Highbrow Magazine - women filmmakers https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/women-filmmakers en African Diaspora Filmmakers Break the Cinematic Glass Ceiling https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/12089-african-diaspora-filmmakers-break-cinematic-glass-ceiling <div class="field field-name-field-cat field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/film-tv" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Film &amp; TV</a></div></div></div><span class="submitted-by">Submitted by tara on Wed, 06/02/2021 - 15:35</span><div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="og:image rdfs:seeAlso" resource="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/1adiff.jpg?itok=LV4TMGU_"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/1adiff.jpg?itok=LV4TMGU_" width="480" height="295" alt="" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p> </p> <p>Did you hear it?  ADIFF (African Diaspora International Film Festival) Women’s History Month Film Series in March 2021 proved that women filmmakers of color not only can break the cinematic industry’s glass ceiling, but the crash can resound around the world. France, Tunisia, Bangladesh, Senegal, and more are part of the program. For this reviewer, the USA stands strong in both the documentary and fiction categories. </p> <p> </p> <p><strong><em>Betrayal of a Nation</em></strong></p> <p>Some worthy cases never come to trial. It’s high time this one did. In <em>Betrayal of a Nation</em>, director Brandi Webb puts the United States on trial for crimes against the Black race stretching back 400 years and then some.  True, you won’t find a case of this magnitude in your local court records, but Webb’s “People vs. The U.S.A.” goes a long way to setting the record straight.</p> <p>It’s an exhaustive undertaking.  Although the director admits her helplessness as a woman of African-American ancestry—faced with an onslaught of back-to-back murders in the Black community, she decides to frame her list of indictments in the form of a trial.  Since this is, after all, a documentary, the courthouse remains little more than a superficial construct to allow Webb to lay out her case.  And what a case it is! </p> <p>Thankfully, Webb employs an arresting array of archival footage, rare interviews, graphs, and an amazingly well-researched historical record of Black plight from the first exit off a slave ship to the current examples of police brutality in the deaths of Brianna Taylor and George Floyd in 2020.</p> <p>When the film does return intermittently to the courthouse, we are greeted with a no-holds-barred delivery of indictments by Jenisse Pierlussi in the role of prosecutor.  Webb  can almost be forgiven for a monotone narration with such a chilling rollcall of crimes on trial.  The white defense attorney, as played by Jason Hewitt, is a patronizing figure.  He blathers about the “land of the free, and the home of the brave” but it’s a pallid defense in the light of the atrocities at hand.</p> <p>It’s worth mentioning some of the historical accounts given, which comprise the heartbeat of the film.  There was no doubt that early oppression from 1501 to 1865 was by design, with slaves reduced to generational property and 4-year-old children working alongside their elders in the fields. The figures are staggering with slave labor worth 3.5 billion, more than railroad and manufacturing profits combined. While the 13<sup>th</sup> Amendment abolished slavery, the Reconstruction period was quick to implement Black codes, with felonies freely administered for chicken stealing.  It takes little imagination to picture the desperation behind such thefts. </p> <p>What viewers may have forgotten in our shared history of oppression, Webb fills in the blanks.  Fourteen-year-old Emmet Till put a tortured face on lynching and the KKK with their nightly raids ensuring bad dreams for the most insular of the populace. </p> <p> </p> <p><img alt="" src="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/2adiff.jpg" style="height:600px; width:600px" /></p> <p> </p> <p>One of the most illustrative stories from the early 20<sup>th</sup> century details the Greenwood community of Tulsa, Oklahoma.  Home to what was referred to as Black Wall Street, this 35-40 block became a petroleum payload for the Black residents benefiting from the oil surge. But as we are reminded, “Blacks can never do better than you.” Revenge was cataclysmic—air drops of explosives with no fire trucks to fight the attack.  Over 10,000 residents were left homeless.</p> <p>The Tuskegee Experiment of 1932, by the U.S. Department of Health, involved 600 African-American men recruited from Macon County, Alabama.  At that time, there was no known treatment for syphilis, a contagious venereal disease. Primarily sharecroppers, many had never visited a doctor.  Duped into believing they had “bad blood,” they were promised free healthcare for participating.  Left untreated as part of the trial, many went blind, died, or went insane.</p> <p>Webb’s indictments shower the viewer like toxic candy from a Mexican pinata. J. Edgar Hoover’s memo advising the removal of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as a societal threat resulted in an assassination almost as contested as JFK’s.  There are more casualties: Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, the Black Panthers and others whose names rest unquietly in the twilight of history. </p> <p>Mass incarceration according to the 2010 census revealed 2.3 million locked behind bars, with the Black percentage five times higher than whites.  If we are to believe the court’s prosecutor, a whopping 70 percent have not committed a crime but simply cannot afford bail.  Police brutality has become a rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter movement and according to Webb, 99 percent of such cases escape conviction, with an officer who can simply say he “was afraid.”</p> <p>The most poignant tragedy covered was that of 13-year-old Nicholas Hayward, shot dead in a park while playing with a plastic gun. There is no greater grief perhaps than the loss of a child and the interviews with Nicholas Heyward Sr. and Samaria Rice should move any viewer to take note. </p> <p>Webb begins and ends her film with the lighting of candles. She tells us it is the combination of light and water that gives eternal emotional freedom.  We can only hope that the making of this significant and moving documentary will reach the greater audience it deserves.</p> <p> </p> <p><img alt="" src="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/3adiff.jpg" style="height:337px; width:600px" /></p> <p> </p> <p><strong><em>Stand Down Soldier</em></strong></p> <p>For starters, it was both revelatory and refreshing to see that a film about a soldier’s return home from active duty in Iraq is focused on a woman. </p> <p>Stacy, as portrayed by Jeryl Prescott Sales, is a lean, mean Black combat veteran who makes it clear that she’s not at all ready to make nice with her family.  She misses her buddies but she can’t call up one in particular on the phone.  As she tells her counselor, she can only feel selfish.  Why?  Because when she put the pieces of him in a plastic bag, she was only thankful it wasn’t her.</p> <p>What we discover soon enough is that the Stacy that has returned from a long deployment <em>is</em> selfish, but not because she values her own survival.  The woman is severely traumatized.  Nightmares of her rape at the hands of another solider prevents any real intimacy with her husband Jesse (Kevin Jackson).  An opioid addiction is fueled by her friend Michael (Eddie Rouse), a wiry hospital nurse who is only too happy to take her money to satisfy the habit. One of their encounters leads to a hit-and-run incident, when Michael runs down a young boy.</p> <p>At that point, the story turns into a tangle of subplots.  Stacy discovers that the young boy, now hospitalized, is none other than her grandson.  Her own son, Jesse Jr. (T’Shaun Barrett) has discovered upon his own return from deployment that his wife Terri (Shanti Lowry) did not abort a child she thought he wouldn’t want.  To complicate things further, Terri’s best friend Billi (Dianna Kilpatrick) is an old flame of Jesse’s.  There are more twists, with the life of the stricken child hanging in the balance.</p> <p>All of the assembled cast turns in believable performances, but I can’t help wishing that Jeryl Prescott Sales, a triple-threat writer, producer, director and actor, had kept a tighter focus on Stacy’s story and her eventual recovery.  It’s a tale that many women in the military, returning home with hopes for a normal life, find essential to share.</p> <p> </p> <p><img alt="" src="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/4adiff.jpg" style="height:338px; width:600px" /></p> <p> </p> <p><strong>Author Bio:</strong></p> <p><strong><em>Sandra Bertrand is</em></strong><strong> Highbrow Magazine’s <em>chief art critic.</em></strong></p> <p> </p> <p><strong>For Highbrow Magazine</strong></p> <p> </p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/adiff" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">adiff</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/african-diaspora-filmmakers" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">african diaspora filmmakers</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/black-filmmakers" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">black filmmakers</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/women-filmmakers" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">women filmmakers</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/stand-down-soldier" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">stand down soldier</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/betrayal-nation" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">betrayal of a nation</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/new-films" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">new films</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/african-americans" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">African Americans</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/film-industry" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">film industry</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-text field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Sandra Bertrand</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-pop field-type-list-boolean field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Popular:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">not popular</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-photographer field-type-text field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Photographer:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">All images courtesy of ADIFF</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-bot field-type-list-boolean field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Bottom Slider:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Out Slider</div></div></div> Wed, 02 Jun 2021 19:35:05 +0000 tara 10390 at https://www.highbrowmagazine.com https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/12089-african-diaspora-filmmakers-break-cinematic-glass-ceiling#comments From Patty Hearst to Pakistani Marriages: Highlights of the Female Eye Film Festival https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/10492-patty-hearst-pakistani-marriages-highlights-female-eye-film-festival <div class="field field-name-field-cat field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/film-tv" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Film &amp; TV</a></div></div></div><span class="submitted-by">Submitted by tara on Fri, 04/10/2020 - 19:33</span><div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="og:image rdfs:seeAlso" resource="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/3womensfilms.jpg?itok=QiZDUJjW"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/3womensfilms.jpg?itok=QiZDUJjW" width="480" height="320" alt="" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p> </p> <p><strong>Ending Early Child and Forced Marriage in Pakistan</strong></p> <p><em>Director: Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy</em></p> <p><em>(Pakistan)</em></p> <p>This YouTube original documentary is a harrowing look at the exploitation of young women who are forcibly pushed into marriage by their families, many as young as 13.  Out of indifference or ignorance or economic necessity, their elders sell or surrender their female offspring to the demands of the greater society.  Rukhshanda Naz has spent her life working on behalf of women and the prevailing view in society that women’s place is “in the home or the grave.”  One heartrending scene shows the confrontation of a daughter, sold to marriage at 13, who returns home to a mother who felt helpless to prevent her daughter’s fate.</p> <p>A worthy investigation into the continuing efforts to face the Council on Islamic Ideology and the society at large, that would deem a girl as young as 9 years of age to be of a body and mind healthy enough for marriage. </p> <p> </p> <p><img alt="" src="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/2womensfilms.jpg" style="height:338px; width:600px" /></p> <p> </p> <p><strong>TAPE</strong></p> <p><em>Director: Deborah Kampmeier</em></p> <p><em>(USA)</em></p> <p><em>Tape</em> is an uncompromising look at the victimization of one aspiring actress, played by Isabelle Fuhrman, who is methodically and relentlessly seduced by her manager.  Tarek Beshara plays the scheming predator, taping her “audition” with all the grisly charm of a reality TV conman, convincing his innocent charge to “own your power.”  But the real scene-stealer in this timeworn tale is Annarosa Mudd, an ex-victim who manages to exact her revenge with all the determination of a Lady Macbeth.</p> <p>Based on a true story, this is a timely, no-holds-barred re-enactment of exploitation in the entertainment industry.  Director Kampmeier refuses to sugarcoat her message, and it’s a lesson for all the young women who arrive in New York, willingly or unwillingly, to  face the slaughter of their innocence.</p> <p> </p> <p><strong>American Woman</strong></p> <p><em>Director: Semi Challis</em></p> <p><em>(Canadian)</em></p> <p>This entry presents us with yet another spin on the Patty Hearst story and her kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army -- a ragtag antiwar ensemble from the 1970s. Based on the novel by Susan Choi, this version avoids the typical rehashing of the rich, young protagonist’s tale by focusing on a young female clan member, Iris, who takes pity on her captive and aids in her escape.   </p> <p>Deft performances by Hong Chau as Iris and Sarah Gadon as the fictional Patty Hearst   raise the bar for a new and younger audience. A brief appearance by Ellen Burstyn as Iris’s cantankerous but compassionate ex-employer is an added treat.</p> <p> </p> <p><img alt="" src="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/1womensfilms.jpg" style="height:338px; width:600px" /></p> <p> </p> <p><strong>Virgin</strong></p> <p><em>Director: Deborah Kampmeier</em></p> <p><em>(USA)</em></p> <p>Jessie is a troubled teenager, trying to sort out where she fits in her small town—comforting both an alcoholic mother, an overachieving sister, and most problematic of all, looking for love in all the wrong places.  When she hopelessly pursues a young man who provides her with drugs and then has sex with her, she not only can’t recall the act but deludes herself into believing she is carrying God’s child.  Her tightknit community is hardly receptive to such claims of a second coming, and she quickly becomes a pariah, a blasphemous sinner finding brief solace with another crazed woman who searches for her own lost baby.</p> <p>What makes this somewhat overwrought, ambitious screenplay work is its lead.  Elisabeth Moss <em>is</em> Jessie.  It’s easy to see how the seeds of great performances to come from this actress are already present in this nascent portrayal.  Every wide-eyed glance, every desperate gesture is present in this early award-winning effort.  Director-writer Kampmeier confessed that she delivered this first feature on a $65,000 budget, garnering two Independent Spirit Awards for her efforts.  This is a director who is not afraid to aim high at considerable risk and it’s paid off in this film.</p> <p> </p> <p><strong>Author Bio:</strong></p> <p><strong><em>Sandra Bertrand is</em></strong><strong> Highbrow Magazine’s <em>chief art critic.</em></strong></p> <p> </p> <p><strong>For Highbrow Magazine</strong></p> <p> </p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/female-eye-film-festival" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">female eye film festival</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/semi-challis" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">semi challis</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/deborah-kampmeier" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">deborah kampmeier</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/sharmeen-obeid-chinoy" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">sharmeen obeid-chinoy</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/pakistani-films" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">pakistani films</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/patty-hearst-films" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">patty hearst films</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/women-filmmakers" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">women filmmakers</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-text field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Sandra Bertrand</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-pop field-type-list-boolean field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Popular:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">not popular</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-photographer field-type-text field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Photographer:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Images courtesy of Female Eye Film Festival</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-bot field-type-list-boolean field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Bottom Slider:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Out Slider</div></div></div> Fri, 10 Apr 2020 23:33:12 +0000 tara 9478 at https://www.highbrowmagazine.com https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/10492-patty-hearst-pakistani-marriages-highlights-female-eye-film-festival#comments Women’s Films and Social Change https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/2790-women-s-films-and-social-change <div class="field field-name-field-cat field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/film-tv" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Film &amp; TV</a></div></div></div><span class="submitted-by">Submitted by tara on Thu, 09/12/2013 - 09:09</span><div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="og:image rdfs:seeAlso" resource="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/1womenfilms%20%28Wiki%29.jpg?itok=iOv34JWW"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/1womenfilms%20%28Wiki%29.jpg?itok=iOv34JWW" width="480" height="270" alt="" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>  </p> <p> <em>The New York Times </em>reported some “happy news” in January 2013: “9 percent of the top 250 movies at the domestic box office last year were made by <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/13/movies/female-film-directors-slowly-gain-ground.html?_r=1&amp;">female directors</a>. That’s substantially higher than the 2011 figure of 5 percent.” While the increase in women directors has fostered the visibility of gender politics, the relationship between films made by women and films about the complexities of being a woman remains mystifying. Traditionally, the category “women’s film” has invoked maternal melodramas (“weepies” like <em>Stella Dallas </em>and <em>Now, Voyager</em>), romantic comedies (<em>Sleepless in Seattle, Clueless</em>), and other sub-genres of “chick flicks” that emphasize interpersonal romance and cosmetic transformation above feminist politics or structural change. It is striking how much the recent reporting about female filmmaking seems to take its cues from these longstanding genre conventions. The journalism about recent gains and setbacks for women in film production tends to focus on statistical representation over changes in representational aesthetics.</p> <p>  </p> <p> The <a href="http://womenintvfilm.sdsu.edu/research.html">Celluloid Ceiling</a> reports that women comprised only 18 percent of all directors, executive producers, writers, cinematographers, and editors working on the 250 domestic top-grossing films in 2012. Laura Beck of <a href="http://jezebel.com/5977854/there-are-1524-male-film-directors-for-every-1-female-film-director-and-things-arent-getting-any-better"><em>Jezebel</em></a> asserts: “There’s Only 1 Female Director for Every 15.24 Male Ones and Things Aren’t Getting Better.” None of the 22 films nominated for a <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/19/cannes-film-festival-2012_n_1436818.html">Palme D’Or at Cannes</a> last year was directed by a woman. Despite a higher proportion of women-directed films at the Sundance Film Festival (in which Lauren Greenfield, Ava DuVernay, and Lucy Walker all won awards in 2012), this festival appears to be more of an anomaly than an impetus for structural reform.</p> <p>  </p> <p> Sundance is the exception that proves the rule of the film industry’s ingrained gender inequities according to industry press discourse. For example, Forbes published these words of optimism in anticipation of the 2013 Sundance: “Maybe the big Hollywood studios don’t always put female directors at the top of their wish lists, but judging from the record number of U.S. competition films directed by women at Sundance 2013—who needs <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/dinagachman/2012/11/29/sundance-2013-women-directors-step-up/">Hollywood</a>?”</p> <p>  </p> <p> This is precisely the problem. Bracketing women’s success in the film industry under certain types of festival venues and distribution networks is another way of marginalizing films made by women. This strategy echoes attempts to delimit women’s films through genre categories like the “weepie” or “chick flick.” It has partly emerged in response to the decline of the Hollywood studio system. Although still immensely powerful, Hollywood no longer reigns supreme as the last word in filmmaking the way it did in the 1940s. The industry now is increasingly organized around niches and networks of production and exhibition, extending from the film festival circuit and even Internet campaigns supported by websites like Kickstarter. However, instead of just asking <em>where </em>women’s films appear, we need to start asking more questions about <em>how </em>they gain visibility in the first place. What do women’s films look like? And how do identity statistics corroborate our notions of what women’s films can be, or of what kinds of social changes they can provoke?</p> <p>  </p> <p> Perhaps the biggest breakthrough has been in the documentary genre. If there is less than one female director for every 15 male ones, there is more than one for every two in documentary production. These gains are significant, but also fall prone to certain dangers given their subject matter. Since films by women are already marginalized, we are often too inclined to view the successful exceptions as truly <em>exceptional</em>, elevating them to the status of gospel. The expert omniscience of the invisible voiceover is of course a longstanding convention of the documentary genre. Lately, the invisible position of a documentary film’s all-knowing narrator seems to find an alibi in the metaphorical invisibility of its female director. The list of recent, woman-directed documentaries with successful market distribution and cultural recognition is quite robust. It includes <em>Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry </em>(Alison Klayman, 2012), <em>The Queen of Versailles </em>(Lauren Greenfield, 2012)<em>, Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel </em>(Bent-Jorgen Perlmutt, 2011), <em>Stories We Tell </em>(Sarah Polley, 2012)<em>, A River Changes Course </em>(Kalyanee Mam, 2013)<em>, American Promise </em>(Michele Stephenson, 2013)<em>, The Square </em>(<em>Jehane Noujaim, </em>2013)<em>, </em>and <em>The Oath </em>(Laura Poitras, 2010).</p> <p>  </p> <p> More controversial instances of otherwise formulaic documentaries are especially revealing. For example, the hyper-visible censorship of CNN’s <em>Hillary Clinton </em>documentary, which has caused the Republican National Committee to draft a resolution banning the network (along with NBC) from airing <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/08/16/republican-party-officials-to-vote-on-whether-to-boycott-cnn-nbc-over-clinton/">GOP Primary debates</a>, ostensibly equates the visibility of women in politics with women’s potential to effect meaningful political change. It bears repeating: visibility and transformation are <em>not</em> the same thing. By scandalizing the GOP’s all-too strategic decision to limit public airing of their ridiculous primary antics, we play into their efforts to make Clinton’s formidable candidacy appear token, when in fact it is anything but token.</p> <p>  </p> <p> Documentary conventions encourage their spectator to take a position in relation to the world. They provide a narrative, a voice, and an organizing framework for smoothing over the complexities and multiple arcs of historical change. Coverage of film industry identity politics often adopts the rhetoric of the documentary voiceover narrator. An <a href="http://www.alternet.org/story/88642/the_success_of_women_documentary_filmmakers">article</a> on “The Success of Women Documentary Filmmakers” by Melissa Silverstein repeatedly slips between concerns about female participation and the social impact of the evidence that women’s films document. “Take a look at all the major film festivals that include documentaries and you will see the women’s names are as prominent as the men’s. Lisa Jackson is a woman on a mission. She is determined to relay testimony from the thousands of women of the Congo who were raped and mutilated during many years of war.” While both issues that Silverstein raises are crucial and pressing, it is disturbing to see how fluidly she shifts between them. She conflates professional inequities in Western media production with the sexual violence arising from Congolese genocide.</p> <p> <img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/2womenfilms.jpg" style="width: 650px; height: 399px;" /></p> <p> Gendered ethnographies premised on Western women who spread hopes of democracy and civil rights to developing world oligarchies have leaned heavily on their instruments. Films like <em>Pray the Devil Back to Hell </em>(Gini Reticker, 2008)<em>, Forbidden Voices: How to Start a Revolution with a Computer </em>(Barbara Miller, 2012)<em>, Invoking Justice </em>(Deepa Dhanraj, 2011)<em>, Sisters In Law </em>(Kim Longinotto, 2005)<em>, </em>and <em>Camera/Woman </em>(Karima Zoubir, 2012) foster reporting like Silverstein’s by equating the spread of global democracy with the physical presence of women documentary filmmakers. On a structural level, focusing on these examples unifies the profound global complexity of the international film production market.</p> <p>  </p> <p> Far from being limited to Hollywood (very far in fact) or to the Western World, current women filmmakers hail from all over the globe. Women Make Movies’ 2013 film catalog highlights films by women produced in Lebanon, Brazil, Korea, Morocco, El Salvador, Mexico, China, Switzerland, Germany, the U.S., Canada, Cambodia, Pakistan, South Africa, the Caribbean, India, Iran, the Philippines, the Congo, Iraq, Japan, Australia, and elsewhere. However, rather than engaging the narrative overdetermination of female filmmaking’s geographical dispersal, documentaries like <em>Forbidden Voices </em>attempt to map geopolitics neatly onto film industry representation. They unify global juridical issues of sexual rights by filtering them through questions of women’s professional visibility.</p> <p>  </p> <p> For example, Karima Zoubir’s <em>Camera/Woman</em> focuses on a community of divorced female wedding photographers working in Casablanca. Extrapolating the political from the personal and the professional, <em>Camera/Woman </em>uses a verité style to explore broader issues confronting working-class Muslim women in societies undergoing profound religious and economic changes. The filmmaker’s instrument, the premise of these women’s ethnographic visibility, becomes a mystical tool for achieving future social progress and gender equality. Cinema’s ability to overcome spatial distance brings the future nearer to us, displacing space onto a utopian temporality, with no explanation necessary other than the medium itself.</p> <p>  </p> <p> More pointedly, Swiss director Barbara Miller’s <em>Forbidden Voices: How to Start a Revolution with a Computer </em>optimistically imagines global digital networks as the impetus for overcoming regional forms of gender inequality. Documenting “cyberfeminists” who blog about human rights injustice from Iran, China, and Cuba, the film attempts to transcend its own medium format. Limited by a global but restricted festival and DVD market, <em>Forbidden Voices </em>associates gendered violence under repressive regimes with the very survival of traditional media distribution and production economies. According to Miller’s documentary, not only is the medium also the message: it is the benchmark for sexual rights under global democracy.</p> <p>  </p> <p> In order to address these entanglements between industry standards and aesthetic politics more thoroughly, we might begin by considering how profoundly interrelated their implications have become.</p> <p>  </p> <p> <strong>1) Women’s Film History</strong></p> <p> <strong>Q:</strong> <em>Would it be unprecedented to see more women participating in the industry as filmmakers?</em></p> <p>  </p> <p> <strong>A:</strong> No. To quote the British film historian Anthony Slide, “There were more women directors at work in the American film industry prior to 1920 than during any period of its history.” From the French filmmaker Alice Guy-Blaché who made over 700 films in France and the U.S. from 1896-1920, to the activist filmmaker Lois Weber, women including Mabel Normand, Helen Gardner, Elvira Notari, Bahiga Hafez, Musidora (Jeanne Roques), Ruth Ann Baldwin, Olga Preobrazhenskaya, Alla Nazimova, and many others dominated international film production. It was not until the emergence and solidification of the Hollywood studio system that women were eked out of directorial roles almost completely (with only a few exceptions like Dorothy Arzner and Ida Lupino). Historically, women’s participation in filmmaking has helped pioneer the very notion of the film director.</p> <p> <img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/3womenfilms.jpg" style="width: 650px; height: 396px;" /></p> <p>  </p> <p> <strong>2) Economy</strong></p> <p> <strong>Q: </strong><em>What changes in the structure of big studio and independent filmmaking have enabled gains for women? How might the reorganization of funding opportunities limit gender representation while simultaneously mobilizing it?</em></p> <p>  </p> <p> <strong>A:</strong> From the global film festival circuit, which regulates independent sponsorship networks, to Internet and Kickstarter campaigns, new funding opportunities have fostered a greater diversity of voices and perspectives for cinematic representation. As Martha Lauzen argues in her study for Celluloid Ceiling, while women have been more active as directors in top-grossing films, their representation as executive producers has stagnated (at around 18 percent). Women’s film production at once thrives and suffocates through the relative democratization of production opportunities. The politics of marginality often become self-fulfilling prophecies. Feminist projects frequently appeal to clichés about gender inequity, which earns them just enough traction for limited financial support and distribution mobility. From untold biographies of historically remarkable women, to ethnographies about sexual injustice in distant lands, the rhetoric of invisibility both creates new financial incentives while stifling many of the structural critiques embedded in women’s filmmaking.</p> <p>  </p> <p> <strong>3) Geopolitics </strong></p> <p> <strong>Q:</strong> <em>Where have women been finding entry into the film industry? How does putting women filmmakers “on the map” reinforce or contradict our geographical perceptions about gender and societal change? </em></p> <p>  </p> <p> <strong>A:</strong> The catchall objective of “globalism” has become the twin sister of gender equality in film production. How could we even think about formulating an identity politics in 2013 that ignores national, ethnic, religious, and sexual differences? The canon of women’s filmmaking has been disproportionately dominated by Western (and by predominantly white) women’s experimental filmmaking. The list has spanned the careers of Maya Deren, Su Friedrich, Barbara Kopple, Yvonne Rainer, Ulrike Ottinger, Laura Mulvey, Germaine Dulac, Barbara Rubin, Yoko Ono, Miranda July, Marie Menken, Carolee Schneemann, Joyce Wieland, Shirley Clarke, Leslie Thornton, Abigail Child, Chick Strand, and many others.</p> <p>  </p> <p> However, aesthetic experimentation too often stands in for the meaningful extension of gender politics to other spheres of identity construction. It is no longer tenable to imagine a feminist politics based on metaphors about linguistic difference alone. For every retrospective highlighting Joyce Wieland’s or Laura Mulvey’s different film language, there should be an effort to account for how popular film narratives have emerged from actual geographies of sexual inequality. For example, how do films like <em>English Vinglish </em>(Gauri Shinde, 2012)<em>, Jassad &amp; The Queen of Contradictions </em>(Amanda Homsi-Ottosson, 2011)<em>, Bollywood/Hollywood </em>(Deepa Mehta, 2002)<em>, Talaash </em>(Reema Kagti, 2012)<em>, </em>and even <em>Lost in Translation </em>(Sofia Coppola, 2003) reframe critical theories about the feminist politics of difference and identification?</p> <p> <img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/4womenfilms.jpg" style="width: 500px; height: 346px;" /></p> <p>  </p> <p> <strong>4) Representation </strong></p> <p> <strong>Q:</strong> <em>What does a woman’s film look like? Does increasing women’s representation behind the camera fundamentally change the way we perceive the world in front of it?</em></p> <p>  </p> <p> <strong>A:</strong> Given the profound impact that film narratives can have on our everyday perspectives, it is inevitable that filmmakers’ own identities would reflect the spectator’s identifications through them. While the director as “auteur” is no longer thought to dictate all textual meaning—film signification exceeds a filmmaker’s agency—this semiotic revelation should not erase the impact of authorial intention entirely. In other words, a film’s meanings are overdetermined. Women’s films, through their sheer representational, historical, economic, and geopolitical disparities, provoke us to entertain arguments whose stakes we cannot conceptualize concretely. Instead of imagining gender politics as the negation or reversal of an oppressive position, we should engage the actual historical conditions of women’s filmmaking through their very political incoherence and fragmentation.</p> <p>  </p> <p> Recent women-directed films have ranged from topical and historical war thrillers like Kathryn Bigelow’s <em>Zero Dark Thirty </em>(2012) and Agnieszka Holland’s <em>In Darkness </em>(2011)<em>, </em>to documentaries about remarkable figures such as the artist Ai Weiwei and fashion editor Diana Vreeland, to linguistic dramas spanning <em>English Vinglish, The Other Son </em>(Lorraine Levy, 2012), and <em>Where Do We Go Now? </em>(Nadine Labaki, 2011). Devastating documentaries about sexual violence under repressive regimes have circulated internationally alongside satires about scandalous upheavals in sexuality: <em>Turn Me On, Dammit! </em>(Jannicke Systad Jacobsen, 2011), <em>Hysteria </em>(Tanya Wexler, 2011), and the U.K./Lebanese co-production aptly titled <em>Jassad &amp; The Queen of Contradictions </em>(Amanda Homsi-Ottosson, 2011).</p> <p>  </p> <p> It is precisely the inconsistencies and tensions among these films that make them useful to contemplate as a common entity. These films challenge us to rethink the relations between women’s films and films made by women, thereby re-awakening us to the present-day politics of a feminism that lacks any single coherent voice or movement to defend it.</p> <p>  </p> <p> <strong>Author Bio:</strong></p> <p> <em>Maggie Hennefeld is a contributing writer at</em> Highbrow Magazine.</p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/womens-films" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">women&#039;s films</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/hollywood" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Hollywood</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/women-filmmakers" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">women filmmakers</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/alison-kleyman" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">alison kleyman</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/lauren-greenfield" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">lauren greenfield</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/katherine-bigalow" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">katherine bigalow</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/jane-campion" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">jane campion</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-text field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Maggie Hennefeld</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-pop field-type-list-boolean field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Popular:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">not popular</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-photographer field-type-text field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Photographer:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Wikipedia Commons</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-bot field-type-list-boolean field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Bottom Slider:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Out Slider</div></div></div> Thu, 12 Sep 2013 13:09:36 +0000 tara 3494 at https://www.highbrowmagazine.com https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/2790-women-s-films-and-social-change#comments