Great (Film) Expectations

I guess I am expecting too much - to want to see movies that show women as people in equal proportion to men - who are actors in their lives. Esp. when looking for mainstream movies - but even at the local Cinema store. I suppose there are some there - if a person looks hard enough. As it is - 95% of the Directors in their featured "Director" section are men (I guess that is not surprising since "only 5% of Hollywood features are directed by women").

We tend to get the less big-name movies - but I still notice time and time again that the vast majority of the actors are males - and it is men who are the people whose lives the movie revolves around. The woman are often either goofs - or the conquest - or the token shrill. This isn't news to anyone who has been paying attention - it's just that lately I have been paying more attention.

Movies that I have watched lately include "The Big Lebowski" and "Clerks". In the "The Big Lebowski" - you have the bowling group - which included the laid back Dude and the instigator. "Clerks" had a similar scenerio - with the laid back "dude" and the instigator/provocateur. In both - the women seemed to be there mostly to create problems - though in "Clerks" - there was some exploration of relationships - not all that different from any of the mainstream so-called "chick flicks". It's so normal for movies to be mostly centered on men - that when they are not - some people have to use a derogatory term to describe them (so that there are even less successful?).

I also watched "Million Dollar Baby". By mainstream standards - it's a very good movie - won the academy award for best picture. About a woman boxer. I suppose someone could say that the reason there were so few women in the film was to show that she was a lone woman boxer in a man's world. And it did have that feel to it. At the end - even though the movie was supposed to seem empowering about carrying out ones dream - she was turned into a helpless victim - dependent on her father figure.

Another movie we watched recently was "Familia". It's in the genre of Art/Foreign and Drama and didn't follow the typical American patriarchal script. It's nice to have a library that carries that sort of thing. But even though it was a woman centered movie - it was largely about women being victims - sometimes from themselves - but mostly from men. Through rape, intimidation, men who impregnate and run, have mutliple wives. So the men didn't look so good. They mostly presented problems to overcome (not so unlike the "Clerks" movie in reverse).

The New York Times had an article yesterday, Wall Street Woos Film Producers, Skirting Studios. It's about successful producers working directly with the financers who won't be concerning themselves with artistic content. No doubt - they won't concern themselves with how women are represented - as long as it sells. A result for moviegoers is that they could begin to see even more thrillers, comedies and horror movies at the multiplex — the types of movies Wall Street favors, because of their more predictable payoff.

This does not sound good at all for movies that treat women as people equally to men. Esp. when you have this mainstream attitude that movies with mostly men are normal movies - whether they are thrillers, comedies and horror movies or dramas - and movies where women account for a reasonable portion of the people/power in the movie are considered "chick flicks".

Anyway - all of this inspired me to see what I could find online. Among other things - I found Women Make Movies, Flicker (with independent movies online) and Jump Cut (who critique movies for their social and political context). And the site of filmmaker Jennifer Proctor Nanoramas that I linked to - as well as from her site a great site on sounds -> Acoustic Ecology that links to all kinds of great sound sites.

It's time to search out more independent filmmakers - esp. those who are able to cast women in a favorable light. The filmmakers who are all about the money are not the ones to do it. With the sort of system that we have - women who make movies that even when "equal" - sell less - will never be the power brokers in the culture. The culture is stacked against equality.