Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!mit-eddie!thakur
From: electro!alternat%watserv1.waterloo.edu@watcgl.waterloo.edu (Ann Hodgins)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.cinema
Subject: women's movies - definition
Message-ID: <1990Aug20.155905.2725@eddie.mit.edu>
Date: 20 Aug 90 15:59:05 GMT
Sender: thakur@eddie.mit.edu (Manavendra K. Thakur)
Reply-To: electro!alternat%watserv1.waterloo.edu@watcgl.waterloo.edu (Ann Hodgins)
Followup-To: rec.arts.cinema
Organization: University of Waterloo
Lines: 78
Approved: thakur@zerkalo.harvard.edu


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