Turning the cameras on women in film

Every year, millions of people go to the movies and sit in a crowded theater as members of anonymous audiences that are collectively swept up by cinema. About half of the mesmerized people sitting in those theaters every weekend are women.

Despite the female population’s consistent and enthusiastic participation in the culture of film, there is perhaps no other national industry in which women are so consistently ignored. A male bias is clear in popular blockbusters as much as in their award-wining independent counterparts. Historically, films are nearly always stories imbued with a male perspective.

A telling example: Of all the Academy Award nominees for Best Picture in the last five years, only four (“Million Dollar Baby,” “The Queen,” “Juno,” and “Atonement”) have centered primarily on female characters. This is not to say that there have not been films that prominently feature women—ensembles such as those in ”Babel” and “Little Miss Sunshine” showcase well-written female characters. But films that could be considered female-centric are few and far between, and testosterone-driven movies like “The Departed” are more typical of contemporary cinema.

Women in blockbusters fare even worse. With the exception of “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,” “King Kong,”perhaps “Wall-E,” and the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise (all of which feature arguably more important male characters), each of the top five highest-grossing movies of the past five years are centered on male characters.

These films—such as “Transformers” and its ilk—are also nearly always tailored to stereotypically male tastes. Women are usually reduced to being little more than accessories to men—Uhura in the recent “Star Trek,” for example, has no meaningful existence outside of her interactions with Spock and Kirk.

But the problem for women in film runs far deeper than their onscreen roles. Of those 25 films nominated for Best Picture in the last half decade, only two were written or co-written by women, and only one was co-directed by a woman. Of the 25 high-grossing blockbusters, not a single one was directed by a woman and women contributed to only two screenplays.

For whatever reason, the belief remains that only men are naturally capable of creating cinema, and that only men are likely to enjoy and pay for it. Movies targeted to women consist of cut-and-dried romantic comedies that typically portray their so-called heroines as nothing but voids desperate for male affection. That women continue to buy into the ridiculous parodies of themselves in movies like “The Ugly Truth” reflects the limited opportunities they have had to see films in which female protagonists are realistic and well-written.

But women also go to see action films, and very often like them. And women are more than capable of making movies too. Some of them, like Jane Campion and Sofia Coppola, make movies primarily about the experiences of their own gender.

But some, like Kathryn Bigelow, SoA ’81, do not. Her most recent film, for example, this summer’s astounding “The Hurt Locker,”­is a searing, action-packed meditation about a bomb squad.
Is there something inherent to women that makes us unsuited to cinema? Hardly. Are female filmmakers intrinsically different from their male counterparts in some way? Do the stories we tell and characters we portray have a distinct dramatic weight or balance?

Since all art is based on experience, and female and male experiences are, at a basic level, different, it is tempting but empirically unsound to believe that women have exclusive insight into the female mind. Over the course of the semester, this column will investigate the presence of women in all aspects of film, both in front of and behind the camera. It will try to shine some light on the roles they have played, currently play, and the hopefully greater role that they will play in the rich fabric of the cinematic canon. Only with the expansion of the role of women in the movies will we be able to better divine what makes female filmmakers unique and invaluable.

Morgan Davies is a sophomore at Barnard College majoring in English. A Film of Her Own runs alternate Thursdays.