10 Movies by Black Women to Stream on Netflix This Weekend by Alexis Jackson at Shine at For Harriet
The radical notion that women like good movies
Check out what we’ve been reading this week–and let us know what you’ve been reading/writing in the comments!
10 Movies by Black Women to Stream on Netflix This Weekend by Alexis Jackson at Shine at For Harriet
Check out what we’ve been reading this week–and let us know what you’ve been reading/writing in the comments!
A pantheon of one’s own: 25 female film critics worth celebrating at BFI
#FilmHerStory: 10 Female Biopics That Desperately Need to Happen by
Ava DuVernay: Focusing the Lens on Equality by Kitty Lindsay at Ms. blog
The Workplace Is Even More Sexist In Movies Than In Reality by Walt Hickey at FiveThirtyEight
13 Gay Things You Can’t Miss at South By Southwest by Neal Broverman at Advocate
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Women and girl characters in film (and the plays and works of literature films are based on) lie a lot. I don’t mean that they tell an occasional (or not so occasional) untruth, the way male characters often do. I mean that the role of a woman or girl in the movie can many times be summed up as “the liar.” The student in ‘The Children’s Hour’, the girl in ‘Atonement’, the girl in ‘The Hunt’, the two teenagers in ‘Wild Things’ the Demi Moore character in ‘Disclosure’ are all liars who disrupt the lives of those around them, usually men, whom they falsely accuse of sexual misconduct or abuse. The men are, of course, always completely innocent of the charges.
Women and girl characters in film (and the plays and works of literature films are based on) lie a lot. I don’t mean that they tell an occasional (or not so occasional) untruth, the way male characters often do. I mean that the role of a woman or girl in a movie can many times be summed up as “the liar.” The student in The Children’s Hour, the girl in Atonement, the girl in The Hunt, the two teenagers in Wild Things, the Demi Moore character in Disclosure are all liars who disrupt the lives of those around them, usually men, whom they falsely accuse of sexual misconduct or abuse. The men are, of course, always completely innocent of the charges.
This scenario is the opposite of the common real life situation, in which a woman or girl lies (or pretends nothing is wrong) when she has been raped, sexually abused or sexually harassed. She doesn’t bring charges. She tries to function as if the rape, abuse or harassment hasn’t occurred and decides not to disrupt her own family or career by calling public attention to what has happened to her. Those stories we pretty much never see played out in film.
Unless that film is Anita, the new documentary from Oscar-winner Freida Lee Mock about Anita Hill, the woman who came forward during the confirmation hearings, over 20 years ago, for Clarence Thomas as Supreme Court Justice. Thomas had sexually harassed Hill when he was her boss at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the agency that is supposed to implement Federal laws against discrimination, including sexual harassment. She had never pressed charges and had even kept a professional relationship with Thomas (for the sake of her career) after moving on from the EEOC. But when officials were interviewing his former coworkers and assistants for a background check, Hill felt she had to tell the truth.
The FBI file that contained Hill’s private interview was leaked to the press. Women politicians and reporters were outraged that the Senate had been prepared to confirm Thomas without looking into his past conduct, so hearings were called in which Hill was subpoenaed to testify in person. We see the media following her with cameras and lights even before her appearance in the Senate, as she makes her way across the University of Oklahoma campus where she was a tenured law professor. “I just want to teach my class,” she tells them. In a humorous moment that didn’t make it into the news stories of the time she mentions what was then her legal specialty. “I can answer any questions you have about contracts.”
The Senate committee grilled her for hours at a time over the course of days, but Hill never lost her composure in spite of being forced to repeat, on national live television, the explicit details of Thomas’s harassment, which included references to pornography and his own anatomy. The excerpts of the hearing are the most striking part of the film, and the documentary could use more of them.
The Republicans on the committee (we see some particularly despicable moments from Alan Simpson and Arlen Spector), eager to confirm Thomas, portray Hill as a liar. These old white men do their best to denigrate her, and although the footage of the hearings shows that they never succeeded in diminishing her clear-eyed, precise testimony, they did succeed, in the off-camera arena, in diminishing her reputation.
The film shows, so we don’t forget, that Hill’s testimony was confirmed by four others whom she had told about the harassment at the time it was occurring. They gave their sworn testimony in front of live national television and one of them, another African American woman even mentions why Hill had kept in touch with Thomas, “My mother always told me, as I’m sure her mother told her, that wherever you leave, make sure you leave friends there, because you never know when you will need them.” She goes on to detail that for this very reason she exchanges Christmas cards with former colleagues she can’t stand.
The film also includes the information that Thomas had harassed other women in the workplace, at least one of whom was also subpoenaed, but mysteriously never called to testify. In the live question and answer period after the showing I attended, Hill explicitly blamed now Vice President, then Judiciary Committee Chair, Joe Biden, for this decision. She explained the “he said, she said” narrative the committee wanted to put forth would have been disrupted if more than one woman had offered testimony of how Thomas had harassed her.
Because of the all-white membership of the committee, Thomas could get away, in his own testimony, with labeling the hearings “a high tech lynching” (the folly of that description is pointed out in the film by the male African American corporate lawyer whose testimony confirmed Hill’s) while ignoring that Hill too was African American. Hill sums up this narrative as “I had a gender. He had a race.”
Hill always had the support of her large (she is one of 13 children), close family. In another clip that never made its way into the news stories of the time, we see her 79-year-old mother giving her a hug at the Senate hearing witness table and stand beside her outside of her family home back in Oklahoma, when the media ask for a statement on Thomas’s confirmation. Dignified as always, Hill tells them that she hopes her testimony will encourage other women to speak up about harassment in their own workplaces.
In spite of her tenured position at The University of Oklahoma, Hill felt the pressure from local Republican politicians (who targeted not just her, but also went after the Dean and the institution itself) to resign and eventually moved across the country to a position at Brandeis University where she is now at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management. She also travels around the country lecturing on sexual harassment, which, she points out, she wouldn’t have felt free to do if she had stayed at the University of Oklahoma. We see that Hill even has a supportive, long term boyfriend. Although the footage of this part of her life is less dramatic than that of the testimony I understand why the director includes it. After people in her own hometown angrily confronted Hill on the street about her testimony, after famously being called “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty” (by a writer who later recanted though the slander lives on), in spite of Thomas being confirmed and sitting on the court to this day when even Hill’s lawyer’s 12-year-old daughter told her Dad, “I believe Anita,” and in spite of politicians and courts still explicitly or implicitly labeling women as liars when they seek justice against powerful men, we need to see at least one happy ending–to give the rest of us the fortitude to continue fighting.
[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGrWaCCVfq0″]
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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing has appeared in The Toast, xoJane, and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.
Check out what we’ve been reading this week–and let us know what you’ve been reading/writing in the comments!
They Cast Whom?! Actor Choices To Offend Every Racial Sensibility by Kat Chow at NPR Code Switch
I Made a Movie About Anita Hill, a Woman Who Changed the Face of History by Freida Mock at xoJane
White guys still don’t get it: This is the real reason they dominate TV by Soraya Chemaly at Slate
Has Bollywood Finally Embraced Feminism In Filmmaking? at Flickering Myth
Why You Should Be Skeptical About The Live-Action Remake Of ‘Jem’ by Nichole Perkins at Think Progress
Black Film Theory Part 3: Subversion & Liberation From The Illusions Of White Supremacy In Cinematic Narration by Andre Seewood at Shadow and Act
5 Reasons to Watch Broad City by Inkoo Kang at Women and Hollywood
New Film “I Believe in Unicorns” is a Teen Girl Dream, But Gets Lost in its Own Magic by Kerensa Cadenas at Bitch Media
The Fantasy of Mammy, the Truth of Patsey by Janell Hobson at Ms. blog
Rosario Dawson on ‘Cesar Chavez,’ Immigration, Gentrification in NYC, and Beating Hollywood Bias by Marlow Stern at The Daily Beast
ABC’s ‘Alice in Arabia’ Is Racist by Rabia Chaudry at TIME
Check out what we’ve been reading this week–and let us know what you’ve been reading/writing in the comments!
Take the Tarrant Test for 2014 Super Bowl Ads! at Ms. blog
Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth premieres nationally Friday, February 7 at 9 p.m. on PBS
Telling women’s stories will change the world, Sundance filmmakers say by Ellen Fagg Weist at The Salt Lake City Tribune
Watching Downton Abbey With an Historian: Birth Control by Mo Moulton at The Toast
Study: Female Movie Stars’ Paychecks Decrease Rapidly After Age 34 by Inkoo Kang at Women and Hollywood
Don’t Be a Dick: A Comic About the History of Lady-Centric Comics by Ladydrawers at Bitch Media
Harvey Weinstein: Quentin Tarantino producer vows to stop making excessively violet films by Tomas Jivanda at The Independent
Reel Girl’s List of Top 10 Movies Starring Heroic Girls to Show Your Kids at Reel Girl
Five Theories For What ‘American Horror Story: Coven’ Was Actually About by Alison Willmore at Indiewire
Watch This Anita Hill Documentary Trailer and Remain Calm, I Dare You by Hillary Crosley at Jezebel
7 Ways Stars Can Change Hollywood This Awards Season by Holly L. Derr at Role/Reboot
Shonda Rhimes on her DGA Diversity Award: ‘We’re a tiny bit p-ssed off that there has to be an award’ by Lindsey Bahr at Entertainment Weekly
4 Films about LGBT Muslims Everyone Needs to Watch at QWOC Media
Margaret Cho cast in Tina Fey-produced comedy by Sandra Gonzalez at Entertainment Weekly
Sexed up Powerpuff Girls point to Cartoon Network’s girl problem at Reel Girl