Tag: Films By Women

‘Suffragette’: The More Things Change the More They Stay the Same

In fact, it made me even more upset at the fact that one hundred years later, we may have the vote but women are still facing inequality, sexual harassment, unequal pay, and poor conditions in the workplace. … I wasn’t expecting to be as taken aback by just how little has changed since the period ‘Suffragette’ is set. …It made me realize we need [feminism] more than ever.

Suffragette movie

This guest post is written by Scarlett Harris. | Spoilers ahead.

I went to see Suffragette at the culmination of a day spent feeling utterly depressed at the state of women in the workplace and the world at large. As you can imagine, Suffragette did nothing to assuage my feelings. In fact, it made me even more upset at the fact that one hundred years later, we may have the vote but women are still facing inequality, sexual harassment, unequal pay, and poor conditions in the workplace.

The day in question saw my Twitter timeline full of defenses of cricketer Chris Gayle, who hit on a female reporter as she was trying to interview him after a game; Jamie Briggs, the minister for cities and built environments, who sexually harassed a young female staffer on an international trip; Peter Dutton, the minister for immigration and border protection, who called reporter Samantha Maiden, who stood up for the staffer in question, a “mad fucking witch” in a text message clearly not meant for her but somehow sent to her anyway (and this is the guy in charge of Australia’s borders!); and the two men who murdered their families as “good guys” suffering from mental health problems (an important issue in its own right but not at the expense of the safety of women and children).

So, heading into Suffragette I shrunk into myself as a form of protection from all the microaggressions I’d faced that day but I raged internally at the depictions of workplace inequality, sexual harassment and assault and the general placement of women as second-class citizens and, behold, this piece was born.

Suffragette movie

Workplace Rights.
In the laundry that protagonist Maud (Carey Mulligan), her husband Sonny (Ben Whishaw) and friend and fellow suffragette Violet (Anne-Marie Duff) work, women toil away over steam and hot fumes. Maud herself was born at the laundry to a mother who was killed when a vat tipped on her only four years later. When Maud gets home, she washes her family’s own laundry and fixes her husband and son dinner. She endures sexual harassment and, it is implied, survived rape by the manager of the laundry, Mr. Taylor (Geoff Bell). All of this is viewed as inconvenient at best, a workplace hazard at worst.

After a day spent reading about the above-mentioned modern day examples of workplace harassment I couldn’t help but see the similarities. While the Gayle and Dutton incidents came to light because they happened in full view of the media, Briggs’ sexual harassment accusations are the exception to the rule: how many other countless examples of sexual harassment and assault have occurred but are swept under the carpet in an effort not to jeopardize positions or be looked on unfavorably by colleagues?

You Don’t Get a Cookie.
When Maud reveals these labor conditions (her standing up to her rapist happens later) in a votes for women hearing, the men on the board seem genuinely shocked. Prominent British politician and statesman David Lloyd George (Adrian Schiller) seems sympathetic to Maud’s plight however her testimony doesn’t convince him of her right to vote.

Maud’s husband, too, seems initially merely inconvenienced by her newfound interest in suffrage but, as the movie progresses, Maud’s feminism gets stronger and she spends more time in prison for demonstrating, he kicks her out of the house and adopts their son out to a rich family. He says he can’t be expected to work, run a household and look after their son — what Maud’s been doing this whole time — in a stark example of male privilege.

These are some of Suffragette’s more sympathetic male characters compared to anti-suffrage policeman Inspector Steed (Brendan Gleeson) and Mr. Taylor but, like men today who express astonishment when women reveal they’ve been harassed and assaulted and the belief that women do, in fact, deserve basic human rights, they don’t get a cookie for it.

Reproductive Rights.
As attacks on reproductive rights threaten to return to pre-Roe V. Wade levels, which is to say non-existent, in the U.S. and pap tests and STI blood tests will come at a price in Australia, they are mirrored in Suffragette. Abused spouse Violet steps down from the suffrage movement when she discovers she’s pregnant again, citing exhaustion at not being able to “take care of the [kids] I’ve got.” Maud is force fed in prison in a harrowingly triggering scene echoing rape, mandatory trans-vaginal ultrasounds for women seeking to terminate their pregnancies, forced sterilization and any manner of other violations against women’s bodies. She asks Steed, when he expresses disdain over her disobedience of the law, “Why should I obey a law I had no hand in making?”

Black Lives Matter.
Much has been made about Suffragette’s whitewashing and rightfully so. There were literally no women of color in the film, despite the real-life involvement of Indian suffragettes, for example. And, in perhaps the most offensive portion of the film that was parlayed into a tone-deaf marketing campaign, suffrage leader Emmeline Pankhurst (Meryl Streep in a two-minute cameo) says in her famous speech:

“We do not want to be law breakers; we want to be law makers. Be militant, each of you in your own way. Those of you who can break windows, break them. Those of you who can further attack the sacred idol of property, do so. We have been left with no alternative but to defy this government. If we must go to prison to obtain the vote let it be the windows of government not the bodies of women which shall be broken.”

First of all, slavery is not a choice. Secondly, the above-mentioned use of this 1913 speech for a Time Out cover featuring the all-white cast illustrates just how far white feminism has to go in the inclusion of women of color.

Three queer Black women formed the #BlackLivesMatter movement after the death of Trayvon Martin at the hands of police as “a response to the anti-Black racism that permeates our society.” Meanwhile, white ranchers are allowed to demonstrate “peacefully” — albeit armed — on seized government land (which let’s not forget was originally stolen from Indigenous peoples hundreds of years ago). Much like the attempts to bar people of color from demonstrating peacefully without militarized police forces (see above tweet) threatening them or mowing them down, Suffragette excludes women of color from its depiction of the suffrage movement by denying them a voice. But on the other hand, consider Pankhurst’s words above and some of the film’s early scenes in which demonstrators are attacked by policemen in the streets: Suffragette could also be viewed as an allegory for racist police brutality.

I’m Not a Feminist, But…
Upon Maud’s first arrest, she insists she’s “not a suffragette.” Where have we heard that before? Modern women’s baffling insistence that they, too, are not feminists seems to be in the news every other day. The online campaigns about why women don’t need feminism and celebrities being asked whether they are feminists have dominated the discussion in recent years reminded me of Maud’s colleagues at the laundry turning their backs on her when she’s outed for demonstrating and when she finally takes her revenge on her abuser. Internalized misogyny is as hard at work today as it was 100 years ago.

White women who do call themselves feminists, such as Emma Watson and Lena Dunham, are seldom met with much push-back, whereas Black women’s (those who do identify with a movement that has often ignored the contributions of feminists who are women of color and not with another movement such as “womanist”) feminism comes with a whole host of caveats. Despite Beyoncé’s spectacular embrace of feminism at the MTV Video Music Awards flanked by an emblazoned erection of the word, she’s still asked to qualify it. Black feminists such as Janet Mock, Roxane Gay and Amandla Stenberg are increasingly having their voices heard by the mainstream media while Kate Winslet refuses to talk about “vulgar” pay inequities in Hollywood and Patricia Arquette urges other marginalized groups to support women — and, let’s be clear here, she was talking about white women in the über privileged world of Hollywood. That’s not to say that Jennifer Lawrence, a fellow champion of closing the pay gap, doesn’t deserve to get paid as much as Bradley Cooper, but it partially ignores the struggles of women like Viola Davis and men like John Boyega to get paid as much as their white counterparts. And to intersect the two, all we have to do is look at this week’s Oscar nominations which resulted in no actors of color being recognized in the four main acting categories. Oscar noms = $$.

I wasn’t expecting to be as taken aback by just how little has changed since the period Suffragette is set. Sure, sexism and misogyny may not be as violent and blatant and we’re more likely to get up in arms when it is, but just because a few high profile women enjoy privileges far removed from what Maud and Violet in Suffragette and countless other women around the world face, doesn’t mean that we don’t need feminism. In fact, it made me realize we need it more than ever.

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Scarlett Harris is an Australian writer and blogger at The Scarlett Woman, where she muses about femin- and other -isms. You can follow her on Twitter here.

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

Check out what we have been reading this week — and let us know what you have been reading/writing in the comments!

Recommended

A Year with Women: What I Learned Only Watching Films Directed by Women in 2015 by Marya E. Gates at Cinema Fanatic

Where Are All the Diverse Voices in Film Criticism? by Chaz Ebert at The Daily Beast

Why Are So Few Film Critics Female? by Katie Kilkenny at The Atlantic

The 10 Best Women-Directed Films of 2015 by Melissa Silverstein, Inkoo Kang and Laura Berger at Women and Hollywood

The Women of Star Wars Speak Out About Their New Empire by Meredith Woerner at The Los Angeles Times

Gina Rodriguez Writes “Love Letter” to Rita Moreno at Kennedy Center Honors by Celia Fernandez via Latina

Fuck You, Spike Lee: Chi-Raq Is an Insult to Do the Right Thing, to Black Women, and to Malcolm X by Ijeoma Oluo via The Stranger

Of Fear and Fake Diversity by Lexi Alexander

Going Home for the First Time: A Return to Cuba by Monica Castillo at RogerEbert.com

Carol Is the Lesbian-Centric Christmas Movie of My Dreams by Grace Manger via Bitch Media

The 11 Most Important Women of Color Moments of 2015 by Melissa Silverstein, Inkoo Kang and Laura Berger at Women and Hollywood

Mara Brock Akil Talks Doing the Work in Spite of Not Getting the Recognition She Deserves via For Harriet

Mustang Director Deniz Gamze Ergüven on Turkish film, L.A. riots and Escape From Alcatraz by Carolina A. Miranda via The Los Angeles Times

The Best and Worst LGBT TV Characters of 2015 via Autostraddle

Leia-Loving Feminists Have A New Hope for Female Roles in Star Wars by Sarah Seltzer at Flavorwire

Writer Phyllis Nagy Talks Adapting Carol by Nikki Baughan at Screen Daily

How Our February Cover Star Amandla Stenberg Learned to Love Her Blackness by Solange Knowles at Teen Vogue

Young Women Weigh in on the Hijabi Character on Quantico by Lakshmi Gandhi at NPR

Fandom vs. Canon: On Queer Representation in The Force Awakens by Maddy Myers at The Mary Sue

The Case for Female Filmmakers in 2015: Breaking Down the Stats by Carrie Rickey at Thompson on Hollywood

Laurie Anderson on Her New Film, Heart of a Dog by David Hershkovits at Paper Magazine

The Top 10 Film/TV Moments for Queer Women in 2015 by Dorothy Snarker at Women and Hollywood

What have you been reading/writing this week? Tell us in the comments!

Moonfaze Feminist Film Festival: Her Story Illuminated

Writer/Director/Actress and Moonfaze Film Festival Founder Premstar Santana has taken on the challenge of not waiting for Hollywood to feature feminist cinema. She is creating the platform that elevates feminist viewpoints from marginalized voices that rarely get the opportunity to shine.

 

Moonfaze Banner

The future is female

On December 5, 2015 Writer/Director/Actress and all-around badass Premstar Santana created a phenomenal short film festival centering powerful feminist narratives. Presented inside of LA Mother, (a non-profit organization and multi-purpose creative space that is dedicated to nurturing women in business and the arts), Premstar carved out a safe space for diverse voices from around the globe to flourish. By creating this platform in conjunction with LA Mother, Premstar has taken on the challenge of not waiting for Hollywood to feature feminist cinema. She is creating the platform that elevates  feminist viewpoints from marginalized voices that rarely get the opportunity to shine.

Premstar Santana at the Festival Opening

The one day evening event started off with a mixer where patrons could nibble on fresh popped popcorn, enjoy some libations and partake of tasty bites provided by a Korean BBQ food truck. Premstar introduced herself the moment I walked in and thanked me for supporting her event. I was immediately struck by her warmth and her sincere appreciation for every person who turned out. And there were a lot of people there. When it was time for the short film showcase to begin, every seat was filled, with an overflow audience sitting on the staircase and standing in the back. A packed house.

Premstar and Sarah

The opening film, Luna — written, directed by, and starring Premstar herself — immediately set the tone for the rest of the festival. Premstar’s film let me know that she was not bullshitting about her clarion call to elevate the game. Luna, is an experimental film that introduces us to a woman performing a sacred ceremony inside a circle of burning candles in a dark room. There is a blood offering, an incantation that opens another dimension, and the woman finds herself surrounded by nature and facing a mirror image of herself who simply says “Hello, I’ve been waiting for you…are you ready?” Our protagonist then responds by asking “For What?” Her question is answered by her second self, “To dance.” The film ends with a gorgeous shot of Premstar standing on a sunlit beach watching ocean waves, the full moon high above her head. The piece resonated with me emotionally, and I had the rare moment of instantly recognizing a fellow sister/creator. After watching her other work in the festival (the sci-fi tinged Dos Lunas) I understood Premstar to be a thoughtful and gifted artist. Her work is deeply personal, poetic, and at times haunting. She creates compelling cinema, so I felt confident that I would enjoy the films presented. I felt like I was at a cinema tapas bar, nibbling on all the various films she was spreading before us at LA Mother.

Luna

The films themselves ranged from comedy, horror, experimental, dramatic thrillers, documentaries and even a Bollywood drenched piece that had a shocking ending that delighted the receptive audience. One of the crowd favorites was a 6-minute French comedy film called Papa Dans Maman (Dad in Mum) written and directed by Fabrice Bracq. In the film two young sisters hear their mother and father having sex. They try to decide if they should go inside the bedroom to investigate when they hear an unexpected arrival downstairs. The humor worked because of the expressive faces of the young actresses, and the tension that was created by the one sister peeking through the bedroom keyhole and telling the other what she sees.

Papa Dans Maman

Another standout piece was the aforementioned 12-minute U.S. Bollywood-Punk Musical, The Pink Sorrys, written by Ben Stoddard and directed by Anam Syed. A deadly girl gang seeks retribution after one of their own is sexually assaulted. The graphic ending was pretty bloody and followed the rape/revenge trope popular in ’70s exploitation cinema. I enjoyed the unique mash-up to tell an unpleasant story about violence against women’s bodies. And come on — Bollywood. Punk. Musical. You got me.

The Pink Sorrys

Afghan rapper Sonita Alizadeh directed and stars in a music video called Brides for Sale where she spits her own rap lyrics advocating for the end of forced marriages globally. In Diyu (written and directed by Christine Yuan), a teenaged girl is caught between heaven and hell in a strangely hypnotic experimental film that won the Best Director Award at the end of the evening.

brides

diyu

The festival found the right balance of showing some serious life-altering narratives alongside lighter fare that was equally compelling in different ways. One of my other comedy favorites was a film starring Moonfaze’s Festival Manager Sarah Hawkins. Roller Coaster (written and directed by Sarah’s father Bradley Hawkins) is a sweet tale about Emily, an aspiring actress who sets out for an audition, only to encounter obstacles that may cause her to miss her big break. The film playfully highlights the plastic-looking homogeneity of casting calls where women feel the need to look a certain way (mainly white, thin, surgically enhanced or bleached in some way). What struck me about Sarah Hawkins as an actor is that her face had that classic oldschool natural beauty that I miss. In fact, that is what struck me about most of the films in the festival. All these wonderful new faces that don’t have the bland manufactured Hollywood “look.”

Rollercoaster

At the close of the festival, awards were given in various categories for Best Screenwriting, Cinematography, Acting, Best Experimental Film, Best Documentary, and Best Director. I left the festival elated and impressed with the quality and variety of the films I watched.

A few days later, still excited about the festival, I contacted Premstar and invited her and Festival manager Sarah Hawkins to talk about Moonfaze on the Screenwriter’s Rant Room Podcast I co-host. It was important to give these feminist filmmakers another platform to talk about their work. You can listen to the podcast here.

Premstar said she conceived the idea for the festival in the summer of 2015, and less than six months later it came to fruition. Feminist filmmakers are hungry and ready to share their stories and 2016 will see another Moonfaze Film Festival. As I told Premstar and Sarah on the podcast, the work that Moonfaze has done is reminiscent of song lyrics done by the acapella singing group, Sweet Honey in the Rock. The lyrics are, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” Simply put, we don’t have to wait for someone else to do this work. Fam, we got this. We really do.

Premstar Santana and all the filmmakers involved in the very first Moonfaze Film Festival are bold, unapologetic, and creating new life-giving narratives. I look forward to the 2nd Annual Festival. You should too.

For more information about the Moonfaze Film Festival and Premstar Santana, check out these websites:

premstarsantana.com

moonfaze.lamother.com

Staff Writer Lisa Bolekaja is a speculative fiction writer, screenwriter, podcaster, Sci-Fi slush reader for Apex Magazine, and a devoted cinefile. A former Film Independent Fellow and a member of the Horror Writers Association, her fiction can be found on Amazon.com.

‘The Red Card’: A Short Film that Treats Young Adults with Respect

Trigger warning: rape and sexual assault | Watching a young adult have to navigate the social stigmas of rape and sexual assault in a small high school community is what pushes this film past the danger of falling into a trope that some filmmakers use as an easy way to tell women’s stories.

The Red Card

Trigger warning: rape and sexual assault

When I took fiction writing as an undergrad, the male grad student teaching the course complained that all girls ever wrote about was rape, that he was tired of it. “Wasn’t there anything else to write about?” he asked as he looked at the women in the room. As he ranted, I curled the page edges of my story I loved — which was about rape. I remember the power of writing a sentence about grass between my toes, the first time my imagery sang in my own head. My story was a young writer’s story as she tried to make sense of power dynamics and gender restrictions.

When I watched Dana Brawer’s short film The Red Card, I had two responses. First, I thought to myself, ANOTHER film that relies on the trope of rape? And then I checked myself. Why on earth would I think that? As if the world doesn’t need to hear another story about rape? My second response was to remember that blustering idiot teaching my class and shutting down my voice as I started to dip my toes into an art, much as Brawer is doing now with her thesis film. So I am grateful there’s a new film about rape. Let’s keep making them and ensuring the stories of rape survivors aren’t silenced.

theredcard_library

Sam is a semi-geeky, comic-book-reading girl on the periphery of the highly charged sexual popular clique at a private school. She speaks to the young adult for whom this film was intended, and I certainly would have connected with her as teen. Brawer writes:

“Too often, stories about high school fall into cliché. They’re campy, corny, romantic, perhaps inspiring, but few of these films touch upon the deeper and secretive pains felt by high school students. These formulaic scripts about both boys and girls chasing an unrealistic ideal of love don’t begin to show the truth about the confusion and exploration of self that signifies such an important developmental time, and I’ve grown tired of coming of age stories that can be misleading to teens and young adults.”  

And she’s right. The saccharine crap fed to young adults in the theaters is demeaning to the experiences of that population, and a film that speaks to them on a mature level is greatly needed.

Sam gets invited lured to a party in the woods where girls are hunted. If they are caught, they belong to the group of drunk teenage boys hoping to get laid, with or without consent. The party scene in the woods is an eerie red, making me wonder if there was going to be some kind of horror element.

theredcard_dancing

When Michael begins to kiss Sam, she likes it. Then when he pushes further, she doesn’t and expressly says so. I wondered if there was going to be an element of Teeth, a vagina dentata or some other kind of intercession. But there isn’t. Her knee does the work to get him off of her.

The most interesting part of the movie is the set of scenes after the assault scene. Sam has to return to school where Michael attempts to apologize — perhaps — by giving her the sweater she left in the woods. All of the other students are looking at her. She has to figure out how to live in this new world where everyone is talking about her — after living a quiet teenage life of library work and comic books. Watching a young adult have to navigate the social stigmas of rape and sexual assault in a small high school community is what pushes this film past the danger of falling into a trope that some filmmakers use as an easy way to tell women’s stories. By complicating Sam’s response, Brawer offers something new, which is what we should be asking our younger filmmakers to do.

[youtube_sc url=”https://youtu.be/JVwoHWuYSYA”]

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

Rewritten History: Affecting in ‘Brooklyn’, Not So Much in ‘Suffragette’

I was surprised at how enjoyable and skillfully made ‘Brooklyn’ is: I cried when everyone else did and gasped when the rest of the audience did too, but in spite of its excellent art direction and affecting performances the film is mostly hokum. New York in the 1950s is a place where no one the main character hangs out with smokes (when all of the men and the majority of women were smokers). Most of the characters barely drink (just one glass at Christmas) and, except for a child’s brief outburst at a family dinner table, (“I should say that we don’t like Irish people”) none of its white, working-class, ethnic characters have any problem with any other ethnic group.

BrooklynCover

I’m never enamored of the cleaned-up, ambiguity-free nostalgia that movies, especially mainstream ones, serve to their audiences in the guise of “history” so I avoided John Crowley’s Brooklyn (written by Nick Hornby from the novel by Colm Tóibín) about an Irish immigrant, Eilis (Saoirse Ronan) in the US. The Irish have been romanticized in films as early as The Quiet Man (a new release when the film takes place) and romanticized among Irish Americans for as long as the Irish have been coming to the US. But when Brooklyn began raking in awards (especially for Ronan) I decided to see it.

I was surprised at how enjoyable and skillfully made Brooklyn is: I cried when everyone else did and gasped when the rest of the audience did too, but in spite of its excellent art direction and affecting performances the film is mostly hokum. New York in the 1950s is a place where no one the main character hangs out with smokes (when all of the men and the majority of women were smokers). Most of the characters barely drink (just one glass at Christmas) and, except for a child’s brief outburst at a family dinner table, (“I should say that we don’t like Irish people”) none of its white, working-class, ethnic characters have any problem with any other ethnic group. In the actual 1950s, my mother, just a few years younger than Eilis is in the film, lived in an Irish American neighborhood in Boston, much like the one the film shows in New York and wasn’t allowed to date Italian boys because, her father explained, “They beat their women.” We never find out what the main characters in Brooklyn think of Jewish people (since the church still taught then that the Jews killed Christ, that opinion probably wasn’t favorable) because none of them encounter any, even though plenty of Jewish people lived in Brooklyn in the 1950s. And Black people in this film are at the farthest periphery: two women in a crowd crossing a street and a Black couple is shown on the beach at Coney Island.

Eilis’s family in small-town Ireland is prosperous enough that her sister works as a bookkeeper and they live with their mother in a decent house, but Eilis immigrates anyway to a sales clerk job, arranged by a kindly priest (Jim Broadbent), at a department store in New York. In other words, she’s the kind of immigrant even the Republican party of today would like: white and “respectable.” She’s not the kind who comes to the country without papers, or has to learn English, scrub floors or work as a nanny and she doesn’t have an impoverished family in her home country to worry about. When being well-cared-for in her new home becomes too much for Eilis, her suddenly sympathetic boss (Jessica Paré) has the priest swoop into the store break room and tell Eilis he’s signed her up for bookkeeping classes at Brooklyn College. He tells her, “Homesickness is like most sicknesses. It will pass.”

BrooklynRonanOutfit

Priests in the US at the time took collection money from their parishioners and gave them very little in return so to have one dole out college tuition after arranging a sales clerk job seems far-fetched, and for the recipient of both favors to be a young “marriageable” woman the priest barely knows seems like something from a parallel universe. For women in the 1950s, especially those in the working class (even ambitious ones like Eilis) the endgame was marriage, not a career. “Real” men (especially working-class ones) didn’t let their wives work outside the home (unless the family was poor), but Eilis’s middle-class, Italian-American, plumber boyfriend (Emory Cohen, a standout in a very good cast) walks her home from her night classes and loves hearing about her studies. His parents and his brothers seem equally charmed instead of exchanging nervous glances and asking, “You’re not a career girl, are you?” The only way a daughter-in-law in that type of family in the 1950s could work would be in her husband’s business — and even then she probably wouldn’t be given a salary for the first decade or so.

What priests did then (and for decades afterward) was browbeat women for working when they had children at home: if they encouraged women to go to college, the goal was for the women to find husbands there and never work outside the home again. If their husbands then beat or neglected them, the priests told the women they must be at fault (this mindset was a secular one at the time too) and they must never, ever get divorced. At the boarding house where Eilis lives she talks about marriage with a woman whose husband has left her for “someone else.” We never have a clue, in all of Eilis’s longing for her old hometown that a woman in that same situation wouldn’t be able to get divorced in Ireland until the very last part of the 20th century, a detail that a woman screenwriter or director probably wouldn’t leave out.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15syDwC000k” iv_load_policy=”3″]

Sarah Gavron’s Suffragette (with a screenplay by Abi Morgan) is another film I put off watching, because even with its creaky plot device of seeing historical events through the eyes of a fictional “composite” character the film apparently still managed to leave women of color out of the fight for British women’s suffrage as well as omitting another integral element, the queerness of some of the most famous suffragettes.

Suffragette

The film isn’t as bad as I feared it might be (or perhaps it just looked good compared to the film I saw just before it: The Danish Girl) but its problems are not just because it’s about white, straight women. Carey Mulligan does what she can with the lead role, Maud, who works at the laundry and is radicalized by a coworker–and by witnessing police beating up “Votes for Women” protesters. The film could do a much better job of integrating present-day concerns with what happened to “radicals” then, with its scenes of not just police brutality and political groups using bombs and violence as a means to bring about change, but the treatment of political prisoners and the force-feeding of hunger-strikers.

We see Helena Bonham Carter in another old-fashioned role: the audience/main character’s guide to the movement but we don’t see what we do in Brooklyn’s portrait of the women in the boarding house: the sense of the group of women as a clique, a cornerstone of the women’s suffrage movement which needs to exist in any radical political movement. If a woman’s family and old friends think her ideals are anathema, she needs to find peers who share those ideals and who will be her new friends — and new family. Except for a few, not very compelling scenes, we don’t get the sense of Maud as part of a group that supports her, just that she’s an outcast from her old life. The film contains very little we haven’t seen before and what’s new in it is allowed onscreen only very briefly: like the idea that Maud, who has worked most of her life including her childhood, would find motherhood her first opportunity to engage in play.

The film instead becomes a guessing game of what horrible thing can happen to Maud next. Suffragette has the chance to contain more dramatic tension when a police captain asks her to be an informant in exchange for dropping charges (another situation with present day parallels). He tells his men, “We’ve identified weaknesses in their ranks. We’re hoping one of them will break.”

But instead of considering the offer or pretending to inform while acting as a double-agent, Maud just writes an impassioned letter to him about the righteousness of her cause. In the end, Maud is just as dull and unimaginative as the film is, which is a shame, because the real-life figures in this fight were never boring.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=056FI2Pq9RY” iv_load_policy=”3″]

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

‘The Violators’ and ‘Wildlike’: Two Films Deal with the Trauma of Child Abuse in Different Ways

[Trigger Warning: for discussion of child abuse, incest, rape, and sexual assault] To what extent are filmmakers obliged to depict scenes of rape and the sexual assault of women and girls — a pandemic-sized problem in real life — in accurate and illuminating ways?

The Violators

This is a guest post written by Holly Thicknes.

Trigger warning for discussion of child abuse, incest, rape, and sexual assault.

Wildlike and The Violators: two independent films released on festival circuits to rip-roaring acclaim. Both are debut features from Frank Hall Green and Helen Walsh respectively, and both deal with the uncomfortable subject of the sexual abuse of teenage girls. Yet the two films left me with very different impressions.

To what extent are filmmakers obliged to depict scenes of rape and the sexual assault of women and girls — a pandemic-sized problem in real life — in accurate and illuminating ways? If ever we are to believe that films can influence society for the better, surely we must look for critical self-awareness along with satisfying storytelling (where abuse is more than just a tool of the narrative that progresses the story). The guise of the art house genre has a history of being perceived as absolving films of the representational issues of rape as spectacle, as if the festival-to-independent-cinema distribution package amounts to an automatic stamp of approval (perhaps anyone seeing Gaspar Noé’s Love will take a moment to cast their minds back to the bitter experience that was his Irreversible, shown at Cannes in 2002). But explicitness — or as some might view it, uncut realism — in representing the sexual exploitation of women in itself is problematic if it serves no purpose other than the pleasure of spectacle. And so it is a delicate balance which filmmakers must strive to strike: an honest representation, made — crucially — for the right reasons.

Wildlike

Green’s Wildlike premiered at the Hamptons Film Festival in October 2014 and was the winner of over 40 Best Film awards at various other festivals. The film promises a scenic hike across Alaska, an unlikely friendship of substitution between a teenage girl and an older man and a tense chase by an abusive, ominously unnamed uncle. It delivers all three with invigorating authenticity: the photography and performances meld together to perfectly tow the line between documentary-inspired art house flick and melodramatic Alaskan road movie. The script and Green’s direction soar in moments of transition, where all the action is embedded in the faces of the characters (articulated with faultless performances all around, namely by Bruce Greenwood as male lead Rene) or else the gruff, ever-changing landscapes, and the contemplative essence of the story feels overwhelmingly all-encompassing. There is an endearing sweetness in the father-daughter friendship being cultivated with very little words but plenty of weighted glances. All the substance is there, evidently so, affording it its success and status as a breakthrough debut.

But for all of Wildlike‘s strengths, what I simultaneously can’t forgive it for nor realistically expect of it is the fact that the guesses feel clumsy around the depiction of the central female character’s abuse. They feel second hand, peripheral, flat.

The Violators

In blatant contrast, The Violators is uncompromisingly captured from 15-year-old female protagonist Shelly’s perspective, and centered around the effects of the sexual exploitation she suffers. It is a film lovingly cultivated by acclaimed novelist and writer/director Walsh, who turned her hand to filmmaking for the first time with the kind of surety that relevant experience for the subject at hand affords you. She reached back into her childhood, where she grew up on the periphery of Cheshire, England, on the same streets and dockland walks we see depicted in the film, and drew out a story about a community of people suffering from the cyclical nature of abuse that forever seems to renew until someone or something finds the strength to break the cycle.

Through the eyes of Shelly, played by acting revelation Lauren McQueen, we see the people of this community play a daily game of chance with the hand they have been dealt. Exploring, as the story does, violation, no one person is made to claim all the blame and no one is absolved entirely, epitomized in Shelly’s complex character role of both sensible mother figure and misled, reckless child. Walsh hints at the details of an abusive father, in jail but possibly being paroled soon, to her and her self-sufficient siblings, and the prospect of it hangs like a spectre over everything so that current moments of violence feel grounded in her damaged past. True as the film is to real life, abuse does not change the centre of gravity of anyone else’s world, but instead informs the path that particular victim takes for the worse.

This perspective is where Wildlike falls down on the representational front, making it into a paternal film about a father-and-daughter-type friendship ever blooming in the beautiful Alaskan wilderness that sidelines the protagonist’s abusive experiences. To be fair, there is nothing insensitive about Green’s portrayal of MacKenzie (Ella Purnell), whose angsty teenager status is drawn onto her face with the filmic trope that is black eyeliner, but beyond this rightfully possesses no superficial traits that simply pigeonhole her character. The scenes of abuse are deliberately not treated as spectacle, but with impressive restraint and disgust-inducing visceral sound effects that imply rather than show (a storytelling technique that Green applies with great success throughout). But the effects of the incidents are observed from the outside, in manner of a concerned father who might look on at his daughter going through her troubled teenage years with genuine concern but bafflement. We are never invited into MacKenzie’s personal space to understand her motivations, and are instead left to second guess how messed up she must be from her experiences. Consequently, when she does break her sullen silence in a burst of emotion, the dialogue feels clumsily roped together in a bid to sound spontaneous but which comes off as whiny.

Wildlike

Unsurprisingly it is much easier to sympathise and identify with Rene, the recently widowed middle-aged male hiker that MacKenzie latches onto, firstly at the whiff of a meal ticket but then being tentatively drawn towards a kind and understanding father figure. Bruce Greenwood is a dream in the role, who we are introduced to in a moment when his defenses are down, in the rue of privacy whilst lying in bed, reminiscing about his late wife, without knowing that MacKenzie is actually hiding under his bed having snuck into his hotel room to nap for the night during her journey to Seattle. His male vulnerability in the wake of the manipulative uncle figure from whom MacKenzie is running is an instant catch: he is afforded an intimate look that we never get to see of her. A few silhouetted crying scenes do not cut it by any stretch.

Green has never claimed, as far as I know, to have made a film directly commenting on the lasting effects of sexual abuse on an underage girl in the hope of enlightening his audience. The meeting point of the two films is their examination of the resilience of vulnerable people in the face of attack. Wildlike does this beautifully — arguably more successfully than The Violators. But having seen both films at film festivals this year with directorial introductions, the contrast between representational intention is blatantly stark. Should films ever sideline child molestation? Should the primary victim’s account ever feel viewed from a distance? And should the issue even ever be used in a film by a male writer/director, one with undeniable storytelling skill, which gets the film into a bunch of festivals with its indie look, but uses the sensitive issue to invoke drama? It’s for everyone to individually make up their minds, but for my part I’m left with the uncomfortable feeling of having watched a film about teenage molestation and incest told superficially from the perspective of the female victim but in reality from the perspective of a man.

Holly Thicknes is a freelance film critic and editor of female-focused film blog Girls On Film. She lives and works in London, studies printmaking, and helps organise themed short film events for Shorts On Tap. She is particularly interested in the ways in which films help people carve out spaces for themselves in an increasingly lonely society. You can follow Girls On Film on Twitter at @girlsonfilmLDN.

‘Heart of a Dog,’ Not the Life of a Wife or Widow

Anderson was working on her film, ‘Heart of a Dog’ (in theaters now; it will be shown on HBO at a later date) when Reed died and she then took a year off before finishing the documentary. The film contains a loosely connected series of stories and images but is mostly a meditation on grief and death with a focus on her dog, a rat terrier named Lolabelle. What it isn’t about, at least not directly, is Reed, though he has a cameo in the film.

AnimatedAndersonDog

When Lou Reed died just over two years ago, a lot of people focused on the person he had spent his last years married to, performance artist, musician and composer Laurie Anderson. I’m always very wary when the public reacts to the private lives of well-known people, whether commenting on Halle Berry’s latest divorce or on Anderson, who has been  internationally known since the early 1980s, but whom many seemed to first take notice of as Reed’s widow. She reacted to this sudden thrust into the spotlight (Anderson works and tours constantly but Reed’s was a more familiar name and face) with a rare thoughtfulness and grace. She wrote about how she and Reed met and came to be married with humor and a distinct lack of sentimentality (after their impromptu wedding, she had to rush out to perform in a concert). Still I hoped the demotion from being known as an acclaimed artist in her own right to being known mostly as the wife of a famous, dead artist didn’t last.

Anderson was working on her film, Heart of a Dog (in theaters now; it will be shown on HBO at a later date) when Reed died and she then took a year off before finishing the documentary. The film contains a loosely connected series of stories and images but is mostly a meditation on grief and death with a focus on her dog, a rat terrier named Lolabelle. What it isn’t about, at least not directly, is Reed, though he has a cameo in the film. When Anderson talks about “we” and “us” in relation to the dog we can presume she is talking about Reed, but she never mentions him by name. While Anderson describes in detail the last moments of her mother’s life, anyone looking for a similar scene about Reed (Anderson has written about his death, but doesn’t include it here) will be disappointed.

LolabelleDog

I admire Anderson’s resolve in not letting the voyeuristic tendencies of the public dictate the content of her work, and, as a longtime fan, was prepared to defend this film against the sexist snark I’ve seen directed toward it in some reviews. One male critic complained the narration was delivered in a “sing-song” voice, which is a little like complaining that Bob Dylan’s vocals are “too nasal.”  Anyone who has listened to any of Anderson’s work (although she is a performance artist, most of her recorded work is audio; Dog is only her second full-length film after Home of the Brave, a filmed concert from 1986) will recognize the cadence she uses in the narration here, first describing a dream in which she gives birth to her dog. Doctors present Lolabelle to her in a pink blanket saying, “It’s a girl!” She explains that the birth had been a kind of performance because she had arranged for the doctors to say scripted lines and for the dog to be sewn into and then removed from her abdomen–which caused Lolabelle considerable discomfort. Anderson explains, “She wasn’t a puppy.”

The story/dream comments both on the role of dogs and cats as surrogate children (especially for those of us who aren’t raising kids) and of our own manipulation of our animals, so they will seem more child-like to us. Other sequences are less evocative: Anderson talking about the distinctive qualities of rat terriers reminded me of every dog person who has bored me with arguments about the superior traits of whatever breed of dog they happen to have. And Anderson’s illustrations of her dog’s entrance into the Tibetan Buddhist version of purgatory are striking and detailed, but perhaps not the best vessel for her talent.

When Anderson brought up her Buddhist beliefs I cringed a little. As a white person who has spent a fair amount of time in rooms full of white, privileged people who are also interested in Buddhism, I would gladly live the rest of my life without hearing one more of them begin a sentence, “My teacher says…” And I would recoil even more from a documentary narrator who intoned, “My pastor says…” Godard’s Goodbye to Language,  in the scenes of his own dog, Roxie, showed more of the mystical dimension of our relationship to our animals than any of the “spiritual” talk in Heart of a Dog does.

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To be fair, Anderson’s other work shows she is much more than a woman who loves dogs and has a Buddhist teacher: her most recent live installation featured a man who was imprisoned in Guantánamo. And in the film, her unique storytelling style is a perfect fit for the death of her mother who, “in a high voice I had never heard from her before,” formally thanks everyone gathered in her room for coming and hallucinates animals looking down at her in the bed from the ceiling. Anderson also tells a harrowing story from her childhood, but when Anderson mentions that she never really loved her mother, we never get more than a few hints about why.

I’m always complaining about films that have great cinematography and acting and an inadequate script, but besides the snappy animated version of Anderson we see at the start of the film, Dog’s visual components can’t equal the high points of the narration. After the umpteenth scene that has superimposed rain droplets streaming down, like tears on a face, over vintage footage of Anderson and her siblings as children or a contemporary rural snowscape, I wanted to say, “Okay, we get it. Let’s move on.” This film’s disjointed structure and emotional reticence would make a better album than a movie. An album also doesn’t demand an engaging overall story to hold our attention, but many of the scenes in this fairly short (75 minute) film had me (briefly) nodding off.

The film would probably connect more with an audience if Anderson had included more references to her and Reed’s relationship, but I respect her refusal to make this film about death about his death. Heart of a Dog, even as a love song by Reed plays over the closing credits, is a reminder that Anderson was much more than a wife and remains much more than a widow.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnKVjZfKhYs” iv_load_policy=”3″]

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

Girls and Women in the Middle of Nowhere: ‘The Wonders’ and ‘Bare’

In some ways Wolfgang could be a stand-in for all the directors and other outsiders who naively idealize and misinterpret contemporary rural settings and the business of farming.

WondersCover

In a scene early in Italian writer-director Alice Rohrwacher’s The Wonders the main character, an adolescent girl named Gelsomina (a radiant Maria Alexandra Lungu), her short-tempered beekeeping, farmer father (Sam Louwyck), her slightly younger sister Marinella (a charming Agnese Graziani) and her two youngest sisters, twins who delight in not doing what they’re told and making messes, are taking a break from the hard work of the farm to splash and scream in an impossibly crystalline body of water. Then a man, fully dressed in black pants and shirt makes his way through a shallow lagoon and tells them they must be quiet. “We’re shooting,” he says. When they follow him back to an idyllic small waterfall set against a backdrop of a rock cliff, we see “the shooting” isn’t the hunters we heard at the beginning of the film but a camera crew and a beautiful, white-wigged, costumed, famous TV host (Monica Bellucci) shooting a promo for a new reality TV series that will take place in the region and feature local, farming families competing against each other on camera for a large cash prize.

“Countryside Wonders will be here,” the host announces to the camera and even after the shoot is finished, Gelsomina who, as the oldest, is her father’s main helper in transporting the bees, collecting honey and even removing stingers from his neck, can’t stop staring at the host who gives her one of the jeweled clips from her wig. Gelso wants the family to be part of the competition, but her father, Wolfgang, whose Italian is clearly not his first language and seems to have some vaguely apocalyptic beliefs that have driven him into farming with his family in the countryside, says, “We don’t need that crap.”

WondersBellucci

In some ways Wolfgang could be a stand-in for all the directors and other outsiders who naively idealize and misinterpret contemporary rural settings and the business of farming. Rohrwacher shows us not just the hard work and financial precariousness of the farm, that just one forgotten chore can potentially put into ruin, but also little slights, like when a customer at the farmers’ market asks if the price of the farm’s honey has gone up, in a tone that implies it’s not worth what the family is charging.

Wolfgang’s neighbor, who grew up in the area, is more philosophical about the reality show, “Maybe we will get some jobs or some tourists.” When he’s on the show, wearing the ridiculous costume the producers force all of the contestants into, he knows just what role he should play, complimenting the host, telling her he’s always wanted to be on her show, lamenting his status as a bachelor and getting the women in his family to sing a “traditional” song for the audience. Gelsomina’s stunt, in which she lets bees crawl out of her mouth while the troubled, 14-year-old boy who lives with the family whistles, is met with much less enthusiasm from both the host and the live audience.

The Wonders could also refer to the film’s gorgeous cinematography shot by Hélène Louvart, whether the scene includes that unnaturally glass-like lake, the crumbling farmhouse, the Tuscan countryside or the open, tender faces of the women and girls (including the girls’ mother, Angelica, played by the director’s sister, Alba Rohrwacher). The beekeeping scenes are surprisingly absorbing, as Gelsomina in her protective suit removes the swarming insects from the thick branch they coat into an open container or finds a pile of dead bees and in the bottom of another and declares them, “poisoned.” I have only a slight fear of bees, but I shuddered at some at these scenes, so anyone with a more serious phobia might want to look away. And anyone who has ever questioned the sanitary standards of small farms will want to look away from a number of scenes showing the gathering of honey in this family operation.

WondersGroup

As beautiful and well-acted as the film is, I couldn’t help thinking once the credits rolled, “Is that it?” Although the film has opportunities for great emotional sweep it consistently avoids them by deliberately cutting away or downplaying action that would engage us more fully with these characters and their story. In some shots Lungu looks like she could have been painted by Modigliani and the film itself is more of a static portrait than an emotionally moving story. We spend a lot of time looking into Lungu’s face, but besides her desire to be on TV and get closer to the farmhand, we never really find out what she’s thinking.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEOS5iy0Y4M” iv_load_policy=”3″]

Stateside, another new film from a women-writer director that takes place far from the city is Natalia Leite’s Bare. Glee’s Dianna Agron and Paz de la Huerta (believably androgynous and a little grubby) are respectively, Sarah, a meek, young woman in small-town Nevada, working (and getting fired from) a series of menial jobs and Pepper a sexy, shoplifting drifter in a truck.

BareCover

Inside this film’s sometimes over-the-top melodrama it has some acutely observed moments, like when Sarah’s best friend disparages a woman they both know, then over a period of time, the two of them become best friends and Sarah is the one they whisper about. We see the aimless wandering of the group of slightly past-high-school kids who don’t have anything like college plans, drinking, driving and shouting in the wide Nevada deserts and canyons. Other films show scenes like these only as preludes to disaster: this one just lets its bored, restless characters blow off steam.

Agron and de la Huerta have great chemistry and unlike many similar films about young women together, Bare doesn’t shy from showing these two characters having sex and, at least on Sarah’s part, falling in love. The film also has a more realistic take on working in a strip club than we are used to seeing in films, though the way the film equates dancing naked for money as degradation, the same way it makes Sarah’s sexual awakening with Pepper coincide with her being able to really let loose onstage, is a little retro. Agron is a lot better than I expected her to be (Glee isn’t exactly renowned for its great dramatic performances) and the film is beautifully shot (by Tobias Datum) but, as is too often the case with both indie and Hollywood films, the script is nowhere near the level of the performances or cinematography–and a good script is what makes a good movie. Maybe someday both Hollywood and the indie world will learn this lesson.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8p5RhFZTm0″ iv_load_policy=”3″]

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

Vintage Viewing: Elizaveta Svilova, Mastering Montage

Born Elizaveta Schnitt in 1900, she became an editing assistant for Pathe in Moscow at the age of just 14. By 1918, she was editing feature films at Goskino, the Soviet state cinema, and from 1922 to 1924 she was their chief editor. Thrilled by Vertov’s dynamic early documentary reels with the agit-propaganda trains, she would be his most vigorous champion toward mainstream support and feature documentaries. In 1922 she joined the Kinoglaz group, serving as chief editor and later assistant director on Vertov’s films.

Part of Vintage Viewing, exploring the work of female filmmaking pioneers.

Elizaveta Svilova

Who gets the credit for a collaborative art-form? When the makers are a husband and wife team, the answer seems to be the husband. We are only now beginning to give credit to Marcia Lucas for her major creative input into the original Star Wars, as both Oscar-winning editor and source of feedback and ideas. A similar fate has met Elizaveta Svilova. Though Sergei Eisenstein is the best-known theorist of film montage, the most striking Soviet documentaries of the 1920s to use kinetic and dialectic montages were made by Kinoglaz (Cinema-Eye), who issued their manifesto in the name of a ‘Council of Three’ – futurist poet and agit-prop director Dziga Vertov, Vertov’s brother and cinematographer Mikhail Kaufman, and Vertov’s wife and editor, Elizaveta Svilova. In June 1923’s LEF magazine, the Council of Three, published “Kinoks: A Revolution” which was a call to arms for cinema verite that could record real life “caught unawares,” while lambasting the falsity and backwardness of fiction film. This manifesto is usually studied by students of Vertov’s art, but what of the woman who was one third of the Council of Three? Who was Elizaveta Svilova?

Born Elizaveta Schnitt in 1900, she became an editing assistant for Pathe in Moscow at the age of just 14. By 1918, she was editing feature films at Goskino, the Soviet state cinema, and from 1922 to 1924 she was their chief editor. Thrilled by Vertov’s dynamic early documentary reels with the agit-propaganda trains, she would be his most vigorous champion toward mainstream support and feature documentaries. In 1922 she joined the Kinoglaz group, serving as chief editor and later assistant director on Vertov’s films.

Dziga Vertov and Elizaveta Svilova were married in 1924, the year they produced the film Kino Eye: Life Caught Unawares. In 1927, Dziga Vertov fell out of favor of the regime and was fired from Sovkino studio (the Soviet cinema studio), with his avant garde and Futurist ideas clashing with the new style of Socialist Realism and the demands of Soviet propaganda. VUFKU, the All-Ukrainian Photo-Film Directorate, which was staffed at the time by administrators sympathetic to Ukrainian Futurism, hired Vertov and Man With A Movie Camera was the sensational result, screened in Germany, France, England, and the United States, and regarded as the most formally experimental film of the silent era. It was followed by an experimental “Symphony of Noises” in Vertov and Svilova’s first sound film, 1930’s Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbass. After releasing Three Songs About Lenin in 1934, Vertov was awarded the Order of the Red Star for his most popular film. Though physically unscathed by the Stalinist purges, Vertov’s health began to fail in the 1930s and he and Svilova struggled to find new patronage from the state-monopolized studio system. Since 1938, virtually all Vertov’s many script ideas went unproduced. He had fallen from favour.

During World War II, Vertov’s Jewish family was destroyed by the Nazis and he suffered a nervous breakdown. It would be Svilova who would edit the first film about Auschwitz in 1945. Svilova’s own skills as an editor and filmmaker saw her strike out to direct feature documentaries, including combat documentaries of the Second World War, showing a keen eye for sweeping crowd scenes and the rhythm of military action, taming the avant-garde aesthetics of Kino-Eye into something more palatable to mainstream Soviet audiences. In 1946, she was awarded a Stalin Prize for her work co-directing The Fall Of Berlin, while another film, The Atrocities of the Fascists (Zverstva Fashistov) supplied visual evidence of death camps to the Nuremberg Trials. Vertov died of stomach cancer in 1954, and Svilova retired from the industry to faithfully catalogue his manuscripts, overseeing the publication of many of his theoretical writings and cementing the recovery of his reputation. She passed on herself in 1975, and was buried in Moscow’s Novodevichy Cemetery.

 

 

Man With A Movie Camera – 1929

 

One of the most influential silent films ever made, Man With A Movie Camera passes in a blizzard of dynamic montage, illustrating an impressionist portrait of a day’s life in the USSR. By a trick of superimposition, the cinematographer Mikhail Kaufman sets up his camera on top of a giant camera. Clouds race over the streets in speeded time. An empty cinema awaits, the chairs magically springing open for the crowds that stream in as the film is loaded. Light ignites and the frozen orchestra springs to life. A girl sleeps, representing the sleeping city, in a film that offers us Everyman’s little used colleague, Everywoman, as an equal representative of the human race. Shots of homeless children sleeping rough suggest why this film was not universally admired by the authorities as Soviet propaganda.

From storefront dummies to machines, the city is frozen. Only the cinematographer’s car is in motion. Pigeons fly backwards, in a film that revels in the power of editing to alter, flip and juxtapose, with the camera editing a suggested collision between man and train, suggestively framing it as the sleeping woman’s nightmare. Tramps awaken and react playfully or defensively to being filmed. Rather than manipulating with invisible editing, the film systematically draws attention to the cinematic gaze’s power to manipulate. The attractive woman’s morning wash is mapped onto the washing of streets and windows, while her eyes opening is intercut with shutters snapping open, disarming voyeurism. Later, the voyeuristic impulse itself is explored as a man’s ogling eyeball is superimposed onto the camera lens when giving a close-up of a napping woman’s legs on a park bench. Women and their labour are often the focus of the film, from seamstresses to older women working as street vendors. We see the woman’s eye creating the film as frozen shots of rolls of film capturing women young and old become sped up, reviewed and spliced by Elizaveta Svilova herself, filmed at work at her editing desk. With the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media highlighting the fact that only 17 percent of cinematic crowds are women, Person With A Movie Camera portrays a refreshingly gender-balanced world simply by allowing women of all ages to take up half the space on screen, while highlighting the gender balance of the film’s own authorship through Svilova’s visible role as editor. Women give birth, marry, divorce, mourn, play sport and work long hours, and their dramas are the film’s, as much as that of male laborers. The film is fascinated by mechanics and industry, but not to the exclusion of humanity. Women are half the audience onscreen at the film’s end, watching and commenting on the action.

 

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zeCdQJcA88″]

  

 

Enthusiasm: Symphony on the Donbass – 1930

 

Everywoman returns in earphones as the onscreen listener to Vertov’s symphony of noises, which applies collage and dialectic principles of montage to the accumulation of noises, in one of the first feature documentaries of the era of sound. The majestic tolling of a church bell becomes the bourgeois sound of a cuckoo clock, undermining the majesty and intimidating power of the church. The camera staggers with drinkers outside, intercut with the prayers of the faithful to associate both as opiates of the masses, before Soviets swarm the church, demolish its towers and carry away its icons as part of the “struggle against religion.” A female sculptor moulds a bust of Lenin, icon of the liberated “Soviet New Woman.” Model tractors and tools illustrate the first Five Year Plan of collectivization, industrialization and increased production (at least theoretically). The models meld into the real factories of the Donbass mines. Industrial sounds replace the orchestra, including discordant squeals and whistles. Vertov defended his use of discordant “noise” as a feature of proletarian cinema opposed to bourgeois ideas of music: “We really are domestic, and for us these sounds are ‘noise’—but for the worker in the Donbass every sound has a specific meaning; for him there are no ‘noises.'” Made before the cruelest years of collectivization, Vertov’s film is a hymn to the industrial laborers of the first Five Year Plan and to the optimism of early Stalinism. Speakers lays out the need for mass mobilization. A triumphal march plays as the workers exit the mines to cheering, low angle shots amplifying their heroism. In its experimental loopings of industrial noise, Vertov and Svilova’s film anticipates the musique concrete movement, setting up elaborate call and responses between chugging heavy machinery and squealing whistles, before the machines and laborers themselves are made to play the soundtrack’s triumphal march with their synchronized hammering. Women singing in the fields and threshing grain are given equally triumphalist framing, before a workers’ brass band plays the film out.

 [youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUInm2dC6Ug”]

 

 

 Brigit McCone writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and learning new things.

What’s in a Name: Anxiety About Violent Women in ‘Monster,’ ‘Teeth,’ and ‘The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo’

The first college course I ever developed focuses on women and violence. Stemming from my interest in women who enact violence on and off the page, I wanted to ask students to think about our perceptions of women as “naturally” peaceful.

This post by Colleen Clemens appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

The first college course I ever developed focuses on women and violence.  Stemming from my interest in women who enact violence on and off the page, I wanted to ask students to think about our perceptions of women as “naturally” peaceful.

When I tell people that I teach a course on women and violence, the conversation almost always goes like this:

Interested and well-meaning person:  “What are you teaching this semester?”

Me: “One of the classes is the course I developed on women and violence in films and literature.”

Interested and well-meaning person:  “Wow, there is so much to focus on.  Domestic violence, rape, such a hard subject. Are you going to use The Accused?”

Me, trying not to sound like a jerky academic:  “Actually the course focuses on women who perpetrate violence.  I want to think about what it means when women enact violence as well.”

Long pause.  Furrowed brow.  Another beat.

Interested and well-meaning person:  “Oh.  I never really thought about that.  Will you talk about Lorena Bobbitt?”

And that is why I developed the course.  Because even the most thoughtful among us rarely take the time to consider women beyond the role of victim.   When a woman enacts violence, we feel great anxiety because she is dismantling the binary of woman as natural caretaker (see Katha Pollitt’s “Marooned on Gilligan’s Island” for a great discussion of this concept.  I start the course with this text).  Only men are supposed to be violent.  And the texts that portray women as violent actors anticipate this anxiety.  When a woman is violent in a film or novel, she often has a reason–often sexual assault–that motivates her violence.  The titles of several of these films demonstrate the anxiety we feel about a text displaying women actors of violence.  And all of the films tell the story of a woman who was wronged–because that is the only way a woman would ever break out of the rigid mold of care-taking, peaceful earth mother.

_________________________

Monster

monster

Based on the true story of Aileen Wuornos, this film follows Theron’s character through the development of her serial killing.  When raped while working as a prostitute, Aileen kills her attacker.  She comes to see that the world she lives in is dangerous and attempts to find a job off of the streets, but those positions won’t take her because they see her as unqualified.  She wants to enter the world of “legitimate female work,” i.e., a secretary, only to be told that she doesn’t get to just jump into the world of law.

[youtube_sc url=”https://youtu.be/sraDVyksYMs”]

The film shows us that she has no other choice but to return to the streets, and once there, she kills her johns because she is terrified of being raped again.  Until the murders turn.  Aileen spares one man only to kill another who offers her help.  When is enacting fear of being raped, the audience feels some kind of pity for her.  When she takes the life of an “innocent,” she loses the audience’s sympathy and becomes the eponymous “monster.”

Here is where titles start to matter.  I ask my students–and you–why isn’t the film titled Aileen?  Because that would humanize her.  And there is no humanity allowed for a woman that enacts violence.  We cannot sit with such an idea that there is something human to her.  She MUST be a monster for us to reconcile our ideas of femininity with the character we feel for during the majority of the film.  Interestingly, the documentary about her life does use her first name.

If we look at a list of films about serial killers that are based on true stories, most of the titles allude to the name given to the male killer:  Jack the Ripper, Doctor Death, Jeffrey Dahmer, Zodiac, the Green River Killer.  Monster‘s title does no such thing.  She is a monster.  No human woman could ever do such a thing.  Perhaps this is why so much was made of Theron’s transformation, as if we all needed to be reminded “It is OK.  Remember, this is all fake. The most gorgeous woman in the world is under all of that makeup!”

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Teeth

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Though I have written about this film before on a piece about the rape revenge genre (for a summary, head on over there for a recap), here I would like to focus on the title of the film.

We see a similar trope:  girl gets raped; therefore, girl becomes violent.  Dawn is literally a lily-white virgin, a “good” girl, until the horrors of patriarchy completely turn her.  And her body protects her from further harm.

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Again, the film creates a space for sympathy for Dawn.  We can “understand” why she becomes violent through–and in spite of–her biology.  Her vagina dentata takes over her thinking self.  Then Dawn learns to use it for her own good. And then Dawn becomes a vigilante.

This movie poster is telling.  Her vagina makes her squeamish. The power of it is too much to handle for her. Again, why isn’t this film called Dawn?  Are her teeth more important than herself?  Her toothed vagina is anxiety producing.  She is monstrous.  Her vagina is all she is, and she must simultaneously protect it and use it protect other women.

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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Series

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I find everything about the titling of this series fascinating.  Stieg Larrson’s orginal title, Men Who Hate Women, has been completely lost on American audiences.  Want to blow someone’s mind?  Tell her this was the title.  So now that we got that fact out of the way, let’s talk about the content and title.  Again, we have an assaulted woman who uses violence to enact revenge on those who have wronged her and her family.

Lisbeth is certainly NOT a girl.  She is a woman in this film.  Infantilizing her and naming the film “the girl” and then pointing out something on her body is similar to naming Dawn’s film Teeth.  The body becomes the girl.  Because a “true” girl would never, ever do the things these women do–even if their bodies were violated.  And why is Lisbeth behind Blomkvist when the trilogy is her story (don’t forget she’s still a “girl” when she kicks the hornet’s nest)?  Making Lisbeth Salander a “girl” denies her womanhood because we don’t want to see her as a woman.  A “natural woman” would never do what she does in the trilogy.

We shouldn’t forget that all of the characters are being failed by the patriarchal system.  Aileen wants to get out of prostituting and is mocked for her attempt.  Dawn is told that being a virgin is all that matters, and she is now dirty.  Lisbeth is raped by the people in the system who are supposed to be protecting her welfare.  Because all three revolt against the system of oppression, we have to “other” them and distance themselves from femininity.  It is the only way society can sleep at night.

 

 

Death of the (Male) Author: Feminist Violence in Lynne Ramsay’s ‘Morvern Callar’

How significant it is, then, that Ramsay changes the ending from the novel where Morvern discovers she’s pregnant to instead give her a narrative of hopeful escape and adventure. Through the economic, cultural and narrative capitals gained from the violence enacted on the male author both inside and outside of the text, the female protagonist is offered a radical feminist alternative. Rather than by trapped by her class position, socio-economic position, job possibilities or pregnancy, Morvern is, instead, offered freedom, autonomy and authority.

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The poster for Lynne Ramsay’s 2002 film, Morvern Callar

This post by Sarah Smyth appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

What would you do if you found your boyfriend dead on the kitchen floor after committing suicide? Panic? Cry? Call the authorities? This is not the case in British director Lynne Ramsay’s delicious 2002 film, Morvern Callar. The film opens with the titular character, Morvern (Samantha Morton) lying on the floor by her dead boyfriend as the lights on the Christmas tree flash in the background. The scene is silent and utterly absurd. Morvern sits quietly, perhaps contemplating what has happened, although the film never quite reveals what she’s thinking. She then touches and caresses the body in a way which is both sensual and erotic. The scene is visceral and private; it’s almost tender. Yet, underneath it’s silent and passive exterior, there’s a subtle kind of violence, a violence in not doing anything through Morvern’s refusal to act in a “moral,” “normal,” and “citizenly” way. This violence quietly yet insidiously perforates the scene. Morvern eventually gets up and looks at the computer where, on the screen, bears the instructions “read me.” This is her boyfriend’s last command but one to which Morvern gainfully obeys. From here on out, Morvern resolutely and, I argue, violently stakes out her place and takes control over her own trajectory by, ironically, reinterpreting the very instructions which her boyfriend left on the computer.

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The violence in the opening scene is of Morvern not acting following her boyfriend’s death

Morvern Callar is based on Alan Warner’s 1995 novel of the same name. It centres on Morvern, a young supermarket assistant, who lives in a cold and bleak Scotland. Her boyfriend commits suicide on Christmas day, leaving behind presents for Morvern including a cassette player, mix tape, and a manuscript of his novel with instructions for Morvern to get it published. The instructions read, “I wrote this for you. I love you,” and Morvern takes this quite literally. She deletes his name from the title page and inserts hers instead. After sending the manuscript to a publisher, she then escapes on a hedonistic holiday to Spain with her best friend and colleague, Lanna (Kathleen McDermott), where they spend their time clubbing, taking drugs and having sex. When she’s there, a couple of publishers seek Morvern out and offer her a lucrative book deal, which Morvern gladly accepts. When she returns to Scotland, she plans to use the advance from her deal to leave home and, perhaps, start a better life. She extends this offer to Lanna who declines, and the film ends on an ambiguous but hopeful note as Morvern sits at the station waiting to begin her new life.

Morvern Callar is not obviously nor overtly a violent film. The opening scene – quiet, muted, subtle – informs the tone and even the theme of the rest of the film. Yet, Morvern’s act of deleting her boyfriend’s name – James Gillespie in the film, unnamed in the book – from his manuscript is a violently feminist act. Since the beginning of literature itself, male authors have continually appropriated the voice, narratives and identities of women Perhaps with the flexibility creative licence, this in itself shouldn’t be problematic. After all, women have also appropriated the voice, narratives and identities of men in their work. Rather, the problem arises with the profusion by which this occurs, the privileging of the male-authored narrative within the canon, and the consideration of these narratives as universal rather than explicitly gendered. Morvern’s act, then, is a protest against this and reclamation, perhaps even reparation, for the years of oppression enacted on female voices within literature.

The realisation of this reparation is significant. Morvern gets paid an extraordinarily large sum, £100,000 (about $270,000 today) to be exact, from the publishers for her book deal. Given her background and socio-economic status, this sum is doubly significant. In fact, its life changing, enabling her to reclaim an authority and autonomy over her life not (literally) afforded to her before. When Morvern asks Lanna to go with her on this new adventure, she tells her not to worry about money; Morvern can take care of it. This offer positions Morvern in a traditional heteronormative male role as she proposes a promise of financial security to the woman. Of course, this involves a level of female dependence of male power, here economic, inducing a loss of female independence and freedom so crucial to the subject of modern feminism. Lanna declines, perhaps for this reason or perhaps because she’s too tied to home. But ultimately, this is journey for Morvern to take, for Morvern to reclaim, and the film leaves us hopeful that it will be successful.

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Lanna chooses not to leave with Morvern despite the tempting financial offer…

In order for Morvern to follow through effectively on this violent act, however, this violence must be literalized on her boyfriend’s body. If she informed the authorities of his death, Morvern would also risk sacrificing his financial and intellectual property. She, therefore, leaves his body on the kitchen floor for a while before eventually cutting it up in the bath and burying it in the forest. The film makes no attempt to suggest any moral quandary on that part of Morvern. As Williams says, “Morvern never reports the death, and deals with the body herself. She mourns Him but shows no remorse, no guilt for -as it were- dancing on His grave. If she gets away with it, it’s partly because she doesn’t lie: Morvern is guileless as well as guiltless.” The scene in which Morvern cuts up the body is, in fact, blackly comic as the blood splatters on Morvern’s body accompanied by the Velvet Underground’s “I’m Sticking with You.” Although we get no point-of-view shot – the body is, in fact, never seen – we are privy to Morvern’s subjectivity and interiority through the music which Morvern is listening to on her cassette player. Our sympathies, then, are directed towards Morvern, not her boyfriend. This violence, then, is both an extension and a literalization of the violence enacted on the (male) authorial authority, and, crucially, I argue, an explicit feminist statement.

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Morvern’s authorial violence is literalized on the boyfriend’s body in a darkly comical way

The violence enacted on the authorial authority within the film is also mirrored outside of the film. The novel is written by a man but is narrated by a woman. The film is adapted and directed by a woman, reclaiming the female narrative voice through this female vision. As Shelley Cobb argues in Adaptation, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers, Ramsay inverts the gendered appropriation by excluding Warner’s narrative voice, reflecting Morvern’s usurpation of the ideal figure of the male author. If as Linda Ruth Williams claims, Morvern “purloin[s] a man’s cultural capital,” Ramsay also purloins the symbolic, cultural and economic capital of (male) authorship. This purloining of capital and the subsequent signature of Ramsay’s (female) authorial authority within the film is most obviously found in the changes Ramsay makes when adapting the novel for the screen. How significant it is, then, that Ramsay changes the ending from the novel where Morvern discovers she’s pregnant to instead give her a narrative of hopeful escape and adventure. Through the economic, cultural and narrative capitals gained from the violence enacted on the male author both inside and outside of the text, the female protagonist is offered a radical feminist alternative. Rather than by trapped by her class position, socio-economic position, job possibilities or pregnancy, Morvern is, instead, offered freedom, autonomy and authority.

In this way, then, I disagree with Lucy Bolton who argues that Morvern’s journey is about establishing the lasting communion with her dead lover. In Film and Female Consciousness: Irigaray, Cinema and Thinking Women, Bolton claims that Morvern lodges the memory of her boyfriend in her mind, using her body as a cradle to preserve the memory of touching him. This reading crucially neglects the violence Morvern enacts on her boyfriend both on his body and his authorial identity. Morvern deletes his name and buries his body; it’s a separation rather than a preservation. Morvern Callar, then, is about violence, a reclamation and reparation through violence, which enables women to radically remove themselves from oppressive male structures, and, instead, construct their own narratives, their own voices and their own journeys through this very destruction.

 

From ‘Ginger Snaps’ to ‘Jennifer’s Body’: The Contamination of Violent Women

Thematically, ‘Jennifer’s Body’ mirrors ‘Ginger Snaps’ in many respects: the disruption of suburban or small town life, the intersection between female sexuality and violence, the close relationship between two teen girls at the films’ centers, and—perhaps most strikingly—the contagious nature of violence in women.

This guest post by Julia Patt appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

“Hell is a teenage girl.” So Anita “Needy” Lesnicki (Amanda Seyfried) informs us in the opening voiceover monologue of Jennifer’s Body.

At first glance, it’s kind of a throwaway tagline sort of quote reminiscent of Mean Girls or Heathers. Teenage girls are the worst—they might even be evil, but just “high school evil,” to borrow another line from Diablo Cody’s highly quotable script for Jennifer’s Body. But we should note that the line isn’t, “The devil is a teenage girl” or “Teenage girls are demons.” Rather: “Hell is a teenage girl.” Which suggests not only evil, but also suffering. Teenage girls may make other people suffer but, more than that, they suffer profoundly themselves. And although Needy’s flashback indicates she’s thinking about her friend, Jennifer Check (Megan Fox), when she makes this observation, her present tense delivery and its placement in the script at least suggest the possibility that she’s also thinking about herself.

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Megan Fox as Jennifer Check

Jennifer’s Body comes from a long, proud tradition of possession movies about women, particularly young women, from The Exorcist to Paranormal Activity. But given the conspicuous absence of old priests and young priests—indeed any mention of exorcism at all—the film’s closest analogue is, I’d argue, its pre-9/11 sister movie and cult werewolf flick, Ginger Snaps. Thematically, Jennifer’s Body mirrors Ginger Snaps in many respects: the disruption of suburban or small town life, the intersection between female sexuality and violence, the close relationship between two teen girls at the films’ centers, and—perhaps most strikingly—the contagious nature of violence in women.

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Look familiar?

Ginger Snaps takes place in a Canadian suburb called Bailey Downs, where a mysterious creature, the Beast of Bailey Downs, has been picking off house pets, mainly dogs. The movie begins with the discovery of another such canine victim, but the attacks happen with enough frequency that, aside from the hysterical owner, no one bats an eye at this newest fatality. Other than the beast, the community is distressingly normal to the film’s two protagonists, Brigitte (Emily Perkins) and Ginger (Katharine Isabelle) Fitzgerald, who as children vowed to be “out by 16 or dead in this scene, but together forever.” Ginger at least appears to have opted for the latter option, as the sisters’ first scene together is a lengthy discussion and staging of various forms of suicide, which they put together as a photo slideshow for class. Although Ginger hails suicide as the “ultimate fuck you,” Brigitte is markedly less certain, worrying aloud that people will just laugh at her in her casket, her death having changed nothing.

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Excellent show-and-tell project

There is of course much about the Fitzgerald sisters’ plan that conforms to the status quo. Suicide is an undeniably violent act, but it’s a self-directed violence, physically harming only the sisters and expected of women whom society views as predominantly nonviolent towards others. Given the abandonment of “out by 16,” it seems evident, too, that the sisters have succumbed to what they believe to be an inalterable, futile situation. They have no power to truly challenge the structures that make them so miserable. That is, until the Beast of Bailey Downs, a werewolf, attacks Ginger and she begins to change.

That the change happens simultaneously with puberty—her first menstrual cycle literally begins on the night she’s bitten—only heightens the sense of power Ginger now feels. Although still a weird Fitzgerald sister, her sexual appeal only increases throughout the movie until she fully transforms. This on its own is insufficient to manifest as a disruption. Ginger’s male classmates are only too happy to view her as a sexual object, albeit a slightly unsettling one. Even her confidence is unthreatening as long as it is confined to the context of their own desires. No, the difficulty is that Ginger remains unsatisfied and is no longer content to be so.

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Unfortunately, nothing in this aisle for lycanthropy

In Jennifer’s Body, Needy and Jennifer play somewhat different roles in an otherwise familiar setting. Rural Devil’s Kettle, named for an unusual waterfall, may differ geographically from Bailey Downs but the sense of limitation and confinement remains. At the beginning of the film, Jennifer urges Needy to come to a concert with her because the band, Low Shoulder, is from the city. Her desire to leave Devil’s Kettle is evident in her enthusiasm, a fact Needy appears to wistfully recognize as they watch Low Shoulder perform at the local drinking hole. But Jennifer is no social outcast in the vein of the Fitzgerald sisters. She is, as Needy unnecessarily informs us, “a babe.” And though she characterizes herself as a dork in comparison, Needy herself hardly qualifies as a weirdo. “We were our yearbook photos,” she explains in her voiceover. “Nothing more, nothing less.”

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Hard to make Amanda Seyfried look “dorky” but they tried

Jennifer and Needy’s desires similarly do not disturb societal structures. Even Jennifer, extremely cognizant of her sexual powers, is ultimately unthreatening. She is not much of a party girl either, saying longingly at the bar: “I can’t wait until I’m old enough to get trashed.” In other words, she plays by the rules. And despite her assertive attitude, willingness to manipulate men, and apparent confidence, the right sort of masculinity is enough to overcome her. This is painfully evident in her interactions with Nikolai, the lead singer of Low Shoulder, who continues to fascinate her, even after he insults Jennifer and the town.

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Satanists with awesome haircuts

In fact, Nikolai brutally uses Jennifer’s desire for and idealization of the outside world against her. After a fire breaks out in the bar, killing several people, she and Needy flee through the bathroom window. Outside, Nikolai finds them and leads Jennifer away to the band’s van—the last time Needy will see her alive, as the members of Low Shoulder intend to sacrifice her in exchange for their commercial success. (It’s a hard world for an indie band. They’re just all so pretty.) When Jennifer appears again, covered in blood, she is possessed by a demon—and as with Ginger, her desires can no longer be sated by ordinary means. As Devil’s Kettle becomes a place of tragedy, Jennifer transforms into an agent of gleeful destruction, lusting not for attention or boys or society dictates for a teenage girl, but rather for power, violence, and fear.

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The new Jennifer doesn’t care about gender roles

Ginger comes to a similar conclusion about her longing. “I get this ache,” she confesses to Brigitte. “I thought it was for sex, but it’s to tear everything to fucking pieces.” This conflation between sex and violence is hardly unique to Ginger Snaps or Jennifer’s Body, but the emphasis on female sexuality and female power subvert our expectations in the violent scenes. Nor are these neat, orderly killings—both Ginger and Jennifer tear open and partially consume their victims. These films are bloody and that blood belongs almost exclusively to men. Of the two, Ginger is much more erratic in her selection of victims, striking out mostly at male authority figures as they threaten her. This is fitting for her affliction and the gradual nature of her change, which, in an unusual twist on the werewolf trope, happens over the course of the month until the full moon instead of all in one night.

Jennifer, conversely, makes a full transition to her new undead, possessed state of being although her feeding patterns notably also occur on a monthly schedule as the life forces of her victims wane. As a hungry demon, as Needy points out, Jennifer appears remarkably like a woman in the throws of PMS: “She gets weak and cranky and ugly.” Being full, Jennifer explains, is an incredible high—and she’s basically indestructible. It’s no wonder that each month she seduces and consumes another boy after the juice from the last runs out. Externally, this does not manifest as a large behavioral shift. Jennifer is flirty, appealing, and deliberately submissive as she lures in her next meal. The difference is she no longer figuratively attains her sense of self-worth from her conquests—they are literally making her more beautiful and powerful.

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Confidence is terrifying

We can understand why Ginger and Jennifer become so insatiable and simultaneously why their hunger appears so monstrous in the context of patriarchal society. Their love of killing makes them a serious threat. It’s the full realization of their powers and the traditional means by which they might be subdued—control over their self-image, social standing or physical wellbeing—no longer work. For the first time in their lives, both are completely uninhibited. They are free to want. There is something almost laudable about their transformations, too; they’ve gone from almost certain victims to powerful killers. And it’s all the more telling that we can characterize both films as macabre comedies as well as horror flicks; they are often as funny as they are frightening and their delight in the upending of social convention is palpable.

But it is the way of horror that normalcy often reasserts itself and the monster is destroyed. In the case of both Ginger Snaps and Jennifer’s Body, the agent of that destruction is not a man but another teenage girl—and not just any girl, but a literal or metaphorical sister.

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Inseparable…until one of us gets bitten by a werewolf

Ginger’s relationship with her sister remains the only reliable element in her life, although her encroaching transformation certainly strains it, as she abandons, threatens, and ignores her at various turns. It’s clear from the outset that their relationship has always been one of distinct inequality with Ginger as the leader and Brigitte the follower. Brigitte, who grows more assertive as the story progresses, is determined to find a cure for her sister’s condition and teams up with local drug dealer and apparent lycanthrope enthusiast Sam. However, this new alliance irritates Ginger, who as they go to consult with him drolly remarks, “Romeo, Romeo, where for art thou, Romeo?” In fact, although there is real affection at the heart of their relationship, Ginger is undeniably possessive and jealous regarding Brigitte, accusing even the school’s elderly janitor of checking out her sister and then killing him in a fit of werewolf-induced rage. Neither is it accidental that Sam becomes her intended target, as she first attempts to seduce him and then attacks him when that fails. However, she does not target Brigitte until the very end of the film, at which point Brigitte resigns herself to killing Ginger in self-defense.

There are striking similarities in the relationship between Needy and Jennifer. Jennifer is often possessive and controlling of the weaker-willed and aptly named Needy. But they genuinely care for one another, as Needy observes, because, “Sandbox love never dies.” Despite her altered state, Jennifer avoids harming her friend, even when the demon inside her would clearly be glad to rip her to pieces, too. Instead, Jennifer settles for consuming the boys around Needy, including her goth friend, Colin, and her boyfriend, Chip. This last murder drives Needy to finally take action against Jennifer and the two exchange barbed insults in two confrontations that eventually result in Jennifer’s death. Needy flatly exposes Jennifer’s insecurities, revealing a dynamic that has subtly developed over the course of the film: Needy is the stronger and more capable of the two.

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Jennifer confides in Needy

It is tempting to read these two endings as a reassertion of patriarchal values in the vein of conservative horror: the well-behaved, sensible girl saves the day and survives to tell the tale while the sex-crazed, uninhibited female monster is destroyed. This is accurate but for two facts: the tragedy of our two heroines and the contagion of violence. Brigitte and Needy are devastated by what they have to do, both visibly mourning the women they loved. For them, these moments are personal, not political. It’s worth asking if they would have intervened at all had Ginger and Jennifer ranged farther afield. Both look for other solutions; both permit at least one person to die despite what they know; both keep the confidences given to them. At the end of Ginger Snaps, Brigitte leans over the body of her transformed sister and sobs; having killed Jennifer, Needy is broken, bitter, and changed, spending her days in a mental health institution for criminals. Neither looks much like a heroine of the patriarchy; neither returns to the strictures of society.

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Not so Needy anymore

And both are marked in more significant ways. Brigitte deliberately infects herself to gain Ginger’s cooperation. Jennifer scratches Needy as they struggle, thus communicating some of her demonic powers to her friend, a fact Needy reveals at the end of the film as she levitates out of solitary confinement and escapes. Although Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed show us more of Brigitte’s fate—which also involves institutionalization—it’s unclear at the end of the first movie what the outcome of her infection will be. Jennifer’s Body gives us rather more, because Needy has one thing on her mind: revenge. The closing credits of the film reveal the gruesome deaths of Low Shoulder, and security footage shows Needy strolling towards their hotel room, her intent unmistakable.

Brigitte and Needy’s reactions remind us what we might forget over the course of these films: both Ginger and Jennifer are victims. They did not intentionally become what they are. But their survival makes them strong, even as it changes them in other more horrific ways. Those changes and that power are, the films seem to suggest, communicable. And despite their destruction, something of what they’ve gained persists in the women who love them and survive. Although the immediate threat may have passed, the possibility for further violence lingers.

 

Julia Patt is a writer from Maryland. She also edits 7×20, a journal of twitter literature, and is a regular contributor to VProud.tv and tatestreet.org. Follow her on twitter: https://twitter.com/chidorme