Paul Dano and Zoe Kazan in Ruby Sparks |
Zoe Kazan as Ruby Sparks |
Calvin at his magical typewriter. |
The radical notion that women like good movies
Paul Dano and Zoe Kazan in Ruby Sparks |
Zoe Kazan as Ruby Sparks |
Calvin at his magical typewriter. |
I rented Persepolis before the recent Iranian election, and have been thinking ever since about the film.
Persepolis is adapted from the autobiographical graphic novels written by Marjane Satrapi (which I haven’t read), and represents the first graphic-novel-as-film. Other graphic novels have been made into films, but none (to my knowledge) have remained as true to form as this. Visually, the film is lovely, stark, and at times deeply disturbing.
In Persepolis, we meet Marjane, a young girl living in Iran at the time of the Islamic revolution of 1979. The society changed drastically under Islamic law, as evidenced by Marjane’s teacher’s evolving lessons. After the revolution, in 1982, she tells the young girls, who are now required by law to cover their heads, “The veil stands for freedom. A decent woman shelters herself from men’s eyes. A woman who shows herself will burn in hell.” In typical fashion, the students escape her ideological droning through imported pop culture: the music of ABBA, The Bee Gees, Michael Jackson, and Iron Maiden.
The history of Iran, while it determines the course of Marjane’s life, really is a backdrop—especially in the second half of the movie. In other words, the film is more about the experience of one woman than a documentary-style account of Iranian history. Once Marjane escapes the society she grew up in, her problems become much more ordinary for a Western audience, more commonplace. She vacillates between different crowds of people. She falls in love and has her heart broken. She feels angst and confusion over who she is and what she wants. She goes home to Iran for a time and, like so many others, ultimately finds she cannot return home.
As evident in the film, Satrapi grew up in a wealthy, educated, progressive Iranian family. They sent her to Vienna as a teenager so she didn’t have to spend her adolescence in such a repressive society, and because they feared what might happen to such an outspoken young woman there. While acknowledging her privilege, not many women in circumstances other than these would be able to accomplish what she has. Satrapi isn’t afraid to show missteps she makes in growing up, either. Young Marjane learns that her femininity, even when repressed by law, offers great power—and shows how she misuses that power. Missing her mother’s lesson at the grocery store about female solidarity, she blames other women for her troubles (“Ma’am, my mother is dead. My stepmother’s so cruel. If I’m late, she’ll kill me. She’ll burn me with an iron. She’ll make my dad put me in an orphanage.”), and falsely accuses a man of looking at her in public to avoid the law coming down on her.
Persepolis is, in every definition of the term, a feminist film. There are strong, interesting female characters who sometimes make mistakes. The women, like in real life, are engaged in politics and struggle with expectations set for them and that they set for themselves. They have relationships with various people, but their lives are not defined by one romantic relationship, even though sometimes it can feel that way.
As much as I like this movie, I can’t help but write this review through the lens of an interview Satrapi gave in 2004, in which she claimed to not be a feminist and displayed ignorance of the basic concept of feminism. I simply don’t believe gender inequality can be dissolved through basic humanism — especially in oppressive patriarchal societies like Iran. I wonder if feminism represents too radical a position to non-Westerners, and if her statements were more strategy than sincerity. Making feminism an enemy or perpetuating the post-feminist rhetoric isn’t going to help anyone. That said, this is a very good movie and I highly recommend it.
The Nation: Icons of the New Iran by Barbara Crossette
Feminist Peace Network: Memo to ABC: Lipstick Revolution FAIL
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Callie Khouri |
Salon: People who make TV also seem much more comfortable making shows for women than people making movies do.
Khouri: “Because you’re allowed. You’re allowed to make things for women on television and there’s not like … you don’t have to go through the humiliation of having made something directed at women. There it’s just accepted, whereas if it’s a feature, it’s like “So, talk to me about chick flicks.” … I just think it’s insulting that if there is something with women in it, it’s relegated to this kind of trash heap. It doesn’t matter what it is, how good it is, if there is emotion in it, it’s immediately going to be talked down to. And I’m obviously irritated by that. Probably all women are. Certainly a lot of women filmmakers are.…Anyway, I don’t want to just complain about features, but it does seem unduly hard given the number of women that exist in the world.”On the show not being “about a catfight,” even though it starts out that way:
Khouri: “…You come at things from the place where everybody thinks they know everything about what they are seeing. And then you just slowly peel back the layers until you’ve got very complicated human beings with very different sets of problems, all of them doing something that’s impossibly hard to begin with and trying to make their place in this world. Watching two women go at it is boring. There are so many other shows where you can get that. I want it to be about something more than that.”
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Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.
Callie Khouri |
Salon: People who make TV also seem much more comfortable making shows for women than people making movies do.
Khouri: “Because you’re allowed. You’re allowed to make things for women on television and there’s not like … you don’t have to go through the humiliation of having made something directed at women. There it’s just accepted, whereas if it’s a feature, it’s like “So, talk to me about chick flicks.” … I just think it’s insulting that if there is something with women in it, it’s relegated to this kind of trash heap. It doesn’t matter what it is, how good it is, if there is emotion in it, it’s immediately going to be talked down to. And I’m obviously irritated by that. Probably all women are. Certainly a lot of women filmmakers are.…Anyway, I don’t want to just complain about features, but it does seem unduly hard given the number of women that exist in the world.”On the show not being “about a catfight,” even though it starts out that way:
Khouri: “…You come at things from the place where everybody thinks they know everything about what they are seeing. And then you just slowly peel back the layers until you’ve got very complicated human beings with very different sets of problems, all of them doing something that’s impossibly hard to begin with and trying to make their place in this world. Watching two women go at it is boring. There are so many other shows where you can get that. I want it to be about something more than that.”
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Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.
(L-R): Zoe Saldana and Nina Simone; image via Black Street |
When Zoe Saldana was recently cast as legendary singer Nina Simone in her upcoming biopic, the decision ignited a firestorm of controversy. People have vehemently criticized the decision. Not because Saldana isn’t a skilled actor (she is). But because her skin is much lighter than the music icon.
“I can guarantee that the sense of insecurity and the questioning of one’s beauty that results from a grownup telling you that as a child you’re too black and your nose is too wide, remained with her [her mother Nina Simone] for the rest of her life.”
At The Huffington Post, Nicole Moore writes about Nina Simone and the “erasure of black women in film”:
“Because Simone’s blackness extended as much to her musical prowess as to her physicality and image, it’s perplexing that the film’s production team, led by Jimmy Iovine, expects anyone, particularly in the black community, to (re)imagine Nina Simone as fair-skinned, thin-lipped and narrow-nosed? I guess if you look at Hollywood’s history of casting black female roles, especially in biopics, it’s not all that surprising.”
Hollywood has a massive race and gender problem. Black women’s bodies belong to a dichotomy suffering from either fetishization or erasure. When Black women appear in media, which doesn’t happen nearly enough, they suffer from stereotypes of mammies, jezebels and sapphires. And too many producers and directors clearly don’t understand the nuances of race, thinking any person of color will suffice.
“In the past few years Hollywood has consistently gotten it wrong when it comes to telling black women’s narratives. From the questionable choice of casting Thandie Newton as an Igbo woman in the film adaptation of the novel Half of a Yellow Sun and Jennifer Hudson as Winnie Mandela, to Jacqueline Fleming, a biracial woman, playing Harriet Tubman, when other people are in charge of portraying us, it seems like any brown face will do.”
The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates also finds the “bleaching of Nina Simone” problematic and reinforcing systemic racism:
“But this casting (with no shot taken at Saldana) manages to both erase the specific kind of racism Simone contended with and at the same time empower it.”
Most white people probably don’t realize the painful history of colorism and skin shade hierarchy — dark vs. light skin — Black women continually face. When the media portrays Black women, we often see women with lighter skin and more Caucasian features. Both L’Oreal and Elle photoshopped Black women — Beyonce and Gabby Sidibe — to make their skin appear much lighter. In film, advertisements and magazine spreads, the media often whitewashes black women, continually perpetuating the unachievable attainment of the white ideal of beauty.
“Skin color and its importance around the world—and particularly in the African-American community—has been a hot-button issue for generations. The debate over skin color and its painful origins dates back to the days of slavery, when lighter skin often equaled a better overall quality of life. With more pronounced European features, bearers of a lighter complexion were also considered more attractive than their darker-skinned peers. Possessing this trait was believed to open the cracked doors of opportunity ever wider.”
Due to white privilege, white people don’t agonize over their skin color. We don’t have to worry if someone will harass us or follow us around in a department store, thinking we’re going to steal merchandise simply because of our skin. If we move, we don’t have to worry about finding neighbors who don’t like us because of our skin color. We don’t have to fret over something as simple as putting on a Band-Aid which won’t match our skin tone.
“The hard truth is this: if we spent more time creating media instead of criticizing it, there’d be way more diversity in representation, and way more stories and perspectives to which white people can be more frequently held accountable.
“Pushing for ownership of both the infrastructure and content that portrays our lived experiences – that is the crux of the issue; not just the politics of light vs. dark-skinned actresses. So, whereas I am completely on board with calling out the colorism behind the biopic’s casting choices (and the harmful message that’s being sent to young, dark-skinned black girls everywhere by having a light-skinned woman play Nina Simone) there aren’t enough strong lead roles written for women of color in Hollywood for me to fairly tell Zoe Saldana, a hard-working, talented brown woman to ”sit this one out.”
Here at Bitch Flicks, we talk a lot about the need for more female filmmakers and women-centric films. One of the takeaways from the Zoe Saldana/Nina Simone controversy is that we desperately need more women of color filmmakers.
“So black women, one of the most sought after audience demographics for movie studios, aren’t behind the camera providing insight into our culture. This leads to a misrepresentation of the black community on the silver screen. Often, we are caricatures of ourselves, as evidenced in Jumping the Broom and other projects, which leads to resentment for what the media machine represents in our communities.”
When a young Black female tennis player is told she’s too fat to receive funding, when the Swedish Minister of Culture and rapper 2Chainz eat racist cakes of dismembered Black women’s bodies, when the media cares more about criticizing Olympic gold-medal winning gymnast Gabby Douglas’ hair than her performance — we as a society clearly have a fucked-up, racist and misogynistic problem denigrating and oppressing Black women.
Woody Allen and Penelope Cruz on set of To Rome With Love |
Hey film lovers! Here’s this week’s feminist film question. Who is your favorite female film director? Here’s what you said (along with some of their films):
Chantal Akerman — Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles; A Couch in New York; The Captive; Tomorrow We Move
Gillian Armstrong — Little Women, My Brilliant Career, Oscar and Lucinda, The Last Days of Chez Nous, Charlotte Gray
Dorothy Arzner — Dance, Girl, Dance; The Wild Party; The Bride Wore Red; Christopher Strong; Working Girls
Kathryn Bigelow — The Hurt Locker, Strange Days, Point Break, Near Dark, The Weight of Water, Blue Steel
Jane Campion — The Piano, Bright Star, Sweetie, In the Cut, Holy Smoke!, An Angel at My Table, Portrait of a Lady
Niki Caro — Whale Rider, North Country
Brenda Champman — Brave, The Prince of Egypt
Lisa Cholodenko — The Kids Are All Right, High Art, Laurel Canyon
Sofia Coppola — Lost in Translation, Marie Antoinette, The Virgin Suicides, Somewhere
Maya Deren — Meshes of the Afternoon, At Land, A Study in Choreography for the Camera, Rituals in Transfigured Time, Meditation on Violence
Ava DuVernay — I Will Follow, Middle of Nowhere
Nora Ephron — Sleepless in Seattle, Julie & Julia, You’ve Got Mail, This Is My Life, Mixed Nuts
Su Friedrich — Damned If You Don’t, Gently Down the Stream, The Odds of Recovery, Hide and Seek, The Ties That Bind
Debra Granik — Winter’s Bone
Alice Guy-Blaché — Algie the Miner, La Fée aux Choux, Matrimony’s Speed Limit
Mary Harron — American Psycho, The Moth Diaries, I Shot Andy Warhol, The Notorious Bettie Page
Amy Heckerling — Clueless, Vamps, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Look Who’s Talking, National Lampoon’s European Vacation
Nicole Holofcener — Please Give, Friends with Money, Lovely & Amazing, Walking and Talking
Matia Karrell — Behind the Red Door, Once Upon a Wedding
Kasi Lemmons — Eve’s Bayou, The Caveman’s Valentine, Talk to Me
Ida Lupino — Outrage, The Trouble with Angels, The Bigamist, The Hitch-Hiker, Never Fear
Deepa Mehta — Fire, Earth, Water, Heaven on Earth
Nancy Meyers — It’s Complicated, Something’s Gotta Give, The Holiday, What Women Want, The Parent Trap
Mira Nair — Monsoon Wedding, Amelia, The Namesake, Salaam Bombay!, Mississippi Masala
Kimberly Peirce — Boys Don’t Cry, Stop-Loss
Sarah Polley — Take This Waltz, Away from Her
Sally Potter — Orlando, Yes, The Man Who Cried, The Tango Lesson
Yvonne Rainer — The Man Who Envied Women, MURDER and Murder, Privilege
Lynne Ramsay — We Need to Talk about Kevin, Ratcatcher, Morvern Callar
Dee Rees — Pariah, Eventual Salvation
Kelly Reichardt — Meek’s Cutoff, Wendy and Lucy, River of Grass, Old Joy
Angela Robinson — D.E.B.S., Herbie: Fully Loaded
Barbra Streisand — Yentl, The Prince of Tides, The Mirror Has Two Faces
Did your favorite filmmaker make the list? Tell us in the comments!
Fire (1996) |
I wanted to make a film about contemporary, middle-class India, with all its vulnerabilities, foibles and the incredible extremely dramatic battle that is waged daily between the forces of tradition and the desire for an independent, individual voice.
More than 350 million Indians belong to the burgeoning middle-class and lead lives not unlike the Kapur family in Fire. They might not experience exactly the same angst or choices as these particular characters, but the confusions they share are very similar–the ambiguity surrounding sexuality and its manifestation and the incredible weight of figures (especially female ones) from ancient scriptures which define Indian women as pious, dutiful, self-sacrificing, while Indian popular cinema, a.k.a. “Bollywood”, portrays women as sex objects (Mundu’s fantasy).
To capture all this on celluloid was, to a large part, the reason I wanted to do Fire. Even though Fire is very particular in its time and space and setting, I wanted its emotional content to be universal.
Radha and Sita |
The reaction of some male members of the audience was so violent that the police had to be called. “I’m going to shoot you, madam!” was one response. According to Mehta, the men who objected couldn’t articulate the word “lesbian” — “this is not in our Indian culture!” was as much as they could bring themselves to say.
It isn’t only the tangible pleasures of a lesbian relationship that created such heated reactions, though that’s certainly the most obvious reason. This beautifully shot, well-acted film is a powerful, sometimes hypnotic critique of the rigid norms of a patriarchal, post-colonial society that keeps both sexes down.
Again, here’s Mehta on Fire:
We women, especially Indian women, constantly have to go through a metaphorical test of purity in order to be validated as human beings, not unlike Sita’s trial by fire.I’ve seen most of the women in my family go through this, in one form or another. Do we, as women, have choices? And, if we make choices, what is the price we pay for them?
There is a ton of information online about Fire. Here are some selected articles for further reading:
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Linda Cardellini as Kelli in Return |
Linda Cardellini and Michael Shannon |
Linda Cardellini and John Slattery |
Amber‘s Picks:
Hillary’s Hair: More Newsworthy Than the Summit of the Americas? by Jenn Pozner for WIMN’s Voices
People on the Internet Can Be Hella Racist by Issa for xo Jane
We Heart: Funny or Die Counsels Rick Santorum on “Aborting” His Campaign by Lauren Barbato for Ms.
Why Everyone Is Losing Their Shit Over the Magic Mike Trailer by Kelsey Wallace for Bitch Magazine
Kristin Marcon & ‘The Most Fun You Can Have Dying’ by Wellywood Woman
Stephanie‘s Picks:
Pakistani Documentary Makers Nominated in Cannes Film Festival by Areeb Hasni for The News Tribe
Daenerys Targaryen and the Most Powerful Women in Television History by Judy Berman for The Atlantic
Joss Whedon Performs at Women’s Rights Event, Decries Sexism, Praises ‘Hunger Games’ by Jordan Zakarin for The Hollywood Reporter
Condescending Dude Review of Hunger Games by Fannie for Fannie’s Room
HBO’s ‘Girls’ Is All About Spoiled White Girls by Renee Martin for Womanist Musings
Girls That Television Will Never Know by Latoya Peterson for Racialicious
Megan‘s Picks:
When ‘Art’ Goes Wrong: Black Women’s Pain Is Not a Prop by Jamilah Lemieux for Ebony
Why We Need to Keep Talking About the White Girls on Girls by Dodai Stewart for Jezebel
Film Women Shining at Tribeca Fest by Associated Press for My San Antonio
Girls Just Want to Change the Needle On a Tired Media Record: Stop Telling Us We’re Fat by Roth Cornet for Hit Fix
The Other Girls and Diversity Goals for Pop Culture by Alyssa Rosenberg for Think Progress
Yes, I’m Buying the Katniss Everdeen Barbie For My Daughter by Hayley Krischer for Ms. Magazine