Films By Women – Page 8

Individuality in Lucia Puenzo’s ‘XXY,’ ‘The Fish Child,’ and ‘The German Doctor’

This guest post written by Sara Century appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

Regardless of the time period or setting, there is a constant element of moody rebellion in the films of Lucia Puenzo; a deep-rooted distrust of authority that informs them at their core. Characters often become metaphors for larger issues of political strife. Good or bad, each individual’s humanity is shown via their shared vulnerability to forces outside of their control. Her work questions not only the desire to fit in, but asks why humans feel that desire to begin with. There is a tendency in her characters to challenge the status quo by their very existence in some way or another. As of this writing, she has written and directed 3 films, 2 of which were based on earlier novels of hers. She has also written a few screenplays, notably serving as one of the screenwriters on her father Luis Puenzo’s 2004 film The Whore and the Whale. Most recently, she co-created a television series in collaboration with her brother Nicolas for Argentina’s TV Publica called Cromo.

Puenzo’s solo directorial debut was 2007’s XXY, based on a short story by Sergio Bizzio. XXY is the story of an intersex teen who is raised with female pronouns, and how their family, friends, and lovers respond to their choice to stop taking hormones. The story begins with their mother and father inviting a plastic surgeon, his wife, and their son to stay with them in order to solicit advice on Alex. The plastic surgeon has an alienating affect on Alex and their family due to his disturbing lack of empathy for others, but his son Alvaro interests Alex, and they develop a mutual attraction. The narrative follows their interactions with one another as their self-discoveries coincide.

There are a plenty of heart-wrenching scenes in XXY but, in the end, it is most defined by its unwillingness to impose identities on its characters. Rather than defaulting to the gender binary, both Alex and Alvaro are given the option not to change, to exist simply as they are. By introducing another gender fluid character late in the film, Alex is shown in the context of a larger community, and accusations of abnormality from other characters seem to fall completely by the wayside. Up to that point, Alex lives in a world where society imposes an ideology that completely alienates them, and even their well-meaning parents tend to treat it as a burden to bear. Additionally, even their parents seem to believe that adherence to the norm is inevitable. By the time we meet the family, Alex would have been hearing these conversations for their entire life, and their alternating wordlessness or aggressiveness in response to these conversations comes across as understandable. The character studies in XXY are subtle and revealing, and critical response to the film was favorable, with many reviewers praising it for the tenderness with which it treats its characters.

This tendency towards deeply felt empathy has become a directorial trademark of Puenzo’s. Her follow up to XXY was the also fascinating The Fish Child, released in 2009. The Fish Child is an adaptation of her first novel, and follows Lala, the daughter of an influential judge. Lala is in love with her family’s maid, Ailin, who is roughly the same age as her, but from a much darker and more violent world. Lala’s father has been sleeping with Ailin as well, although their relationship is significantly less consensual. He is murdered, and Ailin is immediately blamed, which lands her in prison. Lala refuses to accept this fate for them, and determines to free Ailin. The film manages to fall into several genres at once; thriller, romance, drama, modern fairy tale. The dreamily in-and-out-of-focus cinematography and non-linear storytelling would even put it in the category of art house film. Connecting this work with her other films is the stylish aesthetic choices, and in this example in particular, the camera’s shifting focus and Puenzo’s meticulously chosen locations serve as characters in and of themselves, equally as defining to the overall tone as the dystopian political climate.

The Fish Child sees the return of Ines Efron, who played the lead, Alex, in XXY. She is equally compelling as the dreamy, naive Lala. The necessarily complicated relationship between Lala and Ailin is wildly endearing, conveyed expertly by both actors via body language as much by any part of the script. The commentary on Ailin’s position in life, and the way her poverty and history of sexual abuse has hardened her and limited her choices, makes her a fascinating character, and it’s easy to see why Lala falls for her. Ailin’s inner resolve and the way she switches quickly into survival mode is highlighted and contrasted by Lala’s optimistic naiveté. The two girls are very similar, but their outlooks and responses to conflict are separated at their very roots by the realities of class privilege, and this element of the film offers a sense of stark realism to this otherwise dreamy tale.

In 2013, Puenzo told her most ambitious story yet with The German Doctor, a fictional account of the infamous Nazi Josef Mengele. For those blissfully unaware, this is the man otherwise known literally as “The Angel of Death” in Auschwitz, where he conducted his famously horrific human experiments during World War II. After the fall of the Third Reich, it is well known fact that Mengele fled to Argentina, where he was protected by local authorities, civilians, and fascists still loyal to Hitler and the false science of eugenics. Based on her 5th novel, Wakolda, the film takes place during the months Mengele spent in or around Buenos Aires after the war. A young girl named Lilith, who is considered to be too small for her age, encounters a mysterious German doctor who promises her parents that he can make her grow. This should probably set off more alarms in her parents than it actually does, but, before long, he is conducting experiments on her as well as her recently birthed twin brothers. Watching this develop onscreen is absolutely chilling for anyone familiar with his history. At one point, he is shown sketching out plans for his monstrous experiments in a notebook while having a casual conversation with a child he intends to inflict them on. Small details such as that one stayed with me a long time after the credits rolled. The German Doctor succeeds in being utterly horrifying without ever even remotely resembling a horror film, which is an individual accomplishment in and of itself.

Also interesting is the way the development of the film seems to have been curbed at times by its own subject matter. In a 2014 interview with Elle, in anticipation of the film’s release, Puenzo openly discussed some of the conflict of speaking of history that some consider to be best left buried. She was quoted as saying:

“For example, we would have a location, but when we arrived, somebody had made a call and we didn’t have that location anymore. That happened a lot. Whoever was in charge had of course read the novel and knew we were mentioning the German School and that it actually existed before the war, and were very bothered by the idea. Another example was with the hotel that we shot the film in, which is also where we lived. We thought because it was closed for the holidays it would be a great proposition to rent that hotel. But in the beginning we were met with a lot of resistance. And then we found out that this hotel has a lot of German money in its origin — was made with German money. The whole time we were making the film we were confronted with facts of history, which made it very difficult to make.”

The German Doctor is a fascinating film, particularly when viewed as the culmination of the observations first made in XXY and The Fish Child. In XXY, the outside world is pressuring a young person to change something about their own bodies in order to fit in. In The Fish Child, the poor are shockingly vulnerable to the whims of the rich. Consistent with both, Puenzo’s sympathy is with the outsider. Uniquely, The German Doctor shows how the fear of not fitting in can lead to otherwise good people doing horrible things, for instance allowing Nazi war criminals to experiment on not one but three of their children.

In the end, it is this focus on individuality that is the most striking common theme of Lucia Puenzo’s works. Each of her characters undergoes intense scrutiny from outside forces, be it Alex in XXY for their gender, Lala in The Fish Child for her infatuation with Ailin, or Lilith from The German Doctor, who is quite literally forced into a physical transformation by a Nazi. In Puenzo’s films, each of these characters are threatened with the worst of all fates, which is to be just like everyone else. In each case, conformity is presented as being insidiously tantalizing. As in life, these seemingly benign choices will have a sweeping effect what kind of person each character will ultimately become.

This fascination with personal choice shows through in interviews with Puenzo. For instance, when asked in an interview with Indiewire in 2009 how she would define success, Puenzo responded, “Success for any artist is having a personal world that can be seen or felt in whatever they do,” and concluded that, “My personal goal is to be able to keep telling whatever story I want with no speculations but my own desire.” In a world where those outside of the norm are so often left voiceless, films like hers, which prize individuality above all else, are welcome and needed.

Sara Century is a multimedia performance artist, and you can follow her work at saracentury.wordpress.com.

Andrea Arnold: A Voice for the Working Class Women of Britain

British director/screenwriter Andrea Arnold has three short films and three feature films under her belt, and four out of six of those center on working class people. … [The characters in ‘Fish Tank,’ ‘Wasp,’ ‘Red Road,’ and ‘Wuthering Heights’] venture off away from the preconceived notions they have been given, away from the stereotypes forced upon them, and the boxes society has trapped them in.

This guest post written by Sophie Hall appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

If we were to play a game of word association with the offensive word ‘chav’ (a pejorative term that “demonizes” working class people), what would immediately spring to mind? If you’re aware of how the word makes appearances in British tabloids, your words are probably going to be less than savory. ‘Uneducated,’ ‘racist,’ ‘unemployed,’ ‘scroungers,’ and ‘breeders’ are unfortunately likely to be the first among them — horrible stereotypes of poor people. British director/screenwriter Andrea Arnold has three short films and three feature films under her belt, and four out of six of those center on working class people. But Arnold does something unique with this; instead of avoiding the offensive ‘chav’ label, she embraces it and all of its connotations to the characters’ very core, all the while asking the audience: when is it okay to mock these people?

In her Oscar-winning short film Wasp (2003), Andrea Arnold takes on the stereotypes of working class women to an almost unbearable extent. The film focuses on a single mother and her four children over the course of a day. Our protagonist Zoe, a white working class woman in her twenties, drags her kids (and herself) half clothed to a neighboring house so she can attack the mother of a child who attacked her own. When Zoe discovers that the only edible thing she has in her council flat (public housing apartment) is moldy bread, she gives her children a bag of sugar to satisfy their appetites. Later, she leaves her children unattended outside a pub for hours while she stays inside on a date. At first you may be mistaken for believing this is more an advertisement for contraception than a short film.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LemvMDQaRTo

While doing press junkets for the release of Fish Tank, Arnold stated in an interview:

“There’s a lot of press on hoodies and gangs and single mums and a lot of simplistic things said about these people. Every single person is complicated and if you look at everyone’s life they’re complex… you shouldn’t make assumptions about people, you should look at everyone individually and make no judgments.”

Arnold doesn’t just present these extreme flaws in Zoe; she also grants her the benefit of context. Zoe has four children, but she can’t even be in her thirties yet and there is no mention of support in her life. Where is the father(s) of her children? Zoe’s flat is decorated with glittery memorabilia, she compares herself to Victoria Beckham and hopes to one day find her David (with a magazine picture of him stuck to her wall). Zoe isn’t a grown woman, she’s a teenager stuck in the body of one. No one is there to realize this though, as Zoe’s mother “has a better social life than I do,” and the unasked question on absent men lingers in the air again — where is Zoe’s father in all of this? From the locals inside the pub, she gets criticized for her skills as a mother instead of support. Arnold presents these bread crumbs, not sob stories, to emotionally manipulate the audience. Here are her flaws, and these are the reasons why she has them. She presents us with three-dimensional characters, something absent from the headlines of The Daily Mail centering on working class people.

In the book Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class, writer and political commentator Owen Jones refers to a speech Prime Minister David Cameron gave:

“We talk about people being at risk of poverty, or social exclusion: it’s as if these things — obesity, alcohol abuse, drug addiction — are purely external events, like a plague, or bad weather. Of course, circumstances — where you are born, your neighbourhood, your school and the choices your parents make — have a huge impact. But social problems are often the consequences of the choices people make.”

Jones comments that:

“Cameron was tapping into sentiments that Thatcherism had made respectable: the idea that, more often than not, less fortunate people had only themselves to blame (page 74).”

This theme pulses through Wasp; is Zoe’s life the consequence of her own choices or of the society that has neglected her?

In Andrea Arnold’s feature length debut Red Road (2006), she doesn’t deconstruct stereotypes like in Wasp, but she still makes working class life visibly present. The film centers on Kathy, a working class woman in her thirties who is a CCTV operator. Through her loneliness, she observes the lives of the people she monitors with more than a professional interest. One day, she notices a man from her past who caused a great trauma in her life. This man is also working class. Kathy has her trials and tribulations to face over the course of Red Road, but being a working class woman isn’t one of them (nor should it always have to be). Arnold exposes viewers to working class life; instead of a drama set in a semi-detached Victorian house, why not a block of flats for a change?

Andrea Arnold’s follow up film was Fish Tank (2009), or as I like to call it, Wasp 2.0. The fish of the story is fifteen-year-old Mia. She spends her days stuck in the tank that is her council estate (public housing complex) in Essex, which just got smaller as she recently fell out with her best (and only?) friend Keeley. There’s not a lot for her to do in the fish tank — she dreams of one day becoming a dancer and practices in empty rooms. When she’s not doing that, she’s leaning against the glass of the tank, staring enviably at families and groups of friends, all the while binge drinking cheap hard cider and chain smoking.

Arnold taps in to David Cameron’s previous statement with the way she uses cinematography to stalk Mia. We the audience follows her, hand held, uncomfortably close like a documentary. We feel Mia’s claustrophobia and how she — and us — beg to break out of the confines of the tank.

The character of Connor preys on the working class. He uses Mia’s mother and emotionally toys with Mia. In one scene, Connor and Mia are in a lake trying to catch a fish. Connor tells Mia to walk slowly towards him so that the fish will go to him also. It is not just the fish that is hypnotized by Connor. The next day, Mia spots the caught fish dead on her kitchen floor, being devoured by her dog. This is a reflection of Connor’s degradation of the working class women at the end of the film. When he realizes that he could be arrested for statutory rape after sleeping with Mia, he discards both women without a word.

What I also admire about Arnold’s direction is that in both Red Road and Fish Tank, both Kathy and Mia’s characters envy other characters that are seemingly fulfilled, but are also working class. I find this detail pivotal, as it shows that Arnold isn’t saying that even though the characters face certain economic and social status restrictions, they aren’t striving to abandon their class. One class is not superior to the other.

In today’s society, the working class are consistently expected to be striving towards the middle class instead of being proud of their own class. In the book Chavs, Jones states that:

“Those labeled ‘chavs’ became frequently ridiculed for failing to meet lofty middle-class standards in what they wore, or how they ate. Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver was rightly applauded for his crusade to bring healthy food to the British school dinner menu. But it was a campaign marred by tut-tutting at the eating habits of the lower orders. On his Channel 4 programme, Oliver referred to parents who failed to sit around a table for dinner as ‘what we have learned to call “white trash”’. Jonathan Ross asked him on BBC1: ‘Well, do you ever think that some people shouldn’t be allowed to be parents? Like people from council estates?’ It was a ‘joke’ met with cheers (page 144).”

Arnold continued to explore themes of classism in her most drastic departure from her usual style yet, in her adaptation of Wuthering Heights (2011), her first take on a costume drama. Brontë’s Heathcliff is described as “dark-skinned.” Yet the ambiguously mixed race character is usually played by white actors. Arnold cast Black actors Soloman Glave and James Howson to portray the young and adult versions, respectively, of Heathcliff in her interpretation. The film introduces Heathcliff as a working class boy found on the streets of Liverpool. Like Mia and Zoe, the words that recur most in Heathcliff’s vocabulary are ‘fuck’ and ‘cunt.’ Arnold constructs the narrative to be solely through Heathcliff’s viewpoint, rather than housekeeper Nelly’s gaze of the pair’s relationship.

Throughout his childhood, the cantankerous Heathcliff always had Cathy as a rock to lean on. It didn’t matter how he spoke or what words he said, because he didn’t need to say anything with her. They communicated with delighted shrieks as they played in the moors. They spoke by holding each other as they shared a bed at night. At one point when Heathcliff’s back is beaten bloody, Cathy shows her sympathy by licking his wounds clean. That changes when Cathy is introduced to middle class society. She distances herself from Heathcliff by withdrawing her body from him and speaking to him condescendingly in her newly adopted manner.

Even though the film is a love story between Cathy and Heathcliff, it is Heathcliff’s narrative that Andrea makes us live through. She deemed the narrative of a working class man of color more vital than that of a white middle class woman. Like the audience feeling claustrophobic with Mia in her fish tank, the audience feels every whip that Heathcliff suffers, every burn from the stick that hits his flesh, every curse that’s thrown his way. The cinematographer isn’t concerned with capturing Cathy’s pain, who is screaming for mercy on behalf of Heathcliff off-screen.

Arnold’s overall message for Heathcliff’s story, and overall her main characters’ entire stories, becomes plainly evident in where she decided to end the film. In Brontë’s novel, we see Heathcliff spiral into villainy over his toxic love for Cathy and eventually die years later. However, Arnold’s version sees Heathcliff walking off into the moors, the fog making his path uncertain, just like his future, after he failed to open Cathy’s coffin to join her in death. Though seemingly grim, this is the optimistic ending that Arnold always offers her characters.

Zoe, Kathy, Mia and Heathcliff all venture off away from the preconceived notions they have been given, away from the stereotypes forced upon them, and the boxes society has trapped them in. Whether those boxes are council houses, fish tanks or Wuthering Heights.

External Sources: Jones, Owen. Chavs: The Demonization Of The Working Class. Verso, 2011.

Sophie Hall is from London and has graduated with a degree in Creative Writing. She is currently writing a sci-fi comic book series called White Leopard for Wasteland Paradise Comics. Her previous articles for Bitch Flicks were on Mad Max: Fury Road and Star Wars: The Force Awakens. You can follow her on Twitter at @sophiesuzhall.

Sofia Coppola as Auteur: Historical Femininity and Agency in ‘Marie Antoinette’

Sofia Coppola’s film conveys, to me, a range of feminist concerns through history. Concerns of how much agency, even in a culture of affluence, women can wield given that so much of women’s lives are dictated by the structures of patriarchy.

This guest post written by Marlana Eck originally appeared at Awaiting Moderation and appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors. Cross-posted with permission.

When it comes to 2006’s Marie Antoinette, some reviewers have ridiculed Sofia Coppola for creating “just another costume drama.” This is simply an attempt to discredit Coppola as a masterful auteur.

In reality, Coppola spent years (starting in 2001) researching the life of Antoinette with support from historian/writer Antonia Fraser, author of Marie Antoinette: A Journey.

Antoinette’s elaborate costuming is much like an ancient grotesque painting, producing both aesthetic endearment and strange sympathetic curiosity at what kind of deficiency the costuming is compensating for. Marie Antoinette herself has become somewhat of a chimera; a piece of the architecture we use to describe decadent aristocracy.

In one of the earliest scenes, Marie Antoinette is investigated to see if her virginity is still intact before being traded from her family in Austria to the French nobility. We see Marie Antoinette as an inmate, not something we would have attributed to her otherwise. Her world is insular and stunted, punctuated by decadent “treats” and passive, objectifying adoration by the court.

What stood out to me as I looked into Marie Antoinette’s life was the politicized severity in her relationships with people who she was supposed to adopt as trusted family. What they had in riches and prestige they lacked in empathy for each other.

As Antoinette approaches Versailles, The Radio Dept. “I Don’t Like It Like This” plays.

Words fail me all the time
I don’t even feel like talking
still I go on and on
I’m dying here and you keep walking

why are you asking me this?
can’t you see I’m trying?
I don’t like it like this
no I think I’m dying

Destined to go on as, more or less, a piece of furniture, this song is a flawless companion to the scene. Coppola’s use of contemporary music to generate a better understanding of Marie Antoinette’s condition is noteworthy. Kirsten Dunst is the perfect Antoinette with her few lines and held-back-ness in affect.

Through costuming, Marie Antoinette was able to attach a feeling of specialness she did not feel otherwise. Surrendered as a bargaining prize by her family at the age of 15, Coppola portrays the intense amount of watchfulness, and little love, she was exposed to.

As much as I am hard on Hillary Clinton, how much of these parallels can be drawn in her life? Here is another woman dedicated to a system of striving which is part of structural and damaging patriarchy. For Marie Antoinette, it was her flamboyance which helped her declare agency. For other women, maybe it’s joining the “boys club” however oppressive that may be (to others and the self).

Coppola shows that Marie Antoinette was merely using the language of power she had available. To delve further, Coppola’s Marie Antoinette was attracted to anything which helped her portray the eminence she felt she lacked in personhood.

Marie Antoinette was truly a prelude to our DeBordian society of spectacle, or, even more contemporarily (and French) Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young Girl. How different is the reluctant Queen’s high profile folly than anyone else we worship in television or magazines? I’d argue even the modern Kim Kardashian’s life is decidedly martyred and politicized while the cultural roots of her decadence are not so easily scrutinized by the public. The Young Girl is a figure that is both revered and despised.

We can learn much about nobility in this film, whether it is historical past or our nobility at present. As much as people feel dehumanized at the level of working class, we also elevate the “elite” to the level of gods, giving them both immense privilege and unreachable humanitarian expectations.

One reviewer said, “Only an American” would depict Antoinette so sympathetically. But that misses the dichotomy of the grotesque. There is culpability in the culture which creates their iconic demons, the ones which attract and repulse us.

Jason Schwartzman as the reticent ruler Louis XVI says, “Lord God, guide us and protect us, for we are too young to rule.” How true is this of our modern media aristocracy? As we scrutinize politicians and the glitterati alike, shouldn’t we be mindful that they don’t much know what they are doing either?

Coppola shows us Marie Antoinette’s range of human qualities: most movingly that giving up to decadence is easy when love or agency is absent.

In discussions with Antonia Fraser, Coppola reportedly asked her if it was alright for her to leave the political bits out. Fraser remarked that Marie Antoinette would have “loved that.” Funny though, because what I see on screen, at times, is a cleverly wrought political drama in the tradition of “the personal is political.” This phrase becomes much clearer and richer in the life of Marie Antoinette as depicted by Coppola. Here was a girl (then woman) whose entire life was used as a political bargaining chip — from birth it was destined, and her death in an unmarked grave could only be so appropriate for someone whose only told purpose was to be a fancy prop to represent aristocracy.

Coppola’s choice not to show Marie Antoinette’s brutal death instead makes us focus on how cultures worship and dehumanize icons. Coppola does a masterful job of showing how this woman (Marie Antoinette) is only praised when she shows a complete lack of agency (being traded off, marrying someone she doesn’t know, obeying the rules she finds “ridiculous”) and scorned when she does the things which allow her to have agency (buying things, having an affair, having a barn built to experience something new).

Coppola leaves me with questions: why was Marie Antoinette asked to answer to a French public who had monarchs for centuries? Only her? How would they have her respond?

Big questions loom after watching Coppola’s film that defy what we believe about nobility.

Coppola’s film conveys, to me, a range of feminist concerns through history. Concerns of how much agency, even in a culture of affluence, women can wield given that so much of women’s lives are dictated by the structures of patriarchy.

Marlana Eck is a scholar, writer, and educator from Easton, Pennsylvania. Her writing has appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Raging Chicken Press,Hybrid Pedagogy, San Diego Free Press, Cultured Vultures, Lehigh Valley Vanguard, and Rag Queen Periodical. At the latter two publications she serves as director. In her free time she enjoys horticulture and overestimating the efficacy of her dance moves in the living room mirror. Follow her on Twitter at @marlanaesquire.

Mary Harron’s ‘American Psycho’: Rogue Feminism

When the leading man isn’t laughing at remarks from serial killers about decapitating girls, he’s coming after sex workers with chainsaws (at least in his head). Yet ‘American Psycho’ espouses a feminist perspective that fillets the values held by capitalist men.

This guest post written by Dr. Stefan Sereda appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

American Psycho fails the Bechdel Test. Tammy Bruce, coordinator of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization of Women (NOW), called for boycotting the film’s source material. Gloria Steinem allegedly protested the film in advance of its release. The script, co-written by Guinevere Turner and Mary Harron, eschews any appeal to women’s empowerment. The film’s actresses play a milieu of secretaries, sex workers, and spaced-out, self-centered socialites. When the leading man isn’t laughing at remarks from serial killers about decapitating girls, he’s coming after sex workers with chainsaws (at least in his head). Yet American Psycho espouses a feminist perspective that fillets the values held by capitalist men.

Released in March 2000, American Psycho was possibly the first major film release of the new millennium written and directed by women. Director Mary Harron’s previous 1996 film, I Shot Andy Warhol, cast Lili Taylor as Valerie Solanas, a sex worker-turned-failed assassin, whose SCUM Manifesto influenced radical feminism. Harron’s exploration of feminist history includes people who are poor, struggle with mental illness, and advocate for genocide against men. In other words, Harron’s is the not the palatable, feel-good, mass market, go-girl feminism of Legally Blonde (2001).

With American Psycho, Harron shot and co-wrote a runaway hit that converted the film’s $7 million budget into $34.3 million international gross. A 5:1 profit ratio is a decent investment return in Hollywood: Harron’s 2006 follow-up, The Notorious Bettie Page, earned less than $2 million. Therein, Harron uses the biopic to transform a sex icon into a voice for women’s issues. Harron might be situated within Camille Paglia’s gladiatorial school of feminism, rather than Steinem’s arguably censorial feminist view.

American Psycho is also one of the new millennium’s first major film releases to express a feminist agenda. Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale), the film’s Wall Street protagonist, is Harron’s portrait of what Valerie Solanas said men contributed to society: mental illness (Patrick’s dissociation from reality), conformity (his obsession with “fitting in”), suppression of individuality (“I’m going to call you Sabrina,” he tells a call girl), prevention of conversation, friendship, and love (arguing about the importance of friends before axing a colleague), and the monetary system (“feed me a stray cat,” an ATM machine tells Bateman). “You’re inhuman,” Bateman’s fiancé Evelyn (Reese Witherspoon) argues when he drops her. “I’m in touch with humanity, ” Bateman responds in defense of his extreme personification of neoliberal values. From Syriana to There Will Be Blood, the decade that followed would be rife with films about corrupt people winning at capitalism — usually Machiavellian men, but sometimes women, as it happens in Pretty Persuasion and Black Swan.

American Psycho’s runaway popularity, razor sharp satire, and ontologically vague ending have provoked extensive discussion of the film, but little has been said regarding a subtle but important reference that positions Harron’s work as a feminist response to Hollywood’s entrenched neoliberalism.

In an interview with BlackBook, Harron reported that while Christian Bale was preparing for the Bateman role, he came across Tom Cruise giving a televised interview. Bale was struck by what he thought was Cruise’s “intense friendliness with nothing behind the eyes,” which shaped Bale’s interpretation of Bateman. Harron neglected to explain how her 1980s-set film corresponds with the film that made Cruise a superstar, 1983’s Risky Business.

Partway through American Psycho, Patrick, posing as murdered colleague Paul Allen, brings a sex worker to his apartment; she sports the same hairstyle Rebecca DeMornay wore in Risky Business for the role of the sex worker, Lana. Risky Business is a pro-capitalist, product placement-laden coming-of-age fable about a teenager, Joel Goodson (Cruise), who succeeds at getting accepted to Princeton rather than floundering at life through risk-taking: specifically, by enterprising as a pimp. Early in the film, when Joel first meets Lana, she tells him, “You’ve got a really nice place, here, Joel.” In American Psycho, Christie echoes this phrase with the same inflection: “You’ve got a nice place here, Paul.” The haircut and the dialogue add a further uncanny dimension to the film reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), wherein the protagonist becomes obsessed with recreating his memory of a woman who never existed.

As with American Psycho, several have argued, however loosely, that Risky Business satirizes capitalism, but its product placements, soundtrack full of then-hot recording artists and upbeat ending inevitably put forward a contrasting statement. Harron references Risky Business to uncover the misogyny the latter film attempts to suppress in its teen-romp approach to sex work. Elsewhere, Bateman works out with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) or pornography droning in the background. Later, Bateman will make his own pornographic videos as an exercise in self-directed obsession and take on an identity similar to the cannibal villain Leatherface as he chases Christie and bites her before killing her with a chainsaw. Whereas Bateman can wax poetic about Whitney Houston songs and argue in favor of equal rights for women, behind his admitted “mask of sanity” is the Bateman who says to a bartender, “I want to stab you to death and play around with your blood.” Many of the film’s other characters seem to overlook Bateman’s mental illness, or to misinterpret or ignore his statements, in a setting where everyone — women and men included — seemingly want to pretend his psychosis away. As Bateman’s misogyny and hyper-competitive attitude erupt until he’s literally crying for help, Harron calls attention to a world that would rather deny Bateman’s existence than learn from him as a case study in socially entrenched misogyny, consumer-capitalist psychosis, and the Reaganite ideals returning to fashion this election season.

Dr. Stefan Sereda is a writer/researcher with a PhD in English and Film Studies and an MA in Literature with a focus on gender and genre. His publications on American cinema and global media have appeared in A Companion to Martin Scorsese, The Memory Effect, Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty-First Century, the Directory of World Cinema: Africa, and ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature.

Susanne Bier’s Living, Breathing Body of Work

Women consistently make good films around the world, even if we have to look outside Hollywood to find them. Susanne Bier is one powerful example. Her vivid, probing explorations into family dynamics and tenuous relationships are fiercely suggestive marks of a female auteur that deserves recognition.

This guest post written by Sonia Lupher appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

Susanne Bier’s camera yearns.

In her film After the Wedding, Bier’s handheld camera lingers on her main characters as shocking family secrets spill out into the open. Bier is interested in the micro-gestures that are revealed in close-ups on expressive body parts (an eye, a mouth, a hand), and her camera pulsates pensively with the tension unfolding onscreen. Rather than dominating the narrative, these shots are inserted in her films like punctuation. These intimate details bring her characters to life, revealing their interiority amid the situations unraveling around them.

In an interview with Mette Hjort, Bier speaks about the eroticism that drives her films. Even if they don’t involve sex, conflicts are fueled by an “underlying erotic drive or erotic frustration” fundamental in determining who they are and what matters to them. In films such as After the Wedding, this latent eroticism comes through in the electric energy between characters, mediated through Bier’s deliberate, but tender, ability to coax nuanced performances from her actors. Bier’s most powerful and critically acclaimed films (After the Wedding among them) are intimate, highly charged family dramas that hinge upon pivotal moments in their characters’ lives. Films such as After the Wedding, Open Hearts, Brothers, and In a Better World oscillate between tense, pensive moments of silence and uncontainable emotion expressed in explosive rage, grief, outrage, and despair.

These are just a few pieces that make up Bier’s stunning oeuvre, which includes over a dozen features in English, Swedish, and her native Danish. Bier made her directorial debut in 1991 with the semi-autobiographical comedy-drama Freud Leaving Home, which follows a young Swedish-Jewish woman’s sexual awakening while her family is thrown into turmoil when her mother is diagnosed with cancer. An impressive first work, the film anticipates themes that recur in Bier’s later films: intricate or vulnerable family dynamics threatened by sickness (particularly cancer), adultery, divorce, unsatisfactory gender roles, and extra-familial obligations. Bier followed this up with more family-driven comedy-dramas such as Family Matters and Like It Never Was Before, the latter of which follows a dissatisfied father who must reconcile relationships with his wife and children when he discovers he is gay.

Her career took off in the early 2000s with her film Open Hearts, starring Mads Mikkelsen (of James Bond films and Hannibal fame), the 28th contribution to Dogme 95, an art film movement helmed by Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg that solicited a raw, realist aesthetic from participating filmmakers. She carried several visual and narrative techniques from Open Hearts into her subsequent films, including the lingering closeness to her characters. She has also made two films in the United States: Things We Lost in the Fire and Serena – the latter starring Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper. One of her films, Brothers, was remade in the U.S. Most recently, she directed The Night Manager, a miniseries adaptation of a John Le Carré novel starring Tom Hiddleston and Hugh Laurie (it premieres in the U.S. on April 19!).

For Bier, expressing a person’s inner world is more important than plot; all of her formal techniques have some bearing on the formation of her characters. Sadness, joy, and humor often emerge simultaneously in Bier’s films, due to her talent for drawing complex performances from her actors. She boldly combines light and dark, reminding us that people and relationships are too complex to feel just one thing at a time. Her 2012 film Love Is All You Need (its Danish title is The Bald Hairdresser) is a romantic comedy about Ida, a hairdresser with breast cancer, who falls for her daughter’s father-in-law-to-be while they assemble for the wedding in Italy. Ida’s cancer, though important, doesn’t weigh down the film, and it certainly doesn’t keep her from interacting with her family or falling in love.

Bier recognizes the importance of strong emotions in making a film that speaks to various audiences; she expresses disappointment in the “intellectual timidity” that keeps filmmakers from making emotionally powerful films. Yet her films are not corny or melodramatically overwhelming. As she said in a 2011 NPR interview, “I’ve always thought that setting out a set of rules before you start, and then being completely consistent with them, is the only way to make a really good film.” The combination of discipline and drama showcases Bier’s refined instinct for when to hold back and when to let go.

Like those of recognized (usually male) “auteurs,” Bier’s films carry her signature – it is almost as though each film continues where another left off, or follows a secondary character whose storyline failed to flourish elsewhere. But, despite the fact that she is among the most prolific and critically acclaimed contemporary female directors, Bier’s name remains relatively unheralded in the public eye. Film and television scholar Belinda Smaill has suggested that this is because Bier’s films waver between commercial and art film circuits, never quite satisfying the expectations of either audience. Her film’s melodramatic tendencies put her at odds with the art film crowd, but her careful attention to visual composition keeps her films out of the strictly commercial realm. Bier herself consistently expresses her intention to reach a wide audience, rather than constrain her efforts to please one or another. Her films are also overwhelmingly about men, which may complicate her reception among celebrants of women-driven and directed films. On the other hand, films such as In A Better World explore the fragility of a masculine “ideal” within domestic spaces, which may put her films at odds with male viewers as well.

These reasons may all contribute to Bier’s relative obscurity, but even so, Bier’s career illuminates the extent to which “auteur” status is still male-dominated. Kathryn Bigelow’s case is representative of this: she was the first woman to win a Best Director and a Best Picture Oscar in 2009, but, despite her lengthy and impressive career, she is still undervalued as an artist in her own right. Two years before Bigelow won the award, Bier’s After the Wedding was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar category. In 2011, she was nominated again and won the award for In a Better World. Bier was the third woman to win Best Foreign Language Film, following Marleen Gorris in 1995 for Antonia’s Line and Caroline Link in 2002 for Nowhere in Africa. A handful of films by women have been nominated for Best Foreign Language Film since 1959, including several by critically acclaimed directors including Lina Wertmuller, Mira Nair, Deepa Mehta, Claudia Llosa, María Luisa Bemberg, and Agnieszka Holland.

It is easy to overlook this Academy Awards category, and yet it is the most likely to recognize women for their directorial achievements. Unfortunately, the award’s announcement during the ceremony tends to ignore the director. If you watch Bier’s (too short) acceptance speech, you will notice that her win is presented as a win for Denmark, rather than for a woman director who happens to be Danish. But the fact that several films by women have been nominated for or won the Best Foreign Language Film award is a reminder that women consistently make good films around the world, even if we have to look outside Hollywood to find them. Susanne Bier is one powerful example. Her vivid, probing explorations into family dynamics and tenuous relationships are fiercely suggestive marks of a female auteur that deserves recognition.

Sonia Lupher is originally from the Pacific Northwest, but moved east to pursue a doctoral degree in the Film Studies program at the University of Pittsburgh. She is fulfilling her lifelong dream of watching movies for a living, and especially loves horror movies directed by women. You can follow her on twitter @SoniaLupher.

No Apologies: The Ambition of Gillian Armstrong and ‘My Brilliant Career’

However, Armstrong also doesn’t mock Sybylla’s ambition or treat it as a joke. In Armstrong’s world, the fact that Sybylla has desires and wants outside of marriage and men is treated seriously because Sybylla takes it seriously. She never needs to prove herself worthy enough for her desires.

This guest post written by Rebecca Hirsch Garcia appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

It’s almost impossible to think of Australian cinema without women directors. In recent years with her debut film The Babadook, Jennifer Kent has been declared a director to watch, but there’s also Julia Leigh, Sue Brooks, Cate Shortland, Shirley Barrett and Jocelyn Moorhouse, all of whom have had films play at Cannes and achieved various degrees of success and critical acclaim both in their home country and abroad. Not to mention Jane Campion who, while officially a Kiwi, went to film school in Australia and made some of her early films there.

Shocking then to realize that this flourishing of Australian women directors came after a near fifty year gap, a gap that began after Paulette McDonagh’s now lost 1933 film Two Minute Silence and finally ended in 1979 with Gillian Armstrong’s debut film My Brilliant Career.

The auspiciously named movie takes its title from the 1901 novel of the same name by Australian author Miles Franklin. Though the novel was popular, it wasn’t till the mid-70s that serious efforts were made for it to be adapted into a film. It was at that time that producer Margaret Fink bought the rights and began to cast about for a director that was right for the material. Fink reportedly considered Roman Polanski before setting her sights on Armstrong, a film-grad with a series of internationally acclaimed shorts under her belt who, at the time she met Fink, was working in the props department on another director’s movie.

There is much that is familiar, and loveable, about Armstrong’s first film. Set just before the turn of the century in 1897, it features a plain-looking and plain-speaking tomboy by the name of Sybylla Melvyn living on a farm in the Australian outback and dreaming of a better, i.e. more glamorous, life. Charmingly played by a young Judy Davis, in what was her first leading role in her second ever movie, Armstrong introduces us to Sybylla as she is sitting at her desk on a dusty farm while the rest of her family toils outside, prematurely beginning her memoirs, reflecting back on the career she has yet to even begin. As she pens her foreword she openly proclaims, “I make no apology for being egotistical, because I am.”

But Sybylla is quickly brought back to reality by her mother who supports her right to work; as a servant. Sybylla, despite being the daughter of a penniless farmer, has loftier ambitions of being a pianist (despite her discordant key bashing and minimal skills) or an opera singer (despite her untrained voice and the fact that she knows only drinking songs gleaned from the hours spent with her alcoholic father) or a writer (despite the fact she knows little of the world and her days are filled with drudgery). Armstrong never shows Sybylla as being particularly prodigious at any of the things she wants to do, in fact many times she shows just the opposite. However, Armstrong also doesn’t mock Sybylla’s ambition or treat it as a joke. In Armstrong’s world, the fact that Sybylla has desires and wants outside of marriage and men is treated seriously because Sybylla takes it seriously. She never needs to prove herself worthy enough for her desires.

Shortly after the dispiriting conversation between mother and daughter, good news arrives. Sybylla is sent to her wealthy maternal grandmother’s home to live a life closer to the luxury she dreamed of. In her grandmother’s house, her grandmother and her aunt Helen attempt to turn Sybylla into a proper young lady; montages involving the brushing of her unruly hair, face masks and various home remedies are applied. Armstrong’s film, and Sybylla herself, aren’t content to simply wallow in luxury however. Filmed standing in a giant bird’s cage or behind a mosquito net, it is clear, even before Sybylla says the words, that she is not exactly happy, still desperate for the chance to prove herself and to develop the career in the arts that she longs for.

Her ambitions are temporarily pushed aside however once her physical transformation is complete. Sybylla is courted by two potential suitors: the first a smarmy trainee of her grandmother’s and the second, and more interesting prospect, Sybylla’s childhood friend, Harry Beecham (Sam Neil). From the start the chemistry between Sybylla and Harry is electric. Sybylla is unwilling to act coy with Harry and he is willing to meet her on her level playing along when she shows her mischievous spirit by capsizing the boat during a romantic river ride. Sybylla declares them “mates” but the term, which Sybylla means in friendship has a double meaning. From almost the first time they meet it is clear that Harry is fascinated with Sybylla and means to marry her. The romance between them falls along conventional beats right up until an exasperate Harry finally proposes, a proposal which Sybylla declines right before whipping Harry in the face with a riding crop when his romantic overtures become too aggressive.

The moment feels as revolutionary to modern audiences as it must have felt when the movie was first screened in 1979. It is one thing for Sybylla to simply say that she doesn’t want to get married or to turn down the advances of a suitor she finds ridiculous. But in Harry, Sybylla finds not only a handsome, rich man but also a peer, someone who is not only at home getting whacked in the face by a pillow but whom she can talk to about the unfairness of the world, someone who easily apologizes for stepping out of line by acting too aggressively, who empathizes with her need to take two years to try to figure out, “What’s wrong with the world, and with me, who I am, everything.” Watching Sybylla say no to what would be considered the height of success in the society in which she lived in order to feed her own ambition is a sight all too rare in cinema. Despite the love Harry feels for her, and the fact that Sybylla feels, or nearly feels, the same way, she becomes through her rejection, a woman who bravely acts according to her own desires, someone willing to risk everything in order to have what she wants and who recognizes that men and romance are not the sum total of her world.

Armstrong never tells us whether or not Sybylla will have the brilliant career she so desperately craves. There are no scenes of an editor appearing to tell her she is a literary genius and no scenes of anyone reading her work and declaring her a prodigy. In the final scene of the film, a calm and confident Sybylla walks to the mailbox of her father’s farm to post the manuscript she has written, its destination a publishing house in Scotland. It might be a masterpiece or it might be junk, but after Sybylla posts her manuscript she turns her attention to the setting sun, her face filled with hope and the confidence that no matter what happens she can take pride in the fact that at least she tried.

It is easy to imagine that Armstrong was filled with a similar feeling as she crafted her debut film. Women filmmakers today still face an uphill battle having their work financed and distributed. At this point in time, gender parity for directors, at least in the U.S., seems like an unrealistic dream. But at the time in which Armstrong was filming, it wasn’t even a matter of a few women directors fighting to get in the room to pitch their ideas to studios or struggling for financing. In Armstrong’s case, there was very little Australian cinema to speak of and a gap of nearly 50 years separating her from the last feature length Australian film directed by a woman. Like her audacious main character, Armstrong carved her work out of pure ambition, uncertain of the future but willing to try.

The movie may leave Sybylla and the audience forever waiting and wondering as to whether she was able to write her way to a better life. But in terms of Armstrong and her career, the answer is much clearer. My Brilliant Career became a seminal part of what was later termed the Australian New Wave (a movement that also included George Miller and his Mad Max series, the first film of which coincidentally was also released in 1979). Armstrong and the film went on to play In Competition at the Cannes film festival, something that to this day is exceedingly rare for women directors. The film would go on to be nominated for an Oscar, a BAFTA, a Golden Globe and win several awards at the Australian Film Institute (AFI) awards including Best Director for Armstrong making her the first of many female Best Director AFI winners.

Perhaps best known for her 1994 adaptation of Little Women, Armstrong continues to work in film to this day, and has directed cinematic luminaries like Cate Blanchett, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Kirsten Dunst, and Diane Keaton. By anyone’s standards she has had a brilliant career.

Rebecca Hirsch Garcia is a Canadian cinephile. She has previously written for Awards Watch. You can find her on twitter @rhirschgarcia.

OMG a Vagina: The Struggle for Feminine Artistic Integrity in Kimberly Peirce’s ‘Carrie’

Carrie is a terrifying and compelling story, but there is certainly something to be gained and perhaps a certain truth to be found in watching the pain of her journey into womanhood as told by a woman director. … But even in the face of these small victories, we have to wonder how the film would have been different had Peirce been allowed to tell this story without being inhibited by the fear and discomfort of the male voices around her.

This guest post written by Horrorella appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

In his 1981 non-fiction work Danse Macabre, Stephen King noted that, “Carrie is largely about how women find their own channels of power, but also what men fear about women and women’s sexuality.” That statement is as true in the 21st century as it was in the 1970s, and was directly illustrated in the production of the 2013 adaptation.

The horror community was very divided when MGM and Screen Gems first announced that they would be producing a remake of Carrie. After all, this would be the third direct adaptation of the material following Brian de Palma’s 1976 film and a made for TV movie from 2002, directed by David Carson. In our current culture of remakes, reboots and sequels, fans are experiencing a bit of fatigue when it comes to repackaging known quantities over developing original ideas. De Palma’s film is still considered a classic and is very well respected within the genre, so naturally people began to question just what would make this version different from the ones we had already seen.

Enter Kimberly Peirce. Working from a script developed by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, the involvement of the director of Boys Don’t Cry instantly made a new adaptation much more appealing. It offered the promise of a new perspective by inviting a woman to helm this story of female adolescence and horror. Carrie is a terrifying and compelling story, but there is certainly something to be gained and perhaps a certain truth to be found in watching the pain of her journey into womanhood as told by a woman director. Particularly, given how underrepresented women are in the industry in general, and specifically in horror.

Despite Carrie‘s promise, we were largely disappointed by the final product. Reviews were mixed, audience reaction was largely negative, and the film garnered a mere 48% on Rotten Tomatoes. Forty minutes were reportedly cut at the request of the studio, and though there were a few changes here and there, the story remained largely the same, following Lawrence D. Cohen’s original script beat for beat. Notable exceptions included the way the film built the relationship between Carrie (Chloe Grace Moretz) and her mother, Margaret (Julianne Moore), making their interactions much more tender and driven by love (albeit, a rather abusive and misguided love) than they were in either the book or in previous film adaptations, as well as more thoughtful symbolism in the role that blood played throughout the film.

One of the many disappointments was the ending of the film. Brian de Palma broke new ground with his shocking finale, which featured a remorseful Sue Snell (Amy Irving) visiting the remains of the house where Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) died after the slaughter at the prom. As Sue leans forward to lay flowers at the base of a “For Sale” sign, serving as a makeshift tombstone, a bloody hand shoots up out of the earth and grabs Sue’s arm. Audience members were terrified and that scene continues to replicated to this day, marking its place in the history of horror cinema.

The ending of Peirce’s version, again, at the behest of the studio, features a similar scene, showing Sue (Gabriella Wilde) walking towards Carrie’s grave as a voiceover lays out the final sentences of her testimony of the events of the prom, stating that people can only be pushed so far before they break. As she lays a single rose on the grave and turns to go, the ground begins to shake and the tombstone cracks, illustrating the breaking point that Carrie was pushed to and past at the hands of her classmates and tormentors.

It’s not a horrible ending thematically, but it does cause the film to end on a rather uninspired note, especially when compared to its cinematic predecessor. If there is one thing audiences expect from the story of Carrie, it is a strong finish, and this film just fizzled in its final moments. The frustrating thing is, it didn’t have to be this way.

In September, 2014. Peirce gave a talk at AFI Directing Workshop for Women’s 2014 Showcase which was later examined in an article at io9. She discussed the filmmaking process and how her original ending was a bit more intense, and ultimately much more fascinating.

After showing Sue laying a flower on Carrie’s grave, the film jumped forward in time to a delivery room, and a very pregnant Sue laying on the table, about to give birth to the daughter that Carrie had foreseen in her final moments of life. Terrified and panicking, Sue tries to explain to the hospital staff that something is wrong. They try to calm her, telling her to take a deep breath and prepare for one final push. As she focuses her energy, instead of a tiny, screaming infant we see a large, bloody arm, belonging to a fully grown woman (presumably Carrie) making its way out of Sue’s body and back into the world itself. The scene then reveals itself to be a dream as Sue’s mother attempts to wake her from her horrific nightmare, mirroring the final moments of the de Palma ending.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kGJGQZIduo

This scene is fantastic for a variety of reasons. It is scary, it is certainly unexpected, and within the confines of Peirce’s story, it is elegantly poetic. The film opened with Carrie’s birth, featuring Margaret alone in her home, delivering the infant. Carrie being reborn into the world at the end (even within the confines of a dream sequence), bookends the events of the story nicely. It also casts a dark shadow over the remainder of Sue’s life, indicating that despite any kind actions in an attempt to make amends, Sue will be forever haunted by the role that she played in Carrie’s torment. Additionally, from a more practical standpoint, it gives Carrie’s knowledge of Sue’s pregnancy more of a purpose in the narrative. This would have been a clever and strong ending to a film, helping to set it apart from other adaptations and giving it a certain elegance unto itself.

The problem came when male studio representatives tried to come to terms with exactly what this ending would mean and how they could execute it. Though they agreed that it would be scary and unexpected, they had a terribly hard time articulating just what the scene meant or how it could be achieved. In fact, they had a difficult time discussing the scene at all. Says Peirce:

“When one guy started forming a sentence that should have included the word ‘vagina,’ he would just stop. ‘So when you have to shoot the hand coming out of the, uh, the, uh,…’ and then there was just silence. And giggles. And finally it came out: ‘the Vajayjay.’ (The Vajajay? Really?) ‘The cooter, the hole,’ other euphemisms.”

The voices involved were so terrified of even saying the word “vagina,” it’s no wonder they were feeling trepidation of having one in or even near the final scene of the film. And let’s face it – babies come from vaginas, so there was no way this birthing scene was going to happen properly without at least the implication that one was involved. And really, when you look at the nightmare scenario that is a tormented, angry, telekinetic teenager being reborn, the vagina itself should not be the scary part of that scene.

Despite their fears and stammering, Peirce was given the go-ahead to shoot some test footage of her idea. She storyboarded and filmed a three-quarter body prosthetic from every possible vantage, examining and testing a variety of different ways to execute this shot – from above, from the side, form various angles, and yes – even a straight-on shot aimed directly at the vagina itself.

Peirce continues:

“Finally I was having a production meeting, and the guy who hadn’t been able to say the word ‘vagina’ said it. A few times. Proudly. “So you’ll shoot towards the, uh, vagina? But not at the vagina?” And then, excitedly, ‘Can you believe we’re all at a work meeting, saying the word ‘vagina’?'”

Bravo, buddy.

Ultimately, although her ending tested well, the studio decided that it would just be too polarizing and went with the much more sterilized, uninteresting ending taking place in the graveyard.

As Peirce notes in her speech, women in film are fighting a constant battle to be heard among their male peers, and it is important to recognize and celebrate the small victories. Though she was unable to complete the film the way she wanted to make it, thanks to a perplexing fear of getting too up close and personal with the female anatomy, it is important to note that she was given the resources and the support to make this film at all. And even though the birth ending was ultimately cut, the studio did encourage her to give it a try, and a completed version of the scene is available as an alternate ending on the film’s Blu-Ray release.

But even in the face of these small victories, we have to wonder how the film would have been different had Peirce been allowed to tell this story without being inhibited by the fear and discomfort of the male voices around her. There is a certain amount of give and take to the creative control of any mainstream film production – the studio is interested in making sure the story appeals to the widest audience possible, and it is not uncommon for decisions to be made to serve that interest more than the creative drive of artists behind the picture.

But, as Peirce’s story illustrates, women filmmakers are more likely to be affected by decisions based around gender rather than simply a financial bottom line. Her discussions with various producers and studio execs demonstrate how this incident went beyond simply trying to get a specific rating or go for a certain tone. They were physically uncomfortable even saying the word, let alone entertaining the notion that a vagina could be directly involved in one of the scenes of this movie – even if it was not explicitly shown.

Art and finances quite often go head to head when it comes to decisions that will affect the final cut of a production, but with all of the hurdles that woman face in the film industry, having to make decisions and changes based around feminine content should not ever have to be one of them. I would like to see the executive who was oh so proud of himself for finally making it through the uttering of “vagina” without stammers and giggles to now take the next step of not being afraid to have a film go near one in the first place, and to allow these women to tell their stories onscreen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrQu2TlGYwQ

Horrorella has written about film for Ain’t it Cool News, the Women in Horror Annual and on her blog at horrorella.com. She geeks out incessently over movies, television, comics and kitties. You can gab with her on Twitter @horrorellablog.

‘Wadjda’: Empowering Voices and Challenging Patriarchy

Haifaa al-Mansour casts an eye onto the complexity of navigating an autocratic patriarchal society in ‘Wadjda.’ This bold voice from Saudi Arabia continues to empower voices globally.

This guest post written by Sarah Mason appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

Haifaa al-Mansour casts an eye onto the complexity of navigating an autocratic patriarchal society in Wadjda (2012). This bold voice from Saudi Arabia continues to empower voices globally.

I first watched Wadjda in the United Arab Emirates and revisited the film this year. In 2009, I was working for the Middle East International Film Festival in Abu Dhabi, the same year the Shasha screenwriting grant was awarded to Haifaa al-Mansour for Wadjda.

At the cusp of adolescence, 10 year old Wadjda (first-time actor Waad Mohammed) enjoys the fleeting freedoms of her youth. She wears the quintessential American Chuck Taylor shoes with bright laces that allow her to run to school alongside a male friend; a small freedom that will be further limited as she grows into her adolescence.

Her colourful hairclips are a small statement of individuality, and her shayla is causally placed over her hair, often falling down, blowing in the wind, sometimes lost on the way to school, snatched teasingly by her young friend Abdullah. The frivolity with which Wadjda interacts with the shayla is one of nonchalance; a relationship not yet fully formed by the imposition of its more stringent usage and variations. Soon, she will have to fully conceal her hairline with a tightly pinned al-amira or khimar, and later, societal ‘norms’ will expect her face to be fully covered with the niqab.

At school, the head teacher harshly reprimands Wadjda’s elder peers for speaking too loudly. Other students, with their faces covered to avoid confrontation, scuttle past anonymously. The head teacher, Hessa, commands that it is time for Wadjda to wear full abaya for school and to replace her shoes. It is important to mention that such repression of female voices is not only within the borders of Saudi Arabia. In Turkey, the Deputy Prime Minister announced during Eid al-Fitr in 2014 that women “laughing in public” equated to “moral regression.”

At home, Wadjda compliments her mother’s singing, asking her, “Don’t you wish you were a singer?” Her mother’s sharp intake of breath reflects the audacity of the question. There is no official law banning Saudi women from singing, but it is chastised. Much like the musical bard movement that grew out of censorship in the Soviet bloc, magnitizdat, a similar movement is alive in Saudi Arabia. When the Head Teacher empties out Wadjda’s schoolbag, she finds illegal items: tapes of forbidden songs and bracelets of forbidden colours.

In the movie, Wadjda’s mother straightens her hair and applies make-up, yet as a married mother, she wears full niqab when she exits the home. She climbs into a vehicle packed with other women who need transportation to work. Her commute, her strained relationship with the impatient driver Iqbal and the perils faced by other female commuters in this forced environment, is central to her world and her phone conversations. Their fate is in his hands. Every day.

In the only country in the world that bans women from driving motorized vehicles, as decreed by hard-line clerics, this ‘ban’ does not feature in the Qur’an itself and is not written into law. If it were, why does Saudi Arabia stand alone in this inexplicable interpretation of an ancient scripture? Rotana Tarabzouni, a Los Angeles based Saudi singer, refuses to be silenced. She has already voiced her support of the Saudi Women to Drive movement and continues to garner recognition for her singing career. Activist Loujain al Hathloul defied the ban in late 2014 and drove over the border with a valid driving license, from neighboring United Arab Emirates to her home country. She was detained along with Maysaa al Hamoudi who drove from the UAE to the border to offer support. They were both arrested and held for 70 days without any charge, referred to a specialist court on charges of ‘terror’, and have since been released.

Vocal and mobile women are ‘terror’ for the patriarchs of Saudi Arabia, however, for women in Saudi Arabia, the imposition of a male driver on treacherous roads remains their ‘terror’. In 2014, Saudi artist Manal Al-Dowayan exhibited “Crash” to highlight one of the consequences of the driving ban for women. Commuting female teachers are 50% more likely to be killed in a car accident than the average Saudi. Even in notification of death, journalists kowtow to the conservative trend that avoids mentioning a women’s name in public. Tragically, these women often die faceless and nameless. Alternatively, in 2014, licensed pilots Hanadi al Hindi and Yasmeen Muhammed al Maimani became the first Saudi women awarded commercial pilot licenses and they are allowed to fly within their own country’s airspace.

Equally fixated on mobility, Wadjda has her sets her sights on purchasing a bicycle — without training wheels. She listens to rock music and braids friendship bracelets in the colours of the local soccer teams. She takes full advantage of her pre-adolescent youth, delivering hand-written notes to an older boy; where older girls cannot.

In Wadjda, inter-female relationships are strained. Wadjda and her mother argue about the bike. Her mother implores it is “haram” — not permitted. She implies that it may negatively affect her daughter’s marriage and childbearing prospects. Yet it is clear that her mother’s marriage is under siege in a state that encourages polygamy. Even Wadjda’s own grandmother threatens to be the architect of the family’s demise, by selecting other prospective partners for her son to marry. The first line of matchmaking is always a son’s mother and only men feature on the family tree.

In a bid to impress her husband, Wadjda’s mother goes shopping for a bright red dress. The two enter the toilets to try on the garment. The notion of an unclothed women in a dressing room within a mixed-gender store is not permissible in Saudi Arabia. Wadjda’s mother, in the bright red dress is harshly juxtaposed in the decaying bathroom and next to the advertisement for deodorant, where the smiling model has had an abaya block-drawn over her exposed skin. In a world where women are only and always framed within the context of men, Wadjda’s mother doesn’t ask if she looks good in the red dress. Rather, Wadjda’s mother asks, “Will my husband like it?”

With the prevailing existence of Saudi Arabian austerity, ‘rules’ and not laws of the state, undermine gender parity. Many of these ‘rules’ are excused as ‘cultural’ or ‘traditional.’ However, this ‘culture’ is espoused by hardline, wahhabist conservative male religious figures, which mute any discussion or dissent.

We, professional women the world over, do not accept culture or tradition as a rational justification for discrimination against a racial or ethnic group – rather, we would look for opportunities to challenge such prejudices. So why do we continue to accept gender-based inequality and its consequences? We do not. Citing ‘culture’ as corroboration to argument only serves to preserve aspects of a culture that maintains the proponent’s present privileged position.

The internet and increased global travel challenge the old order. Restricting what can be seen, viewed, read and dissipated is much, much harder to control in the new media age. Saudi Arabia is cautiously embracing positive international recognition in new mediums, while dancing precariously with the messaging it conveys. In 2012, the same year Wadjda was released, athletes Wojdan Shaherkani and Sarah Attar made history competing at the London Olympics as the first Saudi female Olympians. A budding art scene, a burgeoning comedy scene, and a feature film directed by a woman — and with women central to its storyline — are all exhibiting new, bold statements.

Since Wadjda’s release, Arab films have garnered more attention in the global market. Barakah Meets Barakah gently navigates young love in Saudi Arabia. The comedic short captured the imagination of Berlin Film Festival audiences who awarded several prizes to Arab films, filmmakers and actors. I write with confidence that each of the Arab filmmakers recognised at Berlinale in 2016 have seen Haifaa al-Mansour’s Wadjda.

It’s a courageous battle to challenge the norm. In a state that imposes rules based on laws unwritten, perhaps it is time to write our own rules. In Wadjda, Head Teacher Hessa proclaims to Wadjda, “Believe it or not, you remind me of myself at your age.” With the wind in her hair, a young girl dreams of the freedom that riding a bike offers so that she may take control of her direction and destination.

Four years after the release of Wadjda in 2012, there are now many more Wadjdas. They are the Haifaas, the Manals, the Rotanas, the Loujains, the Maysaas, the Hanadis, the Yasmeens, the Wojdans, and the Sarahs. They are you and they are me.

They are enrolled in higher education, writing novels and screenplays, vlogging, blogging, creating art, voicing opinions, singing songs, travelling internationally, competing in sporting events, riding bicycles and flying airplanes. They are also doing it all under existing written law, even in Saudi Arabia, and they don’t seek your approval.

See also at Bitch Flicks: ‘Wadjda’: Can a Girl and a Bicycle Change a Culture?

Sarah Mason is an international producer based in Los Angeles. A graduate of Bristol University, UK. She consults on Middle Eastern cultural representation in film and art.

The Gender Trap and Women Directors

But, when was the last time ANYONE sat down to write a story, or direct a project and asked themselves — Is this story masculine or feminine? Exactly none, I suspect. … Storytellers tell stories, audiences engage, the formula is quite simple. But, it only works one way — male filmmakers are able to make any film they want without biased-loaded gender questions, whereas women filmmakers always face more scrutiny and criticism.

This guest post written by Jenna Ricker appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

“Man is defined as a human being and a woman as a female — whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male.” – Simone de Beauvoir

There I was, waiting to be introduced at my first film festival for my first feature film. My stomach was all butterflies. Not sweet lilting flappers, but juiced up buggers pinging around at breakneck speed, swirling with worry about whether the audience would like my movie, or walk out, or worse… what if someone had smuggled in a tomato?

As I stood there trying to play it cool, the festival programmer began talking about my film — a coming of age drama about a young boy who, while searching for his absentee mother, re-connects with his older half-brother— in a way I hadn’t anticipated. While I know he meant to be flattering, I was struck by how many times I heard a variation of this phrase: How did she write and direct this masculine story so well as a woman?

The butterflies, struck dumb by confusion, stopped swirling. I didn’t know I’d written a masculine story. I’d heard of chick-flicks, which I imagined to be movies that chickens watched in the comfort of their coops, but was ‘masculine’ a legit genre? I rattled the usual suspects off in my head — comedy, drama, thriller, horror, masculine, feminine — hold up, what?

Cut to a few years later. I’ve got the same butterflies as I wait to be introduced at a different festival for the premiere of my second feature film — this one a noir-inspired mystery about a conspiracy to control a revolutionary design by inventor, Nikola Tesla. The festival programmer passionately described the film, talked beautifully about our wonderful cast and then with a nod in my direction said — When you meet this director you won’t believe she made such a dark, masculine film. My butterflies gave me a swift kick in the gut.

Here’s the thing — all of the festival programmers who described my films as ‘masculine’ genuinely liked and celebrated my work. They were wonderfully gracious, and no doubt intended to be complimentary, and I’m eternally grateful that they saw something they appreciated and wanted to include in their festivals. But, it got me to thinking.

What makes a story masculine or feminine?

I did some research, reading articles and excerpts that addressed gender identity, feminist literature, sexuality, but I came up short on finding research on assigning gender to stories. What I did discover is that over 80 languages have nouns, verbs and adjectives that are deemed masculine or feminine. Are you suddenly having flashbacks to freshman year Spanish?

In our current political climate it might be easy to forget that words have meanings, however, in these languages gender is inextricably tied to the cultural interpretation. As Mark Twain noted in A Tramp Abroad, “In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has… A tree is male, its buds are female, its leaves are neuter; horses are sexless, dogs are male, cats are female… tomcats included.” While English doesn’t officially have ‘gender-words’, it does have gender-connotations. Take pronouns, for example. I say doctor, you say? He. I say nurse, you say? She. (If you didn’t, congratulations, you’re one in a million.) Language is powerful, like stories, and it would appear our socialization subconsciously compels us to assign gender to both. What’s that about?

There are ‘female-driven’ stories, like Silkwood, and there are ‘male-driven’ stories, like Tootsie; stories driven by the main characters’ gender AND their storyline, which is distinct from ascribing a gender to a story. What the festival programmers didn’t realize, because it’s something that runs deep inside us all, was that their need to label the story by gender was tied wholly to the fact that a woman had directed it. Do you think anyone said to Sydney Pollack, “How did you direct such a feminine film?” when The Way We Were hit theaters. Was James L. Brooks inundated with questions like, “How did you understand such feminine characters?” when he helmed Terms of Endearment? Yeah, I doubt it, too.

But, when was the last time ANYONE sat down to write a story, or direct a project and asked themselves — Is this story masculine or feminine? Exactly none, I suspect. Why is every-day filmmaking ‘for the boys’ cast through an entirely different lens when it comes to the women? Kathryn Bigelow’s Hurt Locker was powerfully executed, and I guarantee the phrase, “Can you believe a woman directed it?” was used by many while exiting the theaters. But did those same folks walk out of The Hours wondering how Stephen Daldry managed to pull it off? Storytellers tell stories, audiences engage, the formula is quite simple. But, it only works one way — male filmmakers are able to make any film they want without biased-loaded gender questions, whereas women filmmakers always face more scrutiny and criticism.

A couple of yeas ago I was on a ‘Women in the Director’s Chair’ panel with these inspiring women filmmakers and we were discussing this need to place gender on story solely when the storyteller was female. Debra Granik (Winter’s Bone, Stray Dog) shared that it had been suggested to her that maybe the way to combat this was to use a male nom-de-plume, or try submitting a script with just one’s initials to see if that changed the reaction or greased the wheels. But, as we all surmised, then what? You’re sitting across from a producer who thought you were a man, and now you’re having an awkward ‘gotcha moment’? And, besides, who wants to pretend to be someone else when it’s already hard enough being yourself in this industry.

This is not just a nuisance but a symptom of a much larger problem: Women writers and directors are already hindered by gender labels miles from the finish line. Other marginalized writers and directors are impeded as much, if not more, when it comes to storytelling. As difficult as it is for all women filmmakers, it’s even more difficult for women of color, LBTQ women and women with disabilities. And, while making a movie is incredibly hard for anybody — it takes ridiculous amounts of stamina and unwavering focus, no matter your gender — when a woman wants to tell a story, her obstacle course is often fraught with more walls to scale, barbed-wire to beat, and fire pits to leap over.

And one of the biggest obstacles, in my opinion, is this need to label a woman’s storytelling as either masculine or feminine. This is yet another Catch-22 for a woman director. You want to tell a story about a World War II battlefield? The gatekeepers will decide that’s probably better told by a man. You want to tell a story about a World War II nursing station? Okay, but the gatekeepers will tell you that no one is going to watch it because it’s about women. This denotes that the first story is masculine and the second feminine, regardless of the actual subject matter. And so it goes…

Ironically, what is more likely to happen is a male director being celebrated for telling female-driven fare. You know, those big ‘chick flicks’ of the that last few years — Bridesmaids, Sisters, Trainwreck, Crazy, Stupid, Love, and the coming Ghostbusters reboot — all directed by men. This means three things, as far as I can guess: 1.That women in leading roles means chicken-coop watching is going to be huge, 2. These films made heaps of money at the box-office, but there is no trickle-up-effect from female-driven stories to female-helmed stories, and 3. If you’re subscribing to this notion that stories are either female or male, then why aren’t women directing these films? I’m not subscribing to this notion, nor taking the Paul Feig’s or Judd Apatow’s to task. I love that they’re casting women in numbers, and clearly making movies that excite them, and further, I don’t blame them for the asinine term ‘chick-flick’ either, but if I ever meet the coiner of that phrase in a dark alley…

Look, this is not ground-breaking territory I’m covering, just another voice in the chorus of frustration at our industries’ blatant gender parities. So what do we do about it? Well, if it were that simple we would’ve leveled the playing field and gotten on with storytelling already. But, getting on with storytelling is helping. As Melissa Silverstein wrote in an IndieWire article “Embracing the Female Gaze“:

“There are women all across this industry taking hammers each and every day to bang away at the glass ceiling that creates this deep inequality in storytelling. Women are picking up hammers by making their own films in any way they can by creating and participating in female film groups and helping each other, as well as using social media to spread the word about the desire for change.”

To push the needle, women have to keep finding a way outside the system to make movies that challenge the status quo. Hiring women in key roles on crews changes the landscape of a production, and starts to chip away at the ‘boys club’ until a woman’s credits start to pile up next to her male counterparts and the excuse of ‘no experience’ becomes a non-starter. More media outlets that create more opportunities for work to be seen is another potential game changer. What other ways can we start to erode at the gender story trap? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Jenna Ricker is a writer/director based in New York City. She received the Mira Nair Award for Rising Female Filmmaker for her first film, Ben’s Plan. Her second feature film The American Side premieres in theaters April 22nd.

First image photo credit: Frank Barrera; second image photo credit: Ginny Stewart.

How Women Directors Turn Narrative on Its Head

Marielle Heller (‘The Diary of a Teenage Girl’), Miranda July (‘Me and You and Everyone We Know’), and the women directors of ‘Jane the Virgin’ are infusing elements of whimsy into their work in strikingly different ways, but to similar effect. The styles they’re using affect the audience’s relationship with their stories and with the characters themselves by giving the viewer an insight that traditional narratives don’t provide.

This guest post written by Laura Power appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

Marielle Heller, Miranda July, and the women directors of Jane the Virgin are infusing elements of whimsy into their work in strikingly different ways, but to similar effect. The styles they’re using affect the audience’s relationship with their stories and with the characters themselves by giving the viewer an insight that traditional narratives don’t provide.

Marielle Heller’s film, The Diary of a Teenage Girl (based on Phoebe Gloeckner’s hybrid graphic novel of the same name) depicts a coming-of-age narrative — a narrative that film audiences have seen hundreds, if not thousands, of times — in such a way that turns the genre into something fresh and spectacular. Our teenage hero is budding comic artist Minnie Goetze (English actor Bel Powley), who lives in San Francisco with her sister Gretel and her single, swinging mother (played by Kristen Wiig). Heller opens the film with a low angle shot of Minnie’s behind as she walks through a park and her voice-over narration reveals: “I had sex today: Holy Shit.”

Minnie’s narration certainly gives us a glimpse into her mind, her feelings, and her emotions. Heller uses this trope to good effect and doesn’t overdo it. But it’s not the voice-over that shows us our true Minnie. It is Heller’s use of animation that allows the audience insight into Minnie’s mind, because we see things come alive in the instant she feels them. Heller uses Sara Gunnarsdóttir’s original artwork and animation to let us “see” Minnie’s thoughts and feelings. Gunnarsdóttir’s work is certainly inspired by Gloeckner’s early original drawings, and some of those drawings appear in the film itself (Gloeckner was a consultant on the art and animation).

The art itself is excellent, but the way Heller uses it is the real magic. Minnie is a girl whose imagination makes the static things around her come alive — the drawings on her wall and in her diary, the stars painted on her bedroom walls and ceiling, the cover of Aline Kominsky’s comic. It’s an effective and creative narrative tool to develop Minnie’s character. But Minnie doesn’t just animate things she already sees; she also creates objects out of her feelings. Hearts appear in the bathtub as she thinks about Monroe (her mother’s boyfriend with whom she has an affair) and, later, flowers bloom out of the receiver as she talks to him on the phone; feathers cover her hands and body and give her wings as she feels empowered on an acid trip; fireworks light up the sky when Minnie and Tabatha kiss for the first time. These are beautiful, sweet, and romantic additions that emphasize what we already sense Minnie is feeling.

But Heller is smart to not let the animation just be sweet; she also uses it to bring us down to understand Minnie’s lowest points. When Minnie feels rejected after Ricky calls her “intense,” we see her self-portrait animated as a giant holding the tiny boy between her thick fingers and then tossing him down to the ground; when Minnie hears Tabatha and Mike talking, she imagines them as black and white grotesque heads and bodies pressing in on her claustrophobically as she realizes she is not just in the apartment to eat a grilled cheese sandwich. The animations make Minnie round, full, and a character whose emotions we, the audience, can truly know, and a girl whose story we can truly feel.

The women directors of television’s Jane the Virgin also use expected and unexpected devices to infuse whimsy. Max Thornton, writing about the series soon after it premiered in 2014, said that it has a “jocular self-awareness,” and this is absolutely true. But that silliness and breaking of the fourth wall is not only done to make us laugh, but also to tell a story in a way unlike any other.

The show uses an omniscient narrator (voiced by Anthony Mendez) and text that appears across the frame as though it is being typed immediately (complete with clicking keyboard sounds) to give backstory, explain character motivations, and stand in for what we, the audience, might be thinking. It allows us to know so much more than the characters know at any given time, but also to know just what Jane (Gina Rodriguez) is thinking and feeling. We are intimately connected to Jane, her feelings, and her story.

To date, there are thirty-eight episodes, or “chapters” of Jane the Virgin, each one using a combination of stylistic devices that include the aforementioned voice-over and text as well as dream sequences, imagination sequences, and animation. Although not every episode is directed by a woman, almost 60% are, and all episodes include a writing credit for show creator Jennie Snyder Urman. The second episode, directed by Uta Briesewitz, and the thirty-seventh episode, directed by Melanie Mayron, provide a good framework to look at how the show uses unconventional narrative devices to tell a great story with a specific and consistent style.

Whereas the pilot, directed by Brad Silberling, sets up the excellent premise, world, and characters of Jane the Virgin, it’s not until the second episode, “Chapter Two,” directed by Uta Briesewitz, that the women of the show (including Briesewitz herself) really start to fly their true colors. This episode brings up issues of family, class, marriage, and sacrifice — both the male expectation of a woman’s sacrifice as well as the reality of a woman’s sacrifice. These themes are introduced and navigated using flashback, imagined scenes, and animation, as well as, of course, tropes from and conscious references to the telenovela genre.

Michael, Jane’s fiancé, is so focused on the fact that Jane once kissed Rafael, that he mishears Rafael as saying, “I used to make out with Jane a lot.” Playing with reality and fantasy this way, Briesewitz gets us into Michael’s head and reveals his insecurities in a way dialogue doesn’t always do. As Petra, Rafael’s wife, explains the moment she realizes he stopped loving her, a single, magical, animated teardrop falls from her face and onto the ground. We feel for her character and our sympathy is reinforced as the narrator reveals that (after two episodes of lying) she is finally being truthful. All of these whimsical pieces make up an episode that illustrates the true strength and sacrifice of the show’s women: Jane changing her entire life to make her best decision about the pregnancy and telling Michael, “I get to be selfish now, not you”; Xiomara (Xo), Jane’s mother, sacrificing herself during Jane’s quinceañera by doing some embarrassing song-and-dance karaoke in order to save Jane from seeing her date make out with another girl; Xo standing up to Rogelio when he pushes her in an effort to meet Jane for the first time.

A more recent episode, “Chapter Thirty-Seven” directed by Melanie Mayron (who also plays the part of Jane’s new graduate school advisor), employs Jane the Virgin’s tried and true stylistic techniques to cover sub-plots dealing with post-traumatic stress, new motherhood and infant bonding, a woman’s need to be validated by other people, and romance between sexagenarians. Our ever-present omniscient narrator gives us the low-down on what’s going on in our characters’ heads, as well as, possibly, in our own heads as we watch. But there is added whimsy through animation: hearts float from Rogelio’s chest when he hears that Jane and Michael are back together and engaged to be married (nearly identical animation to what Heller used in The Diary of a Teenage Girl); Mayron uses flashbacks to show simultaneous narratives as Michael rescues Rogelio from his stalker-kidnpapper (remember: telenovela!), and then uses animated arrows to point to elements in the frame that Michael sees; green check marks appear whenever a scene has passed the Bechdel Test, and red X’s appear whenever a scene has failed; and finally, in one of the most (or least?) subtle, Mayron the grad school advisor character is telling Jane that she needs a “frame” for her work, and Mayron the director cuts to a scene with a literal frame of a shot on Rogelio’s telenovela. This woman knows how to have fun. (And can we give this episode extra credit for mentioning the Bechdel Test in the first place [as well as for mentioning book clubs and Family Matters]?).

It feels appropriate to leave Miranda July for last, since she seems to exist in her own wonderful world. Her films are both stylistically consistent and unique, and she uses whimsy in her writing and her directing in a way that helps her, her characters, and her audience deal with big, dark ideas.

Some might dismiss July as twee, but they would be making a huge mistake. July’s work is, perhaps, cute sometimes, at least on the surface. In her debut feature film, Me and You and Everyone We Know, July plays performance artist Christine Jesperson, who puts white ankle socks on her ears to get the attention of a shoe salesman named Richard (played by John Hawkes), and July has Richard’s six year-old son Robby catfishing a woman over instant messenger by telling her that he wants to “poop back and forth” with her, forever.

And those things are adorable, but July’s subject matter sure as hell is not. Me And You And Everyone We Know deals with connections and disconnections, with heartbreak and humiliation, with sex, with death. In the first five minutes of the film, Richard sets his own hand on fire in front of his two young sons. Soon later, a middle-aged man woos two teenage girls by posting hand-written signs in his living room window explaining the sexual things he’d like them to do to him, and to each other. And just as soon as Richard and Christine seem to have made an honest connection — a connection that is all Christine wants — Richard immediately turns on her, telling her that she doesn’t know anything about him: “I could be a killer of children,” he says, destroying their connection in a matter of seconds. July uses the sweetness, the innocence to offset the darkness of the film as well as make it an even more striking comment on humanity.

July’s second film, The Future, is even more stylistically interesting and uses techniques similar to Heller’s and the Jane the Virgin directors’ to tell a story about infidelity, depression, and death. And, strangely, it’s even cuter than Me And You And Everyone We Know. It’s narrated by a cat named Paw-Paw (voiced by July). Yes, you read that right: it’s narrated by a cat.

The cat is the marble that starts the entire Rube Goldberg machine that is The Future. Sophie (Miranda July) and her boyfriend Jason (Hamish Linklater) decide to adopt the cat, but he is injured and cannot come home with them for a month. This gives the couple the push to use that month as though it’s their last month living life as they know it: they quit their jobs, Sophie disconnects the Internet to focus on making dance videos, and she begins a secret affair with a man she calls on the phone spontaneously in an effort to pull herself out of a kind of depression.

And Paw-Paw the cat does a voice-over narration as he watches the clock, waiting for Sophie and Jason to pick him up. July turns that particular storytelling device on its head, but she doesn’t stop there. She also creates a personified crawling T-shirt (Sophie’s security “blanket”) that inches closer and closer to her until she must finally put it on (leading to an interpretive dance in the middle of her lover’s master bedroom). July also includes a scene where Sophie must deal with her disconnection from her friends and her former life, and she does this by showing the friends pregnant, then with infants, then toddlers, then teens, and so on until the children stand before Sophie, grown adults with their own children. It is of course, all in Sophie’s head, but the startling absurdity of the scene jars the viewer into understanding how helpless she feels in this moment.

Just as with Me And You And Everyone We Know, The Future tells a story that has been told before: people splitting up and being unhappy and then happy, and unhappy, and then finally — hopefully — happy again. But July uses an unconventional whimsy to show us life’s sweetness, its hopefulness, and, sometimes, its tragedy.

This is what women — at least the women at the helms of these films and shows — are doing so well. They are playing with story, with expectations, and with the genre of narrative film itself. And the playing is not always for fun, and it is not even always successful. But it is always appreciated.

Laura Power teaches English composition and creative writing at a two-year college in Illinois. You can read more of her work at Cinefilles and Lake Projects and follow her on Twitter @chicagocommuter.

The Anti-Celebrity Cinema of Mary Harron: ‘I Shot Andy Warhol,’ ‘The Notorious Bettie Page,’ and ‘The Anna Nicole Story’

I’ve always thought Mary Harron’s work was the perfect example of why we need female directors. I think the films she produces provide a perspective we would never see in a world unilaterally controlled by male filmmakers. Harron appears to specialize in off-beat character studies of the types of people a male director may not gravitate towards, nor treat with appropriate gravitas. She treats us to humanizing takes on sex workers and sex symbols, angry lesbians and radical feminism and makes them hard to turn away from.

This post by staff writer Elizabeth Kiy appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

I’ve always thought Mary Harron’s work was the perfect example of why we need female directors.

I think the films she produces provide a perspective we would never see in a world unilaterally controlled by male filmmakers. Harron appears to specialize in off-beat character studies of the types of people a male director may not gravitate towards, nor treat with appropriate gravitas. She treats us to humanizing takes on sex workers and sex symbols, angry lesbians and radical feminism and makes them hard to turn away from.

Her work is so different from what we are used to that, it’s usually depressing to read anything about the making of her films, which always seem to struggle for financing and spend years in development hell.

Harron’s film are like long monologues, focusing on the experiences of a single, larger than life character. In my head, I’ve compared them to less glossy magazine profiles.

Though she is best know for her controversial take on American Psycho (which starred Gloria Steinem’s stepson, Christian Bale), I find her biopics, a triptych focusing on Bettie Page, Valerie Solanas, Anna Nicole Smith, her most interesting works.

These are difficult women to portray in an even handed fashion. Their personas and actions have transcended the truth of who they are and in the cases of Bettie and Anna Nicole, tend to be seen rather than heard. They are also women who have appeared difficult to defend and explain from within a feminist framework.

Harron, who wrote for Punk Magazine in 1970s New York, mixes feminine aesthetics and masculine grit to find beauty in the often ugly experiences of her subjects. She takes daring subjects and portrays them in a formalistically unique style, using different film stocks, gorgeous cinematography and fast kinetic edits to portray different time periods. The Notorious Bettie Page, uses a Wizard of Oz style switch from black and white to lush colour, to portray the character’s feelings of freedom. She lets her actors breathe and inhabit the characters and when her films succeed, they do on the lead character’s stand out performances.

Though it is often unclear what she is trying to say with them. As a whole, her oeuvre does not present a cohesive sense of auterusim or even stick to a specific genre, medium or perspective. Harron’s main interest appear to be intriguing stories.

If her films do have one message, it’s that people are more complicated than we assume. They don’t make a snap judgement about the characters. Mary Harron doesn’t tell us Valerie Solanas was “crazy” or Bettie Page was exploited or Anna Nicole Smith was a gold digger. She says, there are good and bad parts of everyone. What seems to matter is being interesting.

I Shot Andy Warhol (1996)

I Shot Andy Warhol is a little art scene movie about Valerie Solanas (Lili Taylor), a lesbian writer famous more for the delusions that lead her to (non-fatally) shoot Andy Warhol in 1968 than for her feminist treatise, the S.C.U.M. manifesto (Society for Cutting Up Men).

The film is Valerie’s show, portraying her as a desperate person living on the fringes of society and struggling to make a living, who comes face to face with Warhol’s beautiful world and its superstars and hopes to be invited in. She comes to believe Warhol is trying to control and exploit her when she cannot get him to produce a play of hers.

The film doesn’t seem to take a stance on Solanas, but allows the audience to try to understand her based on what they have been shown. We are helped along by Taylor’s performance, intense to the point of being frightening, which makes her character come alive.

The Notorious Bettie Page (2005)

In Harron’s portrayal of the life of 50s pin-up Queen, Bettie Page (Gretchen Mol), we meet a woman who is a living contradiction. She is portrayed as an innocent who doesn’t understand the idea of pornography yet enjoys posing naked. Even the most aggressive bondage scenes where she is tied up and gagged seem to be a great game for her.

Though the film is about pornography, Harron skillfully avoids giving us overtly sexualized or salivating gazes of her star. The nude scenes are either awkward as Bettie fumbles unsure in the beginning or triumphant in portraying Bettie’s proud nudism and her sun-kissed body, glowing. I think Gretchen Mol’s portrayal of Bettie really helps here; she is wide-eyed and perpetually stunned. The way she inhabits the character makes her sexuality seem natural. She enjoys her body and the film’s switch to technicolor emphasizes that happiness.

However, it’s a film with a lot to unpack. Because Harron opens it with scenes of Bettie’s rape and abuse, it’s easy to believe she’s suggesting Bettie’s sexual openness is because of her rape. It’s gets slightly heavy-handed in one point where she is invited to show a private moment in her acting class and she begins to take off her clothes.

The relatively short span of Bettie’s life Harron focuses on cuts out her later mental illness and the extent of her evangelicalism. It’s discomforting to see younger Bettie enjoy her work when contrasted to older Bettie whose conversion suggests she begins to view what she participated in as exploitative.

The Anna Nicole Story (2013)

The Anna Nicole Story is a Lifetime movie, it’s campy and trashy, but it has aspirations. Harron gives Anna Nicole the Marilyn Monroe treatment, telling us that she is a misunderstood bombshell hiding a deep sadness. Though, the device of the ghostly figure of an older glamorous Anna Nicole guiding her through her life is a bit much.

There’s a fine line between campy trashy and exploitation trashy and Harron is fairly successful here. For the last years of her life, evidence that Anna Nicole Smith was mentally unwell and struggling with drugs was turned into a joke and her weight gain was excoriated by men who just wanted her to get hot again. While Anna Nicole was various exploited and exploitative herself, the film tries to rein in her image to something palatable to the viewers at home. Agnes Bruckner tries to make her seem human, but though we are left unsure of the motivations behind many of her stranger actions.

It seemed like every interview Bruckner did for the film was about the enlarged breasts she sported as Anna Nicole. She was asked “How were they made? or “How did they feel?” over and over.

In the finished picture, too much fun is had with Anna Nicole’s breasts, whose size the film enjoys exaggerating and displaying, though this may come with the territory. The scene where she bring cantaloupes to display the size of implants she want is played for laughs, as is the revel of her new large breasts getting her attention at the strip club.

As it’s a Lifetime movie, Harron is hampered by a PG rating, a low budget and shot production schedule, but she still gives us something interesting to explore.

She always has.

Elizabeth Kiy. is a Canadian writer and journalist living in Toronto, Ontario. Someday she will take over the world.

Sofia Coppola and The Silent Woman

Many films touch upon the theme of female isolation, but I remain fascinated with Sofia Coppola’s three major cinematic creations that explore the world of The Silent Woman: ‘The Virgin Suicides,’ ‘Lost in Translation,’ and ‘Marie Antoinette (2006).’ Each film delves into this enigma, forming a multifaceted frame of reference for a shared understanding.

This guest post written by Paulette Reynolds appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

The Silent Woman. You see her everywhere and yet she’s not noticed at all. She exists between the spaces of Everything’s Fine and I’m Okay. She’s your mother, sister, that next door neighbor and your best friend. Most of the time she’s you, too. She often speaks in monosyllables and can also be quite the chatterbox…

When I first heard the phrase, The Silent Majority, I thought it referred to women. After all, the men I saw exercised power: In the boardrooms, between the sheets and at the dinner table — men spoke firmly, authoritatively and with absolute conviction that what they said carried all the weight of a solid gold bar at Fort Knox.

Of course my first frame of reference was visual and women in the real world matched what I saw in the movies. They had no real power and never spoke with any assertiveness, and when they did, they were quickly silenced with an exasperated look, a dismissive declaration, a well-placed joke or a baby. Many films touch upon the theme of female isolation, but I remain fascinated with Sofia Coppola’s three major cinematic creations that explore the world of The Silent Woman: The Virgin Suicides (1999), Lost in Translation (2003), and Marie Antoinette (2006). Each film delves into this enigma, forming a multifaceted frame of reference for a shared understanding.

Sofia Coppola’s directorial career began with The Virgin Suicides. The family surname belongs to her father, film giant Francis Ford Coppola, known for his male-centric masterpieces The Godfather epic and Apocalypse Now. But a popular Coppola project — Peggy Sue Got Married (1986) – would later serve to inspire her own seven-year creative streak.

Peggy Sue Got Married sticks out like an odd sock in Mr. Coppola’s resume, a film about faded prom queen Peggy Sue (Kathleen Turner), who travels back in time to solve an identity crisis. Sofia played her younger sister and goes unnoticed, but the theme of isolation reverberates throughout, as Peggy Sue marvels at how things have changed, but still remain the same — for her, anyway. Ms. Coppola’s film trio borrows a few familiar chords from Peggy Sue for us to recognize: All three occur in different times (The Virgin Suicides, Marie Antoinette) or cultural places (Lost in Translation, Marie Antoinette), featuring naive young blond women (the five sisters, Charlotte and Marie Antoinette), who communicate poorly with their inept male counterparts: a nerdy group of boys in The Virgin Suicides, Charlotte’s workaholic husband, and Marie Antoinette’s clueless Boy King.

Yet The Silent Women, with their inability — or refusal, in the case of the virgins — to connect, diverges from Peggy Sue, whose adult life experiences enrich her inner voice, allowing her a measure of power. Their Nordic blondness also makes them more alluring than Peggy Sue, which is the gold standard of beauty that women are taught to admire from afar. The ironic connector allows them to drift through life, seemingly unaffected, when their fate demands that they adapt to society’s demands or perish.

The Virgin Suicides, is the first in Sofia Coppola’s trilogy about the strangled voice of Woman, narrated from the perspective of one admirer, whose subjectivity and biological entitlement flaws our gaze. The five Lisbon sisters, including Lux (played by Kirsten Dunst), form the mysterious inner circle of bored suburban girls, where their exotic surname separates them even more from their 1970s humdrum surroundings. And from the diseased tree looming ominously on their property, to their father’s chats with plants and Mother Lisbon’s terse commands at the dinner table, we suspect there will be no fairy tale ending.

The youngest daughter, Cecilia, succeeds in killing herself, and our collective dread for the remaining sisters is subdued as the parents try to relax their hold over the restless teenagers. This allows them some temporary freedom, but when Lux violates the curfew after a sexual tryst with Trip (Josh Harnett), everything goes into lockdown. Yet it hardly seems to matter to the girls, who lounge around their rooms as though they’re enjoying an extended sleepover. Lux begins to act out, having random sex on the roof, her behavior mirroring the experience with Trip on the night of the Homecoming Dance. As she stubbornly relives it for everyone to see, we become part of her guilt and sorrow, and like the boys watching, we can only make guesses in the dark. Lux’s name, meaning ‘light’, hints that she is merely illuminating the scene for us, and whatever answer we arrive at will have to suffice.

The narrator, now a disillusioned adult, and his old neighborhood buddies continue trying to unravel the mystery that was the Lisbon girls, “We knew the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love, and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.” Triggered by hormones and too much free time, they spin endless fantasies about them, gleaned from personal belongings and the pop psychology of the times. Their perspective lulls them — and us — into a false arrogance that they’ve plumbed the depths to reveal their secrets. This deepens as we think they’re communicating with them through shared music over the telephone. But the common link of music and feelings becomes something different for each group, as the girls are just marking time and the boys think they’re actually connecting on a meaningful level.

A small pivotal scene occurs between Lux and her mother — whose first name we never know, played to perfection by Kathleen Turner. Lux complains, “I can’t breath in here.” Mrs. Lisbon’s automatic response, “Lu, you are safe, in here,” neatly shuts down any further attempts at communication. Her mother’s desire to keep them safe only intensifies their estrangement from a society that they never wanted to inhabit anyway.

Eventually the girls follow their pioneering sister to a collective death. The men — including a remorseful Trip — are left behind, bewildered by too many questions and no real understanding of these sublime young women.

Ms. Coppola’s second film about female detachment is the commercially successful Lost in Translation. It marked her first scripted venture, where she won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and a Golden Globe for her efforts. Lost in Translation follows the interweaving threads of a brief encounter set against the high-rise hustle and bustle of Tokyo, Japan. The male gaze is again emphasized: Bob (Bill Murray) is a famous actor and John (Giovanni Ribisi) is a celebrity photographer, signaling the dual nature in the preoccupation of looking. But Bob has reached the stage where he is tired of being looked at and John is too self-absorbed to really see. Inserted into this dynamic is Charlotte (Scarlett Johannson), John’s neglected wife.

The beginning sees Bob and Charlotte attempting to relate to their surroundings, each other and their spouses. He sticks close to the hotel culture, surviving with a sour face and brittle humor, deflecting his wife’s long-distant communications by sticking to a well-worn script of automatic replies and bland compliments. Charlotte is acutely aware that she is a stranger in a strange land, where her travels only reinforce the solitary nature of her existence. Coppola employs large landscapes – both cultural and historical — to emphasize how lost Woman is without a voice of her own, disconnected from the very society that layers her life with expectations and carefully placed parameters of behavior. This refrain is repeated in The Virgin Suicides, where most of the action is confined to the Lisbon home. Here, her travels leave her sad, as she and John dissolve into petty disagreements and estranged silences.

John goes on a photo shoot, leaving Charlotte and Bob to explore Toyko together. Bob, older and wiser, shares his knowledge about marriage with Charlotte. She complains about being ‘stuck’ in her life, reeling off her short list of failed careers. He encourages her to keep writing and here a seismic shift transforms Lost in Translation into an autobiographical post-it note for us: Sofia Coppola’s earlier career choices and recent divorce are echoed in this scene, and the connection to her mentor-father now changes Bob into a paternal figure, who acts as an emotional buffer for Charlotte against the harsh realities buried within her life decisions.

As they say their goodbyes Bob whispers something into Charlotte’s ear, which becomes the shared moment of intimacy that they’ve been avoiding. As Bob and Charlotte disengage and he disappears, she slowly walks towards us, and we’re reminded of the film’s beginning, where she came into view with her back facing us. Now, contentedly smiling to herself as the crowd swirls busily around her, we sense that she will survive and grow stronger.

Lost in Translation acts as the fulcrum in Sofia Coppola’s trio, giving way to her third film, Marie Antoinette. Visually stunning, with opulent costumes and breath-taking views of the elegant 700-room Versailles Palace, Marie Antoinette reunites us with Kirsten Dunst as the 14-year-old Austrian princess who would become Queen of France.

Marie Antoinette, wrapped in a cocoon of wealth and privilege, begins a journey supremely ignorant of the world events that will affect her life, as she is handed off to the French government. At the Austrian-French border, she’s forced to surrender all of her belongings for traditional French accessories, introducing Marie to the lengths she’ll be expected to go for King and Country. Princess Marie arrives to a hostile court, where the courtiers refer to her as an ‘apple strudel.’ King Louis XV quickly marries off Marie to Prince Louis Auguste, since their sole function is to produce an heir for France. But Louis’s disinterest, their sexual naiveté and Marie’s inability to communicate produces nothing but gossip and blame, which gets directed at her, of course.

The princess will turn into an extravagant queen whose continuous spending left France stone broke — or so the story goes. Her husband, Louis XVI, (Jason Schwartzman) — just as clueless as Marie — contented himself with hunting and studying locks, while the government made political decisions that hastened the country’s eventual downfall. But Sofia Coppola’s film reveals a young girl who was never allowed to use her voice, sacrificed as a pawn by both Austria and France.

“Letting everyone down would be my greatest unhappiness,” she confides to her Ambassador, but that seems to be Marie Antoinette’s secondary function. She spends her formative years at Versailles bewildered and overwhelmed, often tearfully breaking down behind closed doors. Her mother writes ultimatums, her brother counsels about sex, and her Ambassador wails about her refusal to engage in political intrigue. Her emotional isolation is further heightened by every personal activity, which serves as ritualized theatre for the court’s entertainment.

Marie’s spending sprees, gambling and hard partying become more extreme in her desperation to feel something more than boredom and inadequacy. Coppola’s attention to Marie Antoinette’s clothing points at the language of fashion as a forceful communicator of power. Power statements for the monarchy were tucked into every inch of wig height, where prestige was judged by the width of a skirt and the suffocating amount of embellishment. Yet hidden within the satin and lace was a woman who was screaming to get out.

Marie Antoinette’s sad end marks our final film of Sofia Coppola’s Silent Woman saga, and their collective search for an empowered voice. The Academy nominated Sofia Coppola as Best Director for Lost in Translation — only one of three women to be nominated by the Academy until 2009. Kathryn Bigelow then became the first woman director to win an Oscar, and sadly, no other woman has been nominated for directing since. While most of Hollywood’s directors are still men, The Silent Majority is steadily raising her voice — on film projects, in the boardrooms, and globally — firmly, authoritatively and with absolute conviction.

Paulette Reynolds is the Editor and Publisher of Cine Mata’s Movie Madness film appreciation blog. Film viewing and theory are her passion, but film noir remains her first love. Paulette breathes the rarified Austin, Texas air and can be seen on Twitter: @CinesMovieBlog.