Films by Women – Page 21

Seed & Spark: #EarlyCinemaSoBlack

But they did not do it for fame or hardware, they saw a new industry that they could use to instill pride and confidence in their community and propel the race forward. So for this Black History Month, we can proudly say #EarlyCinemaSoBlack.

This is a guest post by Deborah Riley Draper.

Fortunately I have the honor and privilege of preserving and elevating the historical contributions of people of color everyday. But, since it is Black History Month, I would be remised if I didn’t take this opportunity to highlight some of the original baddass chicks of cinema. Contrary to the misconceptions and blatant neglect of historical fact, Black women have enjoyed success and failure in the movie-making business since the industry began practically. And not too unlike today, these trailblazers of the Silent Movie Era operated fully and completely outside of the Hollywood or the burgeoning Hollywood system.

Of course, most people are familiar with Zora Neale Hurston and her books because Halle Berry starred in the 2005 TV movie adaptation of Their Eyes Were Watching God produced by Oprah Winfrey. The Harlem Renaissance bad girl was not only a celebrated novelist and playwright but a noted anthropologist as well. She produced ethnographic films in 1928 capturing the lives, customs, and beliefs of Southern people. If you are ever in the Library of Congress, be sure to check Hurston’s filmography.

Seven years before Hurston’s films and exactly 100 years before #OscarsSoWhite was trending, the legendary Black newspaper The Chicago Defender mentioned the “three-reel drama” Shadowed by the Devil, penned and produced by Mrs. Miles Webb, in their section “Among the Movies.” Around the same time, photographer Jane Louise VanDerZee Toussaint Welcome, personal photographer of Booker T. Washington and sister of famed Harlem photographer James VanDerZee, and her husband Ernest Toussaint Welcome opened The Toussaint Motion Picture Exchange. Jennie directed Doing their Bit, a short detailing the efforts of Blacks in the military during WWI. Another film pioneer, Maria P. Williams, produced, distributed, and acted in her own film, The Flames of Wrath (1923) and the Norfolk Journal and Guide printed, “Kansas City is claiming the honor of having the first colored woman film producer in the United States.” And Williams’ best friend, Tressie Souders was lauded by the Black press as the first African American woman director for her film, A Woman’s Error (1922), which was distributed by the Afro-American Film Exhibitors’ Company based in Kansas City, Mo. These woman ignored stereotypes, Jim Crow laws, and the lack of women’s rights to get behind camera to capture and document important stories. They used a pen and a camera to create important pathways and springboards to fuel the march to equality.

It is important to mention, since we are talking about woman who used film to impact the social consciousness of a very racially oppressive society, the writer Drusilla Dunjee Houston. She wrote the screenplay, “Spirit of the South: The Maddened Mob,” one of earliest African-American responses to Thomas Dixon and D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915). She was unable to get it financed and produced.

Black women have been involved in every aspect of film from the beginning. While Oscar Micheaux is regarded as the father of Black independent cinema, we must also applaud the women who stepped out prior to men and women of all races to create jobs, opportunities and provide authentic depictions of them on the screen. These woman found their own spark and seed money to create a lane, a voice and compelling narratives that would accurately depict African American life and inspire the next generation. They pioneered cinematic techniques and introduced ways to flourish outside of Hollywood. They were entrepreneurs with start-up film companies. Maybe one day, they will trend on twitter or receive posthumous recognition for their contributions. But they did not do it for fame or hardware, they saw a new industry that they could use to instill pride and confidence in their community and propel the race forward. So for this Black History Month, we can proudly say #EarlyCinemaSoBlack.

Though not cinematic pioneers, two historically significant women will be featured in the upcoming documentary Olympic Pride, American Prejudice. The film captures the heroic turn of 18 African American athletes who defied racism on both sides of the Atlantic to complete in the 1936 Olympics. And, Louise Stokes and Tydie Pickett, the first Black women ever selected to an American Olympic team, bravely and proudly stepped onto the U.S.S. Manhattan to represent the U.S. almost 30 years prior to the Civil Rights Bill. This film is currently funding on Seed&Spark. Please support the telling of this significant chapter in American history and a precursor in the modern Civil Rights movement. Click here to contribute or log on to www.1936olympicsmovie.com to learn more.

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Filmmaker Deborah Riley Draper has a proven track record for creating compelling brand stories as an advertising agency executive. Draperʼs first documentary, Versailles ʼ73: American Runway Revolution, brought to life the legendary 1973 fashion battle between five French and five American designers. Versailles ʼ73 has screened all over the world and received acclaim from critics and fans alike, including the New York Times, LA Times and Harperʼs Bazaar. The film was selected to the St. Louis International Film Festival, NY Winter Film Awards, John Hopkins Film Festival, Marthaʼs Vineyards African American Film Festival, Denver Film Society Winter DocNights, and Gateway Documentary Festival as well as selected to screen at fashion and design festivals in Canada, Saudi Arabia, Croatia, Estonia and Australia. Versailles ʼ73 is distributed through Cinetic/Filmbuff on VOD in North America, Europe and Australia. The documentary has also been optioned for development into a feature film.

Draper is currently completing production on Olympic Pride, American Prejudice, the story of the 18 African American athletes of the 1936 Summer Olympic Games. She is also completing two feature film scripts. Draper recently contributed to several museum projects, including The Groninger Museum in The Netherlands exhibition on Marga Weiman, Museum of the City of New Yorkʼs Stephen Burrows: When Fashion Danced and the Andre Leon Tallyʼs An American Master of Inventive Design at SCAD. Draper will be a contributing writer to the Fall 2015 NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art Fashion Edition.

Draper has been making long format content and commercials for more than 15 years for clients such as Coca-Cola Classic, Sprite, The Georgia Lottery Corporation, Blue Cross-Blue Shield, ExxonMobil, Fedex, Bayer CropScience and HP. She is currently the Client Service Director at Iris Worldwide. Prior to iris, Draper spent eight years at BBDO and three years at the Publicis network agency Burrell Communications Group. Her advertising work has won two Regional Emmy Awards, Gold Effie, and numerous Addys.

The avid Florida State University Seminole is frequent lecturer for the AAAA Advertising Institute and a 2014 Distinquished Visiting Professor at Johnson & Wales University, Florida Campus.

Rosie O’Donnell and Gina Prince-Bythewood Attend the Athena Film Festival

“The movies we screen here tend to be unfiltered,” Barnard President Debora Spar told me on the red carpet of the Athena Film Festival Saturday night. “They’re powerful. They’re different voices. And we just want to provide a platform to get those voices out there.”

This is a guest post by Paula Schwartz.

The Athena Film Festival, co-founded by Kathryn Kolbert and Melissa Silverstein, just ended its impressive fifth year last weekend, Feb. 5 through 8, and featured a strong slate of films, panels, documentaries and shorts focusing on female protagonists and filmmakers.

The film festival ended on a strong note with the screening of Difret, based on a true story about the abduction of a 14-year-old girl in an Ethiopian village kidnapped on her way home from school. She killed her captor after he raped and beat her, and the subsequent trial riveted the country and started a national conversation about child brides. The film, directed by Zereseney Berhane Mehari and produced by Mehret Mandefro, is executive produced by Angelina Jolie. It was Ethiopia’s submission for best film foreign Oscar and will be released in this country in March.

Gina Prince-Bythewood and Melissa Silverstein

But back to the awards ceremony Saturday night, where Olympus Has Fallen actor Dylan McDermott–the only man on the red carpet and a member of Barnard College Board of Trustees–told me he wished there were more female directors. He noted that he made a film directed by Jodie Foster–Home for the Holidays back in 1995–and that Joanne Woodward discovered him while he was doing a workshop and later mentored him and changed his life: “She was maybe the best director I ever worked with.” He added, “I find that women directors are very different from men. Their sensitivity and their vision are a lot different. The two best directors I worked with were women.”

Athena honoree, Beyond the Lights director Gina Prince-Bythewood, told me on the red carpet she was excited about being in the company of women whose work she held in high esteem. “That definitely got me on the plane out here from L.A. to the Athena Film Festival; I’ve heard so many great things about it. Amma Asante was honored last year and we’ve become good friends during this whole awards season. And just that it’s a festival focusing on women and the importance of female filmmakers,” she noted. “There is a difference between female and male filmmakers, and it’s really about the point of view and what we focus on with our female characters, so it’s a beautiful thing to be a part of it, and I hope that honestly I can see some cool films and be inspired as well.”

The filmmaker told me her next film will focus on female friendship and the way it changes over time. “It’s a little more comedic in tone” than her previous works, referencing Beyond the Lights, which was screened later that night at the festival to a packed audience, and at which the filmmaker participated in a lively Q&A. “I love finding young voices, people that have something to say and have chops, and I think that’s my responsibility as one that’s gotten through the door to reach back and help others as well.”

I asked the filmmaker her reaction to the Oscar nominations. “There were a number of people who should have been in the conversation,” she told me. “There were no people of color nominated in any of the acting categories. I mean David (Oyelowo) obviously should have been nominated. Gugu (Mbatha-Raw), who gave two phenomenal performances (Beyond the Lights and Belle) that were 180 degrees from each other; any other actress would have been exalted after that,” she said. “The problem is the drumbeat for her happened too late. It should have happened out of Toronto, but I’m excited for what’s next for her. I just hate that she’s not in the conversation right now.”

Rosie O’Donnell generated a frenzy of media attention on the red carpet as she made her first public appearance since she announced her marital split from Michelle Rounds and her exit from The View. She attended the premiere of her documentary, Rosie O’Donnell: A Heartfelt Stand Up, and later presented the President’s Visionary Award to HBO Documentary President Sheila Nevins.

O’Donnell told journalists on the red carpet her decision to leave the popular daytime talk show, which was just announced the previous day, was a decision she made with her doctor. She suffered a heart attack in 2014, and her doctor carefully monitored her health and told her after the holidays she had an uptick in numbers that indicated an increased risk of a heart attack, possibly as a result of stress from work and her personal life.

O’Donnell cautioned that all women should take care of their health but conceded she knew she was fortunate. “It’s not everyone who can take a break from working because of stress. It’s easy for me because I’m very rich, right? So I have a lot of help. So it’s easy for people like me to talk about it. I have somebody to watch the baby if I don’t feel like it, so I have a much easier life than 99.9 percent of women on the planet and I know that. But every woman needs to take their health seriously,” she said. “I ignored it, my own. I didn’t really participate in anything besides mammograms cause my mother died of breast cancer. I was so sure it would be breast cancer that got me, so when I had a heart attack I was stunned.”

A few days earlier Jodie Foster received the Laura Ziskin Lifetime Achievement Award and was supposed to attend the awards ceremony Saturday but had to jet back to L.A. for the Director’s Guild Awards in which she received two nominations.

During the Athena awards ceremony, via video, Foster, who has been an actress since she was a child, noted that, “There I was a young girl wanting to be a director and never seeing a female director’s face. I thought it was something I would never be allowed to do.” After her mother took her to a film festival of works by Italian director Lina Wertmuller, Foster said, “I came to realize that I could be a woman director if I wanted to because there was one out there, and that was a life-changing moment for me.”

The awards ceremony, which turned out to be a great party attended primarily by women, honored Gina Prince-Bythewood, producer Cathy Schulman, and HBO Documentary Films President Sheila Nevins.

O’Donnell, who presented Sheila Nevins with her award, noted that she fell in love with documentaries from the time she saw Grey Gardens. Then subsequently she’d see documentaries on HBO and every documentary she said, “has a name and it’s Sheila Nevins. Who is this witch I thought to myself?” O’Donnell met Nevins back in 1996, “when most of you Barnard students were in elementary school.”

O’Donnell said of Nevins, “She’s the woman I look up to the most in all of showbiz. Her heart is the biggest of anyone, and she’s got a Geiger counter for truth that’s never failed.” She added that she’s done six or seven documentaries with the HBO Documentary head that does the heavy lifting. “I give her a tremendous amount of credit, and I do very little work, and that’s how I like it.”

In a speech that was basically a stand-up comedy routine, O’Donnell also joked that she saw a woman who walked by wearing a grey hat, who caught her attention. The woman sat at a front table and O’Donnell cracked, “I saw you walking by and I’m like, ‘I don’t know who she is, but she might be my next wife.’” The audience roared. O’Donnell added the feeling might not be mutual and segued into a dig at Brian Williams: “Maybe that’s the problem in my relationships. I see someone and I make shit up like Brian Williams. I escaped on 9/11 from the Twin Towers. Oh No, I didn’t. I got mixed up. F—ing Lance Armstrong liar.”

Gina Prince-Bythewood’s emotional and heartfelt speech about her journey as a filmmaker was the evening’s highlight. She spoke about being adopted by white parents and her search for her birth mother that didn’t work out as hoped. She began her journey as a filmmaker with a rejection from film school but that didn’t deter her: “I wrote a letter to the head of the school telling her she made a mistake. She called me and said I’m in.”

Bythewood credited much of her success to other women who advised and mentored her, including A Different World producer Susan Fales Hill, who presented Bythewood with her award.

Sheila Nevins and Rosie O'Donnell — Sheila Nevins and Rosie O’Donnell

Bythewood said that people asked her all the time about discrimination against Black directors. “I’ve personally not been discriminated against,” she said. “What is discriminated against are my choices, which is to focus on women and especially on women of color, their goals and their love stories and it’s a tougher fight.” A fight made especially difficult because only 4 percent of directors are women in the Directors Guild, and in the Writers Guild it is only 10 percent, “which means that our images of females that young women … are seeing is from a male point of view, and I think that that’s frightening. I think that’s dangerous and just ignores our perspective. It’s not just what happened at the Oscars,” she said. “It’s the fact also that of the films nominated for best picture not one has a female protagonist and is from a female point of view, and that has got to change. I’m in that fight.”

Paula Schwartz is a veteran journalist who worked at the New York Times for three decades. For five years she was the Baguette for the New York Times movie awards blog Carpetbaggers. Before that she worked on the New York Times night life column, Boldface, where she covered the celebrity beat. She endured a poke in the ribs by Elijah Wood’s publicist, was ejected from a party by Michael Douglas’s flak after he didn’t appreciate what she wrote, and endured numerous other indignities to get a story. More happily she interviewed major actors and directors–all of whom were good company and extremely kind–including Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman, Clint Eastwood, Christopher Plummer, Dustin Hoffman and the hammy pooch “Uggie” from The Artist. Her idea of heaven is watching at least three movies in a row with an appreciative audience that’s not texting. Her work has appeared in Moviemaker, more.com, showbiz411 and reelifewithjane.com.

Blurred Lines: The Cinematic Appeal of Rape Fantasy

While Whore stigma is gradually declining, kinky desires remain stigmatized, especially in women. By vocally disowning that desire, “Madonna” Anastasia Steele qualifies herself to serve as an avatar for readers who struggle to acknowledge and integrate their sexual urges. The “displaced consent” model of rape fantasy may be recognized, and distinguished from the “sexual assawwwlt” model, by its masterful Ice Prince hero, whose full control is essential to eliminating the heroine’s responsibility.

Trigger Warning: Detailed discussion of rape apologism (and some explicit reference to Robin Thicke)

The Myth Of Male Power by Warren Farrell (PhD, of course) is arguably the intellectual foundation of Men’s Rights Activism (MRA). It is also notorious for its rape apologism, using female fondness for fictional rape fantasy to argue that men should not be prosecuted for date rape, as long as they are “trying to become her fantasy.” For the record, I don’t believe rape fantasies cause rape. In the real world, desire is not so easily misunderstood. What rape fantasy does feed, as Farrell illustrates, is rape apologism. Our cultural models of “romanticized rape” shape the excuses of rapists and encourage their general acceptance. We might respond by pointing out that women consent to rape fantasy automatically, just by imagining it, by turning the pages as they read or by opening their eyes to watch on-screen. Since rape fantasy is consensual, it has nothing in common with the violation of actual rape. But with the often coercive “romance” of Fifty Shades of Grey set to rule the box office, now is a good time to ask: what actually is the cinematic appeal of rape fantasy?

Gone With The Wind: Putting the “awww” in Sexual Assawwwlt

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRxfZHr3AxY” title=”GWTW%20marital%20rape%20scene”]

Rhett Butler threatens to crush his wife’s skull, declares “this is one night you’re not turning me out” then carries her upstairs, visibly struggling. Cut to Scarlett awakening the next morning with smiling pleasure. Her husband threatened to kill her, declared his intention to rape her while she protested, yet she is shown waking up happy the following day. Like Fifty Shades of Grey, this is an adaptation of a female author’s book, cited as sexual fantasy by many female viewers. What’s going on?

Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind mirrors classic interpretations of Wuthering Heights‘ romance – like Linton, Ashley represents the heroine’s social aspirations, while Rhett mirrors Heathcliff as her primal, resisted passion. This must be understood within a wider tendency by female-authored texts to reject their primary object of desire, which I’ve previously examined for Jane Austen’s Unsuitable Suitor and the “Wolf” of SARCom. In response to such rejection, Twilight‘s Jacob Black forces a long kiss on heroine Bella Swann. Buffy‘s spurned “Wolves,” Spike and hyena-possessed Xander, both attempt to rape Buffy.

This rape-as-romantic-desperation trope echoes the emotional vulnerability of Rhett Butler’s marital rape, where he finally confesses jealousy and desire for Scarlett. As Rhett threatens to crush Scarlett’s skull, the gesture emphasizes his powerlessness to control her thoughts and emotions. Though his role is brutal, supposedly excused by drunkenness, the scene actually affirms Scarlett’s emotional power: he attempts to intimidate her, but cannot; he acknowledges his craving for her emotional approval and his inability to secure it. Treating sexual assault as emotional surrender is the defining feature of this category of rape fantasy, the “awww” in the “sexual assawwwlt.” Because Rhett is the primary love interest, Scarlett’s resistance is a demonstration of emotional power, not lack of desire, as her satisfaction the following morning demonstrates. She is the avatar of female viewers, who both desire Rhett and desire power over Rhett. Our culture views sex as male conquest and female surrender, but “sexual assawwwlt” flips that script: it is female conquest through emotional withholding, provoking a rape that affirms male emotional powerlessness.

The cultural concept of “female sexual power” was born in 411 B.C., with the sex boycott plot of Aristophanes’ comedy Lysistrata. At the time, this was amusing partly because women were understood to have ten times the lust of men. The female fertility cults of Demeter practiced ritual obscenity, the first known sex manual was authored by Philaenis, daughter of Okymenes, and Sappho wrote nine volumes of lesboerotic poetry, all acknowledged literary classics. These expressions of female-authored sexual culture were wiped out by patriarchs of the early christian church. However, the male-authored Lysistrata‘s model of empowerment-through-sexual-resistance survived. “The Rules of Love,” laid down by Eleanor of Aquitaine’s Courts of Love in the 12th Century, included “an easy attainment makes love contemptible” and “jealousy is absolutely required by love.” Eleanor’s influential “Rules of Love” represent an aristocratic female response to social powerlessness, diverting frustration into a sadistic model of love as gratifying empowerment, rather than as emotional fulfillment. Margaret Mitchell’s depicting Scarlett as empowered by her own rape thus reflects over 2,000 years of ideology promoting sexual resistance as an expression of female power. This “female power” of sexual resistance is a poisoned chalice: by separating resistance-as-power from resistance-as-reluctance, it justifies rape as the only way to satisfy female desire, while diverting women from actual social empowerment. “Female sexual power” thus feeds rape apologism and demands male telepathy – a practice best confined to fiction.

Fifty Shades of Grey: Madonna’s Like A Virgin

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JMg9InBcgE”]

If “sexual assawwwlt” represents female sexual conquest, then the “displaced consent” of Fifty Shades of Grey represents disowned responsibility. In E. L. James’ book, Anastasia Steele expresses unwillingness and reluctance to engage in BDSM with Christian, while her consent is detached and embodied as the infamous “inner goddess.” Again, a key to understanding can be found in Jane Austen. Writing at a time of intense Whore stigma, where expressions of female sexuality were harshly punished by the withdrawal of social protection, Austen repeatedly created plots in which the heroine resists her attraction to the Unsuitable Suitor while another woman, usually a female relative, abandons social protection and elopes with him. This constant repetition suggests that the “Whore” relative represents the displaced sex drive of the “Madonna” heroine, an “inner Lydia” comparable to Anastasia Steele’s “inner goddess.” While Whore stigma is gradually declining, kinky desires remain stigmatized, especially in women. By vocally disowning that desire, “Madonna” Anastasia Steele qualifies herself to serve as an avatar for readers who struggle to acknowledge and integrate their sexual urges. The “displaced consent” model of rape fantasy may be recognized, and distinguished from the “sexual assawwwlt” model, by its masterful Ice Prince hero, whose full control is essential to eliminating the heroine’s responsibility. The classic “Ice Prince” of teen SARCom is emotionally intense, but sexually unavailable; E. L. James titillates readers by adapting Twilight‘s sexually unavailable “Ice Prince” Edward into the emotionally unavailable, but sexually intense, Christian Grey.

Compare the earlier Secretary, Erin Cressida Wilson’s adaptation of Mary Gaitskill’s story: the heroine Lee actively requests and provokes the domination of her boss, Mr. Grey, and is depicted in solo acts of masochism and masturbation that clarify her independent desire for BDSM. In BDSM practice, it is the submissive who ultimately controls the play through safe-words and consent, an ironic “paradox of power.” In Fifty Shades of Grey, however, the book’s BDSM negotiations are utterly undermined by Anastasia’s inability to sign or renegotiate Christian’s contracts, due to her disavowal of kinky desire. For sharp analysis of the book’s resulting abusive elements, from the perspective of a practising submissive, see Cliff Pervocracy’s reviews, while E. L. James’ own interviews exemplify covert desire and reinforce norms of respectability politics: “I am fascinated by BDSM, and fascinated as to why anyone would want to be in this lifestyle. Don’t get me wrong – I think it’s as hot as hell, and find Doms hot as hell. I met this guy recently who is a Dom… well… ‘nuff said about that – but he was fucked-up.”

Female director Sam Taylor-Johnson is apparently trying to minimize the book’s disavowal of desire, by emphasizing Dakota Johnson’s lustful facial expressions as nonverbal cues for Jamie Dornan’s Christian. His line “I like to see your face. It gives me some clue what you might be thinking” is prominent in the official trailer. But fangirls now rushing to pre-book tickets are expecting, and will demand, faithfulness to the source novel, including Anastasia’s open reluctance to enter a D/s relationship and her refusal to sign or renegotiate Christian’s contract, which deny her power of consent. E. L. James’ book also shares Gone With The Wind‘s trope of using a sexually aggressive, non-white man to provoke white male heroic protectiveness, suggesting a correlation between mainstream rape fantasy and conservative ideology. How will Taylor-Johnson tackle that? Should we support female directors regardless?

Culture’s association of sexual resistance with (white) respectability, and with (white) entitlement to social protection, acts to detach sexual resistance from lack of desire. Yet, just as Austen’s heroes cannot actually marry both the girl of their dreams and the random female relative who represents her sex drive, a hero’s being justified in forcing himself on an unwilling woman, because her consenting inner goddess is hovering like a sexual Great Gazoo, is equally unrealistic. The seduction of Anastasia may be compared to the seductions of Brad and Janet in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, a rare example of the “displaced consent” trope being unisex, as Brad and Janet’s desire is clear in their visible pleasure at “giving in,” while their vocal resistance reflects social inhibitions and fear of losing status. Janet is shown to be liberated by her coercive seduction, embracing her desires in sex-positive anthem “touch-a, touch-a, touch me,” while Brad caresses his fetish gear and croons, “I feel se-exy!” However, Rocky Horror‘s flamboyant absurdism helps to underline the fantasy aspect of this rape fantasy, as a hypothetical mental experiment in gender and sexual fluidity. Kids, don’t try this at home.

“Blurred Lines”: Male Readings Of Rape Fantasy

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyDUC1LUXSU”]

Like its female equivalent, mainstream male rape fantasy centres on forcing the acknowledgement of suppressed female desire. The fact that dominant culture continues to interpret women’s sexual resistance as unconnected to any lack of desire, may be seen in the huge popularity of Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines.” While Thicke’s lyrics include consent-positive lines like “go ahead, get at me,” the feminist backlash highlights the damaging impact of invalidating sexual resistance, not to mention Thicke’s creepy delivery (catchy hook, though).

There is no denying that degrading porn (porn focussed on humiliation rather than pleasure) appeals to misogynist men and to sexual predators, but is that all it does? Can its full popularity, dominating the ratings of porn aggregate sites, really be explained only by a widespread sexual hatred lurking in most men? I suggest that comparison with the female model of “sexual assawwwlt” offers a more complex reading. The male porn performer, like Scarlett O’Hara, is not a direct expression of desire but an avatar of sexual frustration. Popular porn is shaped by commercial pressure; to cater to the male viewer’s resentment of the female performer’s unavailability (to him personally), the male performer must paradoxically punish that sexual unavailability while having sex with her. Compare Gone With The Wind‘s urge to punish Rhett Butler’s emotional unavailability, while he’s being emotionally vulnerable. I suggest that cinematic sexual fantasy can only be understood through this contradictory duality: performers represent their characters’ sexual fulfillment, while simultaneously being avatars for the viewer’s conflicting sexual frustration. These dual pressures shape dysfunctional models for imitation.

As long as the performers are willing and comfortable, there is nothing wrong with a purely cinematic rape fantasy, or with the intense trust of consensual BDSM power exchange, that confront inhibitions while cathartically venting sexual frustrations. However, we must recognize the roots of rape fantasy in a toxic sexual culture that stigmatizes female lust and imagines female consent as disempowering surrender. Fantasy is as good a way as any to explore the resulting tensions between power and desire. But punishing female inhibition with bodily violation, when that inhibition stems from punishing female sexuality, adds injury to insult before rubbing battery acid on the wound. Films become toxic when they blur the lines of fantasy and reality, leading viewers to mistake expressions of frustration for models of fulfillment.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10YPz0F-KOE”]

Brigit McCone is semi-apologetically Team Wolf, writes and directs short films and radio dramas.

Seed & Spark: The Bravery of Being a “Slut” on Camera

So when I started production on ‘Slut: A Documentary Film,’ I knew the intensity of what I was asking of the women I interviewed. Not only were they sharing their personal experiences with sexual shaming, they were doing it on camera. They were using their full, legal names. They were putting their faces and their voices out there into the world, with the hope that what they had to say would change someone’s life.

Seed and Spark Screen Shot — Contribute to the *Slut: A Documentary Film* crowd-funding campaign to help The UnSlut Project complete post-production.

This is a guest post by Emily Lindin.

When I first started The UnSlut Project, I imagined it would function like the It Gets Better Project – but rather than focusing on LGBT youth, it would be geared toward girls who were being “slut”-shamed. The parallel was obvious: like people who are bullied for being LGBT, girls who are sexually bullied are often convinced that it’s not something about them that is “wrong”; rather, it is their very being, who they are, that is “dirty” and “bad.” This can make them feel worthless as a person and, in the most tragic cases, can lead to self-harm and even suicide.

In case you’re not familiar with the It Gets Better Project, the premise is that when LGBT youth don’t have supportive adults in their lives (which is, unfortunately, often the case), they can find comfort in videos made by adults who have survived similar bullying. These videos provide solidarity, hope, and the message that it will get better.

Slut: A Documentary Film is currently crowd-funding for post-production. — *Slut: A Documentary Film* is currently crowd-funding for post-production.

My idea was that this kind of project would make sense for young girls who were being sexually bullied, since they, too, often lack support from the adults in their lives. Many parents’ first instinct is to blame their daughter for being labeled a “slut” by her classmates, rather than to help her overcome that reputation in a kind, open-minded way. I had supportive parents growing up, but when I was bullied as the school “slut” back in the late 1990s, I would have greatly benefited from the reassuring messages of women who had survived something similar.

N'jaila action — N’Jaila Rhee shares her experience being shunned by her parents and church community after being sexually assaulted, as part of *Slut: A Documentary Film.*

So women started submitting their stories. But here’s the thing: they wrote to me instead of recording video messages, and in most cases they asked me to keep their submissions anonymous. Some of these women were in their 40s or 50s; decades before, someone had decided they were a “slut.” But there was still so much shame surrounding that time in their life that they could not risk being identified. They wanted to reach girls who were going through sexual bullying, they wanted to speak out about their stories, but the stigma surrounding the “slut” label was still so strong that they could only do so anonymously.

Allyson Pereira shares her experience being sexually bullied after sending a photo of her breasts to her high school ex-boyfriend, as part of "Slut: A Documentary Film." — Allyson Pereira shares her experience being sexually bullied after sending a photo of her breasts to her high school ex-boyfriend, as part of *Slut: A Documentary Film*.

I can’t blame these women for wanting to protect their identities. The stigma they fear is not imagined; in many cases, they could be putting their jobs or personal relationships at risk. In fact, when I first launched The UnSlut Project by blogging my own diary entries from when I was labeled a “slut” in middle school, I changed the names of everyone involved. To this day, I use a pen name to protect the people who bullied me over 15 years ago.

So when I started production on Slut: A Documentary Film, I knew the intensity of what I was asking of the women I interviewed. Not only were they sharing their personal experiences with sexual shaming, they were doing it on camera. They were using their full, legal names. They were putting their faces and their voices out there into the world, with the hope that what they had to say would change someone’s life.

They were doing something braver than I have ever done. And they were trusting me to represent their stories clearly and honestly, to make a film that will not only reach adults who need to know just how pervasive and widespread the issue of “slut”-shaming is, but whose message will find girls who need to know that “it gets better.”

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Emily Lindin is the founder of The UnSlut Project and the creator of Slut: A Documentary Film. She was labled a “slut” at age 11. Now a Harvard graduate pursuing her PhD in California, Emily started The UnSlut Project by blogging her middle school diaries. The project has grown into an online community where people who have experienced sexual shaming can share their stories, and where girls who are currently suffering can find support.

The Athena Film Festival: Pushing the Conversation Forward

“We’ve been very lucky,” Silverstein says. “People have given their time to come in and share and teach, because we want to inspire people. The goal, really, is to just allow girls to dream and to believe that they could be directors and producers and writers, and for boys to see women can do this, too.” Silverstein hopes the message they take away is, “Everybody can be successful. It’s about talent. It shouldn’t be about your gender.”

This is a guest post by Josh Ralske.

The Athena Film Festival has grown more ambitious with each passing year, and this year, its fifth, is no different. The festival’s co-founders, Kathryn Kolbert of the Athena Center for Leadership Studies at Barnard College, and Artistic Director Melissa Silverstein of Indiewire‘s Women and Hollywood, spoke with us about this year’s festival and the scant progress women filmmakers have made in Hollywood in recent years.

This year’s festival has gotten unprecedented media attention for its premiere of Dan Chaykin’s Rosie O’Donnell: A Heartfelt Stand Up and for Lifetime Achievement honoree Jodie Foster. The opening night film, Kim Longinotto’s Dreamcatcher, is a documentary about Brenda Myers-Powell, a former prostitute from Chicago who has turned her life around and devoted herself to helping other women and girls break free of the cycle of abuse and exploitation.

“Once I saw Dreamcatcher and I saw this amazing woman, Brenda, I just knew that it was our movie,” Silverstein tells me. “It’s just one of these stories of people that are doing amazing work in their communities that you would never see. We’re thrilled to be able to share the story at its New York premiere.”

“We’re looking for films that are inspiring and that can demonstrate positive social change in ways that demonstrate women’s agency, their ability to make a difference,” Kolbert explains, “and I think Dreamcatcher really fulfills all of those goals. It’s a particularly inspiring film, and one in which individual women have worked together to make a difference in the lives of women who have lived as prostitutes and wanted to come out of that world.”

Still from Dreamcatcher — Still from *Dreamcatcher*

Dreamcatcher‘s themes fit perfectly with the festival’s unique goals and mission. “We’re a unique festival in that we tell the stories of women in leadership roles,” Kolbert says. “We show films that are made by both men and women, as long as women are the protagonists of the story.”

As the festival’s main programmer, Silverstein works at finding a balance between “movies that have been overlooked,” and “great stuff that might have been playing at their multiplex that they missed.”

Co-Founders of the Athena Film Festival, Kathryn Kolbert and Melissa Silverstein

“What I try to do is curate a conversation,” she explains. “So I want to be able to have foreign movies, movies about women leaders in all different areas: in music, in science, in sports. It just shows the breadth and the depth of what women’s experiences are, and that’s what I try to do.”

While Silverstein is often frustrated by what studios will send to the small but steadily growing festival, sometimes she sees a film that she knows immediately they need to show. That was the case at the Berlinale last year, where she saw Athena’s Closing Night film, Difret, Ethiopian-born filmmaker Zeresenay Berhane Mehari’s drama of a teenage girl who responds violently when she’s abducted into marriage, and the bold young lawyer who takes her case. “The second I saw that movie, I knew that it had to play Athena,” Silverstein states, “and I have been like a rabid dog trying to get that movie.”

This year’s festival also includes some higher profile films, including the Centerpiece, Gina Prince-Bythewood’s underseen backstage drama, Beyond the Lights, featuring Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Minnie Driver, screening Saturday with the filmmaker, who’s receiving an award from the festival, in attendance. Filmmaker Gillian Robespierre will also be on hand for Satuday’s screening of her bluntly funny Obvious Child. The racially charged indie comedy Dear White People and Lukas Moodysson’s buoyant punk rock coming-of-age film We Are the Best! will also screen this weekend.

Then there’s actor-director-producer Foster’s well-deserved honor, the Laura Ziskin Lifetime Achievement Award. “Foster has been a quiet leader,” Silverstein says. “She’s been pushing the boundaries. She started to direct, as an actress before other actresses did that.” As an actor, Foster’s career highlights expanded Hollywood’s vision of the type of roles women could play. “The roles that she won the Academy Award for … The Accused was about gang rape, and that was in the late ’80s. That wasn’t a subject matter that was discussed at that time, and she really took that on,” Silverstein points out, “and then with Silence of the Lambs, she was really ahead of the curve. I think that’s what the Athena Film Festival wants to be, and Jodie embodies that.”

As a director, Foster hasn’t made a feature since 2011’s The Beaver, starring her embattled friend Mel Gibson. Like many talented women directors, she’s turned to the small screen, directing episodes of Netflix’s House of Cards and Orange is the New Black. She has a new feature in pre-production, Money Monster, starring George Clooney and Julia Roberts.

I asked both Kolbert and Silverstein if 2015’s successful films directed by women, including Obvious Child, Ava DuVernay’s Selma, Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, and Amma Asante’s Belle, which opened the festival last year, offer cause for optimism. I pointed out that Michelle MacLaren had been hired to direct the upcoming DC Comics adaptation of Wonder Woman for Warner Bros., based on the strength of her television work, including several outstanding episodes of Breaking Bad. Neither was particularly sanguine about what these milestones mean for women in Hollywood as a whole.

“In the film industry, I don’t see a lot of progress,” Kolbert states, “except for the fact that now the paucity of women in film has become an issue that’s discussed.”

“The numbers have been really static for the last decade,” Silverstein points out. “We did a survey at Women and Hollywood from 2009 to 2013, and 5 percent of all the studio films were directed by women and only 10 percent of the indie films were directed by women.” She doesn’t mince words about the backward attitude those numbers reflect. “That’s just abysmal. We’re half the world. And we don’t get the opportunities. It’s not a lack of talent; it’s a lack of opportunities.”

Silverstein agrees with Kolbert that at least people are talking about the issues involved, as in the Academy’s recent snub of DuVernay, which Kolbert bluntly calls “a travesty.” As Silverstein sees it, “The progress has been in this robust, wonderful, inquisitive, and actually angry conversation about the lack of opportunities for women. I will be very happy when the numbers move to where the conversation is.”

The Athena Film Festival is playing a part in moving things along. That’s why it also includes a practical element, with Seed & Spark’s Emily Best giving a workshop on crowdfunding, and industry leaders Prince-Bythewood, Cathy Schulman, and Stephanie Laing providing Master Classes in their respective fields. “We’ve been very lucky,” Silverstein says. “People have given their time to come in and share and teach, because we want to inspire people. The goal, really, is to just allow girls to dream and to believe that they could be directors and producers and writers, and for boys to see women can do this, too.” Silverstein hopes the message they take away is, “Everybody can be successful. It’s about talent. It shouldn’t be about your gender.”

Kolbert makes a similar point. “My goal for the festival is that over the long term, when you think of leadership, you’re going to picture women,” she says, rejecting the traditional image of “a white guy with a little gray hair at his temples.” She sums up the Athena Film Festival’s mission nicely, quoting Marian Wright Edelman: “You can’t be what you can’t see.”

Josh Ralske is a freelance film writer based in New York. He has written for MovieMaker Magazine and All Movie Guide.

Manawee, ‘Mansfield Park,’ and the Limitations of Compulsory Spunkiness

If Austen’s earlier ‘Pride and Prejudice’ and ‘Sense and Sensibility’ (both written by age 23) seem to represent “unnatural prudence” by justifying and approving the Madonna’s inhibitions, then her later Emma and Persuasion both defend “natural romance.” Between proper “prudence” and regretful “romance” hovers ‘Mansfield Park’; every avenue is intolerable and every gate locked.

Written by Brigit McCone.

In the 2007 biopic Becoming Jane, Jane Austen’s relationship with Tom Lefroy is turned into a period romance, ending with Austen refusing to elope with Lefroy for the noblest of reasons and vowing that her heroines will get the happy ending she has been denied. There is a problem with that theory. James McAvoy’s passionate, mischievous Lefroy resembles Austen’s early hero Henry Tilney, of Northanger Abbey, but is otherwise far closer to the archetypal Unsuitable Suitor: Willoughby, Wickham, Crawford and Churchill. If, as the tag-line of Becoming Jane claims, “their love story was her greatest inspiration,” this suggests not the wish fulfillment of “happy endings,” but intense conflict over the Unsuitable Suitor’s incompatibility with social approval.

In Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ female spin on Jungian psychology, Women Who Run With the Wolves, she chooses the African tale “Manawee” to represent the psychological challenges of romantic union. In the story, a man’s dog must discover the names of twins before the man can marry them, avoiding distractions of the flesh to deliver the names to his master. In Estés’ reading, the dog represents the man’s instinctual self; only by recognizing (“naming”) the civilized and wild aspects of woman as dual but inseparable (“twins”), while avoiding the temptations of instant gratification (“flesh”) in favor of deep knowledge, can man qualify himself as woman’s enduring mate.

The Madonna/Whore complex defines as “Madonna” any woman who wins social approval by conforming to convention, and as “Whore” any woman who violates social convention to act on desire (capitalized to distinguish the concept from sex workers). Patriarchal ideology demands that the Whore be rejected and the Madonna rewarded, to discipline female behavior. By contrast, Jane Austen’s writing has the logic of Estés’ “Manawee” fable: the inseparable duality of Madonna and Whore. Marianne Dashwood loves Willoughby, therefore Brandon must win Marianne by protecting his Whore ward who elopes with Willoughby; Elinor Dashwood loves Edward Ferrars, therefore Ferrars must prove his loyalty to the Whore, Lucy Steele, to win Elinor; Elizabeth Bennet falls for Wickham, therefore Darcy must protect her Whore sister who elopes with Wickham; sibling-doubles Henry and Mary Crawford are dismissive of Whore Maria, therefore must be rejected by cousin-doubles Fanny and Edmund; Frank Churchill loves loyal Jane, who Whorishly defies propriety with their secret engagement, therefore Churchill appreciates Emma; Knightley loves Emma, therefore he is protective of Jane and urges Emma to stop distrusting her; Captain Wentworth shows his love for Anne Elliot by appreciating Louisa Musgrove, whose Whorish passion Anne has suppressed. The pattern is too consistent for coincidence: no hero in any Austen novel wins the heroine without protecting her Whore counterpart. The intense resistance to sexual double standards that this implies is often unappreciated, because of the propriety of its expression.

Sense and Sensibility‘s Marianne is particularly fascinating in this light. Her binary with Brandon’s Whore ward establishes Marianne as Madonna, and therefore entitled to count as heroine. Her binary with super-Madonna sister Elinor, however, establishes Marianne as Whore, flaunting social conventions by writing to Willoughby and flirting openly. By centering dual Madonna and Whore heroines, Austen foregrounds the internal conflict over the love plots. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl“ points to convincing parallels between Marianne’s characterization and the symptoms of female masturbation pathologized as “hysteria” by that era’s medical literature. I’m skeptical, however, of Sedgwick suggesting eroticism in the tension between Marianne and Elinor, rather than drama of the divided self. Elinor’s romantic pain over Ferrars is exactly equal to Marianne’s over Willoughby; she attacks Marianne for daring to express what she herself suppresses, then mourns over Marianne’s fevered body as an inseparable part of herself. As Austen’s final completed novel, Persuasion, declares: “one half of her should not be always so much wiser than the other half.”

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_D8pg1O8giQ”]

Emma Thompson gets this book

Andrew Davies, one of the most successful adaptors of Austen, has stated repeatedly that he believes elements of sex and love, even when pushed to the background by propriety, are always important (and faces Janeite wrath for this insight, as in this post dismissing the Whore as an irrelevant “bratty teenager.” As if women were all fine ladies, instead of rational creatures) Davies famously modernized the sexual tension of Pride and Prejudice by adding scenes of Colin Firth bathing and fencing. His version of Northanger Abbey explores the sexual overtones of Gothic horror to portray Catherine Morland’s craving for thrill and exploration as basically sexual curiosity, while JJ Feild’s Henry Tilney does justice to the ideal hero as playful liberator (is there a petition for JJ Feild, James McAvoy or Tom Hiddleston to play all future incarnations of Willoughby, Wickham, Crawford, and Churchill?).

Austen’s own relationship to the Whore is conflicted: Lydia Bennet is foolish for eloping with Wickham, but we’re encouraged to despise Mary’s smug moralizing over woman’s irretrievable virtue. Austen’s early Lady Susan stars a wickedly anarchic Whore, who flaunts society’s ageism and sexual propriety, like a slightly tamer Marquise de Merteuil but without real punishment (summon Diablo Cody to adapt!). Emma marks the full repentance of the Madonna for her self-righteous enforcement of social values. Persuasion lets the Unsuitable Suitor hold the Madonna accountable: “I could think of you only as one who had yielded, who had given me up, who had been influenced by anyone rather than by me.”

We prefer our Austen heroines spunky but not subversive. Elizabeth Bennet is the fan favorite, a spitfire Madonna, mistaken in her judgments but never “one who yielded” to social pressure, nor one who “forgot herself” (i.e. forgot social pressure) by eloping. In Becoming Jane, Anne Hathaway plays Austen herself as just such a spunky tightrope-walker. She would never just “give Lefroy up,” but martyrs herself nobly for his starving siblings. That Lefroy went on to marry elsewhere (whether he named his daughter after Jane or not), rather than waiting until he had independent means to win her, thus reflects poorly on his faithlessness alone. Our heroine is above reproach. The problem with such spunkiness, and the fantasy of social immunity it represents, is that it trivializes social pressure. Spunky heroines suggest any female failure be blamed on their lack of bootstrapping pluck, rather than on crushing social systems. From a patriarchal perspective, Pride and Prejudice, which Austen herself considered “rather too light,” is the most comforting of her novels: dominant ideology is never confronted because the patriarch just happens to be wryly wise, the Eligible Suitor just happens to be desirable and the Unsuitable Suitor just happens to be “one of the most worthless young men in Britain” (though it’s made clear that Elizabeth would heed Aunt Gardiner and reject him regardless).

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7f_wLH3RMw” title=”Andrew%20Davies%20presents%20%27The%20Strange%20Case%20of%20Lizzy%20Jekyll%20and%20Lydia%20Hyde%27″]

Andrew Davies presents ‘The Strange Case of Lizzy Jekyll and Lydia Hyde’

Replace noble Darcy with foolish Rushworth, cynical Wickham with impulsive Crawford, and you have the brooding beast that is Mansfield Park, Austen’s most conflicted masterpiece. Instead of Dashwood duality, there are three sisters in the older generation: Lady Bertram married for prestige and became a pointless, pampered shell; Mrs. Price married for passion and became enslaved to her husband in crushing poverty; childless widow Aunt Norris is a nightmare spinster, channeling sexual frustrations and social resentments into interference in others’ lives. Against this universal failure, the younger generation struggles for happiness. Maria tries to choose Rushworth’s prestige, but revolts and pursues passion with Henry Crawford, before being dumped and joining Aunt Norris in hellish spinsterhood. Fanny is paralyzed by danger on all sides and favors her safely protective cousin, who actually craves Mary Crawford’s rebellious fire. Mansfield Park’s romance cannot be dismissed as insipid cousin-love; it offers real passion with the Crawfords, before tearing it apart through inhibitions and internalized whorephobia (if you liked Pride and Prejudice, you’ll LOVE Inhibitions and Internalized Whorephobia!). Though Henry has been amusingly described as the “original Nice Guy” for refusing to acknowledge Fanny’s lack of interest, what fascinates is Austen using her full powers to make us root for Henry, before mercilessly ripping him away. Henry is the hero who fails; he has “the open-hearted, the eager character” so prized in Persuasion, but he fetishizes a purity he cannot possess and disdains the love that sacrificed everything for him. Henry tantalizes with the promise of mental and sexual liberation, but his double standards turn his promise into Dead Sea fruit.

One of the most symbolic scenes occurs with Fanny stuck on a bench, watching Maria strain for liberation from fiancé Rushworth’s grounds. Rushworth runs for the key to properly release her, but Henry proposes dodging the iron gate: “I think it might be done, if you really wished to be more at large, and could allow yourself to think it not prohibited.” A locked garden was a medieval allegory for virginity. We can read similar symbolism into Louisa Musgrove’s ruinous leap in Persuasion, which says of heroine Anne: “she had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older: the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.” If Austen’s earlier Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility (both written by age 23) seem to represent “unnatural prudence” by justifying and approving the Madonna’s inhibitions, then her later Emma and Persuasion both defend “natural romance.” Between proper “prudence” and regretful “romance” hovers Mansfield Park; every avenue is intolerable and every gate locked.

Bringing us to Patricia Rozema’s 1999 adaptation, Mansfield Park. In the book, the patriarch Sir Thomas’ trip to the West Indies is an excuse for his family to flirt freely, but Rozema confronts the implication that Sir Thomas is a slaver; his character is given a darker edge, while his eldest son is not feckless but traumatized by flashbacks of slavery. Rozema’s Mansfield Park can thus be compared to Mira Nair’s Vanity Fair, which uses Bollywood influences to foreground the colonized India merely mentioned in the book, or Andrea Arnold’s confrontation of racism in Wuthering Heights. It is notable that Austen chose to make her patriarch a slaver, particularly since the novel is commonly read as defending the Park’s “traditional values” against the modernizing Crawfords. In the book, Fanny’s question about the slave trade meets “such a dead silence,” while the estate shares the name of Lord Mansfield, the 18th century Lord Chief Justice who set a legal precedent for abolition. Rozema’s choice to highlight slavery’s implications is bold and refreshing, but her film frustrates with its compulsory spunkiness.

Rozema admits that she finds Fanny “annoying” and was trying to empower her by making her a “wild beast” and witty writer. Giving the lower class heroine a satirical tongue must have seemed like a good strategy for criticizing patriarchal values. But the spunky woman is gender’s Uncle Tom; her psychological immunity to suffering ultimately lets viewers off the hook. If you’re going to confront slavery in your radical Austen adaptation, you must equally confront the psychosexual torture of the Madonna/Whore complex. Instead, Rozema offers a stale reheating of Pride and Prejudice‘s comfort food: Fanny’s a smirking Elizabeth, Edmund’s a duller Darcy and Maria’s a bitchier Lydia. A really radical adaptation would treat Maria’s passion and confusion with the sympathy of Kate Winslet’s Marianne. A really radical adaptation would make Crawford the sexually magnetic center, giving Fanny the painfully paralyzed inhibition of Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter.

Mira Nair, Andrea Arnold, and Patricia Rozema are pioneering re-imaginings of classic literature, that confront our colonial past. But there can be no definitive adaptation of Mansfield Park, or confrontation of our patriarchal past, until we’re ready to get uncomfortable about sexual repression. Couldn’t Emma Thompson and Ang Lee take a crack at it?

[youtube_sc url=” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaiSsbu3Yv4″]

Patricia Rozema does not get this book.

Brigit McCone was Team Crawford in her naive youth. She writes short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and promising this will be her last Austen article.

Eve and the Second Sight

The story of Eve also elevates the image of Black women as the foundation of families. This element becomes most important as the film progresses.

This guest post by Rachel Wortherley appears as part of our theme week on Black Families.

Eve’s Bayou (1997) begins with the haunting lines: “The summer I killed my father I was 10 years old, my brother Poe was 9, and my sister Cisely had just turned 14.” With this preamble is the expectation of the tragic to occur. While the core of a majority of Black family dramas involves tragedy in the form of slavery, poverty, or mental/physical abuse, Kasi Lemmons’ directorial debut reinvents the way audiences view Black families. On a rare occasion, the story of a Black family is allowed to be told through the eyes of a Black female protagonist. Eve’s Bayou is in part a “coming of age” drama.

The history of the Batiste family of Louisiana lies in their ancestry. Eve, an African slave, saved a French aristocrat, Jean-Paul Batiste, from cholera. In return, Batiste granted her freedom and named the island in Louisiana, after her. In turn, Eve bore Batiste 16 children. Ten-year-old Eve Batiste (Jurnee Smollett), the story’s protagonist, is named after her and is a descendant of Eve and Jean-Paul Batiste. The fact that their ancestry is an integral part of their lives reveals several things: the first being that they clearly know who they are in terms of culture. Through the sordid decades of slavery, Blacks in America have little to no knowledge of their genealogy. It is a part of our past that is not clearly defined. However, in Eve’s Bayou, their background is not only acknowledged but embraced. They can often be heard speaking French phrases throughout the film. The story of Eve also elevates the image of Black women as the foundation of families. This element becomes most important as the film progresses.

The first time audiences meet the Batiste family, we are immediately thrust into a world that is uncharted and unfamiliar for most Black families in motion pictures, as well as the audiences. The hot sound of jazz fills the Victorian mansion, women are dressed in fine satins, and laughter fills the air. The young Eve appears and immediately incites mischief upon her brother Poe (Jake Smollett), while her sister, Cisely (Meagan Good), reprimands them, likening them to William Shakespeare’s Tybalt and Mercutio. Louis Batiste (Samuel L. Jackson) is their father and a successful, beloved doctor in the community. Their mother, Roz (Lynn Whitfield) is a homemaker, whose beauty is referenced throughout the film. There appears to be a strong family dynamic and they are living the quintessential American dream. Here, the Black family to audiences is “normalized” to a general American landscape. This factor becomes a metaphor for the supernatural aspects—the gift of second sight—of the film. Lemmons forces her audience to see beyond what is generally depicted about a Black family in the 1950s.

While the traditional family dynamic is important in the film, the coming of age aspect is even more so instrumental to the plot. When audiences first meet Eve, we see through her eyes how she feels marginalized within the family dynamic. She suffers from the classic “middle child” syndrome. Poe, her younger brother, is the quintessential “mama’s boy” to Roz, while Cisely is the clandestine “daddy’s girl” to Louis. Eve finds kinship in her aunt Mozelle (Debbi Morgan). Both share two qualities: their beautiful red hair and the gift of second sight. Not only do Eve and Mozelle see the future, but they are hyper-aware of their surroundings. This becomes especially significant when Eve becomes cognizant of her father’s infidelity. This realization not only disrupts the harmonious father-daughter relationship, but ultimately changes their family dynamic.

Louis’ penchant for adultery is not something that is usually portrayed in stories about Black families. Largely, Black fathers are either portrayed as: physically/emotionally absent or highly upstanding. In comedies, fathers are most likely the source of comic relief, while his wife is the “straight man” and the situational aspects generally focus on him or he is involved in some manner in the resolution. A current example of this is ABC’s Black-ish, while earlier incarnations are The Cosby Show, and The Jeffersons. I think that in Lemmons’ film, as well as Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever, fathers are portrayed as loving, yet flawed. Louis is undoubtedly a serial adulterer, but that does not change his affection toward his children.

When Eve discovers Louis’ infidelity she and Cisely begin to either cling to or detach themselves from him. Eve accompanies him on his house calls—once he closes the door in Eve’s face to give a patient what can be presumed “sexual healing.” This later prompts Eve to question, “Do you ever want other children besides us?” Louis assures her by telling her that he loves her mother, but the seed of distrust was planted the night of the party when she witnessed his infidelity in the shed with family friend, Mrs. Matty Mereaux. Cisely begins to cling to her father. She waits up for him at night when he arrives home late from house calls and pours him a drink to assuage his stress. Cisely also contends with Roz, who scolds Louis about his late nights. Cisely sees her mother as the antagonist who is driving her father out of their lives. This anxiety arguably prompts the “kiss of death” that transpires between Louis and Cisely.

The kiss that occurs between Cisely and her father is what Eve thinks led to his subsequent death. Cisely confides to Eve that one night, she went to comfort her father and a sexual kiss was exchanged. At her resistance he slaps her to the grown and a look of rage filled his eyes. This admission prompts Eve to procure the local witch, Elzora (Diahann Carroll), to cast a spell of death. However, the night that Louis is killed, something within Eve prompts her to attempt to save her father. In going to the town bar to bring him home, it is likely that Eve has reservations about how he hurt Cisely. But it is hard to not believe her sister when Eve has witnessed her father’s distrust on a number of occasions. Yet, it is too late, Mr. Mereaux in a crime of passion, shoots Louis dead, with Eve as witness. This moment leaves Eve forever changed, even more so when she discovers that Louis did not molest Cisely. Rather Cisely’s prominent memory is that Louis hurt her. Symbolically this means that everything Cisely disbelieved about her father to be true.

It is significant that in the beginning of the film, adult Eve states: “The summer I killed my father I was 10 years old, my brother Poe was 9, and my sister Cisely had just turned 14.” Whereas at the end she says: “The summer my father said goodnight I was 10 years old, my brother Poe was 9, and my sister Cisely had just turned 14. ” This changing in lines demonstrates that Eve accepts that her father’s death was not of her provocation, but his own.

The death of Louis allows for several new things to occur. It brings Roz closer to her children, it allows Eve to understand that not everything is “black and white,” and most significantly, women continue to be the foundation of their family. Though Poe is the sole male in their household, perhaps upbringing from Roz, Cisely, Eve, and Mozelle will influence him on how to respect women. However, Cisely and Eve are missing years in their adolescence in which fatherly love and influence is key. Yet there is not the sense that the sisters will stray. The indicator of this lies in the final shot as Eve destroys Louis’ letter in which he reveals the miscommunication between him and Cisely. Ten-year-old Eve assumes the role of her ancestor Eve by nurturing her sister. As they stand together, hand in hand, looking out across the bayou, they intend to deal with this situation and future hardships together. Eve’s Bayou ultimately becomes about how women and sisters look beyond tragedy to find strength in one another.

Rachel Wortherley is a graduate of Iona College in New Rochelle, New York and holds a Master of Arts degree in English. Her downtime consists of devouring copious amounts of literature, television shows, and films. She hopes to gain a doctorate in English literature and become a professional screenwriter.

‘Love & Basketball’: Girls Can Do Anything Boys Can Do

Prince-Bythewood’s ability to draw commentary about the Black family experience in America is so well-integrated we, as the audience, are able to enjoy the emotional ride the characters take us on without the feeling that we’re watching a heavy-handed representation of the social issues of the time.

This guest post by Alize Emme appears as part of our theme week on Black Families.

“I’m gonna be the first girl in the NBA,” proclaims a young Monica (Kyla Pratt). “No, I’m gonna be in the NBA,” replies a young Quincy (Glendonn Chatman). “You’re gonna be my cheerleader.” Breaking down the idea that women can’t play sports, can’t do the same things men can (like in that late 90’s commercial) is the overarching theme of Gina Prince-Bythewood’s debut feature film Love & Basketball (2000). This is the kind of movie you can watch, like I did as a teenager, and think, “what a nice love story” and it’s not really about anything more. Or, you can take a step back, and with a more seasoned eye, find a story that is rich with nuances about race, gender, and relationship roles and realize Prince-Bythewood’s artful commentary is so subtle you’ve spent the past 15 years just really enjoying this movie about a sports romance.

As a film that revolves around 12 years in the lives of two African-American basketball stars, Monica Wright (Sanaa Lathan) and Quincy McCall (Omar Epps) and their neighboring families, it’s not really about basketball. “It’s about emotion,” as Robin Roberts says during a brief cameo. Prince-Bythewood’s ability to draw commentary about the Black family experience in America is so well-integrated we, as the audience, are able to enjoy the emotional ride the characters take us on without the feeling that we’re watching a heavy-handed representation of the social issues of the time.

This isn’t a Black film either. This is the Grey’s Anatomy approach to storytelling before Grey’s Anatomy existed. You look at these characters with a colorblind eye, only seeing their passion and emotion for basketball and each other. Race is directly mentioned a grand total of one time: at the start of the film when the two family’s matriarchs first meet. Nona McCall (Debbi Morgan), mother of Quincy, has just brought over a “freshly baked” cake for her new neighbors and Camille Wright (Alfre Woodard), mother of Monica, is happy to receive her. Nona explains their neighborhood at one time was “a little more mixed,” and jokes, “that was before the Black people down the street became the Black people next door, OK!” Camille, dutifully playing the role of good little domesticated housewife, looks at Nona with utter confusion – OK what? – before an embarrassed Nona quickly switches gears and that’s that.

Economic status is also never mentioned though it’s clear that both families are affluent. Both homes are spacious and have pools; the McCalls have a basketball court in the backyard. These are not struggling families; the passion Monica and Quincy share for the game comes from the heart, not the motivation to achieve a better life.

For the majority of the film, we see this very strained relationship between Monica and Camille. Monica is a basketball-obsessed, jersey wearing, make-up free tomboy whose mother “doesn’t know where [she] came from” because she “acts different” than her dress wearing, hair-styling sister and Camille, the classic country homemaker. Monica is our feminist heroine who personifies the idea that feminist women look down on women who choose more traditional roles. Camille has a longstanding belief that her daughter is disappointed in her “prissy” lifestyle, telling Monica she’s “a female superstar athlete whose mother is nothing more than a housewife.”

Misconstrued thinking creates nearly a decade of strife for these two women until it finally arises that Monica’s only shame for her mother lies in Camille’s inability to stand up for herself at home. Indeed, we see Camille falling deep into a submissive role with her husband. Camille has spent a lifetime silencing herself so her “husband can feel like a man.” The flip side of this coin is that Camille consciously put her life dreams on hold so she could “be there” for her family and create a loving home environment. But most importantly, we learn each woman was merely seeking the approval of the other. While Monica would rather “wear a jersey than an apron,” she wanted her mother’s approval both on and off the court.

Next-door to the Wrights, across a small grassy patch of lawn, resides the McCall family. Led by patriarch Zeke McCall (Dennis Haysbert) we find here another relationship being tested. From a young age Zeke has instilled in Quincy a resilience and confidence geared toward shaping a boy into a man he can be proud of one day. Quincy treats his father’s words as gospel and views him like “he [is] god.” Prince-Bythewood introduces this theme of “My Father Was a God” early and often throughout the film. Quincy wants to be just like his father, play for the same pro ball team, and wear the same number on his jersey and around his neck. But it is tantamount to Zeke that Quincy not be like him, to focus on school and not “care about the team.”

“'Can’t’ should never be in a man’s vocabulary.” — “’Can’t’ should never be in a man’s vocabulary.”

The crumbling of this immortal facade, the fall from grace, comes from the affirmation that all the years Zeke spent being the hyper-masculine bread winner, shutting out his wife, and running to business meeting after business meeting, were all actions masking a love affair which has now evolved into a paternity suit. What really gets to Quincy is that his father, his hero, addresses the accusation of infidelity head-on with a bold face lie. A lie their relationship will never recover from. The outcome is a harsh unveiling for the young phenom; he loses trust in all around him and no longer has an accurate idea of who his father was, and by extension, who he is himself. It’s clear to us that Zeke’s steadfast molding of Quincy was deeply rooted in the mentality that Zeke “just couldn’t” be that man himself. Quincy’s big revelation, and arguably a revelation many young men face, is that he can no longer try to be his father. He “needed ball when [he] was trying to be like [his] pop,” and now that the curtain has lifted, he must redefine himself on his own terms.

The relationship between Monica and Quincy, while romantic and passionate at times, is Prince-Bythewood’s way of knocking down long enduring stereotypes about women in sports. Monica challenges everything Quincy thinks he knows about girls and life in general. He has never met a girl who not only knows how to ball, but balls better than he does. Monica won’t ride on the back of his bike and would rather have Twinkies than his apology flowers.

Monica is a ball player, and she knows how to “show emotion” on the court. But she continuously finds that those around her view her passion as aggression. If Monica were a guy, she’d “get a pat on the ass,” but because she’s “a female” she gets told to “calm down and act like a lady.” There is a huge double standard exposed here. Not only are men, on and off the court, encouraged to be aggressors, they are rewarded for it. But when a woman does the same, she’s seen as this negative force, a beast that needs to be tamed, which those around Monica try to accomplish.

“I’ve loved you since I was 11, that shit won’t go away.”

Despite Quincy being a serial offender of treating women like objects, he does share this very specific friendship, turned romance, with Monica. She gets him like no one else can. But the double standards in their relationship become clear when they arrive at USC to start their basketball careers. Quincy expects Monica to handle the spoils of his success, i.e., the friendly female fans eager to cheer him on, but he will not let her off the hook when she chooses a starting spot in her game versus “being there” for him. He’s already told her it doesn’t matter if she’s “not known as the first girl in the NBA,” she’ll “get more play” being “Quincy McCall’s girl anyway,” so it’s not surprising when he further diminishes her dreams by forcing her to make this decision.

Monica has spent her freshman year struggling on the court, she hasn’t had the “red carpet” treatment like Quincy, and when an opportunity finally does arise, her boyfriend guilt trips her. The idea that women must make this sacrifice between career and relationship is so antiquated but still so accurate. In a great twist of irony, Quincy, who has spent his childhood hearing Mom complain about how Dad doesn’t make time for her and always puts basketball first, accuses Monica of the same behavior and uses that as the catalyst in his hasty decision to break-up with her. Equally interesting, Monica at this point has fallen into a more submissive role in their relationship and blames herself for its demise, pleading, “Whatever I did, we can fix this.”

As someone who grew up going to sports camps, I heard girls comment daily that they wanted to play in the NBA. So, it was completely lost on me that Monica’s constant repetition of “I’m gonna be the first girl in the NBA,” was because there was no WNBA at the time. There is this prevailing idea throughout the film that these female players are good enough to be playing with their male counterparts, but instead are relegated overseas where, as Monica finds, it’s alienating, uninspiring, and also, unfair.

At the end of the film, Prince-Bythewood has shown us the struggles a Black woman faces when entering a highly competitive arena, the breakdown of a Black father/son relationship, a Black mother who has finally given herself a voice, and a Black relationship that through time and maturity is able to advance into its own sort of “Destiny,” all while never feeling like these are Black issues. But mostly she has taught us that women can do anything men can do. This could be any woman’s triumphant story. The film’s final scene shows Monica as the starting guard in the newly formed WNBA while Quincy and their young daughter clap for her on the sidelines, begging the question: Who’s your cheerleader now?

Alize Emme is a writer and filmmaker living in Los Angeles. She holds a B.A. in Film & Television from NYU and tweets at @alizeemme.

A Labor of Love and the Internet: ‘Cyber-Seniors’

I was born in 1980, which means I’m old enough to remember not knowing how to use the internet. I also remember being taught to use it. In 2015 I can’t imagine not having this instrument in my life, but the documentary Cyber-Seniors reminded me that there is a very large swath of the population that passed many more years without the presence of email or instant messenger than I did. The film tells the story of a mentoring program called Cyber-Seniors, founded in 2009 by teenage sisters Macaulee and Kascha Cassaday. Macaulee and Kascha were moved to set up this program because they experienced firsthand the benefits of how Facebook and Skype enabled them to remain connected to their grandparents. Enlisting the help of friends, the sisters started to regularly visit assisted living residences to provide basic computer and internet skills to elderly adults. The people they work with are in their late seventies to early nineties, and express varying degrees of interest, delight, and frustration with their lessons. Shura, 88, is endlessly amused by every new thing she learns about what’s possible on the internet—especially on YouTube. In fact, she becomes quite enamored of cooking videos and decides to make one of her own. The results are more than charming.

There’s an unapologetic sweetness to this film, in part because it is directed by Macaulee and Kascha’s sister, Saffron and their mother, Brenda Rusnak. However, to my great relief, it does well to avoid too much sentiment. After all, the same Internet that has given us Skyping with grandma has also given us an endless pit of ugliness. There are a few moments of gravitas in the film that touch on the pain of loss, aging, and illness. When Ellard, 89, is given the opportunity to connect with his daughter, we learn that they are estranged, and he hasn’t seen her for over five years. And in a sad, unexpected turn, we also see Macaulee fall sick from cancer. At the expense of spoiling the film, though, I hasten to add that the ending is decidedly hopeful.

Perhaps the most moving aspect of the film is the nonchalance of the intergenerational dynamics. We see the teenage mentors move from tentative to completely comfortable—and almost pleasantly bored—by their interactions with these adults, who they would otherwise have no reason to know outside Cyber-Seniors. It’s easy to be cynical about the way social media facilitates a bottomless narcissism, as every YouTube video seems to scream “look at me!” Cyber-Seniors is an antidote to that feeling, and does well to emphasize the upside of the internet by showing a population that too often goes unseen get a chance to enjoy recognition.

‘Selma’ Shows Why We Need More Black Women Filmmakers

This guest post by Janell Hobson previously appeared at the Ms. blog and is cross-posted with permission.

Last year was a stellar one for Black women filmmakers. First, there was Amma Asante’s exquisitely filmed Belle (starring an impressive Gugu Mbatha-Raw), followed later by Gina Prince-Bythewood’s emotionally layered Beyond the Lights (also starring Mbatha-Raw). The year finally closed out with Ava DuVernay’s critically acclaimed historical drama, Selma.

However, while Belle was summarily dismissed by movie critics as a “black Jane Austen drama,” and Beyond the Lights received more favorable reviews but was nonetheless ignored at the box office, DuVernay has a real shot at becoming the first Black woman to be nominated for a Best Director Oscar (having already made history with her nomination at the Golden Globes). Of course, there is something to be said for women receiving critical acclaim when the films they direct focus on the lives of men, but that’s another story. Nonetheless, the acclaim she has received is absolutely earned.

(Editor’s note: DuVernay was not nominated.)

Selma is a rather subversive take on historical events: part sweeping epic drama, part intimate and domestic storytelling in its rendering of the voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama in 1965 (led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and played in the film with an understated grace by David Oyelowo). DuVernay imbues this Civil Rights-era film with a black woman’s sensibility, which makes the storytelling all the richer.

There is the opening shot, featuring King practicing his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize, before he is joined by his wife Coretta (played by Carmen Ejogo in an uncanny resemblance to the late icon) fixing his tie. Here, an international milestone is seamlessly intertwined with the space of domestic intimacy, just as the following scene depicting the four girls in Birmingham decked out in their finest Sunday best—as they gossip about how Coretta Scott King does her hair while descending into a church basement—resonates on the most mundane level. Although we have the benefit of history, it is still jarring when the bomb explodes, and, as occurs throughout the film, each death is doled out in slow motion, the camera (aesthetically positioned by the accomplished cinematographer Bradford Young to capture the brilliance of dark skin) refusing to turn our collective eyes away from the bloodshed and the casualties of “racial progress.”

DuVernay has said in interviews that when she inherited Paul Webb’s screenplay, she altered it to decenter its focus on President Lyndon B. Johnson (even though the controversy surrounding the film managed to once again re-center the story on white male power and its portrayal). Rather than criticize the director for shifting her gaze away from whiteness (or for getting certain historical details wrong), it may be more useful to consider the difference a woman behind the camera—and a Black woman in particular—brings to a motion picture. Because of the rewrite, we not only get a redirection on King and how his Southern Christian Leadership Conference group came into conflict with the younger Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, but women are also added to the picture, including movement participants like Freedom Rider Diane Nash (played by Tessa Thompson), Amelia Boynton (Lorraine Touissant) and Annie Lee Cooper (Oprah Winfrey). They are still marginal to the main story, but at least they are visible and part of the grassroots movement critical to King’s leadership.

We also see certain feminist approaches: from how the movement men can descend onto a woman’s home and make themselves quite comfortable as their very masculine dominance takes over her kitchen space (a subtle critique of the ways progressive men constantly rely on and exploit women’s labor, all wrapped up in the warmth of black Southern domestic comfort) to a scene featuring Amelia Boynton and Coretta Scott King discussing the struggles of activism and the challenge of maintaining hope (a scene Touissant has noted was DuVernay’s own conscious attempts at passing the Bechdel Test by including a scene where women are not talking about men). Through Coretta’s story, DuVernay also highlights how the iconic hero that we celebrate through King does not translate to admirable husband and father. King’s infidelities, however, are included not to tarnish his image but to undergird the real difficulties of committing to both a political movement and the personal sphere. King’s political involvement (including long stays away from home) also brings the constant fear of death, a fear Coretta quietly yet persistently underscores throughout her scenes.

More than anything, Selma is what we get when we intersect the personal with the political, the epic with the intimate, the historical with the present day (e.g. because King’s speeches were off limits, what we also get in the film are double entendres of what the Selma movement meant for 1965 and what present-day struggles mean for us here in 2015).

While the film’s budget is tiny by Hollywood standards ($20 million), what DuVernay does with the film is a real triumph in not only quality filmmaking but in accomplished storytelling, where black people and their allies stand in all their brilliant humanity and where women’s stories hold equal weight against the heavyweight often accorded men’s histories. Let us hope her triumphs will open the doors wider for other women filmmakers.

Of course we may find solace on smaller screens, where diversity reigns and where Shonda Rhimes dominates Thursday television with her Black women leads and multiracial casting. Nonetheless, there is a power that is felt when viewing images in a much larger medium with its expansive and colossal screen and booming soundtrack. DuVernay has shown why Black women still matter on big screens and why they matter more so behind the camera.

Janell Hobson is an associate professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University at Albany, State University of New York. She is the author of Body as Evidence: Mediating Race, Globalizing Gender and Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture, and a frequent contributor to Ms.

One to Watch Out For: HBO’s ‘Bessie’

There is, nevertheless, something magical about Bessie’s life and career. How did an impoverished, orphaned Black girl who spent her childhood singing on the streets not only survive but succeed in a land that still lynched its Black citizens? There is something profoundly modern and heroic about the woman herself. An independent woman with attitude and talent, she has to be one of the most charismatic feminist icons of the 20th century.

A portrait of Bessie Smith by Carl van Vechten

Written by Rachael Johnson.

HBO’s Bessie has to be one of the most exciting offerings on 2015’s cultural calendar. Helmed by Dee Rees and starring Queen Latifah in the title role, the telefilm will recall the extraordinary life of the “Empress of the Blues,” Bessie Smith. It has all the makings of a quality production. Dee Rees impressed us back in 2011 with her well-observed coming-of-age drama, Pariah. An attractive, charismatic presence, Queen Latifah is, equally, an excellent casting choice. But who was Bessie Smith? Although hugely respected by musicians throughout the generations, many of us remain unfamiliar with the entertainer. In anticipation of Bessie, let’s remind ourselves of the exceptional life and career of the “Empress of the Blues.”

Born in Tennessee in 1894, Bessie Smith was one of the greatest Blues singers of the 20s and 30s. Her childhood was marked by poverty and she lost both of her parents by the age of 9. She sang on the streets before performing in touring groups. A dancer, at first, she was a member of the Rabbit Foot Minstrels, the same minstrel show as the great Ma Rainey, another Blues singer, by the way, who deserves her own biopic. Bessie signed a contract with Columbia Records in 1923 and was soon catapulted to fame–and riches. Earning an astonishing $2,000 a week, she became, in fact, the highest-paid Black entertainer of her era. She had her own show and her own railroad car.

Her private life was, by all accounts, pretty lively. Her marriage to husband Jack Gee was turbulent and she was particularly fond of gin. She broke many of the rules of her day. Reportedly bisexual, she had affairs with women during her marriage. Bessie Smith was sexual and successful as well as, of course, immensely gifted. The extraordinary depth and power of her voice is evident from this following clip from the short film, St Louis Blues (1929).

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpVCqXRlXx4″]

“Downhearted Blues,” “Nobody knows You When You’re Down and Out,” and “Baby, Won’t You Please Come Home” are among some of the songs Bessie recorded. Her popularity waned–music historians cite the Depression and changes in musical taste–but there were, it seems, indications that she was on the verge of a comeback. Tragically, Bessie Smith was killed in a car accident in 1937 at the age of 43.

Another portrait of the "Empress of the Blues" by van Vechten — Another portrait of the “Empress of the Blues” by van Vechten

Bessie is a refreshing, tantalizing prospect. God knows, of course, that dramatizing the lives of female cultural heroines doesn’t seem to be much of a concern to the powers that be. This is particularly the case, let’s face it, with women of color. But that must change. Movie studios and television companies, moreover, need to pay tribute to people who create more instead of offering romanticized, revisionist accounts of snipers. The Empress of the Blues’s commanding voice and pioneering spirit resonate today. Hopefully, Bessie will help restore her to our collective memory. She occupies a unique, vital place in 20^th century popular culture.

But Where Does The Road Go?: Journeys of Self Discovery in ‘Electrick Children’ and ‘Blue Car’

I suppose its no coincidence that many coming of age films feature runaways. The coming of age plot is, after all, the search for self realized through the search for something external. It doesn’t really matter what the search was originally for: an old home, a long lost father or a missed connection; in the end, it’s the journey, both literal and figurative, that matters.

Poster for Electrick Children — Poster for *Electrick Children*

When I was a kid, I used to run away from home.

I’d pile on all my favorite things, all my most special clothes, until I could barely walk in all the layers and stuff my plastic purses full of necessities for my new life, like Barbie dolls and plastic dinosaurs.

But I only ever got a far as the end of driveway. I just sat in the car and imagined what my family would be reduced to without my presence. Eventually I went in again. After all he point was only to make a scene, I only wanted to show that my emotions were serious.

I suppose its no coincidence that many coming of age films feature runaways. The coming of age plot is, after all, the search for self-realized through the search for something external. It doesn’t really matter what the search was originally for: an old home, a long lost father or a missed connection; in the end, it’s the journey, both literal and figurative, that matters.

In Electrick Children, the 2012 debut of writer-director Rebecca Thomas, 15-year-old Rachel (Julia Garner) leaves her fundamentalist Mormon community to search for the father of her baby, whom she believes is the true love God has chosen for her. Likewise, Blue Car, a 2002 film written and directed by Karen Moncrieff, introduces us to Meg Denning (Agnes Bruckner), a 16-year-old girl who longs for a father figure, a parent who will love her unconditionally and believe in her specialness. Both Meg and Rachel set out on the road, not sure exactly what they’re looking for and what they’ll find standing at its end.

Rachel’s enjoyment of the cassette recalls a sexual experience

Electrick Children has a fiercely original set up: a sheltered religious teenager listens a song (a cover of “Hanging on the Telephone”) on a blue cassette tape. It’s the first rock song, even the first secular song she’s ever heard and as she listens, dancing alone in her nightgown, she experiences great pleasure, suggesting her first orgasm. When she later finds she has become pregnant, she is sure the singer on the tape is the father of the baby.

Despite all the sermons she has grown up hearing, about the evils of rock music and immaculate conception, no one in the community is willing to believe Rachel’s pregnancy is a miracle and religious leaders blame her brother “Mr. Will” (Liam Aiken) for impregnating her and try to force Rachel into a shotgun marriage.

Instead, she packs her things and escapes to the glittering lights of the nearest city, Las Vegas. A lost little lamb in the big city, Rachel limps along until she meets a group of skaters, musicians, and stoners. Naive Rachel and Mr. Will, who follows along behind her, would be easily exploitable prey, but because this is a movie, they are taken in by the group, who recognize them as fellow outsiders in need of their support.

The gang of Las Vegas teens welcome Rachel and Mr. Will

Along the way, Clyde (Rory Culkin), a sensitive skateboarder notices Rachel and they begin to fall in love with each other. Clyde’s friends tease him for desiring Rachel, as a pregnant girl she is “damaged goods,” he doesn’t care.

Electrick Children is a gorgeous film, stuffed with vivid colors and textures, beautiful scenery and indie rock. However, one might view it as troubling that the origin of Rachel’s pregnancy is never revealed. Commenters on IMDb suggest the film hints that Rachel was drugged and raped by her stepfather, the leader of the religious community, though this is never addressed in the film. Though Rachel’s views of both the religious and secular worlds complicate as she begins to think for herself, one thing that never changes is her belief that God fathered her child. In the main text of the film, her relationship with Clyde, who offers to marry her and raise the baby, suggests a modern update of relationship between Mary and Joseph in The Bible.

As his student, Meg relies on Auster to provide guidance

As Blue Car begins, Meg Denning is the new girl at school. Her parents have just separated and she is sullen and depressed. Her mother seems to work all hours, leaving Meg to take care of her troubled younger sister, Lily. Lily is taking their father’s disappearance much harder than Meg, refusing to eat and making delusional statements about her appearance and identity. Meg resents having to look after her and begins to hate her mother for failing to notice both sisters’ unhappiness.

In school, Meg tries her best to fade into the background, but all this changes when her English teacher, Mr. Auster (David Strathairn) begins to take a shine to her. Auster tells her she has the potential to be brilliant poet, if only she will allow herself to express the true depth of the pain and anger she feels and put it into words. He gives her a light at the end of the tunnel, a national poetry competition in Florida that she is a shoo-in to win, as long as she can find a way to get there.

As imagined Meg begins to come into her voice, with Auster’s guidance. Though his influence is initially set up as a positive force, as the film draws on, it slowly becomes clear that Auster’s own goals are tainting Meg’s newly realized talent. Meg constantly clashes with her mother and drives away everyone else in her life who had supported her or attempted to get through her hard exterior. She comes to view her father as a villain for leaving her and her mother as wicked for working, refusing to see them as three-dimensional people with their own lives.

Meg is lost and confused when Auster’s attentions become sexual

From here, the film’s trajectory is familiar. As viewers, we are not surprised when the older teacher takes advantage of his young protege, but Blue Car runs through this familiar plot in a way that is genuinely affecting to watch. The film refuses to allow either Meg or us as viewer to see her parents as cardboard cut-outs. Meg ultimately recognizes her mother is a person as well as a parent, an imperfect, broken person who had made missteps raising her but is trying her best. Even her father, who we only see briefly, comes across as well-meaning and kind, a marked contrast to the picture of him in Meg’s bitter poem.

In both films, the road ends with a discovery that the road never really ends. Self-discovery is a life long project, but at least Rachel and Meg know where to begin.

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Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and journalist living in Toronto, Ontario.