‘Concussion’: When Queer Marriage in the Suburbs Isn’t Enough

The queer women we see in sexual situations in ‘Concussion’ are not cut from the same Playboy-ready cloth as the two women in ‘Blue’: one client is fat, another is an obvious real-life survivor of breast cancer and some of her clients, like Eleanor herself, are nowhere near their 20s anymore.

concussionCover2

This repost by staff writer Ren Jender appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

How many distinctive, acclaimed films about queer women can be released in American theaters at the same time? If we extrapolate from the actions of film distributors in 2013, the answer is apparently: only one. Concussion was named one of the top 20 films of that year by Slate’s Dana Stevens and was also named one of the top films of 2013 in Salon. Shortly after its premiere, at Sundance, The Weinstein Company acquired it for distribution. For most films that acquisition (and the later support from reviews in traditional media) would mean a national release, but the film had a very limited run in theaters that fall and never played a theater in my art-house-friendly city. The film was on Video On Demand, iTunes, and Google Play, but deserves much more attention than most films that never have a national theatrical run.

This film about a queer woman is, unlike the same year’s Blue Is The Warmest Color, directed and written by a queer woman (Stacie Passon who was nominated for “Best First Feature” in the Independent Spirit Awards and directed an episode of this past season of Transparent) and in many aspects is the answer to those who dismissed Blue as a product of the male gaze. Instead of a teenage protagonist, the main character in Concussion, Abby (played by Robin Weigert: Andrew O’Hehir in Salon summed up her performance as “OMFG”), is a 40-something, stay-at-home Mom, married to another woman and living in the suburbs.

When her son accidentally hits her in the face with a baseball, we see the confusion and blood in the family car ride to the hospital, as she moans to no one in particular, “I don’t want this. I don’t want this. I don’t want this.”

Screen Shot 2012-01-25 at 11.53.36 AM | Jan 25

In the ER Abby says she is going back to work in the city (and that she really means it this time). Abby doesn’t need to work for money: her spouse, Kate, is a divorce attorney, kept busy by the dissatisfied wives in their social circle. We see the wives’ well-maintained bodies in slow motion, at the beginning of the film, in spin and yoga classes as David Bowie sings on the soundtrack, “Oh you pretty things…”

Passon knows this world well She lives in the town (Montclair) Abby does. She is married to a woman and has children, one of whom accidentally hit her in the face with a baseball. The parallels between her life and Abby’s may be why the character and setting seem so fully realized.

Abby for the most part blends in with her straight women friends but we see she’s different from them–and not just in her orientation. She reads books while she vacuums. When a friend is circulating a “new motherhood” survey for an article in a parenting magazine, Abby writes of dreams in which she sticks her then newborn son in the microwave–and other dreams in which she and her son are married. She writes, “My poor baby, I didn’t know whether to kill him, fuck him, or eat him.”

At times Abby’s queerness does separate her from the other women. When Abby mentions to her friend that one of the group of women they work out with is “cute,”  the friend (played by Janel Maloney) reproaches Abby, “She’s not a lesbian!”

Still of Robin Weigert, right, and Johnathan Tchaikovsky in the movie, Concussion. Credit: RADiUS-TWC

Abby starts work with a contractor to refurbish a city loft. As they transform the apartment, she transforms too, first hiring women to have sex with her and then working out of the loft as a high-priced escort, “Eleanor,” whose clients are all women.

A woman character turning to sex work for reasons other than money is usually a male artist’s conceit, as in Luis Buñuel’s great Belle de Jour, which features stunning, beautifully dressed, doctor’s wife, Catherine Deneuve, working in a brothel while her handsome, attentive (but clueless) husband sees his patients. In women’s memoirs of sex work (like Michelle Tea’s Rent Girl) the money is the point of the work (as it is with most work).

A sex worker character whose clients are all women (when the vast majority of sex work clients are men) is also usually the creation of a straight male artist–and is usually a male character so the work avoids any explicit same-sex scenes.

ConcussionAbbyEscort

Perhaps because Concussion turns that last trope on its head (or perhaps because New York is a big city that can cater to many kinds of tastes) we accept the conceit of a woman over 40 seeing women clients (for $800 a session) every day. The queer women we see in sexual situations in Concussion are not cut from the same Playboy-ready cloth as the two women in Blue: one client is fat, another is an obvious real-life survivor of breast cancer and some of her clients, like Eleanor herself, are nowhere near their 20s anymore.

Robin Weigert doesn’t have a Barbie Doll face or a porn model’s body, but does have a passing resemblance to the young Ellen Barkin. Weigert exudes the same confidence and sexiness–reminding us those two qualities are often one and the same.

Concussion has a scene similar to one in Blue in which a straight man interrogates a queer woman about her sexuality. But because Abby is in her 40s, the mocking tone she takes with him is completely different from what we hear from the 20-something main character in Blue, Adele.

ConcussionAbbyEleanor

In Concussion are we seeing the female gaze? Well, we’re definitely seeing one woman’s gaze, that of Passon. The sex scenes in Concussion, unlike Blue, don’t seem like outtakes from an amateur porn video, but flow from the other nonsexual encounters in the film. (Concussion’s expert cinematographer is David Kruta.) We also don’t see full frontal nudity from any of the actresses, and although we see the bare breasts of some of Eleanor’s clients, we never see hers. Eleanor/ Abby is both a psychological and corporeal enigma to us.

Some clues for her motives are in the scenes between Abby and her spouse. They are affectionate and loving with each other, even when they’re alone, but the sex has gone out of their marriage. After a disastrous first encounter with an escort, we feel Abby’s ache of longing when a second “better” escort begins to touch her. Later we see Eleanor’s first client, a 23-year-old virgin, react to Eleanor’s touch in much the same way.

ConcussionMarriage

In the city we see Abby in punk rock t-shirts (vintage Blondie and the now-defunct C.B.G.B) and boyshort underwear and in the suburbs we see her fitting in with her friends in yoga pants and an expensive down-filled jacket. At a suburban dinner party the guests talk about their days hanging out in pre-gentrified downtown New York clubs, Squeezebox and The Limelight, and we realize yes, many of  the club kids of the ’90s have become comfortable, suburban Moms and Dads.

The loft is decorated with posters for Louise Bourgeois and The Guerrilla Girls and has Diet For a New America on the bookshelf, distinct touches some of us in the audience recognize from our own living spaces. In the dialogue we hear echoes of conversations we too have had (or overheard) at parties: “I finally took the Myers-Briggs.” Writers of satire often seem to want their audience to hate the people, especially the women, they create (the Annette Bening character in American Beauty is just one example). Passon’s satire is much trickier–and kinder. She wants us to recognize these people. She wants us to recognize ourselves in them.

ConcussionLaundry

The film Passon says inspired Concussion is from the 1970s: Jeanne Dielman.., (and was also written and directed by a queer woman, the late Chantal Akerman). In Concussion, as in Dielman, we see the first signs of the housewife/sex-worker protagonist starting to unravel when she fails to stick to her usual daily routine: Abby misses picking up the kids after school for the first time in six years. Unlike Dielman, Passon’s film captures the monotony of domestic tasks, but doesn’t ask the audience to endure that boredom themselves.

Although Concussion was made before queer marriage became legal in New Jersey, the film brings up some interesting questions about the queer community’s quest for “equality.” What if we become just as disenchanted with being soccer Moms as straight women sometimes do? What then? At the end Abby throws herself into a home renovation project, the way so many of our married friends, straight and queer do, and we marvel at the mystery of other people’s marriages, not just in the film, but all around us.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8Wg–Mh8YY” iv_load_policy=”3″]

Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing. besides appearing on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.

Why ‘Eve’s Bayou’ Is a Great American Art Film

The story of a family burdened by salacious and supernatural secrets in 1962 Louisiana, the movie has become one of the finer American films in the Southern gothic tradition; but with a Black director and an all-Black cast, ‘Eve’s Bayou’ has been unceremoniously booted from its deserving recognition as the fantastic, moody art film it is.

Eves Bayou

This guest post written by Amirah Mercer appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

When Eve’s Bayou, the writing and directorial debut of filmmaker Kasi Lemmons, opened in 1997, Roger Ebert named it the best film of 1997 and it was the top-grossing independent film that year, but that didn’t stop it from being canonized, years later, as just “one of the finest works by a black filmmaker” (Time) and a “contemporary classic in black cinema” only. The story of a family burdened by salacious and supernatural secrets in 1962 Louisiana, the movie has become one of the finer American films in the Southern gothic tradition; but with a Black director and an all-Black cast, Eve’s Bayou has been unceremoniously booted from its deserving recognition as the fantastic, moody art film it is.

Lemmons’s family drama is told from the perspective of Eve Batiste — played with gut-wrenching sophistication by a then 10-year-old Jurnee Smollett-Bell — who is the descendant of a woman, a slave, also named Eve, and her master. Though not all Southern gothic stories, which typically explore dark and grotesque themes set in the South, delve into the supernatural, this one does. Eve’s well-to-do family is steeped in the sixth sense, most visibly via Debbie Morgan’s Aunt Mozelle, a woman who can foretell the future yet, tragically, cannot see her own fate, as well as with the title character, Eve, whose budding clairvoyance takes a dark and consequential turn. Samuel L. Jackson plays the patriarch, a successful yet philandering doctor whose indiscretions and, specifically, a “did he, didn’t he” moment with his eldest daughter (Meagan Good) disrupt the Batiste family forever.

As a director, Lemmons’s wide, sweeping shots of the hazy Louisiana bayou enhance the spirituality of the place; at the same time, she does not get lost in the expansive Batiste estate. Her critical director’s eye focuses in on three, four, five members of the family at a time, creating such an intimate environment that, as a viewer, you feel uncomfortably crowded in with the Batistes — their dread is your dread.

Still, it’s Lemmons’s mixing of time, of past and present in a single shot, that is her most haunting storytelling technique. When Aunt Mozelle, who is cursed to life live as a perpetual widow, recounts the murder of one of her husbands to niece Eve, the involved players appear in a mirror behind Eve and Mozelle, in which Mozelle jumps from past to present in her narrative, moving in and out of the mirror in time. It’s a chilling scene — made even more otherworldly by Smollet-Bell’s wide-eyed wonderment — and it underscores the psychological scarring the film’s future events will have on its characters.

Eves Bayou

When I googled the best Southern gothic American films, a list that Eve’s Bayou certainly belongs on, the most frequently recognized works were A Streetcar Named Desire, 1991’s Cape Fear, The Beguiled (a little-known Clint Eastwood film), and Robert Mulligan’s 1962 film version of To Kill a Mockingbird. The poetic southern charm of Elia Kazan’s Streetcar; the guilt-ridden anguish of Cape Fear; the deadly temptation in The Beguiled; these themes echo in Lemmons’s debut work. Still, Eve’s Bayou’s defining strength as a Southern gothic work is in the way Lemmons chooses to share the Batistes’ misfortunes with us, through little Eve’s eyes. As with To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee’s literary classic, the loss of childhood innocence is the disturbing truth that we’re forced to reckon with here.

That Eve’s Bayou is now recalled by critics only within a “Black cinema” narrative discredits Lemmons’s beautiful and haunting art film. There’s more to this film than the color of the stars and the woman who made it; though their blackness is certainly important. “I’m an artist. I know my history, I know my roots,” Lemmons has said. “Of course I’m a minority, but that makes it interesting.” One does not need an inherent understanding of Black life in order to empathize with the characters involved in Eve’s Bayou. In making the film, Lemmons shot with an eye towards universality. “When I was making Eve’s Bayou, I thought that everyone should be able to understand it and relate to the story,” she told the A.V. Club in 2001. “They’re people that you’re looking at.”

If Eve’s Bayou has not been recognized alongside the aforementioned films as one of the best in Southern gothic cinema it is because of the way that films created by Black directors are perceived, as being created within a vacuum, intelligible only within a Black-experience context. When The Best Man Holiday beat analysts’ opening-weekend box-office estimates three years ago, the critics were left scratching their heads as to how a Black-led film could have crossover appeal. As I wrote in 2014, the myth around “Black movies” needs to be dispelled. That a film made by a Black woman director is only expected to appeal to a limited number of people, yet equally (if not sometimes more) niche works created by, say, white men are celebrated as universal truths has a dehumanizing effect on Black directors’ works.

But Lemmons’s studied focus on complex and interesting Black characters (she’s also directed Samuel L. Jackson as a detective-esque homeless man in The Caveman’s Valentine and 2007’s Talk to Me stars Don Cheadle as real-life 1960s shock jock Ralph “Petey” Greene) is anything but apologetic: “[These stories] are what I really want to say in a life-mission way.  . . .  You can’t hold me to one subject or one culture in terms of my art.” In the last few years, Lemmons has been attached to direct an adaptation of the New York Times’ best-selling biography The Other Wes Moore for HBO and to adapt Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, two works of literature that, if Eve’s Bayou is any indication, will be beautiful, black-led artistry on-screen.

Also at Bitch Flicks: Eve and the Second Sight, ‘Eve’s Bayou’ Belongs in the Canon

Amirah Mercer is a writer and editor who focuses on storytelling in fashion and pop culture, with a sharp lens on race and gender. She is currently a copy editor for VanityFair.com, where she also writes for the site’s Style and Culture section. Her recent stories for VF.com have explored black single womanhood on the show Being Mary Jane, in discussion with show creator Mara Brock Akil, and how Instagram “It girl” Violet Benson staked a claim in a male-dominated online-comedy field. Her work has also been featured on Salon, HelloGiggles, and Mic.

Vintage Viewing: Alice Guy-Blaché, Gender-Bending Pioneer

When was the last time we watched vintage female-authored films and discussed their art or meaning? Bitch Flicks presents Vintage Viewing — a monthly feature for viewing and discussing the films of cinema’s female pioneers. Where better to start than history’s first film director, Alice Guy-Blaché?

Alice Guy-Blaché

This repost written by Brigit McCone appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors and Vintage Viewing, our series exploring the work of women filmmaking pioneers..

When discussing opportunities for women and minorities created by new media, Kathleen Wallace highlighted the explosion of female directors at the birth of cinema, later squeezed out by the studio system. The list of vintage female directors is long, varied, and multinational. Yet, theorists like Laura Mulvey define feminist cinema by its resistance to the Male Gaze™, virtually ignoring the precedent of the female gaze. When was the last time we watched vintage female-authored films and discussed their art or meaning? Where better to start than history’s first fiction film director, Alice Guy-Blaché?

Alice Guy-Blaché may be compared to Ada Lovelace, who published the original computer program and  first predicted the wider applications of computing. Like Lovelace, Guy-Blaché was the pioneer who envisioned the future of her field. Like Lovelace, her legacy is only now being reappraised after decades of neglect. Though Guy-Blaché’s memoirs indicate she may have directed the world’s first fiction film, her massive output, estimated at almost 1,000 films, is really more remarkable for its overall grasp of film’s potential, both technical (hand-painting color film, pioneering the close-up, synchronized sound, and special effects such as superimposition) and in establishing tropes from melodrama to comedy to action to suspense.

Click here to watch an excellent youtube documentary.

Boss.

Alfred Hitchcock once cited two thrilling early influences: D. W. Griffith and Alice Guy-Blaché. But Guy-Blaché wasn’t simply an influential pioneer who happened to be female; she repeatedly challenged gender stereotypes in her work. Though sexologist John Money only coined the concept of a “gender role” in 1955, Alice Guy-Blaché’s cross-dressing films were interrogating gender’s socially constructed nature 50 years earlier.

 Pierrette’s Escapades – 1900

 “We have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information, confusing it with its opposite, the pornographic.” – Audre Lorde

Pierrette’s Escapades is one of the hand-painted demonstration films that Alice Guy-Blaché produced for Gaumont in France, before her move to America. This film is particularly interesting for probably containing cinema’s first lesbian kiss. Guy-Blaché recognized the power of representation, not only for queer visibility, but with 1912’s affirmative Jewish narrative A Man’s A Man, and cinema’s first Black cast in that same year’s A Fool and His Money, a story of hustling and hard luck inspired by blues narratives. Within a lushly tinted, escapist sensuality, the women of Pierrette’s Escapades play roles from anarchic Commedia dell’Arte and carnival traditions. As such, their flirtations and kisses can be explained by the established relationships between these stock characters, but Guy-Blaché has taken conventionally heterosexual love scenes and reimagined them with an all-female cast.

The femme Pierrette, in her throbbing pink dress, resembles a coquettish Columbine, the trickster wife of sad clown Pierrot, and mistress of witty Harlequin (the 16th century’s Bugs Bunny). As rivals, Harlequin and Pierrot represent the two faces of love, its triumphs and disappointments. The film opens with Pierrette reveling in her costume and powdering herself for Harlequin. A figure sidles into frame, in the traditional costume of Pierrot. Pierrot’s baggy clothes and white-powdered face make it difficult to identify the figure’s sex, who clumsily moves to embrace Pierrette, while she dodges impatiently, before Pierrot steals a kiss on her bare shoulder. Pierrette angrily orders her husband/wife to bed and primps for Harlequin. In the skintight, checkered costume and hat that identify the character, Harlequin is unmistakably feminine. In contrast to her coerced affection with Pierrot, Pierrette blossoms with female Harlequin, swooning and spinning before melting into her arms. Guy-Blaché cuts the film at the moment of their kiss, leaving it open-ended and suggestive.

Pierrette’s low-cut bodice and the raising of her skirts mark this film as teasingly erotic for the time. Records indicate that Guy-Blaché filmed cinema’s first striptease three years before Pierrette’s Escapades. Since the forced hypersexuality of women on film has become an expression of male control, modern feminists often read such images as objectifying. It’s worth remembering that a female director, Lois Weber, filmed the first female full-frontal, while Mae West provoked the paternalist Hays Code with her sexual frankness. The eroticism of Pierrette’s Escapades is a reminder of the liberating power of playful, sexual self-representation. Like the suffragettes, who wore lipstick as a symbol of defiance, it challenges sexless definitions of feminist orthodoxy. Isn’t viewing female bodies only from the imaginary perspective of an objectifying Male Gaze™ itself oppressive? Soundtrack suggestion: Cyndi Lauper, “Girls Just Want To Have Fun“  [youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeByzgJFLMs”]

Walk in the sun 

 The Consequences of Feminism – 1906

“Femininity, if one still wants to call it that, makes American women a target and a victim of the sexual sell.” – Betty Friedan

Alice Guy-Blaché’s work regularly explored the status of women. She moulded Vinnie Burns into cinema’s first action heroine, and depicted women in traditionally male professions such as magicians and dog-trainers. In 1912’s Making an American, “Ivan Orloff and his unhappy wife” represent a caricature of East-European cultures of wife-beating – Orloff’s wife is yoked to his wagon as a beast of burden. When the couple emigrate to America, Guy-Blaché shows Americans constantly intervening to correct Orloff’s treatment of his wife, presenting resistance to domestic abuse as an American value  fundamental to the “Land of the Free.” 1914’s The Lure was a sympathetic examination of the forces pressuring women into prostitution. Nevertheless, many feminist viewers struggle with Guy-Blaché’s 1906 farce, The Consequences of Feminism, an apparently reactionary nightmare in which feminism creates a world of “sissified” men, who rebel by reclaiming their clubhouse and toasting the restoration of patriarchy. Discussing Pamela Green’s Guy-Blaché documentary Be Natural, Kristen Lopez concludes this film depicts “the bad side” of feminism, before apologetically suggesting “the very idea that a woman was exploring social issues in a time when women weren’t allowed to vote is astounding”. Is this really all that can be said? That it’s cool to see a woman having enough of a voice to argue against women having more of a voice?

The Consequences of Feminism does not depict a society on the verge of collapse, it depicts  straightforward role reversal. In her lost 1912 film In The Year 2000, Guy-Blaché also reverses gender roles, with Darwin Karr playing the objectified “Ravishing Robert”. This anticipates later female authors who used sci-fi to interrogate gender, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman with 1915’s Herland, or Ursula LeGuin with 1969 Hugo and Nebula prize-winner The Left Hand of Darkness (off topic: am I the only one shipping the Wachowski siblings to adapt?). Compare “Turnabout Intruder,” the genuinely reactionary 1969 finale of the original Star Trek series, which used role reversal to attempt to discredit second-wave feminism. In “Turnabout Intruder,” Dr. Janice Lester voices feminist grievances: “your world of starship captains doesn’t admit women,” before swapping bodies with Captain Kirk and attempting to command. Kirk shows calm authority in Lester’s body, while Lester is emotionally incapable of handling Kirk’s command and “red-faced with hysteria.” As “Turnabout Intruder” shows, discrediting feminism through role reversal requires a demonstration that women are incapable of performing male roles.

The Consequences of Feminism, by contrast, uses a farcical depiction of feminist rule to demonstrate that, while women thrive in male roles, men could not endure Friedan’s “sexual sell” of trading desirability for loss of power. Male viewers are confronted with a vision of themselves as passive “Ravishing Roberts” who must feign sexual resistance to preserve their reputation, laboring in domestic servitude while women supervise at their leisure. Society’s devaluing of domestic labor is shown by the women ridiculing their clubhouse’s sole washerman and pelting him with linens. If male viewers are relieved by the ending, in which a father revolts against a woman who disowns her child, and leads the men in storming the women’s clubhouse, they must acknowledge that collective rebellion against oppressive female roles is justified. Guy-Blaché’s tongue-in-cheek film is the opposite of stereotypical, humorless feminism, but it demolishes the illusory power of “feminine mystique” just as effectively, as relevant for today’s MRA as for the chivalry of Guy-Blaché’s own era. Soundtrack suggestion: Missy Elliott, “Work It”

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIPMbkHQO3w”]

Put my thang down, flip it and reverse it 

 Algie The Miner – 1912

“We’ve begun to raise daughters more like sons… but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters.” – Gloria Steinem

 As a subversive populist, Guy-Blaché was a master of the bait-n-switch. In 1913’s Officer Henderson, she offers audiences macho police officers dressing as women to catch crooks, the joke being the ridiculous juxtaposition of their fighting skills and feminine image. Then, at the end of the film, Guy-Blaché substitutes the police officer with his wife, who reveals equal skill in tackling the crook. Officers watch and laugh at their supposed crony brawling in drag, but Guy-Blaché’s real joke is revealed to be on the men themselves, for assuming that women are incapable of violence or self-defense.

Algie the Miner‘s IMDb entry lists Guy-Blaché as “directing supervisor” and producer to Edward Warren’s director, at a time when the distinction between producer and director was ill-defined. Her fingerprints are all over the film, however, which she’s often credited as directing. Algie the Miner offers the joke of a flamboyant “sissy” man, contractually obliged by his future father-in-law to “prove himself a man” in rugged Western pursuits, but this is only the bait-n-switch for Guy-Blaché’s critique of toxic masculinity and homophobia. Rugged pioneer Big Jim gives Algie directions to a frontier town and Algie kisses him in gratitude, leading to an explosion of violent insecurity from Jim. After discovering how non-threateningly puny Algie’s gun is, Jim thaws and agrees to become his mentor in manhood, settling into a cohabiting relationship whose separate beds recall Sesame Street‘s Bert and Ernie. Despite Algie’s female fiancé/beard, Algie the Miner is celebrated as a milestone in the history of gay cinema. When shown his separate bed in Big Jim’s cabin, Algie appears to lean into Jim suggestively before being rebuffed, giving grounds to view him as bisexual. As such, Algie’s final empowerment is gay-affirmative, as well as vindicating feminine values.

Though the rugged pioneers howl with laughter and ridicule Algie’s tiny gun, his willingness to kiss larger men demonstrates an effortless physical courage greater than that of his sexually insecure cowboy hosts, anticipating Marvel’s Rawhide Kid. Over the course of their relationship, Big Jim will teach Algie manly skills, but Algie will rescue Jim from ruinous machismo, nursing the alcoholic through his delirium tremens, saving Jim’s life from robbers and bravely defying the macho peers who pressure Jim to drink. Algie’s resistance to peer pressure, as well as his self-sacrificing nurturing instinct, vindicate feminine courage in the face of macho weakness. When Algie plans to return and claim his bride, Jim is visibly downcast until offered the chance to accompany him. Every Big Jim needs an Algie. The film ends with Algie “proving himself a man” by forcing his future father-in-law to bless his marriage at gunpoint. Closing with the father-in-law’s terror, the viewer must question whether such stereotypical masculinity is truly superior. In all, Alice Guy-Blaché’s Algie the Miner offers cinema’s most affirmative portrait of male femininity until Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot. Soundtrack suggestion: Hole, “Be A Man”

 [youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCYYa0WxLXA”]

I’m potent, yeah 

Brigit McCone may now officially be an Alice Guy fangirl (Guynocentric?) She writes short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and making bad puns.

When Love Looks Like Me: How Gina Prince-Bythewood Brought Real Love to the Big Screen

Gina Prince-Bythewood’s choice to center these themes around a young Black couple shouldn’t feel as revolutionary as it does. But when you consider that “universal” is too often conflated with “white,” Love & Basketball feels like such a turning point in the romance genre. It was certainly a turning point for me because, for a moment, Black love and romance, as told by Hollywood, weren’t mutually exclusive.

Love and Basketball

This guest post written by Shannon Miller appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

Growing up, I used to stare at my mother’s seemingly impressive VHS collection, which she maintains to this day. What fascinated me most was its eclectic range. Friday, for instance, was often nestled between Steel Magnolias and Selena. What’s Love Got to Do with It sat to the right of our small Disney collection and just before Speed. Sister Act, if not still warm in the VCR, had its place next the original Parent Trap. Scattered throughout the assortment was a weirdly appropriate representation of the romantic film landscape at the time: Pretty Woman, While You Were Sleeping, She’s the One, Hope Floats, Ghost, One Fine Day, My Best Friend’s Wedding. These are stories of women exploring their version of love in ways ranging from entirely relatable to, quite literally, paranormal.

I recognized my mother’s attempt to support films that featured actors and actresses that looked like us, even going as far as to purchase movies that she hadn’t seen yet, which now seems like a major (and costly) leap of faith. I also knew, and eventually mirrored, her genuine love of romance and beautiful endings, happy or not. Looking at our collection, I came away with a deep seated understanding that, as Black people, we could be funny, dramatic, troubled, and many versions of “strong.” Romance, however, was a white woman’s game. There was a noticeable shift in Black cinematic storytelling in the late 1990’s, but it wasn’t until 2000’s Love & Basketball that I began to find an honest connection with something that felt familiar. The story of Monica Wright (Sanaa Lathan) and Quincy McCall (Omar Epps) opened up a whole new world of possibilities for me in romantic storytelling. I was too young to know that I had writer and director Gina Prince-Bythewood to thank for that.

Gina_Prince-Bythewood

Love & Basketball tells a number of tales. It tells the story of a young woman asserting her identity against narrow definitions of femininity. At times it follows a young man having to learn the hard way that sometimes your heroes can stumble to the point to failing you. You can even come away from the film with a hearty discussion about the long, winding trajectory of success for women in sports versus the plentiful, immediate options available for men. The beauty of this particular film, however, is how each of these stories are bound together by the singular, accessible idea of two best friends falling in love and trying to simultaneously navigate their friendship as well as their individual destinies. Like many solid coming-of-age stories, we get to witness the complexities of aging out of adolescent friendship.

Once they enter college, Monica and Quincy begin to learn what genuine support entails and what it means to require something more from each other than a shared loved and mutual kindness. That’s what the evolution of relationships is all about: adjusting to the changing parameters of certain bonds as you grow and learn. For many, the pang of disappointment that Quincy feels as he chastises Monica for not being available to him at his lowest moment feels familiar. In contrast, it’s easy to connect with Monica’s need for Quincy to celebrate her long-fought, hard-earned victories. This leads to a disconnect that so many young couples have experienced at one point or another.

Love and Basketball, Beyond the Lights

These experiences aren’t exclusive ones; they exist as the universal marks of youth for so many. Prince-Bythewood’s choice to center these themes around a young Black couple shouldn’t feel as revolutionary as it does. But when you consider that “universal” is too often conflated with “white,” Love & Basketball feels like such a turning point in the romance genre. It was certainly a turning point for me because, for a moment, Black love and romance, as told by Hollywood, weren’t mutually exclusive. Not long after that, however, there seemed to be another dearth in quality romance narratives featuring Black people as the Nicholas Sparks aesthetic – blonde-haired, fair-skinned women paired with young, Zac Efron-esque hunks — reigned. Once again, mainstream romance was excluding people of color.

Then 2014 and Gina Prince-Bythewood brought us Beyond the Lights. With that, I felt like I once again had a place in the genre that I cared about so deeply.

On the surface, Noni (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) and Kaz’s (Nate Parker) story – a tortured pop starlet falling for her tender, down-to-earth guard – may not appear as relatable as that of Monica and Quincy. There is, however, a common struggle that bonds these two: the torment of not having the freedom to live as our most authentic selves. As a highly publicized pop star Noni’s every move, word, and look is manufactured by her mother/manager Macy Jean (Minnie Driver) and management team. As an aspiring local politician, Kaz’s relationship with Noni is scrutinized heavily by his father (Danny Glover). As they grow closer, they’re both given an opportunity to relax their personas and escape the criticisms that make their lives uniquely difficult. Their story, above all else, is about their desire to be truly seen as fully realized beings and not just the Troubled Pop Star and the Heroic Guard Turned Politician.

Beyond the Lights

While l praise Love & Basketball for depicting Black love in a way that was relevant to all audiences, what I happened to love most about the romance between Noni and Kaz were the aspects that were specifically poignant to me as a Black woman. On an impromptu trip to Mexico, Noni finds herself standing in front of the mirror in their shared bungalow, contemplating her distinctive purple extensions. In a moment of genuine vulnerability, she decides to shed her famous tresses and reveal her natural hair to her partner. Standing before him in her gorgeous curls, I recognized the glint of apprehension in her eyes as she awaits his reaction to seeing her truly authentic self for the first time.

The significance of Noni showing Kaz her natural hair – hair that is so often scrutinized by the public from youth to adulthood – and him responding with a kiss and reverently running his fingers through her curls is something so simple, yet so extraordinary and rare in romantic cinema. Just like crossover relatability is important, so are the moments that are specifically experienced by marginalized audiences. We need the assurance that our stories are worth telling.

During a Twitter chat that included Gina Prince-Bythewood last May, seven months after the release of Beyond the Lights, I took the opportunity to ask her what she wished to see more of in terms of on-screen romance. “More real love,” she replied. “Not surface, cliché, joke, but the kind that really wrecks you.” Here’s hoping that this phenomenal woman is allowed more opportunities to not only wreck us emotionally, but to obliterate the notion that different shades of romance don’t exist.

Also at Bitch Flicks: ‘Love & Basketball’: Girls Can Do Anything Boys Can Do, The Female Gaze: Dido and Noni, Two of a Kind, ‘Beyond the Lights’ Premiere: Interviews with Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Gina Prince-Bythewood, Gugu Mbatha-Raw Is a Superstar in ‘Beyond the Lights

Image of Gina Prince-Bythewood via Wikipedia and the Creative Commons License.

Shannon Miller’s passions include bossy women, social justice and her three-year-old daughter’s version of “Let It Go”. She co-hosts the Nerds of Prey Podcast, a nerd culture show hosted by four passionate Black women. You can read her thoughts regarding representation in media on her blog Televised Lady Bits or follow her on Twitter @Phunky_Brewster.

Evolution in Marjane Satrapi’s ‘Persepolis’ and ‘Chicken With Plums’

In a similar way to Marji (‘Persepolis’), Nasser (‘Chicken with Plums’) must be sent far away to have his journey of becoming. There is something in him — talent — that requires he must go beyond his home. But whereas in Marji’s case she must go away to protect herself, Nasser must go away so he can grow, get bigger and fuller and richer.

Persepolis

Written by Colleen Clemens as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

I have been teaching Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel and film Persepolis for years. I love introducing the young Marji to my students and giving them the opportunity to think about how growing up in Iran may actually share many elements of growing up in the U.S.: jeans, boy troubles, music your parents cannot stand, coming to terms with one’s body.

I was eager to see Satrapi’s second film (co-directed with Vincent Paronnaud): a non-animated work, Chicken with Plums, also based on a graphic novel. In the film, the main character, Nasser Ali, is dying. The film counts down the last days of his life and relies on flashbacks to help the viewer understand why Ali is choosing to starve himself to death.

I sat in the dark theater on the last night of the week’s run at the local art house cinema and took notes. But I didn’t leave feeling like I had connected with the film; I didn’t feel like the film offered as much to think about as I had first thought.

And then I realized why I had felt funny about the second film: that in it, he is becoming something — an artist — while the first film deals only with becoming a woman.

There are several reasons why I think it is fair to compare the films even though they look so different. Satrapi wrote both screenplays both based on her graphic novels. Both films deal with a protagonist who is fighting for survival — in the case of Persepolis, how to survive as a woman in an autocratic theocracy and coming of age in a country not of one’s origin and away from one’s family — and the story of Nasser Ali who is spending the entire film dying because he has lost his art because his jealous wife destroyed his violin, the one given to him by his master, whom we will meet later.

In an interview with Mother Jones, Satrapi was asked how she relates to this male protagonist. She replied:

“As soon as I draw a female, I know everybody is going to relate it to me. So even unconsciously there are things that I won’t say. When I create a male character, they wouldn’t know it’s me, so I could just say much more.”

I am interested in the fact that Satrapi finds the freedom to use a male character to investigate becoming something, in this case an artist, a freedom she does not feel when writing a female character that will be conflated with her own self. To summarize this ease, Satrapi told French Culture:

“I said that his hurt musician was the character who was closest to me; because, as he’s a man, I can hide behind me much more easily.”

In an effort to investigate these two main characters, both of which Satrapi admits are autobiographical, we can look more closely at the scenes that deal directly with the main characters coming of age with the guidance of a mentor, in the case of Marji her grandmother, and Nasser Ali, his mentor Agha Mozaffar.

Marji has a close bond with her grandmother, a woman whom has seen her share of revolutions and pain, as members of her family were jailed and killed. She is a tough character who laughs when Marji announces later in the film that she will be getting a divorce and who scolds Marji for using her gender as protection and selling out an innocent man. The two key scenes with the grandmother come at moments where Marji is on the cusp of change. The first is the night Marji is about to leave. A young girl about to go through puberty, Marji is sent to Europe by her parents out of fear for their bright and resistant daughter. In this scene, Marji is spending her last night in Iran with her grandmother.

persepolis-jasmine-bra

She has to leave Iran to learn what she is to learn in the film: how to become a woman. Marji’s lesson is focused on maintaining her breasts, a signifier of her femininity. Most of what Marji is to learn in this film deals with her gender and her body’s relation to her gender.

The second scene is when the film is ending. Marji has left Iran for good. She is never to return upon her mother’s orders. The last scene hearkens back to the first scene I showed in which Marji learns about her grandmother’s trick to preserve her breasts. We know that the grandmother has died, that she will no longer be there to teach Marji more lessons about being a woman.  The film ends with the same flowers drifting imagery, closing the film with a reminder of the grandmother’s femininity.

The grandmother character is used to usher Marji into womanhood. There is no mention of what Marji will do when she is older, just that she will be a woman. Here are several lessons that Marji learns about being a woman: through the story of Nilofaur, Marji learns about sexual violence; through two boyfriends, she learns about sexuality; and through her mother, Marji learns that in order to find freedom as a woman, she cannot stay in Iran. The film spends a great deal of its energy showing how challenging it is for Marji to become a woman, be that an independent woman, but still we don’t see Marji creating anything or doing anything in this bildungsroman.

In contrast we have Nasser Ali, whose gender is also an impediment, but only in that women try to get in the way of him being what he is meant to be: an artist. His mother wants him to settle down and his wife destroys his violin. This film also features a mentorship relationship: that of Nasser with Agha.

In a similar way to Marji, Nasser must be sent far away to have his journey of becoming. There is something in him — talent — that requires he must go beyond his home. But whereas in Marji’s case she must go away to protect herself, Nasser must go away so he can grow, get bigger and fuller and richer.

In the first scene, Nasser meets withs Agha Mozaffa in the faraway place that one must have to work to get to. Even the depiction of this place is mystical, magical, not for everyone. As a young man — and one who’s becoming a man is not a focus of the film — he goes to come of age by learning about love and art.

In the final scene, Nasser comes of age as an artist because he had learned about losing love. In this scene, he will get the tool that he will use to be an artist, just as Marji was given the flower trick by her grandmother, the image that ends the film. Again, the mentor is no longer of use to the student: the lesson is complete and now the character can go out into the world.

But there’s a difference between the world Marji enters and the world Nasser enters: the latter is off to jetset as an acclaimed artist. Marji is in the confines of a cab in the place she doesn’t want to be. She does claim to be from Iran at the end, which in a film about conflicts about identity matters greatly, but she is Iranian and a woman. She is not an artist (though we know that she does become a great one).

I love both of these films for different reasons, but I am concerned that in looking at them as major elements of Satrapi’s body of film work that they mirror the idea Kingsley Browne on The Daily Show stated: “Girls become women by getting older, boys become men by accomplishing something.” Watching Nasser become an artist is satisfying in a way that I don’t necessarily feel when watching Persepolis, even if I do love the work that film does to show the difficulty of forming one’s gender and national identity.

Colleen Clemens is a Bitch Flicks staff writer and assistant professor of non-Western literatures at Kutztown University. She blogs about gender issues and postcolonial theory and literature at http://kupoco.wordpress.com/. When she isn’t reading, writing, or grading, she is wrangling her two-year old daughter, two dogs, and on occasion her partner.

21 Short Films by Women Directors

For Women’s History Month, we’ve put together a playlist of 21 of those films for your viewing pleasure. As you’ll see, no two of these shorts are alike. They deal with topics like autism, racism, sexism, losing a loved one and trying to fit in and find yourself at any age.

First Match via Film School Shorts

This guest post written by Film School Shorts appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

Hopefully you’ve caught Film School Shorts on a PBS station near you. We’re a national half-hour weekly series that showcases short student films from across the country, and fortunately for us, the gender makeup of film schools is very different than that of Hollywood proper. Programs at AFI, Columbia, UCLA, NYU, and CalArts are full of women learning how to direct, write, produce, and animate their own films. Which means that when it comes time for us to pick shorts for our show, we have a lot of women-led films to choose from.

For Women’s History Month, we’ve put together a playlist of 21 of those films for your viewing pleasure. As you’ll see, no two of these shorts are alike. They deal with topics like autism, racism, sexism, losing a loved one and trying to fit in and find yourself at any age. And the women who’ve made them have gone on to do great things: Jules Nurrish, director of Kiss Me, was recently named a Film Independent Directing Lab Fellow. And you’ve probably heard of Ana Lily Amirpour, of A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night fame; she also wrote I Feel Stupid, which was featured in our first season.

Our show gives us the opportunity to raise the profile of women-produced student work, and as Hollywood’s gender gap hopefully starts to shrink in the coming years, we expect to see our directors land bigger and bigger projects.

Check out all of the films in the playlist here: #ILookLikeAFilmDirector: 21 Shorts for Women’s History Month.

Film School Shorts is a national half-hour weekly series that showcases short student films from across the country. From quirky comedies to slice-of-life dramas to hard-hitting thrillers, emerging filmmakers offer new perspectives from a new generation.

Seed & Spark: Replacing Shame with Truth and Community

After all, the goal of ‘Don’t Talk About the Baby’ is social change, accomplished by empowering couples to start telling their stories in their communities. … My vision for this film is to examine every thread of shame that permeates pregnancy loss and infertility and reconnect it to support, openness and understanding.

Don't Talk About the Baby

This is a guest post written by Ann Zamudio. Her film Don’t Talk About the Baby is currently crowdfunding via Seed & Spark.

[Trigger warning: discussion of infertility, miscarriage, and infant loss.]

When making a documentary about miscarriage, stillbirth and infertility, it can be easy to get lost in the stories. After all, the goal of Don’t Talk About the Baby is social change, accomplished by empowering couples to start telling their stories in their communities.

The stories are raw and powerful and they’re leading a movement of change which cries out that loss and infertility are nothing to be ashamed of. They’re compelling voices, and they’re easy to get caught up in. As the director, my job is to make sure that doesn’t happen. It sounds counter-intuitive, since we’re asking people to tell their stories, but when it comes to the actual film, I always keep a balance at the forefront of my mind: the balance between the heartbreaking stories, and the fascinating expert interviews that explain the emotions behind them.

Pregnancy loss and infertility are plagued by silence and stigma. It’s my passionate belief that the only way out of the shadows is to thoroughly explore how and why we got there in the first place. It’s harder for a woman to feel like a failure when she knows, scientifically and without a doubt, that she didn’t cause her miscarriage. It’s less likely for a mother to mourn in silence when she knows the words to use to ask for understanding. It’s less likely that a community will forget a family’s loss, when a film tells them the power of remembering and saying that baby’s name.

My vision for this film is to examine every thread of shame that permeates pregnancy loss and infertility and reconnect it to support, openness and understanding.

The experts are key to this documentary, and I chose them by investigating my own experiences after my early miscarriage. What did I do? The woman most likely to watch this film is a woman fresh from a loss, and it’s important to me that the themes we explore are relevant to the journey she’s starting.

I felt silenced when I tried to talk about it. I felt pressured to move on. I felt disconnected from my husband. I went online and sought support from strangers. I found power in sharing my story with them.

So we found an expert scholar who spoke about the value in letting a woman tell her story. She talked about losing trust in your own body, and learning to navigate in a world that places a woman’s worth in motherhood. We found a professor who studied how women share their stories online, and how that’s changed over the last ten years. The revolution we’re in the midst of, with parents dedicated to sharing their stories, is largely due to the rise of social media. I wanted someone to explain the support networks we build online, and how that translates to our real lives. We also have therapists talking about how men and women grieve differently, and giving advice on bridging the gap that grows after a loss. They give the audience tools for starting conversations, overcoming emotional roadblocks, and learning to deal with the shitty hand they’ve been dealt.

Then we follow the real world experiences of couples during and after miscarriage, infertility and stillbirth. We hear their cries and see their tears. They let us into their lives in the most humbling way. And so we strike a balance. When filming these interviews, I always keep in mind the overall goals of this documentary — empowerment, support, and communication. Every interview is geared towards answering one question: How do we learn to heal?

Free from shame, from stigma and oppressive silence. That’s the goal of this documentary, and what I remember at each step in making this film.

The process of making this film has been eye opening and rewarding. Please consider joining our efforts to shatter the stigma, and pledging your support to our Seed & Spark campaign to finish the film.

DTATB Author Pic

Ann Zamudio is a mother, filmmaker and writer based in the Washington, DC area. She’s currently directing Don’t Talk About the Baby, a documentary aiming to shatter the stigma surrounding pregnancy loss and infertility. Her writing has appeared in Scary Mommy, PALS, and The Huffington Post. Follow the documentary on Facebook and Twitter.

‘Bleeding Heart’ and All the Times It’s Probably Okay to Shoot Someone

Written and directed by Diane Bell, ‘Bleeding Heart’ is about class privilege, moral hypocrisy, and the arrogance of preaching nonviolence to people about to be killed. Mostly, though, it’s a chance to watch Zosia Mamet play someone other than Shoshanna and drink in a dark but gorgeous colour palette.

Bleeding Heart

Written by Katherine Murray.

Written and directed by Diane Bell, Bleeding Heart is about class privilege, moral hypocrisy, and the arrogance of preaching nonviolence to people about to be killed. Mostly, though, it’s a chance to watch Zosia Mamet play someone other than Shoshanna and drink in a dark but gorgeous color palette.

Having premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2015, Bleeding Heart tells the story of an ashtanga yoga teacher named May (Jessica Biel), who makes contact with a half-sister she’s never known (Zosia Mamet), and quickly has a crisis of conscience over how she should behave.

May’s sister, Shiva, is in a much different financial position and living with a boyfriend who treats her badly. As May gets to know Shiva better, she finds out that this boyfriend, Cody, is also Shiva’s pimp, and doesn’t seem to care very much for her safety. May feels the need to get involved, and tries to help by giving Shiva money, giving her a place to stay when she can’t go home to Cody. She tries to convince her to leave him for good but, the longer the situation goes on, the less it looks like there’s going to be a peaceful solution.

May’s interaction with Shiva is complicated by the fact that her business and romantic partner, Dex, doesn’t think they should get involved in the drama unfolding between two people they don’t really know, as well as by the fact that Shiva doesn’t always tell the truth. In the end, though, May has to decide whether she really believes in ahimsa – the principles of nonviolence at the core of her spiritual beliefs and practice – to the point of letting someone else get killed.

Spoilers, but the final act involves a lot more guns.

Bleeding Heart

I get what Bleeding Heart’s trying to do, and I think it’s really interesting, even if I don’t always buy the execution.

At its core, the story is about a really specific, new age hypocrisy in which we claim to heal ourselves and the world by ignoring the harsh realities and difficult choices less fortunate people face. The key conflict in Bleeding Heart isn’t between Shiva and Cody or May and Cody or Shiva and May – it’s between May and Dex. May wants to help Shiva even though she doesn’t know her very well, even though it makes her life difficult, and even though Shiva might not even be her sister – Dex wants Shiva to go away and stop disrupting his positive energy. He’d rather use his and May’s money to build a new yoga studio than help Shiva pay her rent, and the point he brings up, over and over again, is, “This doesn’t have to be our problem.”

Bleeding Heart plays May and Dex against each other to show us how May’s choices reflect a conscious move away from the beliefs she held at the start of the film – a move toward an understanding that there’s a kind of arrogance in preaching nonviolence to people who live in real physical danger. She’s struggling with the idea of what it really means to help someone, and whether it’s enough to say that she helps people by teaching yoga practice. Ultimately, she finds that the only way to make a difference in the world is to do things she never thought she would do – she finds that there are some situations where nonviolence just isn’t an option.

May’s personal journey comes across really well in the film, so I was disappointed that the other characters seemed a lot less rounded in comparison. Dex is so self-centered that he can’t even process the concept that May might care about something else in addition to the yoga studio. When May tells him that she wants to take a day off work to meet Shiva for the first time – having hired private detectives to search for her for months or years – he tells her that meeting Shiva will probably be emotional for her and distract her from the business for more than a day, so she shouldn’t go yet. Even taking into account that he’s supposed to be a hypocrite, I find it hard to believe that he would just casually tell his partner to blow off meeting a long-lost, long-sought relative to focus on building a new yoga studio. Just like I find it hard to believe later on that he completely doesn’t care that Shiva’s boyfriend is abusive, even if he doesn’t want to be involved.

It’s part of a larger pattern in the film where the details of the characters’ motivations don’t ring true and drain some of the power from the story. It often feels like Dex, Cody, and Shiva make their choices based on what the plot demands of them, so that May can learn something new and grow as a person.

Aside from that, the cinematography is gorgeous and Mamet and Biel are both stretching themselves as actors, which is fun to watch. I especially gained a new appreciation for Mamet – she’s so good at making her lines sound like something she just came up with that it’s easy to forget how much skill that really takes. There are times in Bleeding Heart when she doesn’t have a lot to work with but definitely makes the most of it.

You can find Bleeding Heart on DVD and VOD in North America and the UK, where it goes by the name Bound by Blood.

Also on Bitch Flicks: Paula Schwartz interviews director Diane Bell about Bleeding Heart

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies, TV and video games on her blog.

Seed & Spark: To Web Series Or…

There’s a certain kind of freedom in the web series form; there are fewer constraints and not as many rules as there appear to be in television or film. I was incredibly inspired by so many shows I saw all over the web that bucked the norm in terms of how they told stories and who they portrayed on camera.

Things I Hate

This is a guest post written by Molly Anne Coogan. Her webseries Things I Hate is currently crowdfunding via Seed & Spark.

I often get asked why I wanted to make a web series. Why not make a short film or put all those pages of a season together and make a feature? For starters, the show didn’t come into my head as a feature or as a short film. When I started writing, they came out as episodes and what I saw in my head was a show instead of a movie or a short; I wasn’t interested in squishing something into a box and I wanted to make what was in my brain.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I wrote this show when I was overcoming some big health issues and I was ready to get my hands dirty and make something — I wanted some immediate gratification. There’s no middleman with a web series, no distribution deal to negotiate, no hurdle to getting it out into the world. You create an account, design a page, and upload. Clearly the process is not as simple as that, but you’re catching what I’m throwing, yeah?

There’s a certain kind of freedom in the web series form; there are fewer constraints and not as many rules as there appear to be in television or film. I was incredibly inspired by so many shows I saw all over the web that bucked the norm in terms of how they told stories and who they portrayed on camera. I loved how F to the 7th challenged conceptions about sexuality and what it means to be a woman; how Broad City basically owned the shit out of everything and unabashedly showed women doing what they wanted without apologizing while having a blast doing it; and how High Maintenance allowed each episode to be its own contained world and didn’t feel the need for a continuous plotline. All these shows have incredibly unique voices, vibes, and tones and each is stellar in their own way. Their uniqueness got my creative juices flowing.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42W_UWQPXok”]

The other benefit to a web series is the simple power of the Internet. You’re able to grow your audience, quickly connect, and find your people, whereas it’s much harder to do with other forms that have bigger machines involved. I had experience with the rapid-fire reach of the Internet when my sketch video “Nickelblock” from my comedy duo Moll & Rell went viral. We woke up one morning to the video having hundreds of thousands of views and being all over the front pages of The Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, Bustle, E!, and more. It was being talked about on the radio; I had friends from abroad telling me they saw it on publications overseas. It was wild and zany and so much fun, but also a totally different thing from a web series. It was a short, comedic tidbit as opposed to a show that you really have to sit and watch. “Nickelblock” was like a handful of candy whereas Things I Hate is more like a rich chocolate torte that you’ve got to take your time enjoying. Now I just want dessert…

I do feel is important to point out is that the line of what is “TV” and what is a “web series” is blurring with each passing day. I don’t own a television, but I “watch TV” because I own a computer. You can stream everything. In essence you could say that all television shows are web series because they’re streamed online. Perhaps they’re not made for the web at the start, but that’s where they’re ending up.

We have only two weeks left in our Things I Hate Seed & Spark campaign. If you’re a fan of ambitious, hilarious web series made by filmmakers easily distracted by sweets, join our team, and spread the word.

Molly Anne Coogan

Molly Anne Coogan is a maker of all things. As an actor she’s worked with Ars Nova, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The O’Neill Theatre Center, The Civilians, TheatreWorks California, CBS, TBS, and more. She is one half of the comedy duo Moll & Rell known for their viral video “Nickelblock,” which Molly directed and co-wrote with her comedy partner Arielle Siegel. As a writer her work has been produced or developed by The Williamstown Theatre Festival, Ars Nova, SPACE on Ryder Farm and The 52nd Street Project. Her web series, Things I Hate, which she created, wrote, produced, and stars in premiered February 2016 on The A.V. Cluband features actors from The Knick, Girls, and Orange Is the New Black. She loves photo booths and the word “burgled.” She refuses to pass a lemonade stand without buying a glass. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Jonathan Anderson.

‘Anomalisa’ and the (Fe)Male Gaze

Charlie Kaufman draws on an emotional darkness that is deeply human – something that every person can relate to in some way, big or small, regardless of gender or age. Which is why it’s frustrating to see in ‘Anomalisa’­ – like in so many movies before it – the sense of hope come in the form of a woman, an object of romance for a man. … To put it bluntly, I’m sick of movies in which sad men think they can be saved by their idea of a woman.

Anomalisa

This guest post written by Sarah Halle Corey previously appeared at REELYDOPE and is cross-posted with permission.

I watched Anomalisa in a room filled with middle-aged men. It was not a movie meant for me, and I knew that going in.

Charlie Kaufman, the writer and co-director of the film, is the king of emotionally damaged men in indie film, from lovesick Joel in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to self-loathing (and semi-autobiographical) Charlie in Adaptation. He creates brooding, self-centered white men who struggle to find meaning in their existences. Michael, the main character of Anomalisa, is no different. He’s a self-help author who doesn’t know how to help himself. Everyone in his world looks and sounds exactly the same, and so he doesn’t know how to connect to other people or to any sense of meaning in his life. He’s trapped by his own weaknesses, especially his own depression and disillusionment. And he’s a middle-aged white man.

The middle-aged men in my movie theater audience ate it all up.

But the thing is, I did too… at least a little. If I didn’t fully eat it up, I took some pretty hefty bites. I, a 22-year-old woman with a big, bubbly smile relate to Anomalisa. What does that say about me? What does it say about the movie?

Roger Ebert famously said, “The movies are like a machine that generates empathy.” Kaufman and co-director Duke Johnson pretty brilliantly demonstrate Ebert’s idea by fully immersing the audience in Michael’s world. We see the same identically blank faces as Michael, and we hear the same single one-tone voice. The drab colors and claustrophobic hotel setting contribute to Michael’s and the audience’s sense that the world is a mind-numbing place. Oh, and did I mention the whole thing is made with stop-motion animation? So each and every movement on screen is slightly stilted, slightly inhuman. The use of stop-motion to create a sense of detachment is the cherry on top of a disillusionment sundae.

The audience is so expertly placed in Michael’s perspective, that we can’t help but feel the fear and tedium and longing that he does. As we watch the movie, we tap into something in ourselves; our own personal feelings rise up and help us to relate to the story being told. Beneath the surface of my bubbly smile, there is some fear and some longing, and maybe even a little tedium every now and then. Kaufman helps us to dig into what might be happening beyond the surface of reality. He draws on an emotional darkness that is deeply human – something that every person can relate to in some way, big or small, regardless of gender or age.

Which is why it’s frustrating to see in Anomalisa­ – like in so many movies before it – the sense of hope come in the form of a woman, an object of romance for a man. Michael, and thus the audience, feel disillusioned until Lisa enters the story. With a detailed face and a unique voice crackling with warmth, Lisa offers a beacon of connection and possible peace of mind. She is in the movie to serve only one purpose: to be Michael’s vision of salvation who he hopes will save him.

We’ve seen it countless times before with the Manic Pixie Dream Girl: the cinematic trope of quirky women who are endlessly available to better the lives of male leads. Lisa doesn’t exactly fit the type; while the Manic Pixie Dream Girl stands out as eccentric, Lisa is completely and utterly ordinary. And, (spoiler alert) Michael’s hopes for salvation through her don’t come to fruition. Nevertheless, even as the antithetical Manic Pixie Dream Girl, Lisa’s only role in the film is to be a projection of Michael’s emotions and issues.

As I sat watching Anomalisa, which had expertly wrapped me up in Michael’s world, I couldn’t help thinking where his fixation on Lisa left me as an audience member. I was there for the ride, there to be swept up into my main character’s point of view. And yet, his point of view is the male gaze, of which I, as a young woman, would theoretically be the object. So then what is my place in watching Anomalisa?

To put it bluntly, I’m sick of movies in which sad men think they can be saved by their idea of a woman. Existential dread and emotional depth belong to us all, not just middle-aged men. Perhaps the male gaze in film is something that women can claim for ourselves, reminding the world that these feelings are universal ones. When we’re not fighting the patriarchy, women also get sad over the meaning of life. Perhaps instead of defaulting to male protagonists, we can see more complex women who are saved by their Manic Pixie Dream Guys, or saved by something else entirely.

It’s true that movies are empathy machines, making the audience feel what the characters feel, and Kaufman excels at that. But, it would be even better if we could get to empathize with a broader range of characters. I liked Anomalisa, but I would have loved a movie with Lisa as the subject, not the object.

Sarah Halle Corey is a writer, filmmaker, and digital content creator who produces work about pop culture, feminism, feelings, and everything in between. You can find her work at sarahhallecorey.com. Sarah is usually drinking way too much coffee and/or tweeting @SarahHalleCorey.

Jake Hoffman’s ‘Asthma’ Is Sick of Its Own Shit

The amount of negative reviews of Jake Hoffman’s film ‘Asthma’ shows us how much we are over toxic “lost soul” white male protagonists bent on self-destruction. … Whether Hoffman intended it or not, there’s a sharp critique of rich white male tears in this film.

Asthma film

This guest post written by Marlana Eck previously appeared at Awaiting Moderation and is cross-posted with permission.

[Trigger warning: Discussion of suicide]

The amount of negative reviews of Jake Hoffman’s film Asthma shows us how much we are over toxic “lost soul” white male protagonists bent on self-destruction.

Here’s our archetype: recklessly bored and trigger-shy-suicidal Gus, played by Benedict Samuel, who looks strikingly like Mick Jagger (or any desirable indie rock crooner), is a “disaffected youth” (as other reviewers are quick to spot). The pastiching of Jim Morrison and Charles Bukowski-esque male figures has more to show us than youthful folly.

Gus is first introduced to us re-painting a white wall with a co-worker. He wonders why they have to paint it white. “It’s already white,” he says. His co-worker responds with “because they’re paying us to paint it again.” This isn’t enough clarification for Gus, so after he fails to turn the work dynamic into goofing off, he gives up resisting and the next thing we see is him wandering the streets, dopey, smoking a cigarette, eventually making his way back to his apartment. When he gets there, the white paint resurfaces and he gives a brief monologue about being “born in the wrong time” before he defaces his prominent Jim Morrison poster along with everything else in the apartment. A shot cuts to his room completely whited out, and next thing we know he’s standing on a chair in his underwear and hipster boots pouring white paint all over his head with a noose around his neck.

Artistically, Hoffman’s commentary, in this scene in particular, speaks to a post-progress aesthetic reaching the ultimate conclusion of nothingness.

Since this is only in the film’s first 10 minutes, it’s not surprising that Gus is not suicided. Instead he hacks loud and hard (hence Asthma) for an agonizingly long amount of screen time and then returns to his wandering, sporting his, now, super rad post-suicide shoes splattered with white paint.

The film’s mantra, which is stated in the very beginning, seems to be this:

“I miss the old New York in like the ’70s and ’80s: CBGBs, The Ramones, Mean Streets, SAMO doing graffiti and Andy [Warhol] going to parties, the birth of hip hop. Just look at Times Square. It used to be cool…all cracked up. And now it’s like fuckin’ Disneyland. The fuck happened here. Shit.”

The New York Gus misses was at the dawn of neoliberalism. He somehow misses the confusion at the precipice of our current social relations. He’s not dissimilar from figures his character would have grown up with like Kurt Cobain who rallied against the “machine” as much as they were a part of its conservation.

At the start, Hoffman places us in late capitalism’s concourse: our postmodern New York City. If it weren’t for this short monologue, I may have hated the rest of the film. Instead I became more engaged with Hoffman’s thesis, which was partially the disorientation Frederic Jameson describes in “Future City”:

It is the old world that deserves the bile and the satire, this new one is merely its own self-effacement, and its slippage into what Dick called kipple or gubble, what LeGuin once described as the buildings ‘melting. They were getting soggy and shaky, like jello left out in the sun. The corners had already run down the sides, leaving great creamy smears.’ Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.

Gus sees life as a mixture of “hey rad bro” highs and self-aggrandized lows. He says he has nothing to lose, steals a car and starts to cruise the city, first stopping off at his drug dealer’s place seeking a heroin fix.

Gus develops a love interest, Ruby.

Asthma film

Some of the funniest scenes in the film are when Gus comes at Ruby (Krysten Ritter) with dialogue that screams a common sentiment of, “Fuck me, I’m a NICE GUY, YOU BITCH!” Because all women are supposed to get aroused by a man who shoots up to experience an infantile state as a nod to all his favorite art gods (who he doesn’t realize were also deeply disturbed by patriarchy). Ruby is hopelessly seen through a male lens with scarcely much depth.

As they drive to Connecticut in the stolen Rolls Royce, they come across a dead deer. Entertained, they pull off to the side with an, “Aw.” Ruby gets out her hip vintage camera and says “Is this disrespectful?” Without skipping a beat she takes the picture anyway as Gus puts deer blood on his fingers and puts it on as eye black (allegedly an homage to Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man).

There’s a scene where she first catches Gus shooting up (we know it’s the first time because she says “Are you shooting up heroin?!” ). She is initially repulsed, quickly turns maternal, then, in a mystical foggy upshot, she is a seductress. She’s so devilishly seductive, when she asks if Gus if he has a condom, he says “like I knew this would happen.” (Because, Gus, you didn’t just spend half the film telling Ruby she was beautiful, that you wanted her, you’d win her, and take her to Connecticut, but you couldn’t have planned for a condom. Had nothing to do with you being lazy or anything.) So in the steamy heat of the moment Ruby does what she’s “supposed to,” which translates to her being all like “OKAY!” and doing whatever Gus wants.

She is a tattoo artist with many tattoos of her own, but when Gus asks what her tattoo means she says, “I don’t like talking about the meaning or whatever,” then saying it’s, “like a guard dog or whatever.” This matches some of the films aesthetic and philosophical indifference.

When they end up at their destination they come upon a commune-style mansion belonging to a semi-famous musician-friend of Ruby. The behaviors of the people at the commune (psychedelics, pot, yoga, qigong) speak to the overall depthlessness; there is a lack of authenticity and a superficial searching behavior.

Ruby does eventually abscond, but stays true to her one-dimensional portrayal. Her depthlessness borders on the kitsch as she tells Gus he has no aspirations, holding the same amount of vagueness as the film’s premise. We also learn Gus is a trust fund kid, adding even more “well what the hell” to the narrative.

At the film’s ending, Ruby tells Gus she has to stop getting hung up on these immature losers and get herself a real job (Gotta LEAN IN!).

Whether Hoffman intended it or not, there’s a sharp critique of rich white male tears in this film. Gus is ultimately sad nobody finds his aimless whining cute. Yet his grumbling seems to even annoy him at the end. In the final scene when Gus walks down the dark alley, I feel like he is sick of his own shit.

Throughout, Hoffman employs his irreproachable taste in music with the panache of Sofia Coppola. Also characteristic of some heirs of Hollywood film, despite his good taste, there seems to be a “why” lacking in this film. Perhaps for Hoffman that serves to underscore an ill of our time, or, maybe (more likely), the film is simply a product of it.

Asthma had the potential to explode some of the Bukowskian phantasmagoria perpetuated by narcissistic youth who are increasingly plagued with the possibilities of recognition or celebrity. Instead, it leaves us unfulfilled and struggling to understand the existing power structures which produce the depthlessness many claim to loathe. Much like the lives of the trumped up, romanticized nihilists Gus idolizes, he is an anomie positioned to inherit the same ends.

Marlana Eck is a scholar, writer, and educator from Easton, Pennsylvania. Her writing has appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Raging Chicken Press, Hybrid Pedagogy, San Diego Free Press, Cultured Vultures, Lehigh Valley Vanguard, and Rag Queen Periodical. At the latter two publications she serves as director. In her free time she enjoys horticulture and overestimating the efficacy of her dance moves in the living room mirror. Follow her on Twitter at @marlanaesquire.

Call For Writers: Women Directors

Our theme week for March 2016 will be Women Directors. The gender gap in the entertainment industry has risen to the level of popular consciousness, such that prominent public figures are frequently commenting on it and demanding change, but while awareness of the under-representation and misrepresentation of women in film and television has grown, is there much being done to combat it?

Call-for-Writers-e13859437405011

Our theme week for March 2016 will be Women Directors.

The gender gap in the entertainment industry has risen to the level of popular consciousness, such that prominent public figures are frequently commenting on it and demanding change, but while awareness of the under-representation and misrepresentation of women in film and television has grown, is there much being done to combat it?

Women directors face myriad obstacles: despite there being an abundance of talented female directors struggling to produce work, many companies refuse to give them projects (only 3.4% of all film directors are female and only 9% of the top 250 movies in 2015 were directed by women), they are not paid as much as their male counterparts, there’s an expectation that their work be stereotypically female (i.e. chick flicks), and their work is rarely appreciated with the same level of acclaim (only 4 women have ever been nominated for a Best Director Academy Award). Despite all these obstacles and hardships, there are a growing number of women making amazing work with wide range of genres and topics: romantic, thought-provoking, innovative, hilarious, or even terrifying. In 2009, Kathryn Bigelow broke barriers with The Hurt Locker, a film about soldiers and war, when she took home Academy Awards for both Best Picture and Best Director. She was the first woman ever to receive an Oscar for Best Director. In 2014, Ava DuVernay’s depiction of the civil rights movement Selma won an Academy Award for Best Song and garnered nominations for Best Picture. But DuVernay didn’t receive an Oscar nomination, an unfortunate snub as she would have been the first Black woman to ever receive a nomination for Best Director.

However, the Oscars are typically white and male-dominated and are increasingly being disregarded as an antiquated, patriarchal, elitist group who should no longer be regarded as the gatekeepers of important cinema, and women are increasingly working in the independent film scene. Despite the somewhat encouraging rise of women directors, white women tend to dominate the field, receiving accolades and projects with far greater frequency than women directors of color, which is a microcosm reflective of the stratification of the feminist movement itself.

The examples below are the names of women directors alongside an example of one of their most acclaimed works. Feel free to use those examples to inspire your writing on this subject, or choose your own source material.

We’d like to avoid as much overlap as possible for this theme, so get your proposals in early if you know which film you’d like to write about. We accept both original pieces and cross-posts, and we respond to queries within a week.

Most of our pieces are between 1,000 and 2,000 words, and include links and images. Please send your piece as a Microsoft Word document to btchflcks[at]gmail[dot]com, including links to all images, and include a 2- to 3-sentence bio.

If you have written for us before, please indicate that in your proposal, and if not, send a writing sample if possible.

Please be familiar with our publication and look over recent and popular posts to get an idea of Bitch Flicks’ style and purpose. We encourage writers to use our search function to see if your topic has been written about before, and link when appropriate (hyperlinks to sources are welcome, as well).

The final due date for these submissions is Saturday, March 26, 2016 by midnight Eastern Time.

Ava DuVernay (Selma)

Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation)

Haifaa al-Mansour (Wadjda)

Jane Campion (The Piano)

Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker)

Amma Asante (Belle)

Lena Dunham (Girls)

Julie Delpy (2 Days in Paris)

Mary Harron (American Psycho)

Mary Lambert (Pet Sematary)

Meera Menon (Farah Goes Bang)

Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust)

Nora Ephron (Sleepless in Seattle)

Penny Marshall (Big)

Lisa Cholodenko (The Kids Are All Right)

Emily Ting (It’s Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong)

Debra Granik (Winter’s Bone)

Dee Rees (Bessie)

Randa Haines (Children of a Lesser God)

Barbra Streisand (The Prince of Tides)

Jodie Foster (Orange is the New Black)