Call For Writers: Women Directors

Our theme week for March 2016 will be Women Directors. The gender gap in the entertainment industry has risen to the level of popular consciousness, such that prominent public figures are frequently commenting on it and demanding change, but while awareness of the under-representation and misrepresentation of women in film and television has grown, is there much being done to combat it?

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Our theme week for March 2016 will be Women Directors.

The gender gap in the entertainment industry has risen to the level of popular consciousness, such that prominent public figures are frequently commenting on it and demanding change, but while awareness of the under-representation and misrepresentation of women in film and television has grown, is there much being done to combat it?

Women directors face myriad obstacles: despite there being an abundance of talented female directors struggling to produce work, many companies refuse to give them projects (only 3.4% of all film directors are female and only 9% of the top 250 movies in 2015 were directed by women), they are not paid as much as their male counterparts, there’s an expectation that their work be stereotypically female (i.e. chick flicks), and their work is rarely appreciated with the same level of acclaim (only 4 women have ever been nominated for a Best Director Academy Award). Despite all these obstacles and hardships, there are a growing number of women making amazing work with wide range of genres and topics: romantic, thought-provoking, innovative, hilarious, or even terrifying. In 2009, Kathryn Bigelow broke barriers with The Hurt Locker, a film about soldiers and war, when she took home Academy Awards for both Best Picture and Best Director. She was the first woman ever to receive an Oscar for Best Director. In 2014, Ava DuVernay’s depiction of the civil rights movement Selma won an Academy Award for Best Song and garnered nominations for Best Picture. But DuVernay didn’t receive an Oscar nomination, an unfortunate snub as she would have been the first Black woman to ever receive a nomination for Best Director.

However, the Oscars are typically white and male-dominated and are increasingly being disregarded as an antiquated, patriarchal, elitist group who should no longer be regarded as the gatekeepers of important cinema, and women are increasingly working in the independent film scene. Despite the somewhat encouraging rise of women directors, white women tend to dominate the field, receiving accolades and projects with far greater frequency than women directors of color, which is a microcosm reflective of the stratification of the feminist movement itself.

The examples below are the names of women directors alongside an example of one of their most acclaimed works. Feel free to use those examples to inspire your writing on this subject, or choose your own source material.

We’d like to avoid as much overlap as possible for this theme, so get your proposals in early if you know which film you’d like to write about. We accept both original pieces and cross-posts, and we respond to queries within a week.

Most of our pieces are between 1,000 and 2,000 words, and include links and images. Please send your piece as a Microsoft Word document to btchflcks[at]gmail[dot]com, including links to all images, and include a 2- to 3-sentence bio.

If you have written for us before, please indicate that in your proposal, and if not, send a writing sample if possible.

Please be familiar with our publication and look over recent and popular posts to get an idea of Bitch Flicks’ style and purpose. We encourage writers to use our search function to see if your topic has been written about before, and link when appropriate (hyperlinks to sources are welcome, as well).

The final due date for these submissions is Saturday, March 26, 2016 by midnight Eastern Time.

Ava DuVernay (Selma)

Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation)

Haifaa al-Mansour (Wadjda)

Jane Campion (The Piano)

Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker)

Amma Asante (Belle)

Lena Dunham (Girls)

Julie Delpy (2 Days in Paris)

Mary Harron (American Psycho)

Mary Lambert (Pet Sematary)

Meera Menon (Farah Goes Bang)

Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust)

Nora Ephron (Sleepless in Seattle)

Penny Marshall (Big)

Lisa Cholodenko (The Kids Are All Right)

Emily Ting (It’s Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong)

Debra Granik (Winter’s Bone)

Dee Rees (Bessie)

Randa Haines (Children of a Lesser God)

Barbra Streisand (The Prince of Tides)

Jodie Foster (Orange is the New Black)

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

Check out what we’ve been reading this week–and let us know what you’ve been reading/writing in the comments!

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Shit People Say to Women Directors and Other Women in Film on tumblr

Amy Schumer Is Making Genius Feminist Comedy (Video) by Kali Holloway at AlterNet

Cecily Strong’s top 10 jokes of the 2015 White House Correspondents’ Dinner b

The Best & Worst Depictions Of Abortion In TV & Film by Dionne Scott at Refinery 29

Can Kathleen Kennedy use ‘Star Wars’ to change Hollywood? by Alyssa Rosenberg at The Washington Post

Meryl Streep Boosts Over-40 Women Screenwriters by Maria Giese at Ms. blog

Every High School (Public & Private) in the USA Will Receive a Copy of ‘Selma’ on DVD Free of Charge by Tambay A. Obenson at Shadow and Act

Laura Bispuri’s Transgender Odyssey ‘Sworn Virgin’ Wins Tribeca Film Fest’s Nora Ephron Prize by Inkoo Kang at Women and Hollywood

‘Fun Home,’ the Musical, Takes Alison Bechdel’s Life to Broadway by Michael Paulson at The New York Times

Native Actors Walk Off the Set of the New Adam Sandler Movie by Kira Garcia at Bitch Media

GLAAD Studio Responsibility Index Reveals Queer Women Basically Don’t Exist In Movies by Heather Hogan at Autostraddle

Women speak out about pulling off the “radical act” of filmmaking in the male-dominated movie business by Alice Robb at The New York Times

Study: Female Directors Face Strong Bias in Landing Studio Films by Cynthia Littleton at Variety

Carey Mulligan, Rose Byrne, and Geena Davis Are All Sick Of Hollywood’s Sexist Crap This Week by Sam Maggs at The Mary Sue

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

Academy Awards 2015 Theme Week Roundup

Check out all of the posts for our Academy Awards 2015 Theme Week here.

Nightcrawler: Centering the White Fear Narrative by Lisa Bolekaja

Bloom is a lonely man who scrapes by on the underbelly of society. His white male privilege allows him to steal, beat up people, and sabotage competitors without fear of repercussions from the police. As the renowned comedian Paul Mooney would say, Bloom has “the complexion for the protection.”


Female Purity Is Some Bullshit: My Problem With Ida by Ren Jender

Religious devotion is a tricky quality to depict in any medium: so many of us have seen piety as hypocrisy both in film and in life that we’re prepared to laugh at or to dismiss deeply held religious beliefs onscreen. In work made for mostly secular audiences, filmmakers who want to show deeply religious characters have to answer the question: if piety isn’t a joke, what exactly is it?


Finding Vivian Maier: The Greatest Art Mystery of the 20th Century by Rachel Redfern

However, Vivian Maier–besides being an obvious genius–remains a mystery. Finding Vivian Maier follows the narrative mystery as we pursue the reclusive and eccentric Vivian (or her personas of Ms. Meier, Mayer, Meyer, Meyers, Maier) across the US and through the streets of the 1950s and 1960s, attempting to discover more of a woman who is still unknowable.


Sexism in Disney’s Into The Woods by Jackson Adler

It seems Disney is saying that The Baker’s Wife is a “fallen woman,” and that it is making a firm decision on how it wants the audience to interpret the affair that occurred. This is made more problematic by how the affair was shot and choreographed. In the film, Cinderella’s Prince pins The Baker’s Wife against a tree and kisses her. There is nowhere for her to escape, even if she wanted to.


A Wild Woman Alone by Ren Jender

The filmmakers (director Jean-Marc Vallée and screenwriter Nick Hornby) profess to be fans of Strayed’s work, but they were apparently so busy patting themselves on the back for not making  this story of a woman alone into some kind of boy-meets-girl rom-com that they forgot to include everything else that makes the book distinctive.


Does Hating Foxcatcher Mean I Hate Men? by Robin Hitchcock

Foxcatcher is very serious meditation on men and masculinities, male relationships, and the white male experience of the class system in America. And I am so fucking bored with those subjects, even when they aren’t presented with a deliberately slow pace, sterile tone, and distracting amounts of face putty.


Gone Girl: How to Create the Perfect Female Villain by Alize Emme

Kudos to the 20th Century Fox exec who decided to market Gone Girl (2014) as a great date movie. This is not a date movie. This is a horror story about the sensationalized pitfalls of a doomed marriage.


American Sniper: We Can Kill It for You Wholesale by Lisa Bolekaja

This cowboy motif is no accident, as it connects this film to the old John Ford Westerns and the nostalgia some folks feel about John Wayne flicks and the mythology of good white cowboys fighting off savage Indians who were keeping good white settlers from utilizing this “wilderness” that would become the U.S.A. Dehumanizing non-whites is the foundation for creating this nation. It’s the glue that holds apple pies and hot dogs together.


The Alchemy of Still Alice by Lisa Rosman

What works beyond a shadow of a doubt is Moore herself. For a long time now, she has demonstrated an uncanny range and power without ever subjecting us to a shred of vanity. Here, she outdoes herself, channeling Alice’s physical, mental, and emotional devolution with an alchemy that is as thrilling as it is harrowing. Her luminous features slacken, her cadences falter, her life force fades. Scenes with Stewart are especially heartbreaking.


Gone Girl: Scathing Gender Commentary While Reinforcing Rape and Domestic Violence Myths by Megan Kearns

I wish I could say that Gone Girl is a subversive feminist film exposing myriad gender biases and generating a much-needed dialogue on rape and domestic violence. Yet it reinforces dangerous myths rather than shattering them.


Big Hero 6: Woman Up by Andé Morgan

The female team members are often shown as being more capable then the males, both as combatants and as scientists. Gogo Tomago, and Honey Lemon, are two bright, young scientists who exhibit strength of mind, body, and will. During a training montage, Gogo uses the phrase “woman up” to encourage one of her teammates to do better. This was a great, subversive line because it flowed naturally from the character and the context, rather than seeming like a forced injection of faux-feminism.


Child-Eating Parents in Into the Woods and Every Children’s Story Ever by Katherine Murray

Your dad is an ogre or giant, your mom is a witch, and both of them want to kill you. Welcome to your fairy tale life.


Birdman Is Black Swan for Boys by Robin Hitchcock

Birdman bears striking similarities to Black Swan, both in the broad strokes—each follow their protagonist’s slipping grip on sanity in the days before a high pressure stage debut—and in a strange number of superficial details—hallucinations of menacing black winged creatures, “surprise” lesbian scenes, and ambiguous suicides at least partially showcased on stage.


Am I The Only Person Incredibly Bored With This Awards Season? by Robin Hitchcock

Only one of the Best Actress nominations is from one of the Best Picture nominees, whereas four of the five Best Actor nominations are for Best Picture-nominated films. As I wrote in 2013, this trend suggests that movies with significant roles for women aren’t considered as great or important by the Academy. This year, it is even worse: four of the five Best Actresses were in movies not nominated outside of the acting categories.


What We Talk About When We Talk About Suck by Katherine Murray

So, you just saw a terrible movie and you want to tell the world about it – not so fast. How we frame our discussions about sucky movies depends on who’s listening, and whether we’ve got common ground.


Selma Backlash: Is It a Gender Issue? by Lauren Byrd

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


Doing The Extraordinary in Two Days, One Night by Ren Jender

Women in films are even less likely to engage in this kind of dispirited struggle. Instead an actress usually plays the wife, mother, or girlfriend whose job it is to be “strong” and rub the hero’s back while he battles against his own obstacles. She talks reassuringly to him whenever he doubts himself, the exact same way Sandra’s husband does with her here.


What’s Missing from the Gone Girl Debate? Privilege! by Natalie Wilson

Gone Girl has been called misogynist, an amalgamation of negative stereotypes of women, a text that perpetuates rape culture, and a narrative that fuels Men’s Rights Acivtists’ ugly depiction of the gender equality feminists are trying to achieve. Yet, what is missing from the discussion is a focus on privilege.


Two Days, One Night: Marion Cotillard’s Insight From the New York Film Festival by Paula Schwartz

Cotillard did triple duty at the New York Film Festival Sunday to promote Two Days, One Night, which had its U.S. premiere. (The film is Belgium’s submission for best foreign film.) At 1, in jeans and a casual but chic top, Cotillard participated in a Q&A for a standing-room crowd. At 3 she changed into Dior and walked across the street to Alice Tully Hall and joined the Dardenne Brothers as they introduced ‘Two Days, One Night’ to a sold out audience, and afterward participated in a Q&A.


Where Is the Female Version of Whiplash? by Katherine Murray

I’d really like to see more introspective films about the human experience where the humans experiencing things look like me.


Boyhood (Feat. Girlhood) by Robin Hitchcock

Let’s face it, Boyhood is a gimmick movie. Richard Linklater sporadically filmed it over a twelve-year period so we could see the child actors in it actually grow-up. If you loved Michael Apted’s Up series but wanted more fiction and less wait, Boyhood is for you. But if you just love coming-of-age dramas, I’m not sure I can recommend this one.


Selma Is Now by Nijla Mu’min

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


The Theory of Everything: A “Great Man” From The First Wife’s Point of View by Ren Jender

Do great women exist? The film industry still hasn’t decided. We had Frida a dozen years ago and that bio-pic about Margaret Thatcher (like Frida, directed by a woman) from a few years back–which won Meryl Streep an Oscar, but tepid reviews along with a completely irredeemable main character kept me from seeing it. Usually the women in the “great man” films are great only by osmosis, because they married or otherwise provide emotional–and other–support to great men. The actresses who play these roles win Oscars too: they make the “supporting” category a literal one. The Theory of Everything, the new bio-pic about astrophysicist (and best-selling author) Stephen Hawking seemed like it might be different since it’s based on the book written by the great man’s first wife, Jane.


Selma Shows Why We Need More Black Women Filmmakers by Janell Hobson

DuVernay has said in interviews that when she inherited Paul Webb’s screenplay, she altered it to decenter its focus on President Lyndon B. Johnson (even though the controversy surrounding the film managed to once again re-center the story on white male power and its portrayal). Rather than criticize the director for shifting her gaze away from whiteness (or for getting certain historical details wrong), it may be more useful to consider the difference a woman behind the camera—and a Black woman in particular—brings to a motion picture.


The Imitation Game and Citizenfour: Secrets Then and Now by Ren Jender

Sometimes I wish the mainstream film industry would stop making movies about queers. The rare times that a queer person is allowed to be the main character in one of its movies, as in this one, he (almost always a “he”), like the rare main character of color is usually unrealistically isolated from the community he comes from, a trope fostered from before Stonewall to the ’90s to now: we are oh-so-tragic and oh-so-alone.


Richard Linklater and Ethan Hawke Praise Patricia Arquette’s Performance in Boyhood by Paula Schwartz

Arquette, who is terrific as Olivia, turns in a nuanced and complex performance that is vanity free. We watch her age perceptively and slowly as her character gains wisdom but still falters. In other words, she’s the kind of three-dimensional woman we rarely see in American films.


Captain Uhura Snub: The Politics of Ava DuVernay’s Oscar by Brigit McCone

It is appropriate, when celebrating the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., to recall Dr. King’s words to Nichelle Nichols, as she considered quitting Star Trek in frustration at the limitations of her role: “You can’t leave!… For the first time on television, we are being seen as we should be seen every day. As intelligent, quality, beautiful people … who can go into space.” Dr. King’s words show that he clearly understood the value of a token image, as a symbol, a precedent and a possibility model for future progress.


The Boxtrolls: Better Than Its “Man in a Dress” Jokes by Ren Jender

In a nice contrast to many children’s films and books, the character at the start who goes against the mob is a girl, Lord Portley-Rind’s daughter, Winnie (voiced by Elle Fanning in a mid-Atlantic accent passing as British). Although Winnie, in her pink ruffled dress and blonde ringlets might look like other storybook heroines, her fits over never being believed or taken seriously by adults and her morbid fascination with the boxtrolls make her more like Daria than Alice in Wonderland. When she asks another character if boxtrolls ate his parents, she adds, “Did they let you, I mean, make you, watch?”


Colleen Attwood’s Costumes in Disney’s Into The Woods by Jackson Adler

Attwood’s designs are stunning, but they also highlight the discussions of gender roles and racial relationships in America.


The Academy’s White Noise: Silencing the Lions by Leigh Kolb

I said that I had hoped this year would be different. However, when the Academy announced its nominations, I was not surprised.


The Grand Budapest Hotel and Wes Anderson Fatigue by Robin Hitchcock

And the worst of it is that awards recognition will probably just send Wes Anderson further up his own ass, if such a thing is even possible. I don’t think I’ll be rushing to see his subsequent films until I hear that he’s finally tried something different.


The Internal Monologue of Wild: Lone Woman Walking, Lone Woman Writing by Elizabeth Kiy

In a film, as in real life, with no language to defend herself, the lone woman is a suspect. She gets stared at and scowled at and catcalled and often told that she’s making herself vulnerable, or taking unnecessary risks. In short, our culture says she’s asking for what she gets. A woman alone is unloved, uncared for and written off. In Wild, the film based on Strayed’s memoir of her months solo hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, she has several uncomfortable and frankly terrifying encounters.


Feminist Highlights and Fails at the 2015 Oscars by Megan Kearns

This year’s Oscars lacked racial diversity with all 20 acting nominees being white. The overwhelming whiteness of the Oscars, which hasn’t been this egregious in nominating people of color since 1998, spurred a Twitter boycott and the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite created by April Reign. In addition to racial diversity, once again the Oscars lacked gender diversity. No women were nominated for director, screenplay (adapted or original), original score or cinematography. The snub of Ava DuVernay especially stung.


Moments of Sincerity in Otherwise Endless Oscars by Josh Ralske

What stood out were what seemed like genuine heartfelt moments. John Legend and Common delivered a spirited performance of “Glory” from snubbed director Ava DuVernay’s Selma, and an equally impassioned acceptance speech when they won, notable for its intersectionality. They brought up Hong Kong’s fight for democracy, Charlie Hebdo, and America’s shameful prison-industrial complex. “Selma is now” is a message many need to hear, including their liberal Hollywood audience.

‘Selma’ Backlash: Is It a Gender Issue?

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


This repost by Lauren Byrd appears as part of our theme week on the Academy Awards.


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

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

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

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

Updegrove makes his argument about what is and isn’t right about this portrayal, but what the articles about the “Selma controversy” in The New York TimesThe Wrap, and other media sites haven’t mentioned is that Updegrove also states that much of the film is correct and an accurate portrayal of the events of that time.
A former aide to Johnson Joseph A. Califano, Jr., wrote a similar piece in The Washington Post and on New Year’s Eve, The New York Times highlighted the charges of inaccuracy against the film in a piece by Jennifer Schuessler, which quoted several LBJ focused authors and historians.
Ava DuVernay on set of Selma
Ava DuVernay on set of Selma
DuVernay isn’t standing silently in the face of the recent criticism. In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, she said, “I wasn’t interested in making a white-savior movie; I was interested in making a movie centered on the people of Selma.”
It’s hard not to compare the sudden firestorm of controversy surrounding a potential Oscar hopeful to the controversy in the 2013 Oscar season that befell Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty.The debate about that particular film was based on its portrayal of torture and whether the film showed enhanced interrogation techniques producing intelligence that led to Osama bin Laden. Many journalists who had covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as national security, thought the film glorified torture, while film critics classified the film as an accurate depiction of the dark decisions made by the U.S. government during the murkiness of the post-9/11 decade.
It’s even more difficult not to note that both these films are directed by women. While questions about accuracy were also brought up about Lincoln during the 2013 awards season, which was directed by a man Steven Spielberg, the backlash against Zero Dark Thirty drowned out any questions around Spielberg’s film. As a result, Bigelow did not receive a Best Director nomination while Spielberg did. The inaccuracies in Argo, of which there were many, were not as widely discussed, and both Ben Affleck and the film went on to win Oscars.
Selma
Selma
This year, another film directed by a man, Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher, has recently undergone criticism from Mark Schultz, one of the brothers whom the film is based on. But FlavorWire has already written a piece defending the film against Schultz’s remarks.
Compared to Foxcatcher, which has been in theaters since November, the controversy around Selma has received more media play and it’s possible the charges of inaccuracies from historians will affect how future audiences view the film. (It opens nationwide on Friday.)

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

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

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

 

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

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

 


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

 

The Academy’s White Noise: Silencing the Lions

I said that I had hoped this year would be different. However, when the Academy announced its nominations, I was not surprised.

Black men and women, organized by character type, who have won Academy Awards. This is an updated infographic after Nyong'o's win last year. We won't get to add "Historical Civil Rights Icon" as a category in 2015.    Click to enlarge.
Black men and women, organized by character type, who have won Academy Awards. This is an updated infographic after Nyong’o’s win last year. We won’t get to add “Historical Civil Rights Icon” as a category in 2015.   Click to enlarge.

 

Written by Leigh Kolb as part of our theme week on the Academy Awards.

Two years ago, after Django Unchained was largely snubbed at the Oscars (compared to the Golden Globes), I looked at the history of the Black actors/characters who were awarded by the Academy over the years. Last year, I revisited that history as 12 Years a Slave dominated the awards circuit.

It’s fairly clear what roles Hollywood is most comfortable with: for Black characters, passivity, tired stereotypes, and villainy get the highest awards. Complex, powerful Black characters–especially those who appear threatening to white supremacy in some way–typically get passed over.

I hoped this year would be different. This year, institutionalized, implicit American racism seeped out of the pores of American cities and psyches post-Ferguson. This year, Ava DuVernay directed Selma, 5o years after the Selma to Montgomery march that led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act. The film is brilliant in its own right–DuVernay’s direction and David Oyelowo’s portrayal of Martin Luther King Jr. are incredible. Certainly the power of the film within the historical context would make the Academy sit upright and give credit where credit is due.

Instead, we got more of the same. Selma was recognized widely in Golden Globe nominations–best picture, best director, best actor, best original song (John Legend and Common’s “Glory,” which took home the award). And then, as always, the Academy turned up its white nose. While it’s up for best picture and and original song, DuVernay and Oyelowo were passed over.

At Rolling Stone, Peter Travers said,

“Why am I calling this year’s Oscars, on February 22nd, the ‘Caucasian Consensus,’ when Selma is one of the eight nominees for Best Picture? Because that landmark film about Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1965 civil-rights march has only one other nomination, for Best Song. Not one person of color appears among the 20 nominees for acting. Apparently, the Academy thought it gave last year when it awarded 12 Years a Slave the gold. The message from white voters? Don’t get uppity.”

Not one person of color.

I said that I had hoped this year would be different. However, when the Academy announced its nominations, I was not surprised.

I had to drive over an hour to watch Selma on the big screen, because none of the theaters in the small towns around me screened it (and they still haven’t).

This happened 20 minutes from my home.

The Voting Rights Act was gutted in 2013.

Writers had to defend DuVernay’s portrayal of an imperfect L.B.J.

In an interview, late author Chinua Achebe quoted the following proverb: “Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” This proverb perfectly, painfully illustrates Hollywood’s–and America’s–hegemonic forces at work.

The hunters write history. The hunters glorify themselves. The hunters’ history infiltrates itself into the very fabric of our cultural narrative, so we’re only comfortable with seeing the complexities of the hunters, and the simplicity of the lions.

Selma challenged that narrative. Oyelowo–who felt destined to play King–and DuVernay dared to glorified the lions.

And the hunters simply wouldn’t hear of it.

Oyelowo and DuVernay
Oyelowo and DuVernay

 


See also at Bitch FlicksThe Academy: Kind to White Men, Just Like HistoryRace and the Academy: Black Characters, Stories, and the Danger of DjangoCaptain Uhura Snub: The Politics of Ava DuVernay’s Oscar 


Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature, and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri. 

 

‘Selma’ Is Now

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

selma-2


This repost by Nijla Mu’min appears as part of our theme week on the Academy Awards.


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

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

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

selma_movie_2

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

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

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

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

03

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

In so many ways, this film reflects the current moment, while also highlighting how things have and have not changed since the King family and their allies risked their lives to secure rights for all. Scenes in the film will jolt you into the present: watching Jimmie Lee Jackson’s mother grieve in 1965 for the son she will never see again made me immediately think of the family of Tamir Rice, the young black boy who was murdered by police officers this year for toting a toy gun in Ohio. Selma is now. It lets us into the interior spaces of pain, progress, and movement that no formulaic historical drama could ever capture.


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

Related Reading: “The Butler, My Grandmother, and the Politics of Subversion. 


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

 

‘Selma’ Shows Why We Need More Black Women Filmmakers

DuVernay has said in interviews that when she inherited Paul Webb’s screenplay, she altered it to decenter its focus on President Lyndon B. Johnson (even though the controversy surrounding the film managed to once again re-center the story on white male power and its portrayal). Rather than criticize the director for shifting her gaze away from whiteness (or for getting certain historical details wrong), it may be more useful to consider the difference a woman behind the camera—and a Black woman in particular—brings to a motion picture.

SELMA-movie-poster-691x1024


This repost by Janell Hobson appears as part of our theme week on the Academy Awards.


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

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

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

SELMA-Main_t750x550

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

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

mlk-lbj

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

church-girls

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

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

selma-march

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

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

 


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

 

‘American Sniper’: We Can Kill It for You Wholesale

This cowboy motif is no accident, as it connects this film to the old John Ford Westerns and the nostalgia some folks feel about John Wayne flicks and the mythology of good white cowboys fighting off savage Indians who were keeping good white settlers from utilizing this “wilderness” that would become the U.S.A. Dehumanizing non-whites is the foundation for creating this nation. It’s the glue that holds apple pies and hot dogs together.

American Sniper poster. Starring Bradley Cooper.
American Sniper poster. Starring Bradley Cooper.

 

On Sept. 11, 2001, I was on the West Coast, living in the mountains of Southern Cali and preparing to go to work. A co-worker came running into our office screaming that the Twin Towers had fallen. Mind you, we were on West Coast time, and by the time I saw the attacks on television, the networks were on replay mode and editing footage deemed too gruesome for viewers.

Gathered around the one tiny TV in another office, my co-workers and I stared in disbelief, and the one thing I said out loud was something I remembered Malcolm X saying about chickens coming home to roost. “This is payback for something folks,” I said to them. While my co-workers were the flag-waving Patriotic types, I was already shaping this assault on American soil as retaliation for the untold dirt our military and government had done for years to countries who didn’t uphold our global agenda. This caused some ruffled feathers between me and some of my colleagues. It was a surreal moment. Our Pearl Harbor for the new millennia.

Looking back at the Sept. 11 attacks, it shouldn’t surprise me why American Sniper was such a big hit with the patriotic ‘muricah crowd.  It is the military chicken soup of the soul cinema experience. It is propaganda of the highest order for viewers who need the Matrix blue pill to live with the lie of America’s War on Terror.

Men are war.
Men are war.

 

What makes American Sniper a disappointing viewing experience is not the ahistorical nature of the film, but quite frankly its generic storytelling. It’s downright boring. I may not agree with the politics of a film in order to enjoy it, but dammit, I have to be engaged with the content and its characters. The only time American Sniper really held my total interest was the appearance of a villainous character named Mustafa (played by Sammy Sheik), another sniper from Syria who we learn was a medal winning sharpshooter in the Olympics. He is for all intents and purposes Chris Kyle’s Arab counterpart. Sammy Sheik is riveting to watch in the brief moments we see him, although he never speaks. (Sidenote: every Arab character is a bad guy in this movie. There are no grays or complexity at all. Men, women, and children are all portrayed as evil, conniving, and dangerous. The idea that they could be defending their country from the cowboy antics of American soldiers is never even hinted at.)

Sammy Sheik as "Mustafa" and the only compelling character to hold my interest.
Sammy Sheik as “Mustafa” and the only compelling character to hold my interest.

 

Bradley Cooper’s portrayal of Chris Kyle as a good ole boy going off to defend American citizens from the new Boogie-Men-of-the-Moment is pretty cut and dry. Usually Cooper is quite engaging to watch with his big baby blues and mega-watt smile. But here he’s not captivating at all, despite his eagerness to be serious and Oscar-worthy. His Kyle comes off as a big dumb reactionary bloke trying to find his manhood through “masculine” pursuits like bronco busting in rodeos and later a trumped up war (lest we forget, the excuse for bludgeoning Iraq was because U.S. intel claimed there was proof of W.M.D.’s—Weapons of Mass Destruction. There were no W.M.D.’s, and the 9/11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, but I digress). This cowboy motif is no accident, as it connects this film to the old John Ford Westerns and the nostalgia some folks feel about John Wayne flicks and the mythology of good white cowboys fighting off savage Indians who were keeping good white settlers from utilizing this “wilderness” that would become the U.S.A. Dehumanizing non-whites is the foundation for creating this nation. It’s the glue that holds apple pies and hot dogs together.

The original "Savages" that Cowboys fought. Actually Native people defending their land and liberty.
The original “Savages” that Cowboys fought. Actually Native people defending their land and liberty.

 

The new Wild West of the east. Actually American weapons of mass destruction.
The new Wild West of the east. Actually American weapons of mass destruction.

 

Clint Eastwood, a veteran of old school cowboy flicks and the poster boy for conservative old boy politics, paints American Sniper as another addition to that long line of wild west nostalgia in contemporary war cinema. Unfortunately the script tells us nothing new or insightful about the American psyche in relation to war today. As it stands, the simplistic plot of American Sniper tells us what we already know. Men are war, and American men thrive on it under the guise of Democracy and helping other countries liberate themselves from tyranny–by ironically (maybe intentionally) becoming the new tyranny in places we are supposed to be helping. Every generation, America creates new evil henchmen: Native Americans on the frontier, The Yellow Peril, Red Scare Russians, Black people and Civil Rights, Communist Cuba, and renegade North Korea. Since the 90s and our first trumped-up invasion of Iraq, the Arab world is the new thing that goes bump in the night. Our penchant for war only teaches us that xenophobia and colonialism never went away. We just dress them up with new language like insurgents and failing diplomacy.

Kyle’s indoctrination into war comes when he sees the bombing of the U.S. embassy in Kenya on television, and he only feels bad when he learns some Americans were killed. When the Twin Towers drop, he is gung ho to go to war. Not to protect people, but really, just to have something to do. Before the war, Kyle appears aimless, searching for a purpose. War gives him purpose. He gets married because that seems to be what he is supposed to do. He goes through life following a script pre-written for him. There are obligatory flashback scenes to show his stern father and the simplistic philosophy he was raised to believe in. That there is evil in the world at all times. That there are three types of people in the world: Wolves, sheep, and sheepdogs. And of course, a real man uses a gun and beats the crap out of people. Kyle internalizes these ideals, and carries them with him throughout the rest of his life.

New marriage, but already thinking of battle. Chris and Taya get married. (Bradley Cooper and Sienna Miller)
New marriage, but already thinking of battle. Chris and Taya get married. (Bradley Cooper and Sienna Miller)

 

The introduction of his wife, Taya (Sienna Miller), adds no meat to the story. She is regulated to being the good wife, the baby maker, the nagging spouse crying on the phone with an infant swinging off her breasts. (Let me say that the fake animatronic baby was creepy as hell and so distracting.) Although it probably wasn’t intended in the writing, you get the impression that Kyle preferred to be away from home not because he wanted to be a war hero, but because being a husband/father was a real drag for him.

Kill shot. Marc (Luke Grimes) and Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper)
Kill shot. Marc (Luke Grimes) and Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper)

 

We are taken through Kyle’s four tour of duties, and each tour builds Kyle up as the sniper with the most kills. There are two scenes, one in the very beginning of the movie, and one later on, where Kyle is faced with the task of killing a child or not. These scenes are meant to show a moral dilemma, but they rang false to me because if someone is the deadliest sniper in American military history, they didn’t get that high body count by worrying about shooting children. There are no children in the Arab world according to this story. Just little insurgents ready to make war.

The "bad guys" in the sniper crosshairs. In America they would be considered Patriots for fighting back.
The “bad guys” in the sniper crosshairs. In America they would be considered Patriots for fighting back.

 

In the theater that I watched the film, a rotund older white gentleman (probably retired military by his crew cut) was actually rooting for Kyle to shoot a child. Because all the Arabs in the movie were considered “savages,” I have no doubt that Kyle never questioned or worried about assassinating children. They weren’t Americans, and therefore not human. (In real life, Chris Kyle bragged about shooting 30 Black people right after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. He bragged about killing fellow American citizens who I’m sure he didn’t view as human. His Katrina shootings were said to be a lie he made up, but his lies spoke volumes about his character. So his fictional quandary regarding Arab children rang false to me because we are never shown a man who questions anything ever. He’s just an unthinking workhorse used by the military.)

The concept of showing a man who just goes along with the war machine could be enhanced dramatically by having side characters who offer a different viewpoint. Unfortunately, we never spend too much time with side characters.  The one character who does begin to question the meaning of this war, Marc ( Luke Grimes—who needs to be in more movies), barely registers a blip on Kyle’s radar of understanding. The plot drags on for over two hours until there’s a stand-off between Kyle and Mustafa. By then, when he’s about to get his ass handed to him by death, Kyle calls his wife and says he finally wants to come home. Not because war has changed his consciousness or philosophy, but because he’s losing a skirmish that he created by not following orders. He went rogue, it backfired, and now he wants out. That was the realest moment in the entire film. Not heroic, just honest human self-preservation.

Snipers in Ferguson, Missouri, their crosshairs on American citizens .
Snipers in Ferguson, Missouri, their crosshairs on American citizens.

 

This is U.S. terrorism. Snipers against Americans.
This is U.S. terrorism. Snipers against Americans.

 

Watching an audience root for snipers to kill humans defending their right to exist on their own land reminded me of images of American snipers here in the states pointing guns at Black American citizens  and their supporters protesting murders by cops in the United States. This same audience that cheered the heroics of Bradley Cooper as Chris Kyle probably cheered the actions of police forces on American streets aiming gun sights on folks with extra melanin. Cognitive dissonance is entrenched in the Patriotic American psyche. It allows Americans to rally around American Sniper, turning it into a blockbuster, while ignoring the home grown terrorism white Americans perpetuated against Black Americans that was depicted in the film Selma. I saw Americans of all colors streaming in to view Selma. American Sniper was vanilla heavy. Not a big surprise to me. Because, history.

Director Clint Eastwood claims he made an anti-war film. He didn't.
Director Clint Eastwood claims he made an anti-war film. He didn’t.

 

Clint Eastwood made spurious claims that American Sniper is an anti-war film. This disingenuous claim falls flat given the simplistic story-line, and the film’s ending dripping with flag waving from real-life  footage of Kyle’s funeral. Had Eastwood really wanted to impress upon an audience the agonies of war, then he would be better off showing actual wounded veterans recovering from the various body traumas they come home with. A lot of flag-waving might become less vigorous when we see war up close and personal. Americans don’t know war. Not really. We watch it on TV like video games. We don’t sleep, eat, go to work, or go to school worrying about unmanned drones and bombs falling out of the sky from some hopped up dudebro with a military computer joystick thousands of miles away.

Unlike the rest of the world, Americans are spared from these continuous horrors and daily PTSD. We are coddled like babies, and this coddling has made us immature children in regards to war. So we deserve a movie like American Sniper. The only message it gives us (like it did Chris Kyle in real life), is that the war you perpetuate abroad will come back to haunt you in another form. Chickens coming home to roost indeed.

No one likes seeing the bodies coming home in movies or in real life.
No one likes seeing the bodies coming home in movies or in real life.

 

 

‘Selma’ Shows Why We Need More Black Women Filmmakers

DuVernay has said in interviews that when she inherited Paul Webb’s screenplay, she altered it to decenter its focus on President Lyndon B. Johnson (even though the controversy surrounding the film managed to once again re-center the story on white male power and its portrayal). Rather than criticize the director for shifting her gaze away from whiteness (or for getting certain historical details wrong), it may be more useful to consider the difference a woman behind the camera—and a Black woman in particular—brings to a motion picture.

SELMA-movie-poster-691x1024

 

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

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

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

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

SELMA-Main_t750x550

 

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

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

mlk-lbj

 

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

church-girls

 

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

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

selma-march

 

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

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

 


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

 

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks: Awards Edition

Check out what we’ve been reading this week–and let us know what you’ve been reading/writing in the comments!

recommended-red-714x300-1

Golden Globes

Strong Female Lead: A Feminist Golden Globes Show by Megan Garber at The Atlantic

Breaking Through Hollywood’s Celluloid Ceiling by Jenevieve Ting at Ms. blog

Watch Gina Rodriguez’s Tearful Golden Globe Speech by Jamilah King at Colorlines

Who Won the Golden Globes? Women. by Jill Filipovic at Cosmopolitan

The Biggest Lesson From This Year’s Golden Globes: Women’s Stories Matter by Sophie Kleeman at Mic

Margaret Cho Has No Regrets About That Golden Globes Running Gag by Alison Willmore at BuzzFeed

Oscars

Some Thoughts on the 2015 Oscar Nominees by Roxane Gay at The Toast

The “Selma” Best Director Oscar Snub: What It Means To a Black Female Filmmaker by Nijla Mumin at Shadow and Act

It’s No Surprise That the Oscars Snubbed “Selma” by Evette Dione at Bitch Media

White, Male by Michele Kort at Ms. blog

People Are Tweeting Their Thoughts About The Fact That #OscarsSoWhite by Emily Orley at BuzzFeed

Why female filmmakers need powerful allies by Monika Bartyzel at The Week

Why Ava DuVernay’s ‘Selma’ Oscar Snub Matters by Scott Mendelson at Forbes

2015 Oscar Nominations: A Dark Day for Women in Hollywood by Melissa Silverstein at Women and Hollywood

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

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

Check out what we’ve been reading this week–and let us know what you’ve been reading/writing in the comments!

recommended-red-714x300-1

The Many Truths of “Selma” by Zillah Eisenstein at Ms. blog

The Melissa Harris-Perry Syllabus 1.11.15 at msnbc

The ‘Selma’ “Controversy” Isn’t About History; It’s About Oscars by Jason Bailey at Flavorwire

The real American Sniper was a hate-filled killer. Why are simplistic patriots treating him as a hero? by Lindy West at The Guardian

Geena Davis Is Launching A Film Festival That Celebrates Women And Diversity by Ada Guzman at BUST

To get nominated for an Oscar, it’s still best to be a mediocre movie about a white guy by Todd VanDerWerff at Vox

Of Femmes, Films and Fatales by Regan Reid at Paste Magazine

Let 2015 Be the Year the Female Fuckup Goes Mainstream by Sarah Seltzer at Flavorwire

Being a “Difficult” Woman on TV and the Refreshing Brilliance of ‘The Comeback’ by Harry Waksberg at Splitsider

Allison Williams Says Tracy Flick Was the Inspiration for Marnie on Girls by Nate Jones at Vulture

Gender in Comedy by Boring Old Raphael on Tumblr

The 2015 Athena Film Festival Trailer Is Here! by Inkoo Kang at Women and Hollywood

 

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

‘Selma’ Is Now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In so many ways, this film reflects the current moment, while also highlighting how things have and have not changed since the King family and their allies risked their lives to secure rights for all. Scenes in the film will jolt you into the present: watching Jimmie Lee Jackson’s mother grieve in 1965 for the son she will never see again made me immediately think of the family of Tamir Rice, the young black boy who was murdered by police officers this year for toting a toy gun in Ohio. Selma is now. It lets us into the interior spaces of pain, progress, and movement that no formulaic historical drama could ever capture.


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

Related Reading: “The Butler, My Grandmother, and the Politics of Subversion. 


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