Ageism and Artists
A few weeks ago I had my worst day of film production in my life. I’ve lost a lot of sleep in the weeks since. Trying to make some sense out of what happened and why. As I stepped through trying to analyze all the events of that day I would do online research and after nearly a month I have come to the conclusion that I was the victim of ageism - not a word I was very familiar with prior to all of this.
I'm sixty-eight years old so certainly not the first time I have experienced ageism but never had it have such a damaging affect to my self-esteem.
At this point I feel like I could write a 300 page book about this entire experience but I won’t take the time to do that (at least not this month). What I do wish to do is share a couple links and a few quotes and statistics in the hopes that maybe it will help to prompt a decline in ageism in America. With that let me start with a definition and a fact:
Ageism is prejudice or discrimination on the grounds of a person's age.
According to the American Psychological Association: Ageism is one of the last socially acceptable prejudices.
Next I ask you to please watch this video:
Here are some of my favorite statements from the video:
“Retirement was thought of as a gift at one time and now it is a bludgeon. Now it’s ‘get off the stage, or we’re going to get rid of you’.”
“Here’s the thing. I don’t think anybody likes to be a whiner but at some point you kind of want people to understand that there’s a issue here and you got to fight for yourself”
“They are invested heavily in this idea that young people have this access to new ideas that old people don’t because for some reason we (older people) are set in our ways and are not willing to be bold and experimental. I disagree with that completely.” My feeling has always been that you work and you work and you work until you can no longer work. Essentially you die with your tool in your hands. That’s a perfect creative career and ageism is this enormous wall that sticks itself up in the middle of that and says NOPE.”
“We talk about ageism as being the last form of socially acceptable discrimination”
“The World Health Organization in 2017 did a study and they found that the most prevalent form of discrimination in the world is ageism.”
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Why do I feel that I was the victim of ageism? As I analyzed what happened I asked myself: with everything else equal and the same events happening except I'm 35 years old - instead of more than 3 decades older than that - would the three people have taken the same action they did. My answer is no they would not have. I imagine that if you asked those three people they would disagree; but I believe it would be like the racists who believe they aren’t racists because they have friends who are POC. I don't believe those three see their own ageism.
I have often pointed out that one of the things I love about film production is that I get to work with people of a wide range of ages. The nature of filmmaking opens itself up to that because when a film script includes a child, a teenager, a middle-aged person, an elderly person; there will likely be people of those ages on set with you. In addition to this an independent film crew will typically have a wide range of people of different ages. I very much like this. I enjoy being around people of different ages as it keeps me more rounded, grounded and connected to the world, to our society. I guess I assumed everyone else had this same appreciation but after this recent experience I’ve come to realize that not all people are completely comfortable with people of different age groups, especially not comfortable with older people.
What is not new to me is discrimination from film festivals because of ageism. Film festivals view films as an art form. Which I totally agree with and when you look at how other arts groups view artists it only makes sense that ageism exists in film festivals. There is an article in artprof.org titled Ageism in the Art World which states “Ageism is prominent in all parts of the art world: in the gallery scene, in academia, on social media, and more.” To me the ‘more’ is film festivals. The article goes on to state: “The art world is most focused on artists who are 20-35 years of age.” I believe film festivals are focused the same.
At this point I will add in one more of my favorite statements from the video above. “I entered my photos in a few contests that were being held by this art gallery . . . and I got (my work accepted) in and was invited to the opening night gala, As usual there was a young woman with a clipboard at the door. I say ‘Oh, I’m on the list’. She looks up and down and says ‘Are you the parent of one of the artists?’ That was the moment when it struck me. To some peoples’ eyes I’m no longer a viable creative person. I’ve either passed my prime or they didn’t think of me that way. Creativity is something practiced by young people and I’m no longer young.”
The events of earlier this month had me feeling very down. I even thought about how it might be time for me to quite filmmaking and to move on to more traditional retirement activities. I knew this wasn't what I wanted to do and that if I did I would be allowing myself to be bullied into leaving my passion of filmmaking. So here is another quote from the film: “If I exit my career I want to do on my terms and I want to do it because I’m blooming in to something else.”
Hopefully the future brings more awareness of ageism. It does exist and everyone has the potential to be affected by it.