Watching Women's Films

September’s Feature Women’s Film: Hope Springs...

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 13:07:00 +0100

September’s Feature Women’s Film: Hope Springs (David Frankel, 2012)

The great Hollywood matriarch returns to our screens in this film about the sexual and emotional needs of a woman in a 31 year-old marriage-gone-stale. But this film isn’t specific to age, it’s about relationships and desires that may be at odds with the very person you want to share them with. As Streep says about the film,

“Everybody is contending with the same thing at a certain point in life … you see certain doors are closed. You’re facing a shorter journey and [wanting to know] how to make it richer, how to make it mean something.”

Apologies for Absence

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 12:49:36 +0100

Watching Women’s Films has been a bit quiet for the last two months. Time just slipped away in this virtual world of constant updates. It’s back now, though…

Nora Ephron, 1941-2012 Filmmaker, director, producer,...

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 16:24:24 +0100

Nora Ephron, 1941-2012

Filmmaker, director, producer, screenwriter, novelist, playwright, essayist, journalist, blogger, humourist.

June’s Featured Woman’s Film: Friends with Kids...

Sat, 16 Jun 2012 16:46:00 +0100

June’s Featured Woman’s Film: Friends with Kids (Jennifer Westfeldt, 2012)

“…I’ve never understood why things always have to be just one way when I’ve seen so many people in my life struggle tremendously to fit into those boxes or to live up to those expectations or pressures put upon them by whatever society’s concept of ‘normal’ is…I’m frustrated by things that are exclusive to one particular life choice…I think that, in all three of my films, I’ve been trying to explore these different milestones, and the idea that there are a lot of valid ways to live your life and make decisions to find happiness on your own terms.” - Writer, director and star of Friends with Kids, Jennifer Westfeldt in an interview with Melissa Silverstein

Click here to visit the WATCHING WOMEN'S FILMS FORUM: a place where you can join in and begin discussions on "Women's Films" today!

Mon, 28 May 2012 10:42:02 +0100

Click here to visit the WATCHING WOMEN'S FILMS FORUM: a place where you can join in and begin discussions on "Women's Films" today!

You can't be what you can't see...

Thu, 24 May 2012 17:35:00 +0100

Following on from my previous post, Women in Film (USA) recently published research in to the under-representation of female characters in the top 100 films of 2011. It found that women made up a mere 33% of all characters in these films, which is a 5% increase since 2002. However, the percentage of female protagonists has declined: 2002 saw 16% female protagonists, while 2011 had 11%.

But that’s not all this study has to offer. It also addresses age (25% of female characters are 40 or over, 4% 60 or over); race (73% Caucasian female characters, only 8% African-American, 5% Asian, 5% Latina, 4% other wordly, 3% animals, and ‘other’ at 1%); status (female characters are more likely identified by their marital status, have unknown occupations, or be out-of-work as either a homemaker or student). Positions of leadership fall mainly to male characters at 86%, with female characters accounting for 14%.

This is something to think about further alongside my earlier post of the Top Grossing Women’s Films in 2011. But considering the population split, and the cinema audience gender split, the representation of female characters is wide off the mark.

“It’s a Man’s (Celluloid) World: On-Screen Representations of Female Characters in the Top 100 Films of 2011”, Martha M Lauzen, 2012.

Geena Davis talks about the imbalance in the representation of...

Wed, 23 May 2012 15:46:23 +0100

Geena Davis talks about the imbalance in the representation of women in the media - where the percentage of female characters hasn’t changed since 1946.

Wall Street Journal’s Women in the Economy series, 01.05.2012.

May’s Featured Woman’s Film: 2 Days in New York...

Mon, 14 May 2012 15:36:00 +0100

May’s Featured Woman’s Film: 2 Days in New York (Julie Delpy, 2012)

Julie Delpy returns with a sequel to her 2007 film 2 Days in Paris with a new man, but all the same neuroses.

This is reportedly the antidote to Hollywood’s depictions of women in rom-coms in their late-30s as, “having the problems of a 25-year-old. Like, should I date him, should I not date him? Should I have sex with him but tell him I don’t like him? OK. I mean, I have friends who are still single, but even they don’t ask themselves those kind of questions. They’ve evolved into something else.”

Deply wrote, directed and stars.

No Cannes Do

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 18:02:00 +0100

After the high hopes for women directors at last year’s Cannes Film Festival (a whopping 4 female-directed films made Palme D’Or shortlist!), Cannes has returned to its 2010 form and have NO films directed by women this year.

Out of the 23 eligible films for one of the most prestigious film awards on the circuit, not one was directed by a woman. Two films directed by women made the “Un Certain Regard” category (for young filmmakers). Nearly 1,800 films were submitted. The submission list is confidential, but surely some women filmmakers submitted their films. So why didn’t they make the cut?

Melissa Silverstein on her Women & Hollywood blog had this to say,

“Cannes is the most prestigious world competition and to have no female directors is just a slap in the face. I cannot believe there were no films worthy of inclusion. I just don’t believe it. The whole process is f***ed up that women can’t even get into the conversations about films that people are even thinking about will be included in lineups.”

The culture of the film industry is still male-dominated. The big, narrative pictures still fall mainly to male directors, women still have limited seats in the most powerful positions in the industry (see my earlier post on The Celluloid Ceiling).

Thank heavens for the Tribeca Film Festival, which has a good representation of female directors, including Sarah Polley (Take This Waltz), Julie Delphy (2 Days in New York), Lynn Shelton (Your Sister’s Sister), Tanya Wexler (Hysteria), Malgorzata Szumowska (Elles), Julia Dyer (The Playroom), Sharon Bar-Ziv (Room 514), Lucy Malloy (Una Noche), Kat Cairo (While We Were Here), and Beth Murphy (The List).

"It's just boring, old-timey, textbook damsel-in-distress."

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 16:11:00 +0100

Lindy West’s recent article in The Guardian highlighted the (her) five most pathetic female film characters of all time: characters who stand by, waiting to be rescued or hunted, or without any desire to take control.

While I disagree with a couple of her choices, she makes a good point (especially with recent teen-film heroines). Moreover, the comments that follow make for an interesting read: lists of other “pathetic” characters, lists of strong (“kick-ass”) characters (although I’m not sure that just because a female character can do some martial arts necessarily means they are strong characters with control over the narrative?!), and opinions on whether this is even a feminist issue.

Is there still a place for the damsel in distress?

"I ask especially how we can leverage strong female-to-female alliances to confront and change that..."

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 22:12:00 +0100

“I ask especially how we can leverage strong female-to-female alliances to confront and change that there is no winning here as women. It doesn’t actually matter if we are aging naturally, or resorting to surgical assistance. We experience brutal criticism. The dialogue is constructed so that our bodies are a source of speculation, ridicule, and invalidation, as if they belong to others…”

-

“Ashley Judd Slaps Media in the Face for Speculation Over Her ‘Puffy’ Appearance”, The Daily Beast, 09th April 2012

April’s Featured Woman’s Film: Titanic 3D...

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 15:39:00 +0100

April’s Featured Woman’s Film: Titanic 3D (1997/2012)

I guess we can’t really ignore the gigantic Titanic in all its 3D and IMAX glory.

Upon its original release, it smashed all box office records (in fact, only Mamma Mia! The Movie surpassed it in 2008). It reportedly crossed all four cinema audience quadrants, and people watched it multiple times.

Our heroine has feminist sentiments, but is it postfeminism in a petticoat and bustle?

WOMEN AT THE BFI: Andrea Arnold, Lynne Ramsey, Carol Morley, Joanna Hogg, Clio Barnard, Gillian Wearing, Kim Longinotto, Lucy Walker.

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 14:23:55 +0100

WOMEN AT THE BFI: Andrea Arnold, Lynne Ramsey, Carol Morley, Joanna Hogg, Clio Barnard, Gillian Wearing, Kim Longinotto, Lucy Walker.:

This year, the BFI sets its projectors on women filmmakers in their new annual series of new British films, MADE IN BRITAIN. That’s a whole month of films made by women!

Independent and often low-budget, these filmmakers place aesthics above marketability, and present complex female protagonists.

The Hunger Games

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 16:40:31 +0100

The Hunger Games took £4.9million in its opening weekend across 511 UK cinemas. A pretty amazing feat considering it’s not a sequel and it’s March (not the usual blockbuster release season).

What’s interesting is that this is a film that is centred around a female character, a strong female character. It is well known that female leads don’t ’open’ a picture and that’s why Hollywood doesn’t favour them. Generally, women go and see films about men, men don’t tend to go and see films about women.

Although there is an element of romance, that is not what the film is marketed on. Despite the fact that the publicity is of a young woman’s face and that the trailer specifically shows a young woman’s story, it’s not sold with a focus on the protagonist’s gender. Therefore, it has a potentially wider appeal to all four ‘quadrants’ of cinema audience (women over 25, women under 25, men over 25, men under 25).

Does The Hunger Games mark the start of female fronted film franchises?

March’s Featured Woman’s Film: Tiny Furniture (Lena...

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 17:10:00 +0000

March’s Featured Woman’s Film: Tiny Furniture (Lena Dunham, 2010)

Written, directed and starring Lena Dunham in 2010, Tiny Furniture is finally being released in UK cinemas this month!

“22-year-old Aura returns home to her artist mother’s TriBeCa loft with the following: a useless film theory degree, 357 hits on her Youtube page, a boyfriend who’s left her to find himself at Burning Man, a dying hamster, and her tail between her legs. Luckily, her trainwreck childhood best friend never left home, the restaurant down the block is hiring, and ill-advised romantic possibilities lurk around every corner.”

"There’s this strange thing that’s happened over the last 25 or 30 years where..."

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 16:19:26 +0000

“There’s this strange thing that’s happened over the last 25 or 30 years where there’s this decision being made that women aren’t able to carry the box office. Now, Bridesmaids has proved that to be bullshit, and The Help has proven it to be bullshit. But it’s much harder to get a film with a woman lead made. When a man hits 40 is when roles just begin to happen. And for women it doesn’t happen. I find that to be a very concerning issue.”

- George Clooney in Entertainment Weekly, 05th January 2012

On the night of the Oscars, here’s a reminder made by...

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 17:41:55 +0000

On the night of the Oscars, here’s a reminder made by Women and Hollywood about the number of women who directed films this year, pretty amazing films, but who haven’t been acknowledged.

Thanks to Stephanie Oswald for sending me this, from Women & Hollywood.

Click here to visit the WATCHING WOMEN'S FILMS FORUM: a place where you can join in and begin discussions on "Women's Films" today!

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 22:42:38 +0000

Click here to visit the WATCHING WOMEN'S FILMS FORUM: a place where you can join in and begin discussions on "Women's Films" today!

The Celluloid Ceiling

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 22:05:00 +0000

When Kathryn Bigelow won the Best Director Oscar in 2010, it was thought that the “Bigelow Effect” would prove a watershed moment in the recognition of women in Hollywood. However, a recent study into women in behind-the-scenes roles shows that women are still vastly underrepresented.

The study analysed 2,636 people working on the 250 top-grossing (Hollywood) films of 2011 and found:

***The percentage of women directors has declined since 1998 while the percentages of women writers and producers have increased slightly. The percentage of women executive producers, editors and cinematographers have remained the same.

***94 percent of the top films of 2011 were directed by men.

***Women made up 14 percent of writers in the top films.

***77 percent of the major films of 2011 had no female writers.

***Women made up 25 percent of all producers on the top 250 films of 2011.

***Women made up 20 percent of editors in the biggest films of 2011, but 76 percent of those films had no female editors.

***There were fewer female cinematographers than directors on the top films of 2011: only 4 percent of cinematographers were women.

Source: Martha M. Lauzen, “The Celluloid Ceiling: Behind-the-Scenes Employment of Women on the Top 250 Films of 2011”, Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University, USA

'You can be highly intelligent – and also ditzy and klutzy'

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 16:55:00 +0000

Decca Aitkenhead’s recent Guardian article about ‘chick-lit’ author, Sophie Kinsella, has revived arguments that surround ‘chick-flicks’ and the limited portrayal of women in mainstream Hollywood.

In 2009, Diane Purkiss publically condemned Hollywood’s output of women’s films as “the worst kind of regressive, pre-feminist stereotype of misogynistic cliche”. She cited the film Confessions of a Shopaholic as “a nadir in the way women are portrayed on screen”. However, this film was a box office success (following in the stilettoed footsteps of Sex and the City: The Movie). Confessions was written by Kinsella and follows the story of Becky Bloomwood, a successful journalist (ironically with a financial advice column) who is driven and ruined by an obsession with shopping and spending. Ultimately, her problems are overcome by the want of the love of a handsome, rich man.

Kinsella is right in claiming that you can be intelligent, ditzy and klutzy. These traits are also perfect for comedy (Kinsella’s series are, after all, romantic comedies). However, a problem arises when ditzy and klutzy become the main identifier of on-screen femininity. Intelligent, strong-willed, capable, passionate (insert positive adjective) female characters are still few and far between in mainstream cinema.

Watching Women's Films

September’s Feature Women’s Film: Hope Springs...

Apologies for Absence

Nora Ephron, 1941-2012 Filmmaker, director, producer,...

June’s Featured Woman’s Film: Friends with Kids...

Click here to visit the WATCHING WOMEN'S FILMS FORUM: a place where you can join in and begin discussions on "Women's Films" today!

You can't be what you can't see...

Geena Davis talks about the imbalance in the representation of...

May’s Featured Woman’s Film: 2 Days in New York...

No Cannes Do

"It's just boring, old-timey, textbook damsel-in-distress."

"I ask especially how we can leverage strong female-to-female alliances to confront and change that..."

“Ashley Judd Slaps Media in the Face for Speculation Over Her ‘Puffy’ Appearance”, The Daily Beast, 09th April 2012

April’s Featured Woman’s Film: Titanic 3D...

WOMEN AT THE BFI: Andrea Arnold, Lynne Ramsey, Carol Morley, Joanna Hogg, Clio Barnard, Gillian Wearing, Kim Longinotto, Lucy Walker.

The Hunger Games

March’s Featured Woman’s Film: Tiny Furniture (Lena...

"There’s this strange thing that’s happened over the last 25 or 30 years where..."

On the night of the Oscars, here’s a reminder made by...

Click here to visit the WATCHING WOMEN'S FILMS FORUM: a place where you can join in and begin discussions on "Women's Films" today!

The Celluloid Ceiling

'You can be highly intelligent – and also ditzy and klutzy'