Female Filmmakers – Page 3

Seed & Spark: #EarlyCinemaSoBlack

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

This is a guest post by Deborah Riley Draper.

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

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

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

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

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

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

___________________________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a guest post by Paula Schwartz.

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

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

Gina Prince-Bythewood and Melissa Silverstein

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blurred Lines: The Cinematic Appeal of Rape Fantasy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fifty Shades of Grey: Madonna’s Like A Virgin

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

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

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

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

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

“Blurred Lines”: Male Readings Of Rape Fantasy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Written by Brigit McCone.

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

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

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

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

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

Emma Thompson gets this book

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Patricia Rozema does not get this book.

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

‘Selma’ Shows Why We Need More Black Women Filmmakers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Pelo Malo’ (‘Bad Hair’): Coding Blackness and Genderqueer Identity

White and non-Black people can have a “bad hair day.” But only Black folks get labeled with bad hair for life, no matter how it is groomed. Especially Black women. Go to any retail store that sells hair products and the ethnic section (read:Black) has more hair creams, gels, mousse, sprays, relaxers, grease, puddings, pomades, hair butter, oils, lotions, to fry, dye and lay that bushy crown to the side. I won’t even get into the hot combs, wigs, weaves, lacefronts, extensions, and clip-ons used to hide a Black woman’s natural hair state. It’s one thing when little Black girls are indoctrinated early to hate their hair, but what about little Black boys who may also be genderqueer? How is this hair struggle tolerated by a homophobic mother struggling to keep her head above water?

Pelo Malo movie poster. — *Pelo Malo* movie poster.

There is nothing more purifying to the human psyche than when another human being sees you for who you really are and accepts you just as you are. And there’s nothing more soul-crushing than when they don’t. This is at the heart of writer/director Mariana Rondón’s Pelo Malo as it follows the journey of a young Venezuelan boy named Junior (Samuel Lange Zambrano).

Junior is a 9-year-old boy living with his single mother, Marta (Samantha Castillo), and infant brother in a Caracas housing development that looks like an overpopulated urban nightmare. I will call the child Black despite differing racial categories between North America and South America. Every coded Black person on the planet knows who the term “Bad Hair” was created for—persons of African descent with that extra curl in their DNA. Most descendants of enslaved Africans shipped to different parts of the “New World” are a mixture of African, Indigenous (Native), and European heritage. Hair textures will fall anywhere from straight, wavy, to extra thick and tightly curled. Or a mixture of all three.

Most Black boys don’t have hair issues because they are typically shorn of their locks at an early age. I’ve often witnessed Black mothers and fathers letting their son’s hair grow freely while it is still soft baby hair, but the moment it kinks up a little too tight, they cut it off. As long as boys and men keep the scalp lined up right by the barber, and don’t let it get too overgrown and unkempt, the struggle is minimal. Some Black men (and boys) get “texturizers” (basically light relaxers for men), or sport a wave cap overnight to create spiral waves around their scalp. Back in the day it was the Jheri curl or the California curl, where often dark-skinned men suffered chemical treatments like women to get that glossy-curly look that some lighter-skinned men naturally had. Ironically, to me at least, Junior has the silky dream hair that some Black boys and girls in my part of the world would pray for. The boy is naturally beautiful; however, in his mind he knows that the ultimate beauty is straight, European-looking hair. Famous singers who he likes are his role models. They have straight hair. All his little heart desires in the movie is to take a yearbook picture for the new school year with straight hair. Dassit.

Junior tries to figure out his place in his marginalized world.

The one friend Junior has in the whole world, La Nina (María Emilia Sulbarán)

The antagonism stems from his mother Marta, who sees Junior’s fixation with his hair as a huge problem. Not only does her son fuss over his hair and appearance, but he is also effeminate. This is the most painful part of watching Pelo Malo. Marta is a beautiful woman, but her face takes on such ugliness every time she looks at Junior. This child loves his mother to death, spends a lot of time just staring at her, as if trying to figure out the laws of feminine allure. One day Junior sits on a couch watching TV with Marta. He looks over and gazes at her face with such adoration and deep love, but then she snaps on him, “Stop staring at me like that!” From her tone we know he does this often. And we get to witness this longing gaze many times. Marta spends most of her screen time projecting onto Junior her fears of having a gay son. She does some pretty damaging things to try and fix him too throughout the film.

Junior (Samuel Lange Zambrano) is fixated on his mother Marta (Samantha Castillo)

Junior doesn’t break dance like the neighborhood kids, he does a trance-like inner groove with his eyes closed and she is disturbed by it. When she catches him doing this same dance on a city bus, she snatches him up, and Junior doesn’t understand why she is angry. It is literally painful to watch. She piles on the psychological and verbal child abuse. The more that Junior tries to get Marta to love him, she pushes him away. If Venus was a boy, she would be Junior. This fact frightens Marta.

Junior and Marta don't see eye to eye. — Junior and Marta don’t see eye to eye.

Of course, part of Marta’s behavior is rooted in the harsh marginalized environment they live in that punishes perceived deviance. Her son’s burgeoning homosexuality is just one more problem she will have to deal with on top of being poor, single, begging for her underpaid job back, and raising two children, one of which is still nursing from her breasts. Every time she looks at her son, she sees the discrimination, danger, and ridicule they will both have to face against the outside world. But instead of being compassionate, she is angry and perturbed by his mere presence. Her face conveys so much deep-seated hatred for the boy, that at first I thought she was salty with the child because maybe he looked like his father and there was a bad break-up. However, later in the story we find out that she loved the boy’s Black father. Marta’s face softens just talking about him, so the audience has to search for other clues as to her lack of affection towards Junior. She’s constantly pushing/pulling him places, screaming at him outside their bathroom door whenever he locks himself in there to fix his hair in some kind of way that flattens it.

Marta is loving and affectionate with her white-skinned, straight-haired infant son. There is a tender moment where she is topless and bathing the little one. Junior watches (always watching), a sad yearning in his expression. I wondered. Did she ever hold him like that? Kiss him that way? Maybe when his father was alive?

Marta bonding with her lighter-skinned, straight-haired little one.

At one point Marta lies on her bed exhausted from her job search, weary from being turned down for security work, something she is trained for. Junior crawls in next to her and tries to comfort her, and she shoves him away. I began to wonder if it was a combination of his non-conforming sexuality and his Blackness that she despised. There are plenty of non-Black women/men who find Black partners and have children, and yet still harbor racial prejudice. There are even Black-with-Black partners that harbor colorism issues regarding light and dark skin tones.

I admit the colorism/affection issue triggered me in this film. I also come from a single parent household where I am the oldest and darkest child, and the sibling I grew up with is fair-skinned, hazel-eyed, and bone-straight dishwater blonde. My mother was auburn-haired and light-skinned, and although she never had issues with my skin-tone, I was young enough to notice how other people (Black, White, Mexican, Asian, etc) reacted when the two of us went places with our mother. My sister was fawned over (her skin, her eyes, her hair), while I was referred to as the reader. Black children (and non-Black children) learn subconsciously (even before they begin to speak) that whiteness and proximity to whiteness is EVERYTHING, and the opposite is viewed as negative.

Throughout Pelo Malo there were uncomfortable re-rememberings of myself looking at myself in the mirror when I was Junior’s age, slathering Vaseline or Blue Magic Hair Grease on my hair, trying to slick all that stuff DOWN. Tame it. Control it. Essentially hide all that made me stand out as the really Black one in the family. So I was all in my feels watching Junior struggle to get that elusive straight hair. It’s not a comfortable experience to watch a film that basically shows you your childhood and how painful it was. I realized I had built up a lot of buffers around my own hair/skin color trauma.

Grandma Carmen (Nelly Ramos) teaches Junior to sing and dance. — Grandma Carmen (Nelly Ramos) teaches Junior to dance and get loose.

Junior’s only saving grace is his Black paternal Grandmother Carmen (Nelly Ramos). The moment I see Carmen’s teeny-weeny ‘fro, I know this is a woman who embraces her natural beauty. She doesn’t sport a wig, or straighten her locks. She plays music and likes to dance. She even straightens Junior’s hair when he asks just so he can see what it would look like, but she admonishes him to wet it back up before his mother comes to get him. She spots right off what is evident about her grandson. He is not a hard boy. He is concerned with his appearance. He wants to be a singer. He wants straight hair for his yearbook picture. Grandma Carmen obliges by making him a suit that looks like something the singer Prince would wear. This time spent with Carmen is a respite for Junior, but unfortunately the need for Marta’s love and acceptance is so strong, Junior convinces himself that Grandma Carmen is trying to turn him into a girl. The frilly suit he found so delightful stitched from his grandmother’s hand becomes a suit of shame.

Grandma Carmen straightens half of Junior's hair so he can see his desire. — Grandma Carmen straightens half of Junior’s hair so he can see his desire.

Grandma Carmen (Nelly Ramos) shows Junior how to sing like a rock star. — Grandma Carmen (Nelly Ramos) shows Junior how to sing like the star he wants to be.

In the end, Marta tells Junior he can only stay with her if he cuts off all his curly ringlets. The hair has become a symbol of Black queerness for Marta. It must be vanquished. It’s a devastating blow, and the last shot we have of Junior is a gut-wrencher. He is in his school uniform wearing close-cropped hair. Unsmiling. It is the yearbook photo. But not the one he wanted.

Pelo Malo ends with no issues resolved, and no hints that life will change or be better for Junior. However, there is one ray of hope in the end credits. We get to see what Junior looks like wearing his grandmother’s Prince-like suit. His hair is blow-dried straight and he dances to his grandmother’s favorite song. He looks glorious. And free.

I left the theater thinking, “How many Juniors, male/female/gay/gender-neutral/genderfluid/transgender/non-binary are out there in the world?”

I know there are millions. And we must be vigilant in holding safe spaces for those children to grow, discover, and define themselves on their own terms. Children like Leelah Alcorn, who recently took her own life because she couldn’t be the person she needed to be. That is the lesson of Pelo Malo.

If nothing else, people should see this little gem just to gaze at the beautiful face of actor Samuel Lange Zambrano. The weight of this movie is carried on his thin little shoulders, and he handles it like a pro. He is perfection.

The riveting Samantha Castillo(Marta) and the perfection that is Samuel Lange Zambrano (Junior) — The riveting Samantha Castillo (Marta) and the perfection that is Samuel Lange Zambrano (Junior)

_______________________________

Lisa Bolekaja is a graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer’s Workshop and a former Film Independent Fellow. She co-hosts a screenwriting podcast called “Hilliard Guess’ Screenwriters Rant Room” and her work has appeared in “Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History” (Crossed Genres Publishing), “The WisCon Chronicles: Volume 8″ (Aqueduct Press), and the SF/F anthology, “How to Live on Other Planets: A Handbook for Aspiring Aliens” (Upper Rubber Boot Books). Her latest SF story “Three Voices” will be forthcoming in Uncanny Magazine.

Seed & Spark: Writing Women

Five-Fingered Lucy, from seedandspark.com, © Jack Lawrence Mayer — *Five-Fingered Lucy*, from seedandspark.com, © Jack Lawrence Mayer

This is a guest post by Martine Moore.

This month, I’ll shoot a short film called Five-Fingered Lucy, in which I play the lead. It’s a dark, girl-meets-patriarchy story about a young shoplifter, written and directed by Jack Lawrence Mayer. The script tackles sexuality, abuse, and solitude. Jack is a long time friend and collaborator, and yet, my decision to be in his film is a conscience call. He is telling a story about male culture from a female point of view. Should I let Jack tell my story for me, or broadly speaking, should women let men tell our stories for us?

This is a question that can be asked at every level of the industry. Let’s take a look at the big awards circuit films this year, as presented by the Golden Globes list of nominees for 2015. Of the Best Picture nominees, only one centers on a woman’s experience, and that’s The Theory of Everything, which, arguably, is a story popularized by the famous male figure it depicts. The film is based on Jane Hawking’s memoir of her marriage to Stephen Hawking. The screenplay is written by a man, Anthony McCarten, and directed by a man, James Marsh.

The Best Actress category is a better place to search for films with female driven content, and here the pattern holds: Cake, Still Alice (an adaptation of Lisa Genova’s novel), Wild (an adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s memoir) and Big Eyes are all written or adapted and directed by men. Annie has a single woman on the writing staff, Aline Brosh McKenna, but is otherwise written and directed by men. The notable exception is Gone Girl, directed by David Fincher but adapted by Gillian Flynn from her own best-selling novel.*

Cheryl Strayed, from her website, cherylstrayed.com, photo by Jobi Kabana

Much has been made of Gone Girl’s feminist or anti-feminist content and its psychopathic anti-heroine, Amy Dunne. I’m not sure this movie qualifies as female-driven content, as half of the narrative is a male POV, but I saw the movie and will say this: I don’t think it’s up to Flynn, simply by virtue of being a female writer, to create characters that advance the feminist cause, though her reliance on stereotypes that seem to re-reinforce misogynistic views—namely that women lie about rape—is unfortunate. Still, these stereotypes have more to do with Flynn’s capacities as a writer and her chosen genre than they do with her stance on feminism. I side with Zoë Heller, who wrote in the New York Review of Books that both the novel and film are too plainly pieces of pop entertainment to be taken as serious examinations of gender.

Yet, Flynn carried her story into this second, male-dominated medium on her own, which is no small feat. How come the female authors of best-selling books like Genova and Strayed didn’t adapt their own work for the screen?

Strayed, in an interview with Indiewire, is asked the question, and responds, “Well I wasn’t offered the job! And I think I agree why. Reese and Bruna both felt that with a memoir the writer isn’t the best person to make that adaptation because he or she is too close to the material and to that life.” Apparently the best person for the job is Nick Hornby, a popular male British writer who has written numerous novels and screenplays. He received Strayed’s blessing before adapting Wild.

Can men tell authentic stories from the female perspective? For any artist, the world should be his or her fictional oyster. Men can write women, and women can write men; imagination and empathy do not have a gender. Male filmmakers who are captivated by women’s stories and want to tell them can be allies. Actresses are still lucky to get a role in which they are fully developed (and fully clothed), with nuance and an inner life, and many words to speak. Still, the overwhelming likelihood is that those words will be written by a man, and spoken under the direction of another, despite the source material.

Women’s Media Center logo, from their website, womensmediacenter.com

It’s not enough to simply say to women, “Make your own work.” They are attempting to do so. Look at enrollment numbers in film schools, as one indication. Women make up 46 percent of USC’s School of Cinematic Studies, according to their admissions site. On the indie film circuit, women’s participation is greater as well, making up 26.4 percent of writers at Sundance in 2013, and 50 percent of its narrative directors. But when women hit the larger market and the culture at large, these numbers slide drastically. Women either can’t get hired or secure funding. The Center for the Study of Women in Television & Film at San Diego State has found that women’s participation behind the camera is at 16 percent for the top 250 domestically made films in 2013, down one point from 1998. The Center’s Director, Dr. Martha Lauzen, is quoted as saying “there is no evidence to suggest that women’s employment has improved in key behind-the-scenes roles over the last 16 years,” debunking anyone’s notion of gradual but linear progress.

So, where does that leave us? There are the dismal numbers, all laid out, Hollywood’s claims that it can’t take risks, that women are a financial liability (though they buy the majority of movie tickets), or that the few female execs that climb to the top can’t or won’t pull other women up with them. But on the micro-level, this is about individual decisions each woman makes when she allows a story she wrote to be usurped as it transfers to the screen, or takes a part, no matter how fantastic, that is written and directed by a man. It’s a decision that comes with internal conflict. We’ve come a ways in acknowledging that women’s stories on screen hold universal, non-gendered appeal. We need to take the next step in giving women more opportunity to tell them themselves.

*While this is a separate though related discussion, I would be remiss not to point out that all these stories, with the exception of a re-imagined Annie, are about white women.

Martine Moore is an actress and writer living in Los Angeles. She is a co-creator of the web series Ingenue and will appear in the upcoming shorts Dry and Five-Fingered Lucy and the feature, Americana. martineaverymoore.com

Seed & Spark: “Stop Whining; Woman Up”

If all of those intelligent people who believe that would give these animated films a chance, they would see how incredibly powerful some of these films are for adults as well. However it is actually a fantastic thing that ‘Big Hero 6’ appeals to kids, and I think this might be one of the most important movies for kids to grow up watching. ‘Big Hero 6’ is the start of creating a reality where gender inequality doesn’t exist.

This is a guest post by Shantal Freedman.

I recently saw a movie that blew me away: Big Hero 6 (spoilers ahead). I tend to come across people who don’t think it’s possible to deeply enjoy a “cartoon” or think cartoons are only for kids. If all of those intelligent people who believe that would give these animated films a chance, they would see how incredibly powerful some of these films are for adults as well. However it is actually a fantastic thing that Big Hero 6 appeals to kids, and I think this might be one of the most important movies for kids to grow up watching. Big Hero 6 is the start of creating a reality where gender inequality doesn’t exist.

First, it was really nice to see that Hero’s group of friends was equally split between male and female: two girls, two guys. Disney’s flagpole films have been switching off between a male lead and a female lead yearly. This one was a male lead, yet the female characters were very prevalent and strong. There wasn’t a single female who wasn’t a completely awesome character. Any girl can watch this movie and feel as connected as any guy.

One of my favorite characters in the movie is Gogo. She’s one of Hero’s friends and she is a badass scientist, both in the lab and out. She kills it in all of the fight scenes. Actually, all of his friends equally kill it – not one person was stronger or weaker, they were all equally strong in their own way with their own powers. You’ll see many times in movies that the “badass girl” is either butch and stiff (also in her personality) or a sex object. Gogo is neither, she is the badass girl who is also a human.

Hero has a breakdown partway through the film. He is a teenager trying to cope with his brother’s death and he finally loses it. He even left all of his friends on an island, taking their only means of transportation out of there. They make it back and meet Hero in his garage. One of the crucial things a person can do to help a friend who is depressed, is to be a friend. Gogo understands this, walks up to Hero without saying a thing, and hugs him. She can be tough but also feminine and nurturing. This teaches boys and girls that they can be whatever they want. This teaches the next generation that they don’t need to fit in a box or be ridiculed for being who they are. That’s true for every character in this film.

And my favorite line in the film? Gogo: “Stop whining; woman up.” It was casual and said in a non-obvious way. It didn’t phase any of the characters. It was a line that appeared to be “normal.” I really appreciate something like this in a film. It’s not trying to beat people over the head with their message that “woman up” is the same as “man up.” She says “woman up” a second time around the climax of the film during the last fight out with Professor Callaghan. She was literally speeding up a pillar of microbots. Gogo’s looks are also an interesting thing to note.

In fact, the looks for all of the female characters are extremely important to mention. Clearly, each significant female character looks quite good. They are all attractive. Part of me thought, “well, maybe they could have switched up their body-types a bit.” Then the other part of me thought, “I’m so glad they made all of the female characters really attractive!” Why? Because not a single one of them was defined in any way by their looks. There was no comment about how hot someone was, there was no romantic relationships going on in the group which is something we’ve come to expect, and there was no one hitting on Hero’s hot aunt, which Fred’s character would have totally been doing if this was another movie.

One of the most important elements of the entire movie is the world that they created. The world in Big Hero 6 is a world where all women are treated with respect. Gender inequality wasn’t even an issue. Not to get all dark, but we talk so much about rape culture these days and hopefully everyone knows by now that teaching women to dress more modestly is not how to fix this but rather teaching our sons to respect women. This is what Big Hero 6 does. A kid watches Big Hero 6 and gets invested in a world where the women are respected. All of them. It’s so common for writers and directors to characterize a “bad guy” by him disrespecting a woman in some way, whether it be physical abuse, demeaning insults or just having an entourage of women at the tips of his fingers. Imagine if that wasn’t even an option. Imagine what the next generation will be like if they grew up on films like Big Hero 6? I tear up just thinking about the beauty and impact Big Hero 6 can and hopefully will have on our society.

As a director myself, this film really moves me. One of the things I care very deeply about is the portrayal of women in films. I just finished shooting my latest film, Ticketed, where I, too, created a world where gender inequality just doesn’t exist. I truly believe that if we positively promote these morals, instead of beating people over the head and shaming them for their bad habits, change will happen. I think there needs to be more films out there like Big Hero 6, which is why it’s so important for me to get Ticketed out there.

We need to raise the funds to finish the film and complete our post production. We’ve launched a funding campaign on Seed&Spark so anyone who wants to support a non-preachy action-packed comedy with a female lead and mission behind it can do so. You can learn more here: http://www.seedandspark.com/studio/ticketed; www.facebook.com/Ticketed, @TicketedMovie. Email ticketedthemovie@gmail.com.

See also at Bitch Flicks: Big Hero 6: Woman Up

Shantal Freedman is a fema-nazi man-hater who became a director to make a point. Although, she’s not really sure what that point is anymore. Despite all that she is a domestic and international award winning filmmaker whose films have incurred compliments such as “meh” and “the popcorn was good.”

‘Beyond the Lights’ Premiere: Interviews with Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Gina Prince-Bythewood

Gina Price-Bythewood: “It’s a love story first, but for me as a filmmaker, I never just want to make a movie that entertains. It should entertain first, but I think it should say something and this was an issue that was important to me, the way woman are objectified. The way that women don’t have a voice. As an artist I was able to put that into the film as well as someone who has something to say and sometimes it’s a struggle to get the chance, to just inspire women, also men, to have their own voice.”

New+York+Premiere+Relativity+Media+Beyond+JSRkDgZtCe6l — Gugu Mbatha-Raw, left, and Gina Prince-Bythewood

This is a guest post by Paula Schwartz.

Read ahead for interviews with Beyond the Lights star, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, and director, Gina Prince-Bythewood.

Gugu Mbatha-Raw, so good earlier this year in Amma Asante’s Belle as a biracial woman raised in aristocracy in slave-era England, is just as impressive in Gina Prince-Bythewood’s Beyond the Lights as Noni, a pop singer who yearns for her identity and authenticity even as she’s pushed to perform sexy numbers in skimpy costumes. Mbatha-Raw’s fiery performance, which showcases her talent as a singer and dancer, just earned her a Gotham nomination for best actress to include her in the company of Julianne Moore and Scarlett Johansson.

As for the talented director, Prince-Bythewood, it’s been way too long between movies; her last feature film was The Secret Life of Bees in 2008, and before that, the critically acclaimed Love & Basketball, back in 2000.

I chatted with Mbatha-Raw and Prince-Bythewood on the red carpet at the New York premiere of Beyond the Lights last week.

Co-stars Nate Parker, who plays the security guard who becomes her love interest after he saves her from a suicide attempt, and rapper Colson “Machine Gun Kelly” Baker, who told me he writes lyrics that respect women, joined Mbatha-Raw on the red carpet, along with writer-director Gina Prince-Bythewood and her producer husband, Reggie Rock Bythewood. (Minnie Driver, who gives a powerhouse performance as Noni’s manipulative “momager,” and in one of the best scenes in the movie has a blow-out argument with Noni over the direction of her career, was sadly not at the premiere.)

First I got to speak to Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who went from the film’s pop diva vixen in the film to an elegant 1940s-style Hollywood glamour queen on the red carpet.
Bitch Flicks: How did the musical scenes come together?

Mbatha-Raw: It’s been such a gift of a role. I grew up singing and dancing as a child, but more sort of musical theater style and classical dancing, so for me to be able to embrace this hip-hop style, you know I had a lot of help. Gina surrounded me with some wonderful people in the industry, not just herself, who’s had a background researching a lot of the hip-hop world, but also Laurieann Gibson, the choreographer (Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj, Katy Perry), The Dream (Kanye West, Beyonce, Jay-Z), who wrote all the original music (Rihanna, Kanye West, Beyoncé) and also Machine Gun Kelly, who’s here, who really is a rapper in the industry and brings so much charisma and authenticity cause he really is from that world, so really I sort of had a lot of things to draw upon and felt very well-supported by the research cause we knew about the movie, or I knew about the movie, for almost two years before we got to shoot it.

BF: Were you uncomfortable performing the sexually suggestive numbers?

Mbatha-Raw: I felt very supported by the choreography. We rehearsed it; Laurieann Gibson as I mentioned, created that whole routine and that was something we rehearsed in the studio in front of a mirror for many hours, you know, and adding the elements of the hair, the makeup, the wigs, the amazing hair designs by Kim Kimble (Beyoncé), and the costumes of course, so we really were building this character on so many levels and then it was just really down to kind of doing it and singing the song and projecting that energy into the lens, which was a new experience for me, because usually as an actress you’re pretending the camera isn’t there but obviously for a music video in that style you have to look directly into the camera. And that was scary initially, but I had to get over it.

BF: Talk about your upcoming projects, including Jupiter Ascending, the Wachowski siblings sci-fi film. (It co-stars Eddie Redmayne, Mila Kunis and Channing Tatum.)

Mbatha-Raw: I just have a small role in that, but it’s a really exciting movie. I’m looking forward to seeing it because I haven’t seen it yet. It’s sort of an epic space adventure and I play a character’s who’s half human, half deer.

I also shot a movie in the summer called The Whole Truth with another female director called Courtney Hunt. I don’t know when that’s coming out yet (Renee Zellweger, Keanu Reeves), and I’ve just started work on another project that’s called Compassion with Will Smith about brain injuries in the NFL.
BF: (To director Gina Prince-Bythewood about her search for an actress to play Noni.)

Prince-Bythewood: I thought I wanted a real musical artist in the lead when I first wrote it (2007) and then realized for this character I needed an actor because this character goes into some pretty deep depths. And I found Gugu two years ago and it was an amazing thing to find a woman who had incredible chops, could sing, and was brave enough to go there. And she really is brave.

BF: How did Gugu prepare for the musical numbers?

Prince-Bythewood: She put in so much work. She has a background in musical theater, which I didn’t know originally. But she worked with Debra Byrd, a vocal coach, one of the most renowned, and then the Dream; he did all the original music, and for her it was hours in the studio singing to his demos the way that Noni would, where they tell you exactly how to sing a word, how to breathe, how to sing a note. There’s no control and that’s what I wanted for Gugu the actress to have to experience, because that’s what Noni would experience.

BF: Your movie besides being entertainment has a message. How important was that to you as a filmmaker?

Prince-Bythewood: It’s a love story first, but for me as a filmmaker, I never just want to make a movie that entertains. It should entertain first, but I think it should say something and this was an issue that was important to me, the way woman are objectified. The way that women don’t have a voice. As an artist I was able to put that into the film as well as someone who has something to say and sometimes it’s a struggle to get the chance, to just inspire women, also men, to have their own voice.

BF: You talk about how women are sexually objectified in pop culture, but how do you avoid that trap in your portrayal of Noni doing those sexy moves?

Prince-Bythewood: It starts with the message of the film and Gugu and I talked a lot about why we were doing this film and it was really to talk to young girls who are only emulating what they see right now. Can we give them something else to aspire to? So going in we knew for the character of Noni, the less she wears the less you see of her, that was the mantra, so we had to make a big jump from her as little girl and that sweetness and innocence about her, to the jump to what she is 15 years later. It has to be dramatic so that you wonder what damage happened in between. Trust me, I’m a female filmmaker, it’s a little tough sometimes to shoot things like that, but we had to compete with what the videos are out today and honestly, we could have gone further. If you see what’s out now, so we had to be authentic so that we could take the character on a journey and bring her back to an authentic place and the place that she wants to be.

BF: What’s your next movie?

Prince-Bythewood: It will take me about a year to write. It focuses more on female friendship and the way it changes through the years.

Seed & Spark: What Do Women Want?

Still searching for a way to answer our question of fairness, the young woman of Jumla, sitting wearily before me, looked quizzically at our translator.

Our translator said: “She’s asking what ‘fair’ means.”

This is a guest post by Sophie Dia Pegrum.

A voice. After filming a day in the life of a young woman of Jumla, Nepal, we asked her whether she considered the physical burdens of her life fair in comparison to her young husband. She thought about it for a long time. I sat, exhausted, watching her thoughts pass across her face from my position behind the camera. As the co-director and DP, I had spent what I considered a fairly grueling day arising before dawn, hauling my first world gear several miles up a mountain pass to follow this young woman while she searched for firewood, chopped it, and carried a seemingly impossible load back down the steep mountain path. The morning’s trek was engaged at a rather leisurely pace by her standards due me getting all the shots I wanted while desperately searching for my inner mountain filmmaker goat. This was just the beginning of a long day which also involved her journey across the village to milk a cow, cook meals for her husband’s family, and to hand clay wash the front of their stone house using freezing water. Her husband had been hanging out in the village most of the day and had decided to go to the river to fish in the afternoon.

Families in Jumla will often spend their limited resources educating their sons, for as soon as a young girl is married, she goes to live with the family of her husband, and essentially becomes their scullion. Why use the little assets a family has to educate the daughters who will essentially marry into a life of drudgery?

Still searching for a way to answer our question of fairness, the young woman of Jumla, sitting wearily before me, looked quizzically at our translator.

Our translator said: “She’s asking what ‘fair’ means.”

How do you find another way to ask this question? For us, the educated women of the industrialized nation, who stand on the shoulders of our sisters who have fought for our equality, we cannot un-know this history. We are as puzzled by the idea of not conceiving of equality, as the young woman of Jumla, who knits her eyebrows, trying to comprehend the concept. Moreover, what good will it do her to try to answer this question. For even if her life was unfair, what could she do to change it?

We spent time on and off over the next three years, embedded in the same village, observing many similar stories and capturing the immense spirit and strength of the women in this remote place in the foothills of the Himalaya. In the beginning, some women were too shy to even consider talking to us, but often, many women who had never been asked their opinion, began to express themselves in front of the camera, and we saw a subtle shift.

I had often questioned our presence as two women filmmakers, and the impact we may be having. Certainly, both being about six feet tall, we were often a source of local entertainment as we constantly hit our heads on low ceilings and doors and crammed ourselves into small corners of smokey kitchens to film. Though loaded with irony for my own personal reasons, being lovingly referred to by the locals as the “cameraman,” I enjoyed the moniker that to them, represented professionalism.

Over time, we recorded the myriad voices of women here, especially in their song. Women sang in the fields as they worked together, their strains echoing uphill as they disappeared with their baskets to collect wood. They sang in their kitchens in the evening after the days work was done and they sang together while they pounded corn. They sang for us and asked us to share our songs. My co-director and I tried to figure out if there was another song aside from “Happy Birthday” that we both knew the words to.

Women who had never been asked to air their opinions were sometimes surprised by their own voices. Often uneducated, they hadn’t had the opportunity to create the thought patterns which allowed them to form their own judgements and ideas, or create a view of themselves in the world. One woman told us that she didn’t feel that she could take a free class being offered by a local charity because she didn’t think she was capable of learning.

One of the most poignant memories I have was at the end of an interview we did with a man who was running a tea shop and inn with his wife and children. As I was packing away the camera he came to us and said that he would reconsider the education of his own daughters. He said that watching us operate “technical things” made him appreciate that perhaps his daughters had more potential than he had realized. He now understood and believed that women could do things like that and he wanted his daughters to have this opportunity.

Women will still have to find their voices, but within this complex and embedded societal structure, men will need to stand alongside them too and this requires better education for all and a deep shift in thinking.

Our film, Daughters of the Curved Moon, will be coming out in the next year and I am looking forward to sharing the inspiring story of these communities with a wider audience. I am also finishing up another documentary I shot on the roof of the world called Talking to the Air, which I am crowd-funding at Seed&Spark. My ability to articulate my voice as a filmmaker comes from the determination of so many others before me. In turn, I wish to use this channel to tell authentic stories of humankind that promote a sense of wonder in us all, and to share the voices of those that are still struggling to find their forum. After working in the high Himalaya, I am now also determined to learn some new songs.

Sophie Dia Pegrum is a director and cinematographer who has produced and shot films in the Antarctic, at the North Pole and in the Himalayas including 77 Below and Daughters of the Curved Moon. Sophie co-owns Horsefly Films and the Rare Equine Trust and produces docs about rare horses and fragile horse cultures worldwide. She is currently finishing a film she shot on the Tibetan border titled Talking to the Air: The Horses of the Last Forbidden Kingdom.

Why ‘The Babadook’ is the Feminist Horror Film of the Year

Firstly, ‘The Babadook’ complicates the depiction of women as primarily victims by presenting Amelia as a complex and multi-faceted figure. For one, she is a not a young big-breasted girl but a mother and fully grown woman. This is not necessarily groundbreaking in itself.

Written by Sarah Smyth.

“If it’s in a word, or it’s in a look, you can’t get rid of the Babadook…”

The poster for 'The Babadook' — The poster for *The Babadook*

So begins the bedtime story read by Amelia (Essie Davis) to her son, Samuel (Noah Wiseman) in the hit Australian horror film, The Babadook. The story focuses on Amelia, a single mother whose husband died in a car crash on their way to the hospital to have Samuel, as she struggles in her role as a parent to her difficult, troubled, and increasingly erratic son. Samuel is afraid of monsters, believing them to be waiting to get him come nightfall. He frequently sleeps in bed with Amelia, and makes his own contraptions to protect both of them. His behaviour becomes so disruptive, however, that he is kicked out of school. One night, Amelia and Samuel read the story of the Babadook in a creepy pop-up book which Amelia has no recollection of owning. The Babadook, a sinister and scary ghoulish figure, will never leave after its presence becomes known. After they read the book, strange occurrences take place, and the rest of the film follows their terrifying encounters with the Babadook.

Amelia and Samuel read the creepy book about the Babadook together

The main strength of the film, in terms of both narrative and gender politics, is the role of Amelia. Before we even consider how women are represented on film, the fact that women are represented on film, particularly by taking on the central role, is an achievement. Not only did only 30 percent of the top-grossing films of 2013 have lead female characters, but a huge number of films still fail the Bechdel test. In terms of race, the picture gets even worse as 73 percent of female characters are white. However, simply making female-led films and passing the Bechdel test is not enough. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Transformers: Dark of the Moon and Transformers: Age of Distinction all pass the test, yet the film’s treatment of women on (and apparently off) screen is atrocious. After Megan Fox quit the franchise, apparently likening Michael Bay, the films’ director, to Hitler, Shia LaBeouf commented that Fox developed “this Spice Girl strength, this woman-empowerment [stuff] that made her feel awkward about her involvement with Michael, who some people think is a very lascivious filmmaker, the way he films women.” The Transformers franchise makes apparent that, in order to get a more accurate look at the role women play and the impact women have in the film industry, we must look at how women are represented on screen as much as whether women are represented at all.

The 'Transformers' franchise demonstrates why the Bechdel test doesn't always cut it... — The *Transformers* franchise demonstrates why the Bechdel test doesn’t always cut it…

Horror films, in particular, demonstrate this case. Although women are often the lead character in this genre, the representation of women as a whole is often problematic at best. When filming The Birds, Alfred Hitchcock famously claimed he always follows the advice to “torture the women!” something which apparently happened as much off-screen as on-screen. As Sydney Prescott noted in the horror-parody franchise, Scream, horror films often depict “some big-breasted girl who can’t act who is always running up the stairs when she should be running out the front door.” Both Hitchcock and Sydney’s comments demonstrate women’s twofold role in the horror genre: victim and sexual object.

Firstly, The Babadook complicates the depiction of women as primarily victims by presenting Amelia as a complex and multi-faceted figure. For one, she is a not a young big-breasted girl but a mother and fully grown woman. This is not necessarily groundbreaking in itself. The Others, The Ring, and Dark Water all depict their central characters as mothers. However, none so brilliantly present their central character as complicated as Amelia in The Babadook. Amelia is not only a victim and a mother but a colleague, potential lover, sister, neighbor, and grieving widow. The strength of the narrative is the way in which the film meshes the difficulties of being a mother to a troubled child with the haunting of the Babadook, and the way in which this complex combination strains all Amelia’s relationships. It also causes her to lash out at her neighbor, miss days at work, refuse advances from potential partners, and fall out with her sister. But whether it’s the stress of being a mother or the terror of the Babadook remains ambiguous as the film presents her identity, relationships and experiences as layered and complicated.

Secondly, The Babadook consciously subverts the conventional depiction of female sexuality in horror films. Broadly speaking, female characters are either presented as “virgins” or “whores,” where they are punished “appropriately,” or female sexuality is presented as something excessive, disgusting and monstrous. In her authoritative and brilliantly titled book, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in Modern Horror Films, Carol Clover outlines the trope of the Final Girl in the slasher film. The Final Girl, she claims, is the films lead character, who, as both the victim but also the only survivor in the film, serves as both the site of the audience’s sadistic fantasies, and the anchor for the spectator’s identification. Primarily aimed at young heterosexual men, the Final Girl must be “masculine” enough so that this (assumed) spectator can identify with her; she is often androgynous or tomboyish in appearance and sometimes in name. More crucially, she must be sexualised but never sexual; she must provide the fleshy site for the heterosexual male’s voyeuristic fantasies but she must never have autonomy over her own body and sexuality. In fact, she is often virginal. If a woman does have sex in these films, she is branded a “whore” so quickly gets killed off. Examples of films which conform to these tropes include Halloween, Friday the 13^th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and, more recently, You’re Next. Post-modern pastiche horror films including Scream and The Cabin in the Woods also play on the trope. On the other hand, as Barbara Creed discusses in her book, The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis, female sexuality is also presented as grotesque and terrifying, reflecting, she claims, male anxieties over female sexuality. Examples include The Exorcist, The Brood, and Carrie.

Laurie in 'Halloween' is a typical example of the Final Girl trope — Laurie in *Halloween* is a typical example of the Final Girl trope

The Babadook subverts these conventions by presenting woman in possession of (healthy) sexual desire and needs. In one scene, Amelia watches a romantic film alone before going up to her bedroom and taking out her vibrator. Her night of pleasure is ruined, however, after Samuel interrupts her claiming he is terrified of his own room and so cannot sleep in it. Her disappointment is evident; motherhood, it seems, can be as much frustrating as it can be difficult. Crucially, however, the film not only radically foregrounds female sexuality and desire, something which horror films, as I demonstrate, conventionally dismiss. It also links the terror of the Babadook with Amelia’s frustrated lack rather than an excess of grotesque and monstrous sexuality. At moments, the Babadook manifests itself in the form of her late husband. When Amelia first sees him, she passionately hugs and kisses him, clearly missing the affection and sexual intimacy offered from a romantic partner. Only after the Babadook, disguised as her husband, asks for her to bring him the child does she realise that this is a trap. Her husband cannot and will not come back to fulfill the needs she so desperately craves. The Babadook, like the grief she feels for her husband, will continue to haunt Amelia forevermore, serving as a constant reminder of the loss of sexual desire and intimacy which the death of her husband so tragically caused. The terror of the Babadook, then, is as much about the loss of a treasured presence as well as the intrusion of an unwelcome presence.

The Babadook offers a hope for feminist horror fans who are tired of cliché-ridden depictions of two-dimensional, victimised, hyper-sexualised female characters. A film which not only passes the Bechdel test, but presents a complex, multi-layered, sexually autonomous central female protagonist, The Babadook offers hope that the horror genre will shift its depiction of lead female characters to create more compelling, engaging and accurate representations of women onscreen.

___________________________________

Sarah Smyth is a staff writer at Bitch Flicks who recently finished a Master’s Degree in Critical Theory with an emphasis on gender and film at the University of Sussex, UK. Her dissertation examined the abject male body in cinema, particularly focusing on the spatiality of the anus (yes, really). She’s based now in London, UK and you can follow her on Twitter at @sarahsmyth91.

Making Sure Female Friendship Films Aren’t Forgotten: ‘Take Care of My Cat’

The film is about the evolving friendships of five young South Korean women as they step away from their technical high school into a less certain world. Their degrees of closeness shift as they consider their futures in the face of particular restrictions in work and life opportunities due to gender and class discrimination.

This guest post by Adam Hartzell appears as part of our theme week on Female Friendship.

Before I knew about the Bechdel Test, I knew about Take Care of My Cat, the 2001 debut film by South Korean director Jeong Jae-eun that is a required text for those interested in New Korean Cinema.[i] Among the many admirable and compelling aspects of the film, I found it most compelling that it had almost nothing to do with boys.[ii] As film scholar Chi-Yun Shin put it, “These women are defined not by men but by themselves and with each other.”

Tae-hee, played by the incredible Bae Doo-na of The Host and Cloud Atlas, continues to work at her family’s sauna and is the hub of the friendship network. She does her best to keep everyone together. Hye-joo (Lee Yo-won) is the social climber, but she is not played for cliché. Her character–at risk of caricature–is provided more depth than is usual for someone of her type. Hye-joo’s closest friend in high school was Ji-young (Ok Ji-young). But Ji-young’s economic situation, living alone with her frail grandparents in a much poorer part of Incheon, results in limited employment options. She doesn’t have the money to keep up with Hye-joo’s status-seeking desires. She wants to go to art school, but her family lacks the funds to enable this pursuit. Then there are the Chinese-Korean identical twins, Bi-ryu and Ohn-jo (played respectively by the Lee sisters, Eun-shil and Eun-ju). Their characters are less developed than the others, but their presence serves as acknowledgement of South Korea’s own specific multicultural make-up, something rarely acknowledged in the film industry at this time. Another character of interest here is the poet with cerebral palsy [iii] who dictates his poetry to Tae-hee. All these characters are, in their own ways, outsiders in relation to the growing South Korean economy only recently recovering from the IMF crisis.

Along with these characters, there is the cat that is passed between them. A stray that was found by Ji-young, it is given as a present to Hye-joo. When she returns this gift, it signifies rejection of their high school friendship that may no longer hold in their adult lives. The cat finds its way into the hands of all the women and represents an attempt to communicate what is unspoken between them. Jeong has said regarding her intent with the cat, “I had hoped for the girls to be like cats – flexible, independent, complex, to have the tendency to leave if they are not happy with their owner.”

In addition, mobile phones play a vibrant part in the communication, miscommunication, and refusal to communicate between the young women. Jeong displays the text on screen alongside the characters in an early creative effort to represent texting on film, of which South Korean cinema was an early pioneer. Finally, the gorgeous soundtrack works off the bleeps and tones of cellphones in its dreamy underscoring of this liminal period in the lives of these young women.

With the exception of the twins, each woman confronts discrimination directly. Ji-young does not have family or other connections necessary for the referrals required for certain jobs. Expectations are made by a male co-worker that Hye-joo should have laser vision corrective surgery. Tae-hee must deal with her father’s continued preference to her younger brother, leading to a confrontation with her father in a restaurant that includes a Korean literary reference. [iv] Explaining how Ji-young and Tae-hee fully resolve these forms of structural discrimination would result in my having to reveal plot points that I don’t want to reveal here. Let me just say that Tae-hee finds a connection with the temporary migrants in South Korea, Filipinos and Burmese, adding yet another layer to the feelings of isolation and exclusion these young women feel in the country of their birth.

Director Jeong Jae-eun has given us a wonderful exploration of female friendship through young women, whose position in their society is not stable. Allegiances shift as class rears a greater presence in their adult lives. As all great direction and scripts do, Jeong mostly shows rather than tells how these women connect and how they fail to connect. Early on in the historical prevalence of mobile technologies, Jeong demonstrates the myth in the promotional hype that such tools will keep us closer. She shows how they also keep us apart in how the tools are used and how class barriers limit access to such tools. Although it didn’t do spectacularly at the box office, Take Care of My Cat so touched its intended audience that it inspired an uprising of support to bring it back to theatres after being pulled sooner than fans wanted.

When New Korean Cinema emerged on the international film scene, part of what made it unique as a national film movement was the significant presence of not one, but three women directors. Along with Jeong, there was Lim Soon-rye and Byun Young-joo. Lim’s first two films were, interestingly, about male friendship (Three Friends and Waikiki Brothers). Lim would go on to direct a 2008 film partially about female friendship, a film based on a real-life South Korean women’s Olympic team handball squad called Forever the Moment. I think I can go on record and say it’s the greatest team handball film ever made. [v] Sports films in South Korea do not tend to do well, so it is a tremendous achievement that Lim garnered box office success for that film. Byun is most famous for her trilogy of documentaries on “Comfort Women,” which involve her friendship with women survivors and their own friendships with each other. Although Ardor and Flying Boys are less appreciated works, I am actually a fan of those feature films by Byun. Her most recent film, Helpless, actually garnered a best director from the industry. Back to Jeong–she moved on from Take Care of My Cat to a film partially about male friendship (The Aggressives). That film did not perform well at the box office and we had to wait seven years before Jeong took the director helm again, this time with critically well-received documentaries about architecture.

The reason I mention this women triumvirate of New Korean Cinema, besides pointing out how they all have directed films focusing on female friendship, is that in spite of their solid work and that of the women directors who joined them later, such as Park Chan-ok, Bang Eun-jin, and Gina Kim, I find myself discouraged that Jeong and other quality films by women directors, such as Kim’s excellent Invisible Light from 2003, often don’t make it on lists of significant films of the New Korean Cinema movement. Such lists are often dominated by the opposite of friendship, the male violence of films like Old Boy and I Saw The Devil.

Case in point: recently Indiewire, which on all other levels is a strong advocate of women’s films and focuses considerable coverage to pointing out gender discrimination in the U.S. film industry, posted a “primer” this summer on what they mislabeled as the “Korean New Wave.” (See the first endnote.) In that primer they completely dismiss the impact of women directors in South Korea. In their parenthetical excuse, they say they were only looking at films with “a measure of international distribution.” This is disingenuous since Take Care of My Cat received considerable international distribution for the time and Hong Sangsoo’s 2013 film Nobody’s Daughter Haewon, which made their list, has received almost next to nothing. [vi]

This erasure of women directors partly happens because we privilege the stories told by male directors, particularly those that are violent or action-oriented as Indiewire’s list of “essential” films demonstrates. Films about women’s lives where relationships are given precedence don’t fall into the male fight club preferences of many casual references to the South Korean film industry. Take Care of My Cat is a canonical text of New Korean Cinema. To leave it off your list is like leaving off Bong Joon-ho’s 2003 masterpiece Memories of Murder. Films about female friendship, the hard work of caring for others while negotiating room for independence, is just as much art, is just as engaging as, if not more than, watching a bunch of guys beat the crap out of each other. Ignoring films by the women of New Korean Cinema is part of a longer tradition of dismissing the women’s labor that makes art and entertainment possible. Take Care of My Cat’s erasure reminds us that we need to take care of our films and make sure that the exceptional works by these women aren’t forgotten or underappreciated. Such systematic forgetting makes it harder for the South Korean women working in the industry now and in the future to bring us their stories.

[i] Some writers have confused the “New Korean Cinema” and “Korean New Wave” film movements. For an example of this confusion, see Indiewire’s “10 Essential Films of the Korean New Wave” (June 26, 2014, credited to ‘The Playlist Staff’) where none of the films listed are part of the Korean New Wave but are actually part of New Korean Cinema. In the scholarly literature “Korean New Wave” denotes certain films made in the 1980s to the mid-90s that first started to address the cultural suppression and censorship at that time in South Korea’s history and were closely connected to the democracy movement. “New Korean Cinema” began in the late 1990s when censorship laws loosened and higher production quality became available. Then another confusing moniker entered the picture, “Hallyu,” which refers to the global pop culture phenomenon of South Korea films, television dramas, and pop music. The launching of the film segment of “Hallyu” began with Shiri (1999) by Kang Je-gyu. Mistakes in naming the wrong movement are primarily due to the names not being distinct enough. The fact that they both have “New” in them doesn’t help. Add to this that Hallyu means “wave” and you can see why Indiewire and others might mix up the movements and their origins. There are several books one can read to clarify this confusion, see for example Chi-Yun Shin and Julian Stringer’s New Korean Cinema (University of Edinburgh Press, 2005), Darcy Paquet’s New Korean Cinema: Breaking the Wave (Wallflower Press, 2010) and Directory of World Cinema: South Korea (ed. Colette Balmain, Intellect Ltd., 2013).

[ii] There is a young man who conveys romantic interest toward one of our characters, Hye-joo. Hye-joo brushes him off. But her romantic refusal is not “punished” or seen as her core flaw. Her friends are more upset with her general rudeness to him rather than any gender expectation that she should find the right man quickly or else she’ll regret it.

[iii] This character is played by an actor of similar embodiment, which is still rare casting for any national film industry.

[iv] The literary reference is to a novella by Cho Se-hui, the title of which goes by a few translation variations but I will use this one – A Little Ball Launched by a Dwarf. It’s a bit of a plot spoiler to mention the actual dialogue so I won’t here.

[v] If anyone knows of another team handball film, I seriously would love to know since sports films are one of my other film interests.

[vi] I am assuming by “international distribution” the authors mean what most folks intend by that phrase, distribution outside of film festivals.

Adam Hartzell has been a contributing writer to Koreanfilm.org since 2000. He has written for various websites (Fandor, sf360, VCinemaShow), the quarterly Kyoto Journal, and has a chapter in The Cinema of Japan and Korea (Wallflower Press) along with contributions in Directory of World Cinema: South Korea (Intellect Ltd). He writes often about the films of Hong Sangsoo such as for a retrospective of his work held in San Francisco and a paper delivered at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in Seattle in 2014.