By Gabrielle Miller
We are going to talk about Women in film! Writing about women in film is something that I care about and want to speak more about. Women in a male dominated industry has been groundbreaking over the years and I am so happy of where it has gone…besides the strike going on currently but we are not talking about the strike right now. When I was looking at schools to go to college, I was looking at Western at their film program within Stage and Screen, it was something that I wanted to do, and I wanted to learn more about cinematography. The film that made me want to pursue it was Black Panther! That movie made me excited about the things I could possibly do to film and so on. So, I started researching film programs and when Western found me and heard what the program was like, I fell in love instantly. I had zero film experience before; it was something I wanted to learn and pursue. Little did I know that the Film and Television program in Stage and Screen required me to already have some film experience which I did not have but I have always loved it they also have only one female film professor in the Stage and Screen program. The BA program allowed me to get basic training in film which is what I needed but I am pursuing theatre instead.
Women are underestimated in a male dominant industry. Beyond the general definition of feminist film theory as a mode of theoretical speculation that makes gender its investigative focus, the exact method of that investigation has been from the beginning disputed. The earliest critical stance came to be known as the image of women approach or reflection theory. Marjorie Rosen sees the history of Hollywood representations of women as part of an overarching design to mold female audience docile, willing victims of male dominance through the presentation of negative female stereotypes (pg. 8 Feminist Film Studies).
There was an article I found by Anneke Selik about Feminist Film Theory. Feminist Film Theory came into being in the early 1970s with the aim of understanding cinema as a cultural practice that represents and reproduces myths about women and femininity. From semiotics, feminist theory drew the insight that Hollywood cinema veils its ideological construction by hiding its means of production. Cinema passes off the sign “woman” as natural or realistic, while it is in fact a structure, code, or convention carrying an ideological meaning. I was researching some books on this topic, and I found a book that caught my eye! Laura Mulvey’s book “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975/1989). This book describes the ways in which women are displayed on screen for pleasure of the male spectator. Laura takes from Freud the notion of scopophilia, which is the pleasure of looking, to explain the fascination of Hollywood cinema.
The same development occurred for gay and lesbian cinema. From experimental films and more realistic or romantic films for a more mainstream audience. Postmodernist cinema of the 1980s and 1990s brought campy strategies as gay subcultures into the mainstream. Women in this industry have had a tremendous break through either in front of the camera or behind the camera. We still have a lot to do with women in unions and non-unions, but women are breaking this industry!
Resources
Smelik, Anneke. (PDF) feminist film theory. Accessed March 22, 2024. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316228058_Feminist_Film_Theory.
Hollinger, Karen. Ebook central - proquest. Accessed March 22, 2024. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/.
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