MP Jo Cox (top image, middle) chaired the Labour Women’s Network, as well as bringing her social policy experience from work with Oxfam and the NSPCC to bear on a range of political issues, including ending gender violence, and working for the rights of Syrian refugees and of Palestinians. As Adam Ramsay writes on Open Democracy:
It was also an attack by a man on a woman. We shouldn’t ignore that. It’s not an original observation to say that murder is almost always committed by men. And neither is it a new discovery that far-right hate is bound up with misogyny. Many fascist men hate nothing more than strong left-wing women.
One of the reasons for the F-rating is the idea that cinema has power: what we see influences who we see and how we see them. The stories we are told shape how we tell our own stories, and how we do, or don’t, share the stories of others. Cinema is by far not the only medium or framework for our lives, and sometimes it feels ridiculous to be talking about the role of women in film, on and offscreen, in the face of such brutal real life violence. And yet, without drawing a simple equation, we can echo UN Women Executive Director Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, who believes that onscreen representation plays a role in global gender equality:
Twenty years ago, 189 Governments adopted the Beijing Platform for Action, the international roadmap for gender equality, which called on media to avoid stereotypical and degrading depictions of women. Two decades on, this study is a wake-up call that shows that the global film industry still has a long way to go.
Jo Cox’s murder is a wake-up call about many things, but it’s also part of the wake-up call about how media representation: plays a part in our political and social lives, globally. After all, to “stereotypical and degrading” we could certainly add “violent and violating.”
Which is why novelist Helen Walsh’s triple F-rated debut feature is so fascinating. The Violators, out in cinemas today, looks at the effect of abuse on a teenage girl in care, Shelly, who enters into a dark friendship with Rachel, who is better-off, and pursuing her own ends. It’s been compared to Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold), but it also pulses with the same intensity as My Summer of Love (Pawel Pawlikowski), which had a class dynamic. Violation begets violence in the film, which announces Walsh and her leads Lauren McQueen and Brogan Ellis as ones to watch. And you can also rent it online via We Are Colony, and read more about it via our friends at the Bechdel Test Fest. (Oddly, it was very difficult to find a Bechdel Test-passing picture online, almost like the distributor is scared of what people will make of an image that has more than one woman in it...)
More troubled, possibly troubling, teens in Eva Husson’s debut Bang Gang (A Modern Love Story), which fuses the sun-drenched, long-limbed images of adolescent desire found in Sofia Coppola and Mia Hansen-Løve (Husson is French, but the film is based on an American news story). “Bang Gang” is the name that a group of lissom, languid young things give themselves one summer, after a party at an friend’s house (sans parents) goes all the way. Less Kids and more “Kids in America” despite its festival-circuit reputation for explicit content, if nothing else this sweet and pretty film ends with a firm recommendation to practice safer sex.
From new voices to an old master: Chris Hegedus, the (often unnamed or unheralded) co-director and editor of legendary feminists vs. Norman Mailer doc Town Bloody Hall, and co-director of many subsequent films with DA Pennebaker (also her husband) since 1977. She has 29 feature documentary credits, including this week’s release Unlocking the Cage (co-directed with Pennebaker), a truly extraordinary film about undoing images of violence against the other. It follows the Nonhuman Rights Project, which is championing the legal rights of apes and other animals with complex cognitive abilities, and uncovering disturbing aspects of American law in the process, surrounding concepts of slavery, personhood and competency.
Long Way North (Rémi Chayé) and The Keeping Room (Daniel Barber) and both boast female protagonists originated by female screenwriters Claire Paoletti and Julia Hart respectively, but couldn’t be more different: a sweet animation about a Russian aristocratic girl in the 1880s searching the Arctic for her lost explorer grandfather; a grim Western in which two white Southern sisters and their black female slave (Muna Otaru, who wins the film) have to defend the farm from renegade Union soldiers. Both feature new variations on Strong Female Characters (TM) getting to undertake action and wield weapons in Ye Olde Historical Tymes, and it’s good to see a history that’s not just populated by active men and passive women across such different genres.
The Girl King (Mika Kaurismäki) also gives us a female-fronted history, although Queen Kristina, who could be read as lesbian or trans and/or non-binary, has long been famous, if only from Greta Garbo’s magnificent turn in Queen Christina (Rouben Mamoulian). There’s also women to the fore in pseudo-historical horror The Conjuring 2 (James Wan), and music documentary Where You’re Meant to Be (Paul Fegan), which pits contemporary singer Aidan Moffatt against the very much alive folk singer and composer Sheila Stewart, as he rewrites and reperforms the songs she collected and made know, much to her very enjoyable disapproval.
Finally, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cemetery of Splendour is my pick of the female-helmed films this week, for the tenderness of the relationship between hospital volunteer Jen and psychic interpreter Keng, who are both caring for soldiers struck by a mysterious sleeping sickness. A world of waking women and sleeping men some becomes blurred as Jen succumbs to sleep and walks with the soldier Itt, who is also both Keng and a goddess who had previously had lunch in a food court with Jen to warn her that the soldiers were digging on the site of an ancient royal military cemetery. But it’s really about gentleness and touch, love and care, humour and song, ravishing images and simple gestures, as responses to militarisation and politics of domination.
