Are Womens Voices in Film More Powerful Than 60 Years Ago

HEAD TO HEAD

Are womens’ voices in film more powerful than 60 years ago? OPINION

43(1): 181/185 | DOI: 10.1177/0306422014522917 10.1177/0306422014522917

Olivia J Fox

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As a 50-something British actress and screenwriter living in Los Angeles, I’ve seen both the glitter and the grime of Hollywood. My first job when I washed up on the shores of this movie capital eight years ago garnered me my own trailer at Paramount Studios and a Screen Actor’s Guild (SAG) card and, although it has not been exactly smooth ABOVE: Olivia J Fox sailing since, I believe that there are more opportunities for women in film than ever before. In fact, looking at this year’s crop of awards season contenders, it would be hard to deny that women in film are in a better position than they have ever been. Front runners included Blue Jasmine (a female-driven drama starring Cate Blanchett); Gravity (in which Sandra Bullock shared equal billing with George Clooney); August; Osage County (with strong roles for

Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts); American Hustle (gritty characters for Amy Adams and Jennifer Lawrence); Saving Mr Banks (Emma Thompson as Mary Poppins creator PL Travers taking on the Disney machine); and Philomena (starring Judi Dench as a mother looking for her stolen child). Jane Earl

Things just aren’t the way they used to be. Just file through your collection of classic films from the 1930s, 40s and 50s to find feisty women characters who stride across the screen and dominate the action. Bette Davis, Katherine Hepburn, Greta Garbo anyone? And when it comes to running a major studio, Mary Pick- ABOVE: Jane Earl ford helped set up United Artists back in 1919. This year began with the news that the highest-earning film around the world in 2013 was Iron Man 3. A superhero movie aimed predominantly at a young male audience where the female lead character Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) plays perpetual ➔

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second fiddle to a comic book superhero as his assistant/love interest. You could argue that further down the list of the top 10 grossing films of 2013 one finds The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and Gravity, both featuring strong female lead characters. But those are just two titles in a testosteronefuelled top 10 that includes Fast & Furious 6, Man of Steel, Thor: The Dark World and three animated features. Moreover, it’s great that female directors like Sophia Coppola and Sarah Polley and performances like that of Emanuelle Riva in Amour are helping to push female voices to the forefront, but the sad truth is that any film that isn’t a massive blockbuster like Gravity will only be available on a limited amount of screens. Which means there will be millions who won’t get to even see this work unless they live in major metropolitan areas. Even Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine with Cate Blanchett in a leading role received a limited release in Los Angeles and New York and may only get a wider release following Blanchett’s Oscar nomination and recent Golden Globe win for Best Actress.

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OJF

As a young girl growing up in the 1960s, my screen heroines were somewhat more disparate: tomboys like those personified by Hayley Mills in films such as Pollyanna and The Parent Trap or the impossible glamour of a Bond girl and nothing much in between. Things have moved on apace since then, with far more varied and complex female characters being represented in film and with women as the protagonists of more films than ever before. Screen heroines have become feistier role models for a new generation: witness Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss in The Hunger Games and Catching Fire, and Rooney Mara and Noomi Rapace as Lisbeth Salander in the US and original Swedish versions of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, all proving that it’s okay to be different. 182 INDEXONCENSORSHIP.ORG

It’s not only actresses who are finding meatier roles these days, but also women writers and directors, who are stepping up to bat in record numbers. I recently attended a SAG members screening of The Invisible Woman in Hollywood, followed by a chat with its stars Felicity Jones and Ralph Fiennes. It’s Fiennes’s second foray into directing and, while he plays a starring role as Charles Dickens, the story is really that of Dickens’s mistress, Nelly Ternan. Felicity Jones was drawn to the project by a strong female role and Fiennes by Abi Morgan’s screenplay. She won the Emmy last year for TV’s The Hour and also wrote the screenplay for Oscar-winning biopic The Iron Lady. Costas Sarkas

It’s hard to feel that women in Hollywood are in a better position than ever when one comes across newspaper articles like one in December 2013 in The Observer. The naked truth: Hollywood still treats its women as second-class citizens. The article addressed a comprehensive study by the New York Film Academy on gender inequality in film. Its findings ABOVE: Costas Sarkas are highly indicative of there still being a very long way to go in countering the prevalence of male voices in Hollywood. It might indeed be true that more actresses are finding meatier roles nowadays but the numbers are still worryingly low: the study looked at the top 500 films between 2007 and 2012 to find that only 30.8 per cent of the speaking parts were filled by women and that only 10.7 per cent of movies featured

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an equal balance between male and female characters OJF

Disney’s animated smash hit Frozen has two female protagonists and is also written by a woman (Jennifer Lee), who shares the directing credits on the film. In fact, animation seems to be one area where women are definitely upping the ante. Last year, Brenda Chapman became the first woman director to win an Oscar for an animated feature with Brave. She was also the first female director at the film’s studios – Pixar – an d, previously, the first woman director at rival Dreamworks, with The Prince of Egypt (1998). Whilst I grew up adoring the black and white films of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford shown on TV on rainy British Saturday afternoons, the old Hollywood studio system spawned an industry dominated by male directors, producers, writers and actors. There were a few rebels, like feminist actress-turned-director Ida Lupino, famously suspended by Warner Bros in the mid 1940s for turning down roles she considered beneath her dignity, but let’s face it, how many Ida Lupino films can you name? JE

annually. What all the above points to is that any female success stories in the fields of acting, directing and even sitting in the big chair at a major studio are exceptions that cannot change the fact that Hollywood is still very much a male-dominated celluloid playground. OJF

These days, many more female directors spring to mind. Kathryn Bigelow bust the Best Director Oscar category wide open when she became the first woman to win the award category in 2011 for war drama The Hurt Locker – a genre not typically tackled by female directors. Other notable directors include Jane Campion, Penny Marshall, Nancy Meyers, Andrea Arnold (Red Road), Lynne Ramsey (We Need To Talk About Kevin) and Phyllida Lloyd (The Iron Lady). Social networking and crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and the newly-announced Gamechanger fund – which has been formed to back women directors – are all helping to propel female film makers to the forefront. Actress, director and producer friends of mine in LA are no longer content to wait for the c all – they are simply taking advantage of new media and funding to create their own work. CS

I don’t think things look much better when we turn to the number of female directors currently working in Hollywood: women accounted for only 9 per cent of directors in Hollywood in the last five years, the same number as in 1998. In the entire 86-year history of the Academy Awards, only four women have ever been nominated for best director: Lina Wertmuller for Seven Beauties,  Jane Campion for The Piano, Sophia Coppola for Lost in Translation and Kathryn Bigelow, the only female ever to win the Best Director Oscar for for The Hurt Locker. And all this in a country where women purchase half the cinema tickets on sale

Away from Hollywood, looking at cinema on a more global scale, female voices have varying degrees of representation. One of last year’s biggest art house hits, the very charming Wadja, was not only the first film shot by a female director in Saudi Arabia but also the first full length feature to ever be shot in the country itself. It tells the inspiring tale of a young girl who dreams of owning a bicycle in a country where women are not allowed to drive. But one swallow cannot an Arab cinematic spring make. For every Shirin Neshat, Nadine Labaki and Mania Akbari (who has been living in exile in London since 2012), ➔

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there are thousands of female directors, actors and artists in the Middle East that face inherent sexism, censorship and, in some cases, even death. Until their voices can be heard, we can’t really say that things are improving for women in film. Thankfully, film festivals like the UK’s Birds Eye View are helping to shed a light on the work of female directors from the region. Last year’s festival offered a celebration of Arab women filmmakers with feature and documentary screenings and panel discussions. ➔

JE

Meanwhile, at the other end of the northern hemisphere, Sweden has recently introduced a film classification system based on how sexist a film is. The Bechdel test

In the entire 86-year history of the Academy Awards, only four women have ever been nominated for best director awards the highest “A” rating for gender equality only when a film has two named women characters that talk to each other about something else other than a man. It’s by no means a perfect system though, since films like Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker and recent British film The Selfish Giant (by Clio Barnard, arguably one of the UK’s most exciting filmmaking talents) would both fail the test.

in Black) and Bridget O’Connor (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy). This, says the BFI, “suggests the possibility of a breakthrough by female writers into the top rank of UK feature film screenwriting”. The annual Celluloid Ceiling report from San Diego State University says the number of female directors involved in making the US’s top 250 movies in 2012 was up to 9 per cent from 5 per cent in 2011. We often hear that there are no decent roles for female actors over 40. Certainly a previous generation of actresses suffered in later years from being offered shockingly bad scripts – bordering on Grand Guignol for Crawford and Davis – but this is no longer the case. Today’s screen greats seem to be defying the odds. Judi Dench, Meryl Streep, and Helen Mirren work constantly. Julie Christie, 72, was a revelation in Away From Her, receiving an Oscar nomination for this touching drama about a woman with Alzheimer’s disease. The film was written and directed by Sarah Polley. Other mature actresses, like 86-year-old Emmanuelle Riva, received an Oscar nod in 2012 for Amour, and Brenda Blethyn was twice honoured with Oscar nominations (Secrets and Lies, Little Voice). I’m on my theatrical agent’s books as a character actress but that no longer means I have to be odd looking to succeed as one. In previous generations you were either “leading” lady and drop dead gorgeous or “character”, which meant you had acting chops but weren’t attractive. Thankfully, the line is now far more blurred, though we haven’t completely resolved that issue.

OJF

A recent report from the British Film Institute (BFI) seems to bear out the fact that women screenwriters and directors are getting a bigger slice of the filmmaking pie. The report says that 10 per cent of the 27 screenwriters associated with the UK’s top 20 Indie films for 2010-12 were women. They include Jane Goldman (The Woman 184 INDEXONCENSORSHIP.ORG

JE

Some initiatives are helping to generate a healthy debate on how widely and how loudly female voices are being heard in cinema, both in Hollywood and outside of it. In France we can speak of a female new wave, with fascinating actresses, like Cannes Best Actress joint winners Lea

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Seydoux and Adele Exarchopoulos (from Palme D’Or Winner Blue is the Warmest Colour) and formidable female directors like Rebecca Zlotowski, Katell Quillévéré and Céline Sciamma following in the foosteps of Claire Dennis, Agnes Vard and Coline Serreau. However, in Iran, in Uganda, in Greece, and in many other corners of the globe, women are still struggling for the great parts and to direct, still fighting to be heard and remain visible in a male dominated cinematic landscape. It’s definitely praiseworthy when actresses like Helen Mirren and Judi Dench sink their teeth into meaty parts well into their 60s and 70s. However, even Dame Helen took the opportunity in 2013, while accepting a “Legend Award” at the Empire Film Awards, to speak out against gender inequality in film by gently and ever-so-eloquently chastising director Sam Mendes for not mentioning a single woman in his list of directors that inspired him as a newcomer. This muchfeted dame knows better than most that the glass ceiling for women in film has barely been cracked. The shouts will have to be louder, the ears will nee d to be more strongly bended.

Amy Pascal, who currently chairs Sony Pictures, followed. More women writers, producers and directors are crafting and developing more interesting and complex roles for actresses of all ages. I may be one of those actresses on the wrong side of 40 and working in one of the toughest environments – Hollywood – but I approach 2014 with confidence and the determination to keep highlighting the increasingly important role women are playing in the film industry. Women are undoubtedly still under-represented in film but are in a far better position than they have ever been. x ©Olivia J Fox, Jane Earl, Costas Sarkas www.indexoncensorship.org

OJF

Men coming up the ranks also seem less afraid to make women central to their films. I recently shot a teaser trailer for a period action adventure film that has two female protagonists and a decent role as a domineering duchess for a mature actress like myself. Women are also helped by the fact they have broken through the glass ceiling of having the role of studio head as being a male prerogative. Sherry Lansing became the first woman to head a major studio, 20 th Century Fox, in 1980 and later Paramount, stepping down in 2005. Dawn Steel at Columbia, Nina Jacobson at Buena Vista, Stacey Snider, CEO at Dreamworks and

Olivia J Fox  is a British actress based in Los Angeles and tweets @erinwindsock  Jane Earl   is director of Rich Mix, an independent cinema and arts centre in London Costas Sarkas  is a freelance film writer and former film editor at Time Out Athens and Time Out Cyprus

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