BACKGROUND: WOMEN IN FILMS
In film, a study of gender portrayals in 855 of the most financially successful U.S. films from 1950 to 2006 showed that there were, on average, two male characters for each female character, a ratio that remained stable over time.
Female characters were portrayed as being involved in sex twice as often as male characters, and their proportion of scenes with explicit sexual content increased over time. Violence increased over time in male and female characters alike.
According to a 2014 study by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, in 120 films made worldwide from 2010 to 2013, only 31% of named characters were female, and 23% of the films had a female protagonist or co-protagonist. 7% of directors were women.
Another study looking at the 700 top‐grossing films from 2007 to 2014 found that only 30% of the speaking characters were female. In a 2016 analysis of screenplays of 2,005 commercially successful films, Hanah Anderson and Matt Daniels found that in 82% of the films, men had two of the top three speaking roles, while a woman had the most dialogue in only 22% of films.
WHAT IS FEMINIST FILM THEORY?
Feminist film theory is a theoretical film criticism derived from feminist politics and feminist theory influenced by Second Wave Feminism and brought about around the 1970s in the United States. With the advancements in film throughout the years feminist film theory has developed and changed to analyse the current ways of film and also go back to analyse films past. Feminists have many approaches to cinema analysis, regarding the film elements analyzed and their theoretical underpinnings.
HISTORY AND EVOLUTION
Initially in the United States in the early 1970s feminist film theory was generally based on sociological theory and focused on the function of female characters in film narratives or genres.
Feminist film theory, such as Marjorie Rosen's Popcorn Venus: Women, Movies, and the American Dream (1973) and Molly Haskell’s From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in Movies (1974) analyses the ways in which women are portrayed in film, and how this relates to a broader historical context.
Additionally, feminist critiques also examine common stereotypes depicted in film, the extent to which the women were shown as active or passive, and the amount of screen time given to women.
In contrast, film theoreticians in England concerned themselves with critical theory, psychoanalysis, semiotics, and Marxism. Eventually, these ideas gained hold within the American scholarly community in the 1980's. Analysis generally focused on the meaning within a film's text and the way in which the text constructs a viewing subject. It also examined how the process of cinematic production affects how women are represented and reinforces sexism.
British feminist film theorist, Laura Mulvey, was influenced by the theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. Her essay, "Visual Pleasure" is one of the first major essays that helped shift the orientation of film theory towards a psychoanalytic framework.
Prior to Mulvey, film theorists such as Jean-Louis Baudry and Christian Metz used psychoanalytic ideas in their theoretical accounts of cinema. Mulvey's contribution, however, initiated the intersection of film theory, psychoanalysis and feminism.
Beginning in the early 1980s feminist film theory began to look at film through a more intersectional lens. The film journal Jump Cut published a special issue about titled "Lesbians and Film" in 1981 which examined the lack of lesbian identities in film.
Jane Gaines's essay "White Privilege and Looking Relations: Race and Gender in Feminist Film Theory" examined the erasure of black women in cinema by white male filmmakers. While Lola Young argues that filmmakers of all races fail to break away from the use to tired stereotypes when depicting black women.
REVOLUTIONS IN FEMINIST FILM THEORY: THE MATRIXIAL GAZE
From the 1985 onward the Matrixial theory of artist and psychoanalyst Bracha L. Ettinger revolutionized feminist film theory. Her concept, from her book, The Matrixial Gaze, has established a feminine gaze and has articulated its differences from the phallic gaze.
It is extensively used in analysis of films, by female directors, like Chantal Akerman, as well as by male directors, like Pedro Almodovar. The matrixial gaze offers the female the position of a subject, not of an object, of the gaze, while deconstructing the structure of the subject itself, and offers border-time, border-space and a possibility for compassion and witnessing. Ettinger's notions articulate the links between aesthetics, ethics and trauma.
FEMINIST FILM THEORY TODAY
Recently, scholars have expanded their work to include analysis of television and digital media. Additionally, they have begun to explore notions of difference, engaging in dialogue about the differences among women (part of movement away from essentialism in feminist work more generally), the various methodologies and perspectives contained under the umbrella of feminist film theory, and the multiplicity of methods and intended effects that influence the development of films.
Scholars are also taking increasingly global perspectives, responding to postcolonialist criticisms of perceived Anglo- and Eurocentrism in the academy more generally. Increased focus has been given to, "disparate feminisms, nationalisms, and media in various locations and across class, racial, and ethnic groups throughout the world".
Scholars in recent years have also turned their attention towards women in the silent film industry and their erasure from the history of those films and women's bodies and how they are portrayed in the films. Feminist film theory today is used to analyze all forms of media.
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