alternat%watserv1.waterloo.edu@watcgl.waterloo.edu (Ann Hodgins) (08/20/90)
Someone enquired to the net: what is a woman' s movie? I did not press F or r at the time because I expected that a flood of responses would make my own ideas redundant but now it seems that no one will respond, so I will. It seems to me that in the 50s and 60s (at least) the movie studios were totally controlled by male studio heads who hired men in all the key positions. Those men hired everyone else and chose the scripts and the directors. A man would chose the scripts, give authority to script changes and casting, consider the opinions of male intellectuals about 'classy' material, consider the opinions of male authorities about popular material, consider the input of male actors over female, respect male improvisations over female, etc., etc., etc., all down the line until the final product is evaluated by male critics. In the process a very considerable bias is built into the product. If media is a mirror to reality, then the result is a very distorting mirror. The result is media that deals with male concerns in a way that will tend to dismiss female concerns and will also tend to be overly flattering or reasurring to men. Male media tends to be a psychodrama for men rather than a fair picture of reality. By this I mean that a male drama would have as characters perhaps a man as he wants to be, a man that he dislikes, a man that he fears he might be, a woman that he wants, a woman he fears, a woman that he does not like, etc. As a result, male viewers see their reality and women see a warning about how they must behave to please. A woman's movie (by my definition) is the opposite of this. Ideally it would be women investors in a woman - owned production company, to female managed theatre, to female directors who chose camera angles to dwell on what *they* find interesting, to female casting directors, etc. Women critics would review it with the concerns of a feminine audience always in mind. Men would feel misrepresented and disturbed by the results but their opinions would be brushed aside. Obviously, a totally woman dominated media would be as bad as a male dominated one but in the meantime, women's movies are challenging without seriously threatening to distort male self-perception and sense of reality as much as a male dominated media has already shaped our minds. One distortion, for example, that really irrites me is the way that the camera seems to follow male characters as though women cease to exist when men walk out the door. Men do not know what goes on in their absence. This is a problem that men cannot overcome. They need women to fill in what women do alone, among themselves and what they privately think. A man, no matter how fair minded, cannot represent that reality for a woman. If the camera stays on the woman when the man walks away, I suspect a woman'\s influence on the movie. If women are integrated at every level of the movie making process we may well achieve a bia sex-bias-free media. That is my own personal utopian vision for the movie world. Things that do not impress me as good a or as 'women's movies' are movies that present women as dominant or aggressive since this is not a reflection of most women's true behaviour or fantasies. Dominant women are more likely to be male fantasy characters repressenting either what men want or what they fear. Culture should offer benefits to all its members equally. I have seen the process for black people from the time when their were no blacks except maids, to the time now when a black person can play villians, romantic leads and men on the street. There was a time in the middle when a black person could only play a very clean cut hero, such a Sidney Poitier. Women similarily went through a stage when women could only be fiesty and independent. I hope we are past that now and able to show the full range of real women's feelings and experience. Ann Hodgins
reiher@onyx.Jpl.Nasa.Gov (Peter Reiher) (08/22/90)
In article <1990Aug20.155905.2725@eddie.mit.edu> electro!alternat%watserv1.waterloo.edu@watcgl.waterloo.edu (Ann Hodgins) writes: > >It seems to me that in the 50s and 60s (at least) the movie >studios were totally controlled by male studio heads who hired >men in all the key positions. Those men hired everyone else and >chose the scripts and the directors. > >A man would chose the scripts, give authority to script changes >and casting, consider the opinions of male intellectuals about >'classy' material, consider the opinions of male authorities about >popular material, consider the input of male actors over female, >respect male improvisations over female, etc., etc., etc., all down >the line until the final product is evaluated by male critics. >In the process a very considerable bias is built into the product. Going back further, the picture is a bit different, yet with many common factors. In the thirties and forties, and even in the fifties, the female part of the audience was viewed as being very important. Many films were made with the intention of appealing to that audience. Yet, with very few exceptions, these films were made by men. The leading character was female, the story was about what happened to a woman (or women), and men were secondary to the story. But the director was almost always male, the screenwriter was more often male than female, the cinematographer was always male, and the producer was certainly male. Some examples would be the films of Bette Davis ("Now, Voyager", "Dark Victory", etc.), the films of Katherine Hepburn ("Sylvia Scarlet", "Alice Adams", etc.), the films of Greta Garbo ("Queen Christina", "Catherine the Great", "Camille", "Anna Christie"), and the films of Norma Shearer ("The Women", "Marie Antoinette", etc.). This tradition continued through the fifties. But it began to die out with the growth of television. In the fifties, the popularity of TV made producers look for properties that worked especially well on the big screen. Epics became the order of the day, with the emphasis on war, exploration, and other large struggles. Such films were tilted towards men's stories, and away from women's. Films about simple human stories were the right scope for TV, so film producers began to make fewer of them. One area where women's stories were still told was musicals. Even in the sixties, many of the large musicals were fundamentally about women. "My Fair Lady" is at least half Eliza's story, "The Sound of Music" is much more about Maria than Captain von Trapp, "Star!" was about Gertrude Lawrence, "Hello Dolly" was a woman's film, so was "Funny Girl", and "Darling Lili" gave more attention to Julie Andrews than Rock Hudson. But the musical died, as well, and that avenue for women's films also disappeared. The seventies and eighties have been a very rocky period for films about women. Not through a dearth of good actresses. Meryl Streep, Cher, Sally Field, Jessica Tandy, Geraldine Page, Jessica Lange, and many other actresses gave superb performances, when given decent parts. The reason for the decline is that the studios don't believe films about women will make money. What will make that change? Maybe someone will notice that three of the biggest grossing films of the year, "Pretty Woman", "Driving Miss Daisy" (released in 89, but made most of its money in 90), and "Ghost" feature major parts for women, and deal with concerns closer to women's hearts than blasting away bad guys. Maybe not, though. Despite the fact that these will probably be the three most profitable films of the year, the studios will also notice that they required good scripts and direction to make a lot of money. Summer junk can clean up without much beyond lots of action and a big male star. That's much easier than really working at producing a good film, since it's just throwing money at things, not producing art. One can argue, of course, that even in the heighday of Hollywood women's films the true concerns of women were ignored, due to the lack of women in behind- the-camera creative roles. Undeniably, women had little creative say in these films, except as actresses. (And, due to the actresses' power, indirect input into the script and choice of other, male, creative talent.) But many of the trademarks Ann listed as telltale, such as the camera following the woman instead of the man, were present in these films. I think these trademarks are less issues of the gender of the writer and director than issues of who the story is about. If the studios were telling stories about women, instead of about men, these would fall into place. But it still would be men telling stories about women, resulting in a male perspective on the women's experience. I think that what Ann and other women would want is not equal screen time for women, or cameras following women, or women getting the good lines, or women as protagonists, but rather female control of the creative process. (Of course, this is another man telling you what women want, so take it with a ton or two of salt.) That is precisely what women have rarely had. Even when they had it, they never were able to combine creative freedom with resources that come close to equalling what Hollywood rolls out for a major film. Peter Reiher reiher@onyx.jpl.nasa.gov . . . cit-vax!elroy!jato!jade!reiher
hsu@csrd.uiuc.edu (William Tsun-Yuk Hsu) (08/28/90)
Peter Reiher: >I think that what Ann and other women would >want is not equal screen time for women, or cameras following women, or >women getting the good lines, or women as protagonists, but rather female >control of the creative process... That is precisely >what women have rarely had. Even when they had it, they never were able >to combine creative freedom with resources that come close to equalling what >Hollywood rolls out for a major film. I'd like to add as a footnote that in independent film circles, where resources are limited for everybody, there are many respected woman filmmakers. One of the more recent success stories is Rene Tajima and Christine Choy's complex and sophisticated _Who Killed Vincent Chin?_, a powerful documentary with some similarities with the work of British collectives Sankofa and Black Audio Film Collective. (Incidentally, both of these groups have important female members and are mostly comprised of racial minorities.) Bill
rshapiro@uunet.UU.NET (Richard Shapiro) (08/30/90)
In the history of American cinema, the term "woman's picture" means something quite different than the feminist films we've been discussing here recently. If you see this phrase in the literature, it's likely to have the Hollywood meaning rather than the feminist one. A woman's picture was essentially any Hollywood movie which was marketed specifically towards the adult female audience. These movies tended toward family melodrama and typically involved the lead female character making enormous, unappreciated sacrifices for the family's benefit. A classic of the genre is "Stella Dallas". Here's the Variety review of it (courtesy of Halliwell): A tear jerker of A ranking. There are things about this story that will not appeal to some men, but no one will be annoyed or offended by it. And the wallop is inescapably there for femmes. Barbara Stanwyck plays the martyr Mom in this one. Not surprisingly, many feminist film critics who are interested in popular culture have been studying these films, for much the same reason that feminists have been studying pulp romances. Enlightened or not, this kind of entertainment was, and is, consumed by enormous numbers or women. So the obvious question for feminists is: why should movies like this appeal to women more than men (we can take Variety's word on this, I think -- when it came to the movie marketplace of this era, Variety knew better than anyone what the situation was). How are preferences like this formed? One simple suggestion is that the sacrifices made by the women in these movies accurately reflected the kind of sacrifices female movie goers made in their own lives. If a woman as strong as Barbara Stanwyck (who was well known at the time as an actress who played strong parts) could suffer in this way, any woman might. And of course martyrdom brings nobility. In "Stella Dallas", a mother destroys her own life for the benefit of her daughter. What could be more noble than this? Clearly there are some important issues of subject formation involved here. Movies like this didn't just appeal to women; they helped form women into a particular kind of movie goer. Of course there were men's pictures as well, of several kinds: gangster films (and its descendant, film noir) in particular had almost the opposite preference profile to women's pictures. No doubt there are significant gender issues to be discovered here as well.