Films By Women – Page 21

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Male Mask, Female Voice: The Noir of Ida Lupino

Lupino then struck out from the studio system to direct three noirs of her own: ‘Outrage,’ ‘The Hitch-Hiker,’ and ‘The Bigamist,’ the only classic noirs made by a female auteur. Each uses a different strategy to challenge the empathy gap between spectators and female characters, and to subvert the femme-fatale trope.

This is a guest post by Brigit McCone.

The IMDb page of Woody Allen’s Match Point (2005) offers the following summary: “at a turning point in his life, a former tennis pro falls for a femme-fatale type.” The plot of Match Point: Jonathan Rhys Meyers’ former tennis pro aggressively pursues Scarlett Johansson’s sexually confident actress, begins an affair that only she expresses guilt over (though she is single, breaking up with her fiancé after her first hook-up with Meyers, while he remains engaged), then he plans and executes the cold-blooded murder of Johansson to cover his adultery. In other words, Meyers plays a classic, manipulative “psycho killer bitch” in all but gender.

The fact that Johansson’s character is nevertheless judged as a “femme-fatale type” and Meyers’ character excused as being “at a turning point in his life,” points to the real underpinnings of the femme-fatale: the assumption that female sex appeal is responsible for male violence. Her manipulative behavior may confirm the femme-fatale’s evil, but her responsibility for male violence is the core of her role, rooted in a victim-blaming lack of empathy for women. If that remains true even in 2005, it was certainly true of the ’40s and ’50s heyday of film noir.

Few people understood the logic of the femme-fatale better than Ida Lupino. Her looks, confidence and intelligence saw her typecast as a seductive “vamp” from the age of 14. Lupino became one of the iconic femme-fatales of the 1940s, breaking out as crazed villainess of They Drive By Night, followed by genre classics High Sierra, The Hard Way, and Road House. Lupino then struck out from the studio system to direct three noirs of her own: Outrage, The Hitch-Hiker, and The Bigamist, the only classic noirs made by a female auteur. Each uses a different strategy to challenge the empathy gap between spectators and female characters, and to subvert the femme-fatale trope.

Rape Culture As Ultimate Noir: Outrage

The first cinematic examination of what feminists now call “‘rape culture,” 1950’s Outrage introduces Ann Walton (Mala Powers), a character whose wholesomeness is emphasized from the film’s start. She is liked by co-workers and says of her fiancé, “I found the right one,” showcasing her mental monogamy. In a tense, expressionist sequence of shadowy yards and deserted streets, Ann is stalked by a sexual predator and caught when she swoons; it is her traditional femininity that makes her vulnerable, not transgression. Ann is constantly watched: chatting to her fiancé, she is smirked at by an old lady; when talking with a co-worker, the clenching hands of her future attacker are visible in the foreground, making the audience uncomfortably aware that we share his gaze. We, too, will be asked to watch and judge Ann throughout the film.

This surveillance of chivalry offers Ann no protection. As her future attacker insistently flirts with her, to her visible discomfort, bystanders are blank-faced and avoid eye contact. As a vulnerable woman alone at night, taxis refuse to stop for her. As her attacker closes in to rape her, the camera pulls back to a neighbor firmly shutting his window. After the rape, we are shown the averted eyes of former friends and the everyday intrusions of men, who casually grab her flinching shoulder or invade her space, an entitlement to the female body that is weaponized by Ann’s trauma. When Ann is finally triggered into striking a blow, she does not get revenge against her rapist, but attacks a random stranger who is stroking her hair and pestering her for a kiss. This sends a clear message that such pushy violations of a woman’s boundaries collectively create a triggering environment that normalizes rape. The conventions of noir, which condition the audience to accept that society is hostile and unjustly disbelieving the protagonist, are used by Lupino to shape the audience’s interpretation of rape culture.

Ann finally finds redemption through the friendship and support of Rev. Bruce Ferguson. It is visiting him alone at his house at night, and driving with him into the countryside unchaperoned, that allows him to counsel her. The fact that she is healed by ignoring society’s proprieties, and victimized when swooning in conventional feminine panic, demonstrates the irrelevance of woman’s transgressions to man’s actions. Rev. Bruce’s authority as man and as cleric is invoked to justify Ann. In the film’s climactic trial of Ann for attacking the harassing flirt, the authority of the legal system is used to hold male sexual aggression responsible for female violence, neatly reversing the “femme-fatale” formula. Rev. Bruce’s mansplaining authority presents his blistering condemnation of chivalry’s failures as an act of chivalry itself: his courtroom speech establishes rape as an epidemic social problem, “a shameful blot on our towns and cities,” excuses Ann’s actions (Rhys Meyers’ tennis coach might have been “at a turning point in his life” when he gunned down Johansson’s “femme-fatale type,” but Ann had “been suffering in her mind a long time” when she clobbered a flirt with a wrench), and indicts society for the assault – “it’s our fault, all of us” – appealing to the judge “as a man.” Of course, Rev. Bruce is not speaking “as a man” at all, but “as Ida Lupino.” Society’s dismissing of woman’s testimony as “hysterical” required Lupino to dress female perspective in a male mask for it to be heard.

Outrage is fascinating as a direct appeal from the suppressed female voice. It exposes the hypocritical underbelly of traditional chivalry, and its human cost, but it is not a fully satisfying drama. The very victim-blaming that Lupino condemns, forces her heroine into one-note wholesomeness to dodge femme-fatality. Ann often irritates viewers with her “damsel-in-distress” manner, but this only highlights how inhuman a woman had to be, to be chivalry’s “justified” victim. At the same time, the need for Rev. Bruce to project authority makes his character smug to the point of creepiness. In her next film, The Hitch-Hiker, Lupino would banish women from the screen entirely and reveal herself capable of sharp psychological subtlety.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCRemHI0usY”]

Why Didn’t They Just Leave Him? The Hitch-Hiker

1953’s The Hitch-Hiker opens with a bold declaration: “what you will see in the next seventy minutes could have happened to you.” We hear a woman’s scream and gunshots. A lady’s purse falls to the floor at the attacker’s feet. This opening scene establishes the villain as a killer of women, but his victim is not shown. To give her any character would be to expose that character to scrutiny. Why was she traveling alone? Why would she pick up a hitch-hiker? Why didn’t she just leave him? To convince the audience that it “could have happened to them,” the faceless woman must be replaced by all-American Roy and Gilbert, on their manly hunting trip. A man can be everyman; a woman represents only herself. Roy and Gilbert, then, must walk in the shoes of the female victim; we will experience her terror through their male masks. The film is a master class in suspense and claustrophobia, making maximal use of both cramped car and empty Mexican desert. The hitch-hiker has one eye permanently opened, so the captives can’t tell whether he is asleep or watching, piling on the paranoia as the pair squirm under his peering panopticon, until they internalize his surveillance. Roy and Gilbert are as minutely scrutinized by the hitch-hiker as Outrage‘s Ann is by society.

One of the film’s harsher comments on IMDb complains that “the two captive men are presented with innumerable opportunities to outsmart or overpower their captor, but fail to do so out of apparent cowardice or stupidity,” which actually points to the film’s central strength. Under crushing pressure, the group evolves the psychological dynamic of an abusive family. The captives’ loyalty to each other becomes an exploitable weakness that prevents them from fleeing. Roy and Gilbert gradually grow complicit in the hitch-hiker’s schemes, as they adapt to his demands and learn to anticipate and appease his rages. They miss opportunities to appeal for outside help, as they are blackmailed into silence. The Hitch-Hiker is one of the rare films that realistically captures the psychology of intimidation, letting the audience witness the group’s toxic dynamic develop over time. The intimate violence of emotional abuse emerges as an ideal subject for noir. George Cukor’s Gaslight is a strong example, but Lupino’s choice of protagonists, all-American hunting buddies, explores the dynamics of abuse as universal human psychology rather than female vulnerability. In her next film, The Bigamist, she would exploit the audience’s higher tolerance for flawed and complex male protagonists, to promote empathy for complex women.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIeFKTbg3Aw”]

Woman Humanizes Man Humanizes Woman: The Bigamist

On the surface, 1953’s The Bigamist presents a classic narrative of infidelity: Harry is driven, by the neglect of his careerist wife Eve, into an affair with a brassy, smart-mouthed broad, Phyllis. But Lupino’s film humanizes the stereotypes into sympathetic individuals. In the process, she demonstrates that the ideology of male unfaithfulness depends on the dehumanizing of women to make them disposable; it must be justified either by condemning the wife as cold, castrating harpy, or by dismissing the mistress as calculating femme-fatale. The climactic trial of the bigamist becomes a trial of society, just like that of Lupino’s Outrage. In the authoritative voice of the male judge, the film spells out the irony that it is no crime to commit adultery, but a crime to recognize and protect both women by marriage.

Like its hero, the film refuses to demonize either woman or to imply that they deserve to be abandoned. Joan Fontaine’s Eve is a workaholic, but she is also loving and supportive. Ida Lupino’s Phyllis reveals layers of loneliness and fragility under her brash, defensive surface. She is not trying to trap Harry, giving him the opportunity to leave even after she falls pregnant. Refreshingly, the women do not turn on each other when the bigamy is revealed, but turn their looks of hurt onto Harry at his trial. The script was written by Collier Young, Lupino’s ex-husband and professional collaborator, who was married to Fontaine at the time of shooting. Lupino’s collaboration with Fontaine, and her sympathetic portrayal of Fontaine’s Eve, is thus an act of solidarity that puts its money where its mouth is, radically rejecting cat-fight logic between women who have shared a man.

Ida Lupino exploits the audience’s willingness to identify with a male protagonist, to encourage them to see both women from the hero’s sympathetic viewpoint. Lupino herself takes the role of a woman pregnant from unmarried sex, then uses the hero’s voiceover to empathize with her character and avoid moral judgment; yet another male mask for the defense of female worth. Defying double standards, Harry takes full responsibility for his choice to sleep with Phyllis, marrying her to support their child. He is flawed, against the standard of a fully committed husband, but noble when compared with the casual exploitation of women tolerated by Lupino’s society. The result is a morally complex and ambiguous portrait of polyamory, which affirms that no human is disposable and that no “femme-fatale” is without her humanity.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eUmFS7ww5s”]

Ida Lupino’s career as director is an intriguing example of an actress seizing power to rebut the misogynist traditions of her own genre. In the process, she reveals noir’s natural potential to explore female psychology and experience. When her company, “The Filmmakers,” folded, she went on to be a prolific director in television, then directed 1966’s The Trouble With Angels, a sympathetic portrait of a Catholic convent school. As the only female director working in ’50s Hollywood, and as a striking artist in her own right, Ida Lupino deserves a fresh look.

Brigit McCone over-identifies with Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. She writes short films, radio dramas and “The Erotic Adventures of Vivica” (as Voluptua von Temptitillatrix). Her hobbies include doodling and making bad puns out of the corner of her mouth.

‘The Imitation Game’ and ‘Citizenfour’: Secrets Then and Now

A stereotype in popular media about very smart people is that they must have some great deficiency in other areas of their lives–as if someone with extraordinary intelligence being able to make friends and get laid would be unfair to the rest of us. The only reason I can surmise for the positive reviews The Imitation Game, a highly fictionalized new film about gay, World War II codebreaker Alan Turing is that it confirms all the “normal” audience’s worst suspicions about “genius” and queer life, without offering any meaningful insight into either.

Sometimes I wish the mainstream film industry would stop making movies about queers. The rare times that a queer person is allowed to be the main character in one of its movies, as in this one, he (almost always a “he”), like the rare main character of color is usually unrealistically isolated from the community he comes from, a trope fostered from before Stonewall to the ’90s to now: we are oh-so-tragic and oh-so-alone. Because he has no peers to rely on, the main gay guy invariably confides in the straight guy (particularly ridiculous in The Imitation Game’s 1940s setting) just like in movies set in the Civil Rights-era South, Black people have all their deepest conversations–and bonds–with white people. When a film shows the rare group of people of color relying on each other, as in Selma, awards snub it and prominent white guys denounce it. When a film like the underrated Pride shows a group of queers working together, the blurb on the back of the DVD makes sure it doesn’t offend any “Christian values” by mentioning something as crass as LGBT identity.

“Homosexuals”–as they were known then–could be arrested during the time the film takes place (as Turing was after the war, one of the few parts of the film that isn’t doctored) and imprisoned both in England and elsewhere, but that didn’t stop them from existing or having sex with each other–and straight people knew them even if they didn’t acknowledge that they did. World War II was a vehicle for many queers from the US (and probably those in the UK too) to find each other, no longer isolated in their small hometowns. But even before the war, academia (where Turing came from) was, notoriously, also a refuge for gay men. The arts were another. Accounts from those who knew him say that Turing was quite open about his sexuality (instead of the anguished confessions we see here): and then, as now, straight people (and I’m presuming most of the people interviewed were straight) were always the last to know. Also unchanged in the intervening years: the rules for men in power or ones with powerful friends were different: actor John Gielgud was arrested in the same time period as Turing was for having sex with another man, but faced neither imprisonment nor the forced hormone treatment Turing accepted instead of a prison sentence.

Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley) and the guys

All the most interesting twists of the story are the ones the film avoids. As part of the huge wartime operation at Bletchley Park Turing had helped win the war against the Nazis (in fact his team’s decryption might have been the deciding factor) but he couldn’t tell anyone about it–nor could anyone else. Some powerful people did write letters of support for him during his trial, but they couldn’t say precisely why they were writing them. If his work during the war hadn’t been secret the charges against him probably would never have come to trial–or been made in the first place.

Instead, what passes for drama in this film are pedestrian scenes that are the invention of screenwriter Graham Moore. Even though there’s no historical evidence of any such incident we get more than one sequence in which Turing’s supervisors attempt to destroy his work. “You will never understand the importance of what I’m creating here,” Benedict Cumberbatch, as Turing, cries in the first film performance I’ve seen that is best encapsulated by the phrase “the gnashing of teeth.”

These scenes might be a reflection of the vanity of its hack filmmakers (writer Moore along with director Morten Tyldum). “I’m afraid these men would only slow me down,” the film’s Turing says about the team of other codebreakers. Not only does this film leave out all the other people (including some Polish cryptologists who made a valuable prototype) who helped Turing get to the point where he could successfully design and run Bombe (not “Christopher”: the name Turing gives his codebreaking computer in the film– after his first love!) but in the film he’s also perpetually misunderstood and under-appreciated by others the same way white, male writer and director “auteurs” seem to often feel they and their own work are, even as they dismiss (and underpay) the many other people who make their films possible and enjoyable. Maybe this parallel is the reason for the spate of “great man” films and the awards they always seem to collect this time of year.

The lone woman with a decent-sized part in the film is Joan Clarke (played by Keira Knightley) Turing’s fellow cryptanalyst who becomes his friend and, for a time, is engaged to him. Unlike the ridiculous scene in the film when Turing breaks up with her, the real-life Clarke was reportedly “unfazed” when she found out her fiancé was queer, because in those days (as the film touches very briefly on) marriage was the only way for most young women to get away from the control of their parents.

And even though a big deal is made of Joan Clarke being one of the only woman cryptanalysts, like “Rosie The Riveter” stateside, 80 percent of Bletchley Park’s employees were women. The codebreakers were popularly known as “Dilly’s girls” after the (male) head of the operation, none of which is reflected in Game. Thanks for erasing the historical contributions of women again, mainstream film industry!

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5CjKEFb-sM” iv_load_policy=”3″]

Another film about genius and secrets making the rounds of top ten lists and awards is Laura Poitras’s Citizenfour, the documentary about Edward Snowden, who acted as a whistleblower by releasing evidence of the US’s widespread and unconstitutional spying on its own citizens.

You’d never know from the many news accounts about Snowden that Poitras was the first person he made real contact with when he decided to go public. Poitras reads his first message aloud on the soundtrack, “Laura, at this stage I can offer nothing more than my word. I am a senior government employee in the intelligence community. I hope that you understand that contacting you is extremely high-risk.”

The film makes clear, hilariously, that when Snowden first tried to get in touch with Glenn Greenwald, who is usually given the credit for bringing Snowden’s story to the rest of the world, Greenwald couldn’t learn to use the encryption Snowden (who knew how volatile this information was) insisted on, so Snowden moved on to Poitras (who was well-versed in encryption after the government had seized footage from her previous documentaries, including one about the Iraq war). After a time Snowden suggesting that she bring in Greenwald–when presumably she could instruct him what he needed to do to get his encryption skills up to snuff.

Citizenfour, I had to keep reminding myself, shows us history in the making. We meet Snowden before his first media interview. We see him in the hotel room in Hong Kong where he was first holed up when the story broke. I had to keep telling myself what I was seeing was important because most of it is otherwise pretty dull.

We never find out much about Snowden beyond what we’ve seen in other media. He is a man who is preternaturally sure and calm about what he’s done, perhaps because, as an autodidact (he has a GED) at the top of a highly skilled field, he was able to think for himself on the implications of the work he was being asked to do.

We do see the travails of another whistleblower who went through more traditional channels and is still suffering blowback for it, to show us why Snowden released the info to the media directly. And we see Snowden upset at how the girlfriend he lived with and left behind in Hawaii is treated by the government in his absence. But as a friend remarked as we left the theater, “Watching Edward Snowden stare at his laptop isn’t very exciting.”

Although Snowden was sure he would be tried and imprisoned for his actions, saying in one of his preliminary messages to Poitras, “In the end if you publish the source material I will likely be immediately implicated,” he eventually saw that he could, with help, escape and chose to do so. But the scenes that should build up tension and our empathy for him (even those of us who admire his actions and sympathize with his plight) fall flat.

An exception is when we see Snowden’s face on video blown up to epic proportions in a main Hong Kong Square, just after his first big media interview, and then cut back to Snowden still in his hotel room, trying to change his appearance so he won’t be recognized (and abducted) on his way to the airport. Otherwise we don’t feel like we are in Snowden’s shoes in this film, even as we spend much of our time looking and listening to him. At the end we see Snowden has reunited with his girlfriend in Russia (where he has been trapped since the US government cancelled his passport–just before he could catch the second leg of his escape flight). We see them through a window, preparing dinner together, from a distance, an apt metaphor for how well we have come to know Snowden in this film ostensibly about him.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiGwAvd5mvM” 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

‘Selma’ Is Now

In so many ways, this film reflects the current moment, while also highlighting how things have and have not changed since the King family and their allies risked their lives to secure rights for all. Scenes in the film will jolt you into the present: watching Jimmie Lee Jackson’s mother grieve in 1965 for the son she will never see again made me immediately think of the family of Tamir Rice, the young black boy who was murdered by police officers this year for toting a toy gun in Ohio. ‘Selma’ is now.

This guest post by Nijla Mu’min previously appeared at Bitch Media and is cross-posted with permission.

Historical dramas often stick to a tried-and-true formula: Important figures face struggles, then they triumph, becoming the great people we know today. We can usually count on a scene from their conflicted childhood, scenes showing their romantic troubles, any issues with drugs or alcohol, and how they persevered through it all to deliver whatever divine message or artistic gift they possessed.

Ava DuVernay’s new Martin Luther King Jr. biopic, Selma, avoids this formula—much to its benefit. It is one of the most effective, well-crafted historical biopics that I’ve ever seen because it goes off the traditional narrative about the Civil Rights Movement, giving us a moment in history that feels immediately familiar to the moment we are currently living in.

Selma captures the tireless efforts of Martin Luther King Jr. and a group of black activists attempting to secure equal voting rights for black people. These efforts led to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson. The film takes its name from the series of marches that King and his followers embarked on at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. One of those marches was infamously known as “Bloody Sunday,” after police and deputized locals descended on the protesters with nightsticks and tear gas. DuVernay and Director of Photography Bradford Young capture that march in all its terror in a scene where young and elderly marchers are clubbed and chased by angry police on horses. Selma certainly doesn’t cast the history of the Civil Rights Movement in feel-good soft focus.

In a recent interview I conducted with DuVernay, she discussed the way she approached the humanity of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., including his suspected infidelity. She was most interested in how this information affected his wife, Coretta Scott King, and how Martin Luther King would respond in the moment when questioned by Coretta. This emphasis on the intimacy in their relationship, rather than the scandal that the FBI sought to publicize, is something that informs the core of the film.

DuVernay is not interested in showing us montages of the unfaithful hero, his mistress, and the scorned wife, as was done in Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom. She is interested in the complex spaces of love and pain between two people. Coretta Scott King, played with an uncanny resemblance by Carmen Ejogo, takes on a central role in this film, not only as a wife and mother, but as a key player in the movement as she faces daily death threats made against her and her family. The attention and specificity paid to her character and her relationship to King is another gift that DuVernay brings to this film.

Further, there are so many ways this film could’ve become an extension of the Hallmark image that we see of Martin Luther King Jr., one that replays the same “I Have a Dream Speech” and tells us that nonviolence is the only way. While those elements are important, they are often overemphasized at the expense of the other work he did.

That is where Selma fills in the blanks. In this film, we get to know a methodical, intelligent, human Martin Luther King Jr; a man who just wanted to sit down at the end of the day and smoke a cigarette, or call Mahalia Jackson in the middle of the night to hear her sing a soothing gospel song. In the film, he invokes nonviolence but also cleverly provokes outward hatred in his opponents, helping people around the world witness this physical racism in the media. His tactics were risky, his negotiations with the likes of LBJ were grueling, and he was often put in positions of extreme discomfort, along with the many people he worked with.

This is not a film about a man and his followers, but about how a man’s work is informed by the respect he has for the people he works with—and even those he doesn’t. It reflects the movement by emphasizing distinct traits in each of the civil rights leaders it documents, from the youthful resistance of Jimmie Lee Jackson (played powerfully by Keith Stanfield), to the gentle persistence of Malcolm X (Nigel Thatch), who appeals to Coretta Scott King in a beautifully rendered scene. That scene and others completely reverse the rhetoric we’ve been fed about who these people were. The warring ideals between Malcolm and Martin aren’t the focus of this narrative, but rather how Malcolm X may have actually intentionally pushed many black people to follow Martin Luther King Jr., helping to strengthen the movement after all. Again, DuVernay utilized Coretta Scott King in a way that shows her role in the movement beyond being a supportive wife. She serves as a sort of peacemaker here.

Selma opened Christmas Day in Los Angeles, New York City, Washington, DC, and Atlanta. It opens nationwide Jan. 9.

Nijla Mu’min is a writer and filmmaker. She writes and direct movies about black mermaids, black lesbians, black girls in-between worlds, and boys too.

‘Selma’ Backlash: Is It a Gender Issue?

So what can women do about these smear campaigns directed at films by women? Go see films directed by women, support these filmmakers any way you can, whether it’s by filling theaters or participating in social media campaigns. We may not be able to change Academy voters’ minds, but we can continue drawing attention to gender disparities and focus on the positive changes.

This guest post by Lauren Byrd previously appeared at her blog and is cross-posted with permission.

Oscar nominations haven’t been announced yet, but there’s already a campaign to dethrone an Oscar hopeful. Selma, directed by Ava DuVernay, is a solid choice for film critics (100 percent on Rotten Tomatoes), but in the weeks following its release, the film has come up against criticism for its portrayal of President Lyndon B. Johnson.

During a time when the holiday season detracts from awards season, historians and former members of the Johnson administration voiced their concerns with the film.

Three days before the film’s release, Mark K. Updegrove, the director of the Lyndon B. Johnson Library and Museum in Austin, Texas, wrote a piece in Politico, titled, “What Selma Gets Wrong”:

In the film, President Johnson resists King’s pressure to sign a voting rights bill, which—according to the movie’s take—is getting in the way of dozens of other Great Society legislative priorities. Indeed, Selma’s obstructionist LBJ is devoid of any palpable conviction on voting rights. Vainglorious and power hungry, he unleashes his zealous pit bull, FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, on King, who is determined to march in protest from Selma to Montgomery despite LBJ’s warning that it will be “open season” on the protesters. This characterization of the 36th president flies in the face of history. In truth, the partnership between LBJ and MLK on civil rights is one of the most productive and consequential in American history.

Updegrove makes his argument about what is and isn’t right about this portrayal, but what the articles about the “Selma controversy” in The New York Times, The Wrap, and other media sites haven’t mentioned is that Updegrove also states that much of the film is correct and an accurate portrayal of the events of that time.

A former aide to Johnson Joseph A. Califano, Jr., wrote a similar piece in The Washington Post and on New Year’s Eve, The New York Times highlighted the charges of inaccuracy against the film in a piece by Jennifer Schuessler, which quoted several LBJ focused authors and historians.

Ava DuVernay on set of Selma — Ava DuVernay on set of *Selma*

DuVernay isn’t standing silently in the face of the recent criticism. In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, she said, “I wasn’t interested in making a white-savior movie; I was interested in making a movie centered on the people of Selma.”

It’s hard not to compare the sudden firestorm of controversy surrounding a potential Oscar hopeful to the controversy in the 2013 Oscar season that befell Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty.The debate about that particular film was based on its portrayal of torture and whether the film showed enhanced interrogation techniques producing intelligence that led to Osama bin Laden. Many journalists who had covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as national security, thought the film glorified torture, while film critics classified the film as an accurate depiction of the dark decisions made by the U.S. government during the murkiness of the post-9/11 decade.

It’s even more difficult not to note that both these films are directed by women. While questions about accuracy were also brought up about Lincoln during the 2013 awards season, which was directed by a man Steven Spielberg, the backlash against Zero Dark Thirty drowned out any questions around Spielberg’s film. As a result, Bigelow did not receive a Best Director nomination while Spielberg did. The inaccuracies in Argo, of which there were many, were not as widely discussed, and both Ben Affleck and the film went on to win Oscars.

This year, another film directed by a man, Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher, has recently undergone criticism from Mark Schultz, one of the brothers whom the film is based on. But FlavorWire has already written a piece defending the film against Schultz’s remarks.

Compared to Foxcatcher, which has been in theaters since November, the controversy around Selma has received more media play and it’s possible the charges of inaccuracies from historians will affect how future audiences view the film. (It opens nationwide on Friday.)

These smear campaigns against films helmed by women are yet another sign of the disparity of the treatment of men and women in the film industry. So are these smear campaigns a gender issue or simply a coincidence?

As someone who knows enough about the industry to know that the Academy Awards are certainly not based on merit or artistry, but rather on money and publicity, it was still hard to believe smear campaigns were a reality until the 2013 Oscar race when Zero Dark Thirty‘s awards season chances quickly diminish.

Kathryn Bigelow moderating a Q&A with Ava DuVernay after a screening of Selma — Kathryn Bigelow moderating a Q&A with Ava DuVernay after a screening of *Selma*

While it’s unclear what effect the controversy will have on Selma and DuVernay’s Oscar chances, let’s hope that in the future, audiences and Academy voters learn how to think for themselves rather than be carried away by the most recent awards season smear campaign. Man or woman.

Lauren Byrd has a master’s degree from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School. She’s worked in television and recently worked as part of the education team at Brave New Films.

Seed & Spark: Writing Women

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

This is a guest post by Martine Moore.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Regarding Susan Sontag’: An Intimate but Incomplete Portrait of an Icon

Directed by Nancy Kates, the HBO documentary ‘Regarding Susan Sontag’ (2014) chronicles the intellectual icon’s private and public life. Sontag came of age in conservative post-war America but did not conform to its rigid sexual and gender norms. She was told by her step-father that too much reading meant no husband. She ignored him, of course, and went on to study at Berkeley and the University of Chicago.

Written by Rachael Johnson.

Susan Sontag (1933-2004) was a writer, political activist and filmmaker as well as an immensely influential critic. She wrote and spoke about almost everything. Her interests included high and popular culture, photography, politics, and illness. Her essays “Against Interpretation” (1966) and “Notes on Camp” (1964), are rightly recognized as pioneering works of cultural criticism. Although Sontag was a better cultural critic than novelist, her works of fiction demonstrated a certain creative ambition. She was also politically active. In the 60s, she campaigned against the Vietnam War and in the 90s, she directed Waiting for Godot during the Siege of Sarajevo. Sontag challenged and provoked. Her piece in the New Yorker characterizing 9/11 as “an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower” was hugely controversial.

Directed by Nancy Kates, the HBO documentary Regarding Susan Sontag (2014) chronicles the intellectual icon’s private and public life. Sontag came of age in conservative post-war America but did not conform to its rigid sexual and gender norms. She was told by her step-father that too much reading meant no husband. She ignored him, of course, and went on to study at Berkeley and the University of Chicago. Strangely enough, she married the sociologist Philip Rieff at 17, and had a child at 19. Although the marriage lasted eight years, her life soon took another turn when she left the States to study in Paris. Sontag was bisexual, and had affairs with men and women throughout her life, although she did not come out in her younger years. The documentary also covers her activism–her trips to North Vietnam and Sarajevo as well as involvement with PEN American center.

Featuring commentary by former lovers, friends and family, Regarding Susan Sontag offers a very personal portrait of its subject. Acknowledging both her strengths and flaws, the documentary cannot be accused of hagiography. Armed with arresting looks and a penetrating intelligence, Sontag was a glamorous cultural icon. She was, however, sometimes knocked as self-absorbed and self-important. Some interviewees testify that she was not always an easy person to be around. A friend and former lover confides, “She was never able to know what goes on inside another person.” Still, Sontag loved life, and the accounts of the suffering she endured during her illness–she had two bouts of cancer–move the viewer.

The documentary does not, however, engage with Sontag’s ideas sufficiently, and more time could also have been spent on her politics. The first part of the film, in particular, focuses too much on her private life. This is, of course, quite typical of British and American profiles of cultural and political figures. You also don’t get the sense of just how provocative Sontag often was for an American public intellectual. At the beginning of the documentary, we see a clip of the writer on television defending the essay she wrote after 9/11, but we don’t return to the debate. Sontag also delivered another polemic when she stated that “the white race is the cancer of human history.” Kates touches on this but there is no discussion about the piece.

The documentary also does not examine her film on the Israel-Palestine conflict, Promised Lands (1974). Time constraints factor in here as well, of course. The documentary simply needs to be bigger, and longer. Nevertheless, we should be thankful for Regarding Susan Sontag. God knows there aren’t that many documentaries about public intellectuals out there–male or female. It’s certainly not dull. Sontag led a colorful, ground-breaking life, and her contemporaries offer interesting observations regarding the private woman. While not being a particularly erudite contribution to our understanding of the intellectual icon, Kates acknowledges her subject’s individualistic spirit.

‘A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night’ and Scares Us

Nice girls aren’t supposed to walk alone in the dark, even in the movies. So in the generically titled ‘A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night,’ the debut feature from writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour we in the audience wonder what a woman in a black cloak (a traditional Iranian garment called a chador) is doing on the streets of a largely empty desert town in the wee hours. We see her witness a pimp (Dominic Rains) exploit and then cheat a sex worker (Mozhan Marnò). We soon find out the woman in the chador, The Girl–we never find out her name (played, unforgettably, by Sheila Vand) is no ordinary woman, but a vampire with fangs that retract like a cat’s claws–or a switchblade.

Nice girls aren’t supposed to walk alone in the dark, even in the movies. So in the generically titled A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, the debut feature from writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour, we in the audience wonder what a woman in a black cloak (a traditional Iranian garment called a chador) is doing on the streets of a largely empty desert town in the wee hours. We see her witness a pimp (Dominic Rains) exploit and then cheat a sex worker (Mozhan Marnò). We soon find out the woman in the chador, The Girl–we never find out her name (played, unforgettably, by Sheila Vand) is no ordinary woman, but a vampire with fangs that retract like a cat’s claws–or a switchblade.

The film takes place in a parallel California which contains a Farsi-speaking, Iranian enclave called “Bad City.” We know we’re not in Iran because the pimp has visible tattoos and later we see a woman in public with her hair and much of her body uncovered. Also The Girl wears her chador in such a way that we see her hipster, stripey, boat shirt (too short for modest dress) and skinny jeans underneath.

In spite of its surface differences, the film to which Girl has the greatest parallel is probably David Lynch’s Eraserhead. Like that film, every sumptuous, black and white shot is framed and lit with care, creating an alternate universe for the audience to lose themselves in. And as in Eraserhead, even what we hear is fussed over in a way that grabs our attention: incidental sounds are recorded close. The proximity doesn’t alienate us, the way less skillful dubbing in other films often does, but gives us a heightened sense of intimacy, as if we are almost touching the characters.

When The Girl interrogates The Street Urchin (a young boy played by Milad Eghbali) the film shows a truth that many films, including horror films, elide–but that the other recent acclaimed horror film directed by a woman, The Babadook, also addresses–the first person who scares us when we are children is often a woman, whether it’s a mother or another woman authority figure. Tilda Swinton has said that her character in Snowpiercer was based on a particularly terrifying nanny from her own childhood. Few lines in films this year have been more chilling than the one The Girl leaves The Street Urchin with after she threatens him: “Be a good boy.”

Like Michael Almereyda, who, in the ’90s made a stylish black and white film about a woman vampire among New York hipsters, Nadja (its star, Elina Löwensohn, had eyes you couldn’t look away from, much like Vand’s) Amirpour combines familiar elements in an unfamiliar way for maximum resonance. In Almereyda’s modern day New York Hamlet (from 2000), he famously incorporated a video of Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh talking about “being” in the background of a scene, priming us to later hear Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy.

In Girl Amirpour gets at how women in modest Muslim dress (including those from Iran) are used for xenophobic and anti-Islamic fear-mongering (often in the guise of “feminism”) in the US (like in the recent ad campaign for Homeland) but also uses a chador’s resemblance to a cape to give us an eerily familiar–but new–“Dracula” silhouette. When The Girl rides on the skateboard The Street Urchin leaves behind (after he runs away from her in terror) the chador billows around her as she rolls down the road, and she becomes, without CGI trickery, a bat in flight.

Americans often read chador on women to mean vulnerability, but like the frail-seeming, pale, young, blonde Mae in another beautifully-shot, vampire Western (also directed by a woman, the pre-Hurt Locker Kathryn Bigelow) 1987’s Near Dark, who, when her cowboy boyfriend lassoes her as a “joke” takes hold of the rope and pulls him in, The Girl has hidden reserves of strength. The Girl becomes an avenging angel in black, attacking the men we see abuse women, using her “traditional” quiet passivity to draw these guys close. As the abusive men do with the cat who is many times in the frame (rarely has a filmmaker caught how much of our daily lives our animals witness) they ascribe motivations and personas to The Girl which are more about their own perceptions than about who she is or what she is thinking.

Like a number of films Girl has an early scene, fast becoming a campy cliché, in which a woman suggestively sucks the finger of a man. But when The Girl takes the pimp’s forefinger into her mouth, he gets more than he bargained for.

And as we do with Mae, we see that The Girl is lonely, and a hapless, good-looking guy, Arash, played by Arash Marandi touches something in her. When they meet, he’s coming from a costume party where he’s taken some of the club drugs he was dealing and is still wearing a vampire cape as he stares into a street light. She immediately becomes protective of him.

Vand’s presence burns through the screen. She has the intensity of the great silent actresses–and in many of her scenes, the ones in her room plastered with ’80s music posters, dancing by herself to Farsi synth-pop records or even when she interacts with other characters, she often does not speak. This film is low on back story but Vand’s face, especially her huge dark eyes (we see her put on her heavy eyeliner in the bathroom mirror before she goes out) tells us what she is feeling in every scene.

Amirpour’s camera (the magnificent cinematography is by Lyle Vincent) lingers over Arash’s beauty–his high cheekbones and large, long-lashed eyes under a dark, curly version of James Dean’s pompadour–in a way few male filmmakers would. His clothes (a plain white t-shirt and jeans that hug his muscled body) also evoke Dean’s. And even though the pimp, Saeed, is a villain, meant to repel us, Amirpour lets us take in the attractiveness of his body, especially in a shirtless scene with The Girl when his pants hang very low and we see the full extent of his tattoos–and his muscles.

LA has enough Iranian-Americans in it that some have nicknamed it “Tehrangeles” (after Iran’s capital), but I can’t think of another film produced near there (Girl was actually filmed in Bakersfield) in which most (or all) of the cast is of Persian descent, but no one is a terrorist or a relic from the old country. These characters speak Farsi to each other but, except for Arash’s father, with his drug addiction and collection of pre-revolutionary framed photos of family (complete with 60s-style teased hair on the women), these people aren’t living in the past–even The Girl’s retro record collection, clothes and bobbed hair reflect present-day fashion.

We can never know for sure, but just as with Black actress Gugu Mbatha-Raw giving two terrific, completely different star-turns in movies in one year but the media still largely ignoring her, I wonder if Amirpour’s flawless visual sense, skill with actors and unique reworking of a genre many of us thought didn’t have an original angle left would garner more attention if she were a white guy. Girl is distributed in partnership with VICE‘s film arm and has even made some year-end, top-10 lists, but I had to go to New York to see it and whole countries (like Canada) have yet to get even limited distribution. Nevertheless Amirpour continues to work on films unimpeded. Her next work is about cannibals. I can’t wait until its release.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YGmTdo3vuY”]

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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 Enemy: Race and Gender In Andrea Arnold’s ‘Wuthering Heights’

Heathcliff illustrates the brutalization of the non-white male; his every attempt to integrate is rejected, so he grows embittered and alienated, forced to exploit others to achieve his goals. If Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom is often criticized for being implausibly forgiving and accommodating to racist slave-owners, then surely Heathcliff is the anti-Tom, an openly angry and defiant agent of revenge against the racist patriarchy that has killed his love.

This is a guest post by Brigit McCone.

Heathcliff is not white. Though his exact race is never defined, racial stigma is used to mark him as a threatening, “dark-skinned” outsider throughout Wuthering Heights. It is significant that this interracial aspect of the novel’s passionate romance wasn’t addressed on screen until Andrea Arnold’s 2011 adaptation, over 160 years after the book’s publication. Arnold foregrounds the issue of Heathcliff’s race by casting Black actors in the role, rather than the conventional “white-Anglo-Saxon-gypsy” dodge. The swearing, which was considered shocking by Brontë’s contemporaries, has been updated by Arnold to retain its impact for modern audiences, as has the racist language. Essentially, her film is a partial retelling of the novel, exclusively from Heathcliff’s perspective. Where Catherine makes a stray remark in the book about Heathcliff’s dull silence compared to Linton, Arnold’s film embodies that silence in wordless scenes on the Yorkshire moors. When Heathcliff is cast out of doors, Arnold’s camera forces us to share his exile and peer through windows at events within. When Heathcliff is beaten, we experience his pain in flinching close-up. When Heathcliff leaves in the middle of a dramatic speech, we are likewise denied its conclusion.

The result is fragmentary and sometimes frustrating, perhaps not satisfying as a standalone film. But it achieves what no previous adaptation has: to be a real enhancement to the book, rather than a pale reflection of it. Where Brontë’s novel filters our impression of Heathcliff through the narration of Lockwood’s smug, educated gentleman and Nelly’s commonsensical servant, each sometimes presenting him as incomprehensible, barbarous or threatening, Arnold flips this narrative to show us the incomprehensible barbarity and threatening cruelty of the dominant society itself, as seen through the outsider’s eyes. From this alienated perspective, Heathcliff’s descent into cruelty appears an inevitable and almost overdue reaction to the constant, painful brutality he suffers. Arnold’s interpretation might be compared to Steve McQueen’s approach to 12 Years A Slave, stripping away the rationalizing aimed at 19th century readers, to lay bare oppression in the most raw and physical way possible. In a world where an unarmed Black youth can be interpreted as more threatening than an armed representative of “mainstream” society, film’s potential to challenge our identification and flip our perspective is as timely as it is rarely used. By the time Mumford & Sons’ “The Enemy” plays over the film’s final moments, the song’s sentimental regret feels earned.

I Am Not the Enemy; It Isn’t Me, the Enemy

The question is, does Arnold’s sympathetic portrait of Heathcliff reflect Brontë’s own view of the character, or does it re-imagine the original author’s racist view, as reflected in Wuthering Heights’ narration? Firstly, it must be said that the story Arnold unearths is taken straight from the original book, although there it is diluted by the perspectives and interpretations of others. Perhaps the book’s most crucial speech is Catherine Earnshaw’s “whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same… Nelly, I am Heathcliff,” placing Brontë’s white heroine in absolute solidarity with the non-white hero, which Arnold highlights by letting Cathy’s “I am Heathcliff” echo after her film’s end credits. This is more than a declaration of love; it is a radical declaration of interchangeability. The fundamental similarity of Heathcliff and Catherine allows the book to present their divergent outcomes as a product of divergent treatment, linking the actions of their adult selves to the experiences of their childhoods. Catherine is Heathcliff, therefore their pairing allows Brontë to explore how differently the same behavior is interpreted, rewarded or punished, when acted by different bodies.

Catherine, by contrast, illustrates the psychological pressures of the pedestalization of white womanhood. She is harshly punished for rebelling, roaming the moors or obeying her instincts, being explicitly told by her beloved father that his love is conditional on her being a “good lass,” while that father hypocritically rewards adopted son Heathcliff for the behavior he rejects in Catherine. Catherine is, however, extravagantly rewarded with social approval for acting traditionally feminine. Her fear of suffering the same degradation as Heathcliff forces her to attempt to assimilate as Linton’s wife, where she suffocates and dies from the frustrations of that role. Through its image of an oak tree struggling to thrive in a flower pot, the book attributes Catherine’s suffering to her entrapment, in contrast to her natural strength and potency. The novel’s portrait of Catherine’s existential struggles is glimpsed in Arnold’s adaptation but cannot be explored; we are not permitted to understand her reasons for marrying Linton because Heathcliff does not understand them. But the roots of Heathcliff’s alienation, as the direct result of his treatment, are exposed by Arnold with more clarity than ever before.

So Why Did You Choose to Lean on a Man You Knew Was Falling?

Wuthering Heights is a book intimately concerned with learned cycles of intergenerational abuse, a theme Arnold’s film captures by ending with the striking image of young Hareton hanging a dog in the same way Heathcliff did earlier in the film. The novel’s dainty and feminine Isabella and Catherine Linton become embittered and abusive in the dysfunctional environment of Wuthering Heights, just as Hindley, Hareton and Heathcliff do – Brontë rejects any limitation of abusive behavior to a single race or gender, attributing it rather to a toxic environment. The Isabella subplot in Wuthering Heights also offers a radical affirmation of a wife’s right to flee an abusive husband with her child, a century before the establishment of the first women’s shelters. This theme would be expanded in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, where it caused a storm of controversy (it was possibly overlooked in Wuthering Heights because readers were distracted by the interracial necrophilia. Ellis Brontë: epic punk). To claim that Brontë’s portrait of Heathcliff romanticizes abusive behavior is to ignore the Isabella subplot’s explicit denial of a loving woman’s power to rescue an abusive man, which urges the reader to heed warning signs of cruelty (Heathcliff hanging Isabella’s dog) rather than satisfying their ego by struggling to redeem a lost soul. Heathcliff and Catherine share a profound love and affinity, but they are both too damaged to save each other; the novel demands the reader’s understanding of the roots of abusive behavior, and recognition of the human potential for love and unselfishness, but never demands approval of abuse itself.

The fundamental interchangeability of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw also lends the novel to transmasculine readings, where Heathcliff’s racial stigma might symbolize Catherine’s stigmatized masculinity, without which she cannot thrive and which she must sacrifice to conform to a traditional, wifely role. Ellis is recorded by Charlotte as the only Brontë sibling to oppose being publicly assigned a female name; Ellis’ masculinity is also suggested in Charlotte’s biographical sketches and her fictionalized portrait of her sibling as Shirley. Wuthering Heights’ potential as lesbian closeting drama may also be demonstrated by comparison with Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, dedicated to Woolf’s lover, Vita Sackville-West. Orlando asserts the interchangeability of the womanizing male Orlando and his female alter-ego (whose male lover Shelmerdine is distinctly feminized, and encountered while Orlando pledges herself to 19th century moors in an apparent nod to Wuthering Heights), allowing Orlando to maintain superficial heterosexuality while being both woman and lover of women. Wuthering Heights is preoccupied with Catherine Earnshaw’s interchangeability with both Heathcliff and Hareton Earnshaw, while her feminized lover Edgar Linton is variously incarnated as Heathcliff’s lover Isabella and Hareton’s lover Catherine Linton. The novel’s final reconciliation is only achieved by divorcing Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff from society, through death and ghostly dematerialization, and by whitewashing and re-gendering them as happy couple Hareton Earnshaw and Catherine Linton; this “happy ending” upholds its heroes’ ultimate incompatibility with a racist, sexist and heterosexist society, ending by contemplating their “unquiet slumbers.” As a heterosexual tomboy, however, I also found Wuthering Heights fully expressed my own teenaged frustrations and craving for passionate equality with a male lover (Heathcliff represents the primary love object in most heterosexual interpretations, but alter-ego in lesbian and transmasculine readings); Ellis’ recorded wish for an ungendered name might equally reflect perceived prejudice against female writing, rather than transmasculine identity. This multiplicity of meaning is one of the book’s enduring fascinations, indicating how deeply Brontë cuts to the universal, metaphysical bone of the struggle to love ourselves through the mirror of another. Arnold’s film must sacrifice some of this multiplicity; Heathcliff’s racial stigma might represent the stigma of female masculinity or lesbian sexuality, but the visceral impact of a Black body brutalized onscreen can represent only itself.

Give Me Hope in Silence; It’s Easier, It’s Kinder

Wuthering Heights is one of the greatest novels in the English language: enigmatic, passionately sincere, spare, and magnificently disregarding of social convention. It is also cunning in its use of the educated Lockwood to voice dominant ideology and disarm rationalizing criticism, and plainspoken Nelly to disarm common-sense objections. In resisting the judgments of these narrators, readers reach out towards Catherine and Heathcliff’s perspectives rather than defending against them. The fact that this is a first novel, by a writer not yet thirty, is mind-blowing. The book’s confrontation of racist and sexist ideologies feels incredibly modern; its unflinching portrait of the psychology of abuse retains its impact. Andrea Arnold’s brutal, stripped-down take on Wuthering Heights does justice to these elements, rather than fossilizing the book into a cozy classic or tamed romance.

Just as we must mentally resist the book’s judging narrators, so Wuthering Heights resists depicting Heathcliff and Catherine on the moors, allowing that image to haunt through suggestion alone. Arnold cannot avoid directly depicting the moors; rather, she complements the book by boldly visualizing the submerged spaces of Brontë’s novel. Arnold’s moors are an expressionist landscape, filled with the tumult of wind and rain like a storm of passions, and the harsh poetry of sex and death in animal life; the oppressively amplified sound resembles a cross between The Piano and Das Boot. In any other 19th century novel, the reader would demand whether Catherine and Heathcliff had sex during their unchaperoned time on the moors; it is one of Brontë’s achievements that Wuthering Heights makes this question simply irrelevant. It is a drama of love and being, not of sex and marriage. Arnold’s film follows the same oblique model; suggestive shots leave Catherine and Heathcliff’s physical relationship open-ended. The leap between child and adult actors is jarring (especially as it represents a gap of only three years), but it satisfyingly reflects the novel’s conceptual leap: Heathcliff and Catherine are victims of circumstance before Heathcliff’s departure; when he returns, they are adults who must wrestle with their childhoods’ legacy and suffer the consequences of their choices.

Nineteenth century writers used their romantic plots to explore diverse philosophical and political concerns. Just as Wuthering Heights confronts sexism, racism, and intergenerational abuse through a central love story, so Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South uses its love plot to propose a progressive model of industrial revolution, combining libertarian profit incentive with social welfare investment, with women as equal business partners and strikes averted through bilateral negotiation between masters and union leaders, while pioneering African-American writer Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy flips the trope of the “tragic mulatto” by using a love plot to affirm Iola’s positive choice of Black identity.

Andrea Arnold’s 2011 adaptation of Wuthering Heights points the way for more challenging and political exploration of the female canon’s classic authors, revitalizing them by blowing the cobwebs from safe romantic cliché. Bravo.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30XKzxnTYK8″]

Brigit McCone refuses to be embarrassed by the emo associations of Wuthering Heights fandom, writes and directs short films, radio dramas, and The Erotic Adventures of Vivica (as cabaret pseudonym Voluptua von Temptitillatrix). Her hobbies include doodling and eating sushi.

Spirit Possession and Military Service: Talya Lavie Talks to Us About ‘Zero Motivation’

What were the biggest challenges in making a feature film? How do people see compulsory military service in Israel? Was that Russian girl really possessed by a ghost? Writer/director Talya Lavie answers our questions about her award-winning film.

Zero Motivation, which won Best Narrative Feature at the Tribeca Film Festival, is a dark slacker comedy set in the Israeli military. You can read our review of it here.

The first feature-length film from writer-director Talya Lavie, Zero Motivation was inspired by her own military service. In the Director’s Note found in the movie’s press kit, Lavie writes that “Israeli women may of course serve in more glamorous roles, like pilots or tank crew instructors. But I wanted to focus on us office girls, the unseen and mostly ignored majority whose contribution is lacking any social or symbolic value.”

While promoting the film’s release in New York, she took the time to follow up on that statement, and to answer a few of our questions.

Bitch Flicks: Most of our readers are from the US and Canada, where the concept of mandatory military service is a little bit foreign, so I’m wondering if you could expand on that statement and talk about how you see the role of female conscripts in the Israeli military.

Lavie: Israel is one of the only countries that has mandatory military service for women as well as men. It creates a paradox because, on the one hand, it’s a symbol of equality but, at the same time, the IDF… still demonstrates real gender discrimination. There are women in combat roles but, as I said, the majority of women are still doing secretarial jobs. I believe this may change only if the army becomes less central in Israeli society – hopefully one day.

BF: In many ways, this is a coming of age story, but one that takes place within a very specific setting. (How) do you think that serving in the military has influenced the way these characters define themselves and develop as individuals?

Lavie: In a way, the army for those characters is what college is for Americans. Everyone participates and accepts it as a fact. It is, though, challenging to define your individual identity while having to wear the same uniform as everyone else, and to [live under these] rules. I guess it influences each person in a different way, like every other thing in life.

BF: While the film is very funny, there are a few darker moments in the story. How did you go about managing the changes in tone in the film?

Lavie: The film is defined as a “dark comedy” but, while writing the script, I didn’t want to lock myself into a specific genre. I put a large [range] of emotions in it, and was interested in mixing different spirits. Ultimately, my greatest challenge was to maintain the specific subtle tone of the film; to balance the transitions between humor, sadness, nonsense and seriousness. I felt like an acrobat in a circus walking on a rope, trying not to fall off, and yet to keep the film’s free spirit.

BF: I think the sequence where Irena is “possessed” by the spirit of the dead girl works really well on a metaphorical level, but inquiring minds want to know – was she really possessed by a ghost?

Lavie: All of the characters in the film have a very detailed biography that is not told in the movie – none of them gives a personal monologue. But their background is hinted at in many ways. In Irena’s character, we tried to hint that she has a history of violence. And when she sees Zohar nearly raped, it brings a very strong reaction out of her. Is she really possessed? I leave it for each viewer to decide for himself.

BF: What were some of the biggest challenges you faced in making this film, and do you have any advice for aspiring filmmakers?

Lavie: The biggest challenge was raising the budget for the film. It took several years. That stage in the creation of a film can be very frustrating for any first time filmmaker. My advice for filmmakers at this point is, in addition to applying anywhere you can, use that waiting time for learning and preparing for shooting. Eventually, when I look back on the process, that waiting period was frustrating but also useful for rewriting and studying. I came to the set very prepared. And since we had a very short time for shooting, [being prepared] was significant.

Thank you to Talya Lavie for taking the time to speak with us. Zero Motivation is currently playing in New York, San Francisco, Toronto, and other select cities in North America.

Angelina Jolie Wins Over Manhattan Press to Promote ‘Unbroken’

Angelina Jolie: “I thought often in making this film about my children, my sons, who are of the age appropriate to see it – the older sons – and it’s a movie for everybody but I think it’s one you think about this great generation and the values they had and how they were as men and I think it’s one that we want to raise our children and remind this generation of their sense of family and community and honor and pay respect to them.”

This is a guest post by Paula Schwartz.

Angelina Jolie swept into Manhattan last week for some serious Oscar politicking for Unbroken, her second time at the helm as a feature film director. She attended a dizzying round of luncheons, receptions, press conferences, and Q&As to promote the film and for some needed sizzle to propel it in the awards race. Treated like royalty – a week before those other Royals arrived – and even with more anticipation, the Maleficient star dazzled even the most jaded entertainment reporters.

Based on the best-selling book about Louis Zamperini by Laura Hillenbrand, the movie chronicles his life as Olympian runner, World War II bombardier, ocean castaway on a raft surrounded by sharks, and enslaved prisoner brutalized by sadistic guards. After the war, Zamperini struggled with alcohol addiction and PTSD but finally found redemption through faith and forgiveness. Jolie’s main concern is that the film honor Zamperini’s life and struggle and that it inspire audiences.

Oscar prognosticators hint Unbroken could bring Jolie a Best Director Oscar nomination and Universal has pulled out all stops to make that possible. With Ava DuVernay a shoo-in for her brilliant film Selma, an epic about another great man, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., this could be the first year two women are nominated in this category. (Even more historic would be Ms. DuVernay’s nomination because shamefully no African-American woman director has ever received this honor.)

Unbroken received an awards boast earlier in the week when the American Film Institute picked it as one of the outstanding 11 films of the year. (Selma is also on the list.) But two days later the Screen Actors Guild and the Hollywood Foreign Press left Unbroken off their list. This is especially surprising since the Hollywood Foreign Press loves glittery movie stars at their Golden Globe celebration.

In 2011 Jolie, who wrote and directed In the Land of Blood and Honey, a controversial film about a love affair between Bosnian woman and a Serbian solder, received a Golden Globe nomination for best foreign film. I spoke to her by telephone to get her reaction for the New York Times. She told me she knew the subject matter was a hard sell but it was a story she had to tell. “I didn’t want to be a director,” she told me, “I’ll just only do it if there’s something that I feel so compelling it must be told.” She also told me she never reads press about her or Brad Pitt. “It’s better not to know,” she said.

Both director and cast members, Jack O’Connell (Zamperini), Takamasa Ishihara (sadistic prison guard, Watanable), Garrett Hedlund and Finn Wittrock participated in a press conference last Friday at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. Jolie choked up several times when she spoke about the subject of her film, with whom she became very close. Six hours later she teared up again at a Bafta screening when she discussed how she visited Zamperini in the hospital to show him the film and seek his approval. He died several weeks later in July of this year at age 97.

Jolie materialized at the press conference surrounded by her supporting and admiring cast, but she was the star attraction. Slender and fine boned, with her high cheekbones and saucer eyes, she is as spectacular in person as her pictures lead you to expect.

She was in New York a week before the leaked Sony e-mails in which producer Scott Rudin insulted her and the film. She has chosen so far not to comment.

The cast of Unbroken — The cast of *Unbroken*

Here are selected quotes from the press conference last week featuring Angelina Jolie.

Why it was so important to you to make the film:

I thought often in making this film about my children, my sons, who are of the age appropriate to see it – the older sons – and it’s a movie for everybody but I think it’s one you think about this great generation and the values they had and how they were as men and I think it’s one that we want to raise our children and remind this generation of their sense of family and community and honor and pay respect to them. And I want my children to know about men like Louis so when they feel bad about themselves and they think all is lost, they know they’ve got something inside of them because that’s what this story speaks to. It’s what’s inside all of us. You don’t have to be a perfect person or a saint or a hero. Louis was very flawed, very human, but made great choices and in the end a great man.

I came into this because I felt it was an important story. I was drawn to the message of the story. If you’d asked me a few years ago what kind of a film do you want to make? I never would have assumed to make a film that included shark attacks and plane crashes. I would never have thought of myself handling that kind of cinematic filmmaking. I wouldn’t think I could do that or should do that (laughs).

What was it specifically about this book that made you so passionate about bringing it to the screen? Was there one specific thing abut this story that said to you, this is it, this is my next movie?

I think what it was, like everybody, we wake up, we read the news, we see the events that go on around the world and we live in our community and we’re disheartened by so much. We feel overwhelmed and we don’t what’s possible and we don’t know where… We want something to hold onto and something to give us strength. And I was halfway through this book and I found myself inspired and on fire and feeling better and being reminded of the strength of the human spirit and the strength of having a brother like Pete and what that is and to remind us to be that for each other and how important that is to have that in your life… I realized if this was having this effect on me and I knew it had this effect on so many people, isn’t this what we needed to put forward into the world at this time? And I believe it is and I’m very happy also it’s coming out during the holidays. I think it’s an important time. It’s the right time.

Transforming the book into the film:

The Coen brothers (the screenplay writers) said something to me that helped me completely. They said when you put the book down you have a certain feeling and a certain understanding. That’s what they need to feel when they walk out of the theater. That’s your job. To literally put this book on film you won’t make a good movie and you’ll do no service to anyone. So know the themes and to us these themes, so then we would go back to the film and so for example, faith, faith is so important to him, instead of it being a specific chapter and how to put it all in, and all the experiences of his life, faith was represented from the beginning, from the little boy and represented all through the film in other characters but also in the sunrise and the darkness and the light and the struggle between them and him coming into the light. But it wasn’t literally, technically as it was in the book, but the things are the same, so that’s what we tried to do. But I think a lot of our favorite stories aren’t in the film.

It was tough. I’d be carrying the book, before we were doing the film, and a lot of people would say that’s my favorite book. You know what my favorite scene is? And I started to say don’t tell me.

Your next movie is with Brad Pitt, By the Sea. Is that sort of an antidote to this epic?

By the Sea was emotionally difficult acting in it but it was logistically a walk in the park in comparison to Unbroken. It was a nice break.

On Zamperini watching Unbroken in his hospital room:

Louis was 97 (when he died). He began skateboarding in his 80s. He was still living alone taking care of himself. He was very full of joy and love of life and very sharp. And he was doing speaking engagements for about two weeks prior to the day I got the call and he went into the hospital. So I put the film on my laptop – it was missing some of the special effects and music – (but it was) pretty much wrapped, and I went over to the hospital and I sat beside his bed and I held it over him and he watched the film and I watched him watch the film. I thought I would get some review, he would say good shot… and in reality I found myself in this extraordinary moment where I was watching this man at the end of his life reliving the moments of his life, remembering his mother, remembering his brother and all the friends he’d lost. He was the last alive, and preparing himself, as a man of faith… watching him cross the finish line while he was in this hospital bed and smiling…When it (the film) was over, he just looked at me and smiled. And then he told me a really inappropriate joke.

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

‘The Babadook’: Jennifer Kent on Her Savage Domestic Fairy Tale

Jennifer Kent: “I didn’t start with motherhood being the primary focus, but it is a very important part of the film, and I’m very adamant not to make this woman the evil mother. That’s why I placed the film very much inside her experience.”

This is a guest post by Josh Ralske.

Australian writer-director Jennifer Kent’s feature debut The Babadook is the surprise hit horror film of the year. (Read Sarah Smyth’s review here.) With no stars and a limited budget, Kent cannily tells the story of Amelia (Essie Davis), a widow still wracked with grief over the death of her husband six years earlier, and Amelia’s troubled young son Samuel (Noah Wiseman), whose obsessive fear of monsters verges on the manic. One night, Samuel pulls an unfamiliar book from the shelf for his mother to read to him, Mr. Babadook. Amelia reads the book, unleashing the titular monster into their home. The mother and son, and the movie, increasingly retreat into their own horrific private world, terrorized by a fairy tale-like creature that seems intent on driving Amelia into madness.

The narrative is simple, and pointedly familiar, but The Babadook is notable for the complexity of its two main characters, and the remarkable performances that bring them to such vivid life.

We spoke with Kent on the phone about the film’s creation and its success.

Bitch Flicks: Congratulations on all the acclaim that the film is getting.

Jennifer Kent: Thank you. It’s been a real trip. It’s been a long and fantastic journey for this film. It’s been amazing.

BF: How did you get the idea for the film? Are you a parent yourself?

JK: No. No, I’m not. Obviously the mother/child relationship is really important in the film, but what i was really focused on was her, on this woman and her suppression of something she found impossible to face. That was the starting point for me. I feel if you suppress things in life, you don’t just affect yourself; you affect everyone around you. So then the choice to have that little boy in the picture, and to make him a kind of mirror to her was how it worked out. But it wasn’t, for me, entirely a story about motherhood, although that is a really important factor in the film.

BF: I understand what you’re saying about it being a very personal story, and starting with Amelia’s character, and what’s refreshing about it is how complex her character is. She isn’t just one thing. She’s not the type of female protagonist that you see in a typical horror film.

JK: I didn’t start with motherhood being the primary focus, but it is a very important part of the film, and I’m very adamant not to make this woman the evil mother. That’s why I placed the film very much inside her experience. Even when the shit hits the fan later in the film, we’re still experiencing it largely from her perspective, and I wanted her to be complex. She’s trying so hard. She’s a loving person. She’s drowning. She’s a drowning woman in this situation, but she wants to do the right thing, and I was interested in exploring that. I’m the type of person, when I read or hear about these parents killing or harming their kids… Of course it’s a tragedy, and the act of those parents is abominable, but they’re not monsters. They’re human beings. And my empathy and my sensitivity around these things made me curious. How does one get to that place where they become this monstrous mother? How does that happen? And so that’s why, I guess, I feel proud of that character, of Amelia. No one’s saying that she’s a one note character.

BF: Your empathy for the character really comes through. Could you talk a little bit about casting Samuel, and your conception of that character, because again, it’s not a child character that I’ve seen in any other film. He’s a very unique movie kid.

JK: Yeah. If you met [Noah], you’d be shocked, because he’s the opposite of Sam. He’s very quiet and sweet. That’s all acting. And he is an empathetic kid. He really loved Sam. He really felt sorry for Sam, because his mom wouldn’t listen to him. And he was right. And I think the quality that I was looking for in the little boy who would play Sam was that empathy. And of course, Sam’s a strange kid, and very annoying at times, but ultimately, he loves his mom and he wants to protect her. So I needed a child who could embody all those qualities. And someone who could be directed. A lot of kids that come into these auditions, they’re like machines. But they can’t necessarily change and give you a subtle performance. But Noah could, and the key to that for me was improvisation. So we played games and we imagined things with the boys who got down to the final short list. And Noah was a standout in that way: vivid imagination, very emotionally intelligent. And robust. You know, I didn’t want a kid that was going to collapse on the second day of shooting, saying “I wanna go home.” He was there for the six weeks of shooting, day in and day out, and when I think about what he did, it’s an extraordinary thing for a 6-year-old to achieve.

BF: Yeah, that’s amazing. I didn’t know if you’d found a kid who was just sort of like that, or if you’d found someone capable of bringing that character to life without necessarily being that way. That’s interesting.

JK: Yeah, he was really fun and sweet. And in fact, one interesting thing about that process is that kids don’t want to be disobedient, so it was really hard to get him to be that way in rehearsals. I had to give him permission to be naughty, because yeah, kids are socialized — unless they’re brought up badly — to be well-behaved. So yeah, it was a real process for him.

BF: Did you set out to make a horror film? Is that a genre that you’re interested in generally? I noticed the clips from Black Sabbath and House of Exorcism and of course, all those great George Méliès clips that Amelia sees on TV. Is that the type of work that drew you to this type of story?

JK: Yeah. I mean, I love horror. I love it! I even will see most of the modern stuff, and I always hope it’s gonna be good. But I definitely have watched a lot of Italian horror, lot of everything. So it’s in me. It’s in my DNA, but it isn’t the thing that rules me. And I have to say… I can’t speak for other filmmakers, but I imagine it wasn’t something that ruled them either. They start with an idea and a story and that’s what happens. I think there’s a danger in becoming subservient to a genre, going “Oh, I’m going to make a movie that’s going to scare everyone.” I needed to look deeper than that, and that’s why… It’s such an interesting thing, how bad horror can be, and I think when it’s really bad, it’s just made by people who don’t get it. Who don’t understand how powerful it is. You can really discuss deep issues with horror, in a way you can’t through drama. It’s one of the most cinematic genres as well, because it’s very closely linked with dreams. So yeah, I’m a fan.

BF: I agree with you that you can touch on these deep human issue through the genre. It doesn’t just have to be about saying “boo.” Amelia’s grief in the film is such a powerful thing that seems to be the genesis…

JK: Yeah. How would you discover that in drama? It would be very hard to not make it melodramatic. To put it in this realm actually makes people feel what Amelia’s feeling, on some level, and have empathy with her. I’ve noticed that the film doesn’t work with people who have low empathy [laughs] as human beings. It’s not a film for them. The people who it scares have more of that going on in their systems.

BF: Well, I liked it. I thought it was scary. So, I guess I check out on the empathy scale.

JK: So you’re a decent human being. [laughs]

BF: Yeah, I guess. If that’s your barometer for that. It’s really interesting to me. It has these very classical elements to it with the sense of isolation and the darkness and the way the Babadook himself is portrayed. There’s an old-fashioned quality to it. Could you talk about how you decided to visualize this monster?

JK: It was something that just felt right, this kind of childlike world. I’m really drawn to myths, and I guess I wanted to create a new myth in a domestic setting. Old children’s books, old fairy tales — you know, the brutal ones, the real ones — they touch on something very primal. They look childlike and innocuous, but deep down, there’s something really savage and sinister there. So that was my starting point for the world of the film. The book is obviously a very important part of it, so I wanted the Babadook to spring from the book, in terms of its style as well. And there’s something about the old horror that is very childlike, because it’s done in what we would consider now a very simple way, all in-camera techniques, but there’s something still very powerful about that, I think. Sometimes even more powerful than CGI and a lot of complicated post-production work. When something happens in camera, and you’re seeing it with the naked eye, you feel — I feel, anyway — differently. It feels like it’s happening there and it’s more real to me.

BF: I think it’s very effective, and it is an extension of the book in a way that works really well. Could you talk about the book itself? It was great. Very memorable, very vivid work that Alex Juhasz did.

JK: We looked for ages for an artist. We looked at lots of Australian illustrators, and we even worked with a couple in developing the Babadook look, but Alex was unique in that he’s actually an American artist. I saw his work and it was beautiful but really strange. I was drawn to him and his work. He has this thing of being able to keep his work original, but also took direction. So we were able to develop the look of the creature according to how I needed it to operate. So it wasn’t just finding an illustrator to make these beautiful pictures. He really understood the need for it to support the story. He was a good storyteller. And he also had a lot of work in stop motion animation. He designed the opening credits for United States of Tara, and he’d worked a lot with Jamie Caliri, the stop motion animator who did Lemony Snicket‘s end credits. He had a lot of experience that proved invaluable when it came to animating the book. He’s a bit of a genius, Alex.

BF: The illustrations themselves really set the tone for what’s to come.

JK: They come to life, so they needed to be energetic and have an ambitiousness to them.

BF: For women filmmakers, in the states at least, it can be particularly challenging to get a first film made and shown. Is that something you want to address?

JK: I’m not so much aware. I don’t think of myself — I know I’m a woman, of course, but I don’t feel ruled by it. I think a film is hard to make, full stop. I think a person’s first feature is a real trial by fire, no matter if you’re male, female, or otherwise, and it’s not something that I feel really informed me. It certainly didn’t hinder me. Not in Australia, anyway. And I must say, I’ve had a lot of meetings with various people in America since Babadook premiered in Sundance, and admittedly, I haven’t done any work there yet, but I’ve never felt encumbered or restrained by my gender in that context. I’m not saying sexism doesn’t exist, but I don’t give it much time. I’ve got too much to do.

BF: Do you think, though, that — I don’t know, that scene where Amelia is using the vibrator… I’m not sure there are many male filmmakers that would’ve thought to include a scene like that, but it’s an important scene in terms of understanding who Amelia is and what she’s dealing with.

JK: My gaze and my way of looking at the world is inherently feminine, from a feminine perspective, and there are things in that film that probably wouldn’t be written by a male writer. But I don’t know. Isn’t that the way with all films? They come from the person who makes them. I understand what you’re saying, Josh, I’m just trying to… it’s a complex issue. Yes, there’s sexism in the world and there’s an incredible imbalance of males to females represented in all films. Most films are about male stories. So yeah, maybe I just put a female story out there, and the fact that it’s unique says that we still have a long way to go in terms of making more female stories come to life. I hope I can put a few more out there. Female stories with women at their core.

BF: Me, too. Congratulations on this film. It’s very effective and well done. Do you know what your next project is going to be yet?

JK: I’ve got two films I’m working on, and I’ve come back from America with about 25 scripts to read, so I’ll be plowing through them. And it looks like I’m going to jump onto a TV series, to write and direct in America. A miniseries, but that hasn’t been announced, so I’m hesitant to talk about it. A lot of opportunities have come up. I’m in a very fortunate position at the moment, and hopefully we’ll be making something sooner rather than later.

BF: I’m looking forward to seeing what you do next. Thanks a lot for taking the time to speak with me.

Josh Ralske is a freelance film writer based in New York. He has written for MovieMaker Magazine and All Movie Guide.