that feminism has forgotten or misused the political struggle of women of color, Ramanathan attempts to engage in this debate by demonstrating that it has been possible for female directors to use their power to discuss the idea of race and womanhood in films such as Cheryl Dunye’s [End Page 74] Watermelon Woman, Claire Denis’s Chocolat, Marguerite Duras’s India Song, and Gurinder Chadha’s Bhaji on the Beach. Through a reading of each of these films, Ramanathan is able to demonstrate how difficult it is to show women of color onscreen in a favorable and realistic manner, versus the standard practices of mainstream filmmaking that opt for a conservative approach, such as having women of color be surrounded by the accoutrements of consumerism...

'Seeing the Female Body Differently': Gender issues in The Silence of the Lambs

In this paper it is argued that the habitual representation of women in film has played a considerable part in constructing ideas of femininity, which contemporary filmmaking can deconstruct. The Silence of the Lambs deconstructs femininity as it has been constructed in four classic genres: the serial killer movie, the horror or monster movie, the 'pupil and mentor' movie and the 'psychiatrist and patient' movie. The Silence of the Lambs can be shown to deconstruct the generic amalgam of voyeurism, the 'male gaze' of the camera, castration anxiety and the confused and reinstated gender identities typical of the serial killer movie. The empathy between Doctor Hannibal 'the cannibal' Lecter and young FBI agent Clarice Starling criticises the encoding strategies of the classic monster movie wherein both woman and monster are feared objects within patriarchal orders of seeing. Starling's appetite for success coincides with Lecter's more obviously worrying appetite; the film deconstructs those films wherein the ambition of the female pupil is personified by a demonic mentor. Starling, unlike most female pupils, is not punished for her ambition and strength, qualities partially created through the iconographic meanings of actor Jodie Foster. In psychiatrist and patient films, the heroine's behaviour is explainable when located within the patriarchal metanarrative of psychoanalysis, towards which The Silence of the Lambs is deeply ambivalent.

Echo and Narcissus: women's voices in classical Hollywood cinema

Do women in classical Hollywood cinema ever truly speak for themselves? In Echo and Narcissus, Amy Lawrence examines eight classic films to show how women's speech is repeatedly constructed as a 'problem', an affront to male authority. This book expands feminist studies of the representation of women in film, enabling us to see individual films in new ways, and to ask new questions of other films. Using Sadie Thompson (1928), Blackmail (1929), Rain (1932), The Spiral Staircase, Sorry, Wrong Number, Notorious, Sunset Boulevard (1950) and To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), Lawrence illustrates how women's voices are positioned within narratives that require their submission to patriarchal roles and how their attempts to speak provoke increasingly severe repression. She also shows how women's natural ability to speak is interrupted, made difficult, or conditioned to a suffocating degree by sound technology itself. Telephones, phonographs, voice-overs, and dubbing are fore grounded, called upon to silence women and to restore the primacy of the image. Unlike the usage of 'voice' by feminist and literary critics to discuss broad issues of authorship and point of view, in film studies the physical voice itself is a primary focus. Echo and Narcissus shows how assumptions about the 'deficiencies' of women's voices and speech are embedded in sound's history, technology, uses and marketing. Moreover, the construction of the woman's voice is inserted into the ideologically loaded cinematic and narrative conventions governing the representation of women in Hollywood film.