GIRLS ON (/IN/MAKING/ CONSUMING) FILM

Visual, visible

[heirloombabydoll-deactivated201]

Calamity Jane (1953), dir. David Butler

[fillesonfilm]

“We found no evidence that that fewer women wish to become directors than men.  Given the lack of any disparity during film education or at the point of entering the career, the scale of the disparity at later stages in directors’ career progressions and its consistency through careers and across the industry, this explanation simply seems highly unlikely to be even close to a full explanation of the issue.

If the personal choices of women in the film industry is inadequate as an explanation of the disparity between male and female directors then, given individual decisions and contacts are the gate-keepers to progression and success within the industry, whatever the root causes of the inequality are, the point at which they are realised must involve some action of the individuals with power in the industry. In other words, the disparity must be a result of the preferences of those making hiring decisions rather than those applying for those positions.  

We found evidence to support this hypothesis in the difference in representation of female employees under female directors and heads of department and their male counterparts. Female key creatives have a notably higher percentage of women in their departments and female directors hire a greater percentage of female key creatives. Hence, the differing preferences of male and female employers is clearly resulting in a difference in their hiring practices.  

However, we found no evidence of any organised, conscious or deliberate efforts to exclude women from the industry or certain positions within it. Therefore, it is our belief that the gender imbalance is primarily due to an unconscious bias...”

Cut Out of the Picture: a study of gender inequality amongst film directors in the UK film industry - Stephen Follows and Alexis Kreager, Directors UK

https://d29dqxe14uxvcr.cloudfront.net/uploads%2F1461930983739-erk37ak82v20lnpl-0dacf96122678073f64e99c9b75e90bf%2FCut+Out+of+The+Picture+-+Report.pdf

[fillesonfilm]

Submission now open for London Feminist Film Festival!

London Feminist Film Festival, LDN

Eligibility:

Women directors from any country may enter. In the case of multiple directors, all should be women.

Films should deal with feminist issues and/or be feminist in their representation of women.

Films can be of any length or genre, and from any year.

Fees:

Short films (under 25 minutes) – £ 7.00 Mid length films (between 25 and 50 minutes) – £ 10.00 Full length films (above 50 minutes) – £ 12.00

Deadline for submission: 12th June 2016

https://londonfeministfilmfestival.com/2016-submissions/?mc_cid=2e66624f56&mc_eid=57c3973275

[fuckyeahfeministcinema]

Criterion Collection: Films Directed/Co-Directed by Women

I still remember how gutted I was when I found out that neither Carol Reed nor Lindsay Anderson were female, and my whole idea of the rad British Free Cinema movement fell apart. That disappointment echoed when looking over the Criterion catalogue. Criterion list 878 items in their catalogue, which includes box sets, and they also release the Eclipse sets, intended to focus on “lost, forgotten or overshadowed” areas of cinema - so you’d think women would be well represented!.

Out of 44 Eclipse box sets, three are by women (6.8%, close to the contemporary figure of 7% given for women directors in mainstream cinema):

11: Larisa Shepitko (2 films)

19: Chantal Akerman in the 1970s (5 films)

43: Agnès Varda in California (5 films)

and Vera Chytilova’s film Daisies is included in Eclipse 32: 13 films in total.

Across the 798 single-release items, there are four additional films by Varda (available singly or as a collector’s set), and Akerman’s Jeanne Dielmann, 23, quai du commerce is available as a single DVD.

So that’s another 5 films.

The only female director other than Varda or Akerman represented by more than one title is Jane Campion with An Angel at my Table and Sweetie. 

There are only three solo-directed films by American women in the collection:

Harlan County USA (Barbara Kopple)

Monsoon Wedding (Mira Nair)

Tiny Furniture (Lena Dunham)

and three co-directed films

Border Radio (Allison Anders with Dean Lent and Kurt Voss)

Gimme Shelter (Albert and David Maysles with Charlotte Zwerin)

Grey Gardens (Albert and David Maysles with Ellen Hovde and Muffie Meyer)

So that’s 13 films so far available as single discs.

The other titles are:

Bergman Island (Marie Nyreröd)

La Ciénaga (Lucrecia Martel)

Fat Girl (Catherine Breillat)

Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold)

Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (Volker Schlöndorff and Margaretha von Trotta)

Night Porter (Liliana Cavani)

Ratcatcher (Lynne Ramsay)

White Material (Claire Denis)

Another 8, for a total of 21 films available as single discs out of 798 (or 2.6%), or 34 films if we include the Eclipse box sets. I don’t have the patience to work out the total of films across all the Eclipse sets. But the statistic is pretty meagre either way.

[guardian]

When the dragon in Mulan has more dialogue than the titular character, the question isn’t just whether women are underrepresented in Hollywood — the question is who gets to give voice to the stories that form our shared cultural narrative, and the answer is men.

Megan Carpentier, asks why are women still (mostly) silent film stars?  (via guardian)

[kinaidoi]

[fillesonfilm]

Christmas on Earth, dir. Barbara Rubin, 1963 (originally titled Cocks and Cunts and definitely, definitely NSFW) - watch free here, s/o UbuWeb: http://ubu.com/film/rubin_christmas.html

[amandla]

Sometimes our emotions are our best friends.

So excited to officially share Blue Girls Burn Fast with you.

Leeza Lester stars as Andy, and Julia Rocha stars as Lea.

It’s a short I wrote, directed, shot, and edited. I made it with my best friends, with a DSLR camera and lots of love. It’s very personal to my heart. I hope you enjoy!

[fillesonfilm]

“Since 2007, the ‘hypersexualisation’ of men on film has increased: in 2014, 8% of male characters were figured in “sexualised attire” (up from 4.6% in 2007), whilst 9.1% (an increase from 6.6%) were shot “with some nudity”. 2013 marked the high water mark of this trend, with 9.7% of male characters in sexualised attire and 11.7% getting some (or all) of their kit off.

Before we shed too many tears over the plight of the sexualised male, however, it is important to put these findings in context. 

More men may be required to bare their bodies (and, often, hit the gym for this purpose) on-screen, but 8% and 9.1% are paltry figures in comparison to the 27.9% of women that are scripted to wear sexually-appealing clothing and 26.4% that expose their chests, legs, or other body part in front of the camera. 

Women make up less than one-third of all speaking characters on screen, and less than one-quarter of the leading roles. This makes these percentages all the more alarming: women are less visible in films, but when they are present they are exponentially more likely (roughly three times more than men) to be figured in sexualised terms. Granted, these figures haven’t worsened considerably since 2007 (sexualised attire came in at 27% and partial/full nudity at 21.7%) but they haven’t improved either.

The Annenberg report offers some interesting insights into why this ‘hypersexualisation’ discrepancy is so marked. When a female producer is on board, female characters are much less likely to be depicted in sexually revealing clothing (26.4%, rather than 35.9%) or with nudity (25.1%, instead of 33.3%). So too, films that have at least one female screenwriter as part of the production team feature a higher percentage of girls and women in significant roles (34.8%) than teams that only have male screenwriters (25.9%)."

Inequality on screen: The sexualisation of men—not women—in film has worsened - @theeconomist

http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2016/04/inequality-screen

[fillesonfilm]

EVENT! Feminisms and the Moving Image: Symposium & Launch

Feminisms and the Moving Image: Symposium & Launch

14.00-19.30, 23 Jun 2016 @ Chelsea College of Arts, LDN

A pretty inimitable line up of speakers: Oriana Fox Laura Mulvey Griselda Pollock Zineb Sedira Rehana Zaman

And it’s free, and there’s drinks - book here, now, soon:

http://events.arts.ac.uk/event/2016/6/23/Feminisms-and-the-Moving-Image-Symposium-Launch/

[viceland]

A new series spearheaded by Gloria Steinem investigating how violence against women drives global instability. WOMAN begins May 10 at 10pm.

[fillesonfilm]

Deadline: Fringe! Film Fest

Fringe! Queer Film & Arts Fest, LDN

Primarily interested in films created by, for, about, or of interest to gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer, trans or intersex people - deadline for (free!) submission: August 18th 2016

Do it, do it, do it:

https://filmfreeway.com/festival/FringeQueerFilmArtsFest

[fillesonfilm]

In 22% of films, actresses had the most number of lines (i.e., they were the lead).

“For each screenplay, we mapped characters with at least 100 words of dialogue to a person’s IMDB page (which identifies people as an actor or actress). But there are definitely problems with this approach: films change quite a bit from script to screen. Directors cut lines. They cut characters. They add characters. They change character names. They cast a different gender for a character. We believe the results are still directionally accurate, but individual films will definitely have errors.

Each screenplay has at least 90% of its lines categorized by gender. If you notice a missing character from the analysis, their lines may be in the remaining 10%. If a character was cut from the film but is present in the screenplay, we inferred his or her gender based on the script’s pronouns.

Across thousands of films in our dataset, it was hard to find a subset that didn’t over-index male. Even romantic comedies have dialogue that is, on average, 58% male. For example, Pretty Woman and 10 Things I Hate You both have lead women (i.e., characters with the most lines). But the overall dialogue for both films is 52% male, due to the number of male supporting characters.”

Film Dialogue from 2,000 Screenplays, Broken Down By Gender and Age

- Hannah Anderson and Matt Daniels, @polygraphing

http://polygraph.cool/films/

[jon-snow]

[fillesonfilm]

The cure:

Findings/Behind-the-Scenes Employment and On-Screen Representation:

 •In films with at least one woman director and/or writer, females comprised 40% of all speaking characters. In films with exclusively male directors and writers, females accounted for 30% of all speaking characters. 

•In films with at least one woman director and/or writer, females comprised 50% of protagonists. In films with exclusively male directors and writers, females accounted for 13% of protagonists. 

•In films with at least one woman director and/or writer, females comprised 29% of antagonists. In films with exclusively male directors and writers, females accounted for 15% of antagonists.

It’s a Man’s (Celluloid) World: Portrayals of Female Characters in the Top 100 Films of 2015 

- Dr Martha M. Lauzen

http://womenintvfilm.sdsu.edu/files/2015_It%E2%80%99s_a_Man%E2%80%99s_Celluloid_World_Report.pdf

[daantaat]

[fillesonfilm]

Do you know Scotty’s on Madison?

[fillesonfilm]

“We’ve got your Death Star plans right here, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it. I can only imagine how frustrating it must be to realize just how much the plot of your favorite movie hinges on the actions of one woman (accompanied by a team full of dudes anyway). I guess it’s kind of like realizing that the name of your men’s rights movement is wholesale stolen from a movie written by two trans women. Oh, the irony. But I digress.

You see, we’ve got more than just your Death Star plans. What we have is this realization that these worlds—these rich, fantastic fantasy/sci-fi/everything worlds—don’t just belong to you anymore. They never really only belonged to you. They belonged to all of us, and always have, despite how hard you’ve tried to erase us from the narrative.” Dear Fanboys Angry at Rogue One’s Mary Sue - Jessica Lachenal, @themarysue

http://www.themarysue.com/open-letter-angry-fanboys/

[fillesonfilm]

“In Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory, Clare Hemmings invents a pair of words that are useful for thinking about how this kind of film criticism and canonisation works: hetero-citation and hom(m)o-citation.

In other words, feminist theorists are always attributed influences from male theorists, and rarely from female theorists; while male theorists are attributed influences from other male theorists, and rarely from female theorists. Hemmings gives the example of Judith Butler, who is always seen as influenced by Michel Foucault rather than Monique Wittig or Hannah Arendt.

The same practice operates in film criticism, so that female filmmakers – as and when their existence is admitted – get written out of being influential... We need to invest in what Lucy Bolton calls ‘feminist geneaology’, which connects women and their work to each other, but might also admit that female filmmakers could influence individual male filmmakers – or even film culture more broadly.”

Where We Are Is Here: On the Influence of Female Filmmakers - Sophie Mayer

http://www.anothergaze.com/where-we-are-is-here-on-the-influence-of-female-filmmakers/