The radical notion that women like good movies
What I didn’t remember, and was pleasantly surprised by, was all of the diversity present in the show and the incredibly positive female role models that it presented to its young viewers. … It offered a positive statement on cultural acceptance and feminine strength at a time when children’s programming was lacking in both areas (and often still is today).
So what distinguishes ‘Labyrinth’ from the Hero’s Journey tropes it so closely follows? Its protagonist. Sarah is the hero of the story. She doesn’t need to be saved because she’s the rescuer, and she carries the plot forward with her resourcefulness, tenacity, and self-actualization. …She navigates a tricky tightrope between fantasy and reality, dreams and goals, past and future, and discovers the kind of woman she wants to be.
We love to highlight and showcase the work of women filmmakers here at Bitch Flicks. Here are all 17 of the women-directed films you should check out at the 2016 East End Film Festival in London.
Having a superhero grapple with the right use of their power is hardly a new theme and it’s central to the broader narrative of ‘Captain America: Civil War.’ But allowing a female superhero to tackle the same dilemma on a deeply personal level feels quietly subversive. …Women superheroes can be inhumanly powerful without being reduced to a boringly infallible female badass caricature.
From Imperator Furiosa to Letty Ortiz, strong and knowledgeable female characters crop up in car movies. The women who used to be relegated to flag girls and objectified as hood ornaments are now being introduced as main characters with their own plot points and story developments.
With the women of color being so scarce in the show, it’s just as important to look at the quality of these portrayals. While ‘Game of Thrones’ does give us some strong women of color, many of them are portrayed problematically in their own ways: either put into subservient roles, exoticized, demonized, or otherwise discarded by the narrative in ways that the white characters aren’t.
Perhaps the depiction of “the girl” in ‘The Girl in the Train’ will reassure my fears by allowing the woman to literally “grow up” on-screen. Yet, the title makes me very pessimistic. Presenting women as “girls” continues to fetishize women’s powerlessness in cinema. By situating this girlhood in a similar way to the male fantasy construction of the Final Girl, and by enforcing an infantilizing return to post-feminism’s “girliness,” these films offer ultimately disempowering images of female subjectivity.
Check out all of the posts from our Women Directors Theme Week here.
I’m a woman director who’s been working in Hollywood for nearly 3 decades. I was compelled to bring Lilly Ledbetter’s story to the big screen because her David-and-Goliath battles with an entrenched, American corporation resonated for me politically, professionally, and personally. The truth is that, while Lilly’s life and mine may seem worlds apart, we are both female workers in male-dominated industries — and gender discrimination hurts the same everywhere.
British director/screenwriter Andrea Arnold has three short films and three feature films under her belt, and four out of six of those center on working class people. … [The characters in ‘Fish Tank,’ ‘Wasp,’ ‘Red Road,’ and ‘Wuthering Heights’] venture off away from the preconceived notions they have been given, away from the stereotypes forced upon them, and the boxes society has trapped them in.
But, when was the last time ANYONE sat down to write a story, or direct a project and asked themselves — Is this story masculine or feminine? Exactly none, I suspect. … Storytellers tell stories, audiences engage, the formula is quite simple. But, it only works one way — male filmmakers are able to make any film they want without biased-loaded gender questions, whereas women filmmakers always face more scrutiny and criticism.
Marielle Heller (‘The Diary of a Teenage Girl’), Miranda July (‘Me and You and Everyone We Know’), and the women directors of ‘Jane the Virgin’ are infusing elements of whimsy into their work in strikingly different ways, but to similar effect. The styles they’re using affect the audience’s relationship with their stories and with the characters themselves by giving the viewer an insight that traditional narratives don’t provide.
