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It's the year people stopped talking, and started listening. The conversation is louder than ever, and change is coming.

Girl Talk is a weekly look at women in film - past, present, and future. This week, we look back on a monumental year, for better or worse.
Ask enough women in Hollywood about beinga woman in Hollywood, and eventually a theme emerges: conversation is great, and the acknowledgement of the skewed numbers and lack of equality is essential. It's a discussion that needs to happen, but won't it be great when we can stop just talking and put words into action?

It's a two-pronged dream - that conversation will move past chatter and produce real results, and that those results will create a world where inequality becomes a thing of the past.

But talking has a way of being one-sided and, as it turns out, there needed to be one more step in between the chatter and actually moving things forward. That finally happened in 2017, the year people stopped talking, and started listening. The conversation is louder than ever, and the change - the real change - is coming.

Read More: How Refinery29's Female Filmmaker-Focused Shatterbox Shorts Are Creating the Next Generation of Auteurs

Here are five ways that women in the film industry have forever changed it.

Changing the Conversation About Sexual Harassment and Abuse

It's the biggest story of the year, and one indicative of the sea change taking hold throughout Hollywood. Early stories, like the harassment charges leveled at Cinefamily brass and claims against Ain't It Cool News founder Harry Knowles and his associates at the Alamo Drafthouse, hinted that long-held secrets and whisper networks were about to burst to the surface, but few could have anticipated either the wave of allegations against disgraced Weinstein Company co-founder Harvey Weinstein or the other revelations it would lead to involving other major players in the industry.

The list of the accused is staggering, ranging from power players like Weinstein and former Amazon head Roy Price; lauded newsmen Charlie Rose and Matt Lauer; performers Kevin Spacey, Louis C.K., Ed Westwick, Dustin Hoffman, Richard Dreyfuss, and Jeffrey Tambor; directors James Toback and Brett Ratner; and all the way down to small-scale media personalities like Andy Signore.

And of course, the allegations lead back to the man occupying the White House, thanks to that infamous "Access Hollywood" tape - a horrific slice of American history that owes its literal existence to tabloid television. While fallout has been swift for many of the accused, long-term effects still remain to be seen. It may seem like a lifetime ago, but the Weinstein accusations only hit in October. If there's one thing that seems destined to forever change Hollywood and the wider world it touches, it's these stories.

And why did they finally hit so hard this year? Why are there so many? Why aren't they stopping? Because people finally started listening and believing women, not just "letting" them talk or nodding along. Women have mobilized ( including, most notably, Rose McGowan, who has gathered a literal army around her), not letting up on these difficult stories and continuing to come forward with their experiences. That's not to say that the path has been without its added hardships, from victim-shaming to secret operations aimed at silencing victims, but the conversation has turned a corner. It will never be forgotten, and it can no longer be ignored.

A Billion Dollar Box Office

This year's box office played home to just 15 new studio releases from female directors and co-directors ( and next year looks even worse, with just eight titles on the current schedule), but between those titles, female-directed features pulled in a massive $1.2 billion take at the global box office. Women don't just make movies - all kinds, too, no matter what some people want you to believe - they make movies that people want to see.

Look no further than the number-two domestic earner of the year, Patty Jenkins' boundary-busting " Wonder Woman," which has so far earned over $412 million at the domestic box office, second only to the juggernaut that is "Beauty and the Beast." When it opened in June, "Wonder Woman" set a new record for a female-directed feature opening, earning $100M in its first weekend and far surpassing the last film to hold the record, Sam Taylor-Johnson's 2015 hit "Fifty Shades of Grey," which opened to just over $85 million. Next up for Jenkins: a well-earned sequel that will likely only continue Wonder Woman's legacy with further success.

Read More: Wonder Women: 2017's Biggest Box Office Breakouts Show How Far Hollywood Still Has to Go

In the indie sphere, money-making women are also emerging in full force, including the similarly record-breaking Greta Gerwig, whose acclaimed "Lady Bird" became the best-ever limited opening for a feature film directed by a woman. Just a month into release, and the awards season favorite is poised to break $20 million, while also racking up big accolades.

A24

Gerwig is hardly alone, as this year's highest-grossing indies list include six titles from fellow female filmmakers, including established filmmakers like Kathryn Bigelow and Sofia Coppola, alongside rising stars like Ry Russo-Young and Niki Caro (who will next direct Disney's live-action "Mulan").

Moving Past "Strong Female Characters"

Consider it a problem of semantics, but the concept of the "strong female character" no longer fully encapsulates the kind of women bursting out of the big screen. As Kate Winslet recently told IndieWire:

That word "strong," I think it means prominent, dominating, female-driven. I think it means that we are taken through the thrust of a story by a woman, as opposed to a man. To be "strong" sometimes isn't the most interesting thing. It is more interesting to be complicated, and vulnerable, and real, and terrified, and hopeful, and full of regret.

The female-centric stories of 2017 speak directly to that, offering up a chance to turn "strong" into "complex, interesting, complicated," or even the most important designation of all: "real."

Gerwig's "Lady Bird" offers a vivid coming-of-age tale that eschews cliche and lets star Saoirse Ronan (as the eponymous Lady Bird) play a big, messy, character that's so often glossed over in teen-leaning films. Russo-Young's "Before I Fall" did something similar with a sci-fi twist, casting Zoey Deutch as a popular teen stuck in a "Groundhog Day"-style loop that literally requires she works towards becoming a better person before she can be freed from it. Stella Meghie's charming "Everything, Everything" follows a teenage girl trapped inside her own home, thanks to a life-threatening disease that finds bodily threats at every turn. Meghie turned the story (based on a YA novel of the same name) into a funny and sweet story that also finds room to - GASP - portray teenage sexuality in an honest manner.

Action films gave women plenty of room to grow as well, from Anne Hathaway's genre-bending turn in monster movie "Colossal" (itself one heck of a coming of age story) to Charlize Theron's butt-kicking badass from "Atomic Blonde." And what is 2017 without "Wonder Woman," a crowdpleasing spectacle that didn't balk at telling a decidedly woman-centric story within the context of the superhero genre, which so often can't seem to get its heroines right?

Brightlight Pictures

Elsewhere, wild and raunchy women threatened to take the "crazy trip" comedy trope away from men once and for all, thanks to both "Girls Trip" and "Rough Night." While both films went whole-hog on the comedy, they also offered up sweet and touching commentary on the importance of actual friendship, rendered most vividly by Tiffany Haddish's breakout performance in the former, the kind of go-for-broke role that any performer dreams of nailing - or, such as the case may be, grapefruiting.

Some of the year's most lauded films also hinge on its complex female characters, including Steven Spielberg's "The Post," which sees Meryl Streep breathing profound life into the remarkable world of Katharine Graham; "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri" gave Frances McDormand a well-deserved lead role that she grabbed with both hands. Both are - quite rightly - deep in the awards conversation as best actress contenders. Other awards hopefuls, such as documentaries "Jane" and "Faces Places," follow real-life women into new spaces, contextualizing their contributions to a world still grappling to know them fully.

Introducing More Directors of Color

A record-breaking six female directors of color released feature-length films this year through studios and well-known distributors, including Stella Meghie, the only black woman with a wide release film this year, and Dee Rees, entering the Oscar conversation with her Sundance favorite "Mudbound."

Rees and Meghie were joined by names like Amma Asante, Angela Robinson, Maggie Betts, and Janicza Bravo, whose very different films speak to the range of creativity currently being exerted by black female directors. Asante and Betts both churned out compelling historical dramas, thanks to "A United Kingdom" and "Novitiate," while Robinson took a more creative approach with her sexy biopic "Professor Marston and the Wonder Women." Bravo's wild comedy "Lemon" was a Sundance hit, and was later released by Magnolia Pictures.

Read More: Every Studio Film Directed By Female Filmmakers Coming Out Over the Next Two Years

But even with 2017's perceived uptick in releasing features by black female directors, other minorities still struggle for representation behind the camera. According to a February report from USC's Annenberg Media, Diversity & Social Change Initiative, black and Asian filmmakers directed less than 10% of of the top 1,000 films in the last decade (and that includes both genders).

Stefania Rosini

"For the last decade, female directors of color have been nearly invisible in the director's chair," said report co-author Stacy L. Smith. The report found that, of the Asian directors that helmed the 1,000 top films of the past 10 years, only 8.8% were women. And of those 1,000 films, only one was directed by a Latina.

The Rise of All-Female Crews

While men continue to dominate positions behind the camera, a number of female filmmakers have made it their business to alter those stats by employing all-female (or nearly all-female) crews. "Band Aid" filmmaker Zoe Lister-Jones did it for her feature directorial debut "Band Aid," and while she was widely hailed as the first filmmaker to do such a thing, her name is now joined by scores of others. Rainy Kerwin used an all-female crew for her "The Wedding Invitation," as did "Below Her Mouth" director April Mullen.

Elsewhere, perennial indie favorite Marianna Palka employed a majority female crew for her upcoming "Egg," which has the same producers of "Equity," another movie that featured a predominantly female crew. The upcoming comedy "The Feels" hit up the crowdfunding circuit with a promise to employ a crew made up of 68% women.
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None of these projects have hit any roadblocks when it comes to finding qualified women for their sets. As it turns out, the future isn't female; the present is, and always has been.

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The Year of the Woman: 5 Ways Female Filmmakers, Actresses, and Advocates Forever Changed Hollywood in 2017

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It's the year people stopped talking, and started listening. The conversation is louder than ever, and change is coming. Girl Talk is a weekly look at women in film - past, present, and future. This week, we look back on a monumental year, for better or worse.

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When it comes to children, influences of Disney are hard to miss. The umbrella of the Disney Corporation reaches from books and toys to movies, television networks, and radio (Towbin, 24). Starting...

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Also known as the Bechdel-Wallace test, it is named after the American cartoonist Alison Bechdel, in whose comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For , the test first appeared, in 1985. Bechdel credited the idea to a friend, Liz Wallace, and to the writings of Virginia Woolf.

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1) Women account for 50% of moviegoers. ( MPAA 2017)

2) On the top 100 grossing films of 2017, women represented:

8% of directors

10% of writers

2% of cinematographers

24% of producers

14% of editors

( Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film)

3) On the top 250 grossing films of 2017, women comprised 3% of composers. This represents no change since 2016. ( Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film)

4) Kathryn Bigelow is the only woman to ever win the Academy Award for Best Director. Only five women have ever been nominated (Lina Wertmüller, Jane Campion, Sofia Coppola, Bigelow, and Greta Gerwig).

5) In 2018 "Mudbound's" Rachel Morrison became the first woman ever nominated for the Academy Award for Cinematography.

6) In the top 100 films of 2017:

Females comprised 24% of protagonists

63% of female characters had an identifiable job or occupation (compared to 78% of male characters)

55% of female characters were seen in their work setting, actually working (versus 69% of males)

( Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film)

7) 68% of all female characters were white in the top 100 films of 2017. 16% were Black, 7% were Asian, 7% were Latina, and 2% were of another race or ethnicity. ( Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film)

8) On the top 500 films of 2017, movies with at least one female director employed greater percentages of women writers, editors, cinematographers, and composers than films with exclusively male directors. ( Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film)

9) DIVERSITY SELLS:

Films with diverse casts enjoy the highest median global box office and the highest median return on investment

Broadcast scripted shows featuring diverse casts net the highest median 18-49 ratings

10) During the 2016-2017 broadcast network TV season:

Women accounted for only 28% of all creators, directors, writers, producers, executive producers, editors, and directors of photography working on broadcast network, cable, and streaming programs

97% of programs had no women directors of photography, 85% had no women directors, 75% had no women editors, 74% had no women creators, 67% had no women writers, 23% had no women producers, 20% had no women executive producers

66% of female characters were white. 19% were Black, 5% were Latina, 6% were Asian, and 1% were of another race or ethnicity.

On programs with at least one woman creator, females accounted for 51% of major characters

On programs with exclusively male creators, females comprised 38% of major characters

( Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film)

11) A "fiscal cliff" faces female directors. Women:

Directed 27.5% of independent narrative competition movies at Sundance from 2007 to 2017

Accounted for 22.2% of first-time episodic TV directors from the 2009-10 season to the 2016-17 season

Accounted for 17% of episodic TV directors from the 2012-13 season to 2016-17 season

Represented 4% of the top-grossing films directors from 2007-2017

( Inclusion Initiative)

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1) Women account for 50% of moviegoers. ( MPAA 2017) 2) On the top 100 grossing films of 2017, women represented: 8% of directors 10% of writers 2% of cinematographers 24% of producers 14% of editors ( Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film) 3) On the top 250 grossing films of 2017, women comprised 3% of composers.

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Representation Of Women In Early Hollywood Films

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Representation Of Women In Early Hollywood Films

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The representation of women in early Hollywood Cinema.

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Introduction to film studies personal presentation.

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Of course, film directing is one of the most exclusive professions in the world, with only a handful of men or women ever getting the opportunity to direct a major motion picture. If it's difficult for men, women feel that for them it sometimes seems nearly impossible. Men in the film industry, from studio bosses to directors, are defensive on the subject. They acknowledge that sexist attitudes persist, but they claim that opportunities for women to direct have never been better. The trouble, they say, is that, with one or two exceptions, first-rate ''mainstream'' women directors have not emerged who combine the creative and leadership qualities needed to handle multimillion dollar projects. Many women, these men say, want to make women's pictures.

This notion is angrily rejected by aspiring women directors, and they are making the industry aware of the depth of their frustration and bitterness. The motion-picture industry, and television, is male-oriented and always has been, these women say. Movies are still financed by banks, and banks, they contend, are unwilling to bet large sums of money on women directors. The women point out that when a male director is temperamental, this is often considered part of his artistic genius; when a woman is temperamental, she is ''acting like a woman'' and is not to be trusted. When a man produces an expensive flop, he is judged as an individual and generally given another chance. When one woman fails, all women are tainted. Whatever the reason, the statistics suggest that women are being short shrifted.

Last June, a committee of women members of the Directors Guild of America invited executives of all the major studios and television networks, as well as some large independent production companies, to a meeting in the guild's Los Angeles headquarters. The producers were presented with a package of statistics that pointed out that of the 7,332 feature films (not including documentaries or films made by small independent production companies) released by major distributors during the last 30 years, only 14, or two-tenths of 1 percent, were directed by women. And that out of 65,500 hours of national network, prime-time dramatic television for the same period, only 115 hours (mostly productions concerned with female themes), or two-tenths of 1 percent, were directed by women.

The statistics may be a little misleading in that they include only feature films released by major distributors and do not include small, independent productions - films that did not receive major distribution and promotion - or documentaries, industrial and educational films. Nor do the television statistics include publictelevision productions, which have a better record of employing women directors.

Nevertheless, it is films released by the big distributors that are seen by the larger public; these are the films that have the opportunity to make money -the rest, too often, really do not count commercially.

It may seem, also, at first glance, that in the last few years, things have changed for the better. Joan Darling directed ''First Love.'' Joan Tewkesbury directed ''Old Boyfriends.'' But one look at the production statistics for some representative major studios for 1978-1979, the last year for which complete statistics are available, illustrate graphically what women directors find themselves up against: Columbia Studios. Feature films. Female directors: 0. Male 11. Television episodes. Female directors: 1. Male directors: 138. Universal Studios. Category, feature films. Female directors: 0. Male directors: 17. Television episodes: Female directors: 2. Male directors: 381. Paramount Studios. Feature films. Female directors: 0. Male directors: 8. Television episodes: Female directors: 1. Male directors: 211.

''We know how hard it is for men to become directors in this industry -very hard,'' Nell Cox, a committee member, told the executives at the meeting, ''but the odds against women are apparently 99.8 percent harder.'' Many of the male executives at the meeting expressed shock and dismay at the statistics and said they had no idea that things were so bad. o aid in righting the balance, the women's committee proposed an affirmative-action program and the formation of a resource group of prominent men and women - including such industry heavyweights as Claire Townsend, vice president of the production of features at 20th Century Fox, and Verna Fields, her counterpart at Universal Studios -who would meet with selected women directors, assess their work and report back to the guild.

After the meeting, a lot of letters went out to production staffs from studio heads who wanted to put themselves on record for supporting the women's aims and who declared their intentions to do better. Fundamentally, however, little has changed as yet. During their discussions with executives, the committee members emphasized the absence of women from episodic television, which is the real center of the film industry today. It's where young male directors get their training. It's where directors can make a living while learning and polishing their craft - an opportunity that, with the exception of ''soft'' shows like ''The Waltons'' and ''Family,'' is largely denied to women, who are caught in a seemingly inescapable ''Catch-22'' situation. Women are told they can't direct episodic television or movies because they don't have enough hours of directing under their belt. And they can't acquire those hours because no one hires them to direct. While men entering the industry encounter similar problems, the women claim that their experiences are infinitely worse because of sexism.

Occasionally, the established female star of a television show will direct an episode or two. Nancy Walker, for example, did some 'Rhodas'' and ''Mary Tyler Moores,'' and Penny Marshall did a couple of ''Laverne & Shirleys.'' But most of the top shows have regular directors who lock themselves into a series, and very few of those regulars are women.

The exclusion operates on every level. When she was still a film editor, Verna Fields (who is widely acknowledged to have saved more directors' hides in the cutting room than most of them would care to admit) was suggested as the director for ''Jaws II'' (she won an Academy Award for editing ''Jaws'') after another director fell by the wayside. But, she says, ''I was told I couldn't do it, because, according to guild rules, in order to replace another director, I had to have directed one feature (film) or 90 minutes of television, and, (technically), on paper, I hadn't.''

Barbara Peters, a veteran low-budget action-and-exploitation film director reports that when ''I was teaching a directing course at an experimental film college in Los Angeles, I helped one student shoot and put together a 10-minute videotape to use as his calling card. With it, he immediately got an episode of 'The Incredible Hulk' to direct. I couldn't even get an interview on that show.''

Although production companies are willing to look at test videotapes in the hope of unearthing a new young directing talent, few of them seem to consider the possibility that that talent could be female.

Jan Haag, a woman film director who administers the American Film Institute's (West Coast branch) programs to aid film makers, explains: ''Young men come out of our Center for Advanced Film Studies and go straight into jobs in TV and film. The women in our workshops produce tapes ... many of which are as good or better than the men's, yet they can't get a look in.'' Increasing numbers of women are also coming out of other film schools, but their chances have not appreciably changed as yet.

Adell Aldrich, daughter of veteran director Robert Aldrich, began her career as a script supervisor at the age of 16. ''My father,'' she says, ''started off his career as a craft serviceman, going for coffee, and moved from third assistant, slowly but steadily, through the ranks to director. ... My family told ... me the men in the industry simply didn't see women in that light. They were right. It took me 18 years to be given the opportunity to direct (small-budget films for independent studios).'' Other women seem stuck permanently in assistant-director or second-assistant director ruts while their male counterparts move up more steadily to directors' chairs. Why has an industry which may have had a woman as its first storyfilm director (it is hotly debated whether Alice Guy-Blache, who directed ''La Fee Aux Choux,'' made in Paris in 1896, was the first person to direct a story film), an industry which allowed the late Dorothy Arzner to become one of the top 10 Hollywood directors in the 30's, been so resistant to giving opportunity to women directors since World War II?

There was one notable exception in this worst of times for women directors in America. Ida Lupino, tired as an actress of waiting for the right films to come along, formed her own production company with her then husband, the late Collier Young, and between 1949 and 1954 directed, produced and wrote eight feature films, characterized by their tough subject matter and their provocative picture of American life beneath the surface, and went on to do shows for television.

Ida Lupino's films were low-budget, fast-shoot independent. Her first feature ''Not Wanted'' (1949), the tale of an unwed mother who gives up her baby and then kidnaps another, cost $110,000 to make and grossed $1 million. It might have been characterized as a women's picture, but one could certainly not say the same of the ''The Hitch-Hiker,'' an all-male suspense drama shot in 1953, of which a contemporary reviewer wrote: ''It is breathtakingly keyed to an agonizing pitch of terror for its full running time.''

In the three decades since, no other woman has managed to amass a similar body of work. One possible explanation of the phenomenon is that the history of women as film directors has simply not been fully documented. As the writer-director Nancy Dowd pointed out in Action magazine in 1973, the history of the great directors began to be written in the 50's, spurred on by the French creators of the auteur theory, wherein directors, not stories, became preeminent. When the interest spread to America, it did so in a climate that was scarcely sensitive to women's efforts.

''It was the era of the feminine mystique,'' wrote Nancy Dowd, ''of Jayne Mansfield, Betty Crocker cake mixes, Dior waists, crinolines and Mamie Eisenhower. ...

''The cultural blinders of the era,'' she continued, ''blunted (the historians') scholarship. They simply did not see, or could not believe, or preferred to forget, that women had been among the first film makers, that women had made distinguished films, that women directors had amassed significant filmographies.''

Women also tended to have been allowed to direct when directing wasn't considered all that important. Under the old studio system, the ranks of journeymen directors could well include an Ida Lupino. Once the director became the star, from the mid-50's on, women were, to all intents and purposes, passed over.

It became easier to ignore women as directors. The one woman who could not be ignored, because she was so obviously a cinematic genius, Leni Riefenstahl, was easily discredited because of her Nazi connections.

Some male industry leaders today rush to explain the dearth of women directors. Women don't have the technical skill to direct. Women can't ''control the floor.'' Male crews don't respect them. Women are stubborn, inflexible and won't compensate. Women make heavy-handed ''messagey'' films that no one wants to see. Women don't have the physical stamina.

''Directing for television is a very, very tough job,'' says Douglas S. Cramer, a co-executive producer with Aaron Spelling Productions (the company that makes ''The Love Boat'' and ''Vega$''). ''It's a merciless, constant pounding. It's gruelling. I don't want to sound like a chauvinist, but I don't know if a woman could stand up to it.''

''It's easy to blame male chauvinism,'' says Harry Ufland, one of Los Angeles's most successful agents (with a reputation for launching many first-time directors, none of them women), ''but it's quite simply that no woman except Elaine May has ever made a good movie, and her last one, 'Mikey and Nicky,' never got finished. Everyone knows how brilliant she is, but no one will trust her with a film. The rest of the women's stuff I've seen is just awful.''

It is difficult for a neophyte male director today to get a production company to take a chance on him. It is virtually impossible for a woman. She simply adds an extra layer of risk in an already risky formula.

At the present uncertain time in the movie industry, what with the advent of home video cassettes, cable and other new software, no one is quite sure who the audience is anymore. No one, therefore, is inclined to take risks, and women directors are perceived as the greatest risk of all.

Film producers claim that budgets today are too big for them to entrust a movie to a woman. And television producers say their budgets are too small to risk the mistakes an untested woman director might make.

Money and power move the film industry. Women have traditionally had neither. Banks, which lend money for films, are notoriously conservative, but, say women directors, they become positively Scrooge-like when a woman is at the helm of a picture. And there is little indication that the introduction of women's banks has made any difference.

But first, and fundamentally, the word ''director,'' like ''general,'' continues to have a primarily male connotation. Fay Kanin, who is currently president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, head of her own production company, and writer and/or co-producer of such television hits as ''Friendly Fire,'' ''Hustling'' and ''Tell Me Where It Hurts,'' explains it this way: ''The director is a papa figure. We were always told women couldn't exercise authority over a bunch of men. It's nonsense, of course. Some women are lousy at authority. But then, so are some men.''

But old conditionings die hard. Verna Fields sits in her large, prestigious vice president's office at Universal Studios, surrounded by posters of some of the successful films she's edited, and admits, ''To be honest, my early education has never really left me. It's like how you feel passing a nun, even though you've given up Catholicism a long time ago. It will take several generations in this industry to get over our subservience to the male gender.''

It may be this early conditioning that produces a profound lack of confidence in the women themselves when they decide to try their hand at directing. As Barbra Streisand, who is widely believed to have virtually ''directed'' many of the films she has starred in over the years, prepares to make her official movie directing debut with the musical ''Yentl'' for her own production company, she is, accord-ing to a woman who has worked closely with her, ''so scared, she's making herself ill.''

The fear, of course, comes from the visibility of failure. A man makes a bad movie and it's John Doe who's made a bomb. When a woman fails, it's ''women'' who can't direct. A ''Moment by Moment'' or a ''Can't Stop the Music'' sets every woman who has ever directed, or wanted to direct, back a decade. A ''Heaven's Gate'' or a ''1941'' would finish them forever. But such monumental failures by men are regarded as momentary aberrations by otherwise gifted directors. A Robert Altman can direct a string of failures and still get ''Popeye.'' Ken Russell can produce embarrassment after embarrassment and go on to ''Altered States.''

The injustice galls. ''We want the same opportunity to make fools of ourselves as the men,'' says Nancy Walker, who directed ''Can't Stop the Music.'' If nervous studio heads these days watch young male directors closely - and they do -the scrutiny is multiplied tenfold for women. ''It was like being in a fishbowl,'' says Claudia Weill of her experience with Columbia Pictures on ''It's My Turn.' (The New York Times film critic Janet Maslin said the movie was ''full of brief, telling details that Miss Weill somehow makes unexpectedly interesting.'')

''I heard (the production people),'' she reports, ''talking to the crew - 'You mean she took five takes (not an inordinate amount) on that?' 'What the hell is she doing?' -that kind of thing.''

The new breed of women production executives at studios can go only so far to help. ''They'll bring up a woman director's name a couple of times,'' says Barbara Peters, ''then they simply have to let it drop. Otherwise, they might be asked, 'What's the matter with you, can't you work with a man?'''

There are, however, small signs of hope. The presence of women executives at several major studios may represent the best chance for a change. New studios in town, like Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope, are apparently receptive to women directors and are actively seeking projects from them. Lucy Fisher, who started in the industry as a studio reader 12 years ago and is now vice president for worldwide productions at Zoetrope, says, ''We've been interested in women making films since before it became fashionable.'' And she points out that it makes good sense to hire new people, both male and female, to direct. ''The public certainly hasn't been too happy with the caliber of movies they have been getting lately from the same old people,'' she adds, ''so why go back to them just because you know them?''

At 20th Century Fox, Sherry Lansing says she is discussing a development deal with Karen Arthur, director of ''Legacy,'' and one with Gilliam Armstrong, director of ''My Brilliant Career,'' and there are several others cooking which she does not want to discuss until they become settled. She, however, emphasizes that she has trouble answering when she is asked how many projects with women directors her studio has. ''I simply don't break them down into male and female,'' she says. ''We have some projects we're talking about with terrific directors, and, yes, some of them happen to be women.''

''I've seen some wonderful films by women,'' Sherry Lansing adds. ''Elaine May did two of the best films I've ever seen. I loved 'It's My Turn.' I've seen brilliant work from Joan Silver, Beth Brickell, a director called Evelyn Demme and Amy Heckerling, and there're lots more. ... Six months from now, I'm sure we'll have several projects under way with women at the helm.''

Most woman directors agree that big-name actresses -those with enough clout to have director approval -could help by insisting that a woman be at least considered in the running to make their pictures. But it rarely happens.

When Jane Fonda was asked at the 1975 San Francisco Film Festival why she had never worked with a woman director, she said there weren't any. ''Later,'' says Karen Arthur, who was honored at the festival as one of three outstanding new directors of the year, ''I asked her if she'd view some of my films. She refused. She had told the woman who had directed her in a documentary ... on Vietnam ... that women shouldn't direct.'' A spokesman for Jane Fonda quotes the actress as saying, ''It's totally false. I don't recall ever meeting Miss Arthur, but if I refused to see her films it was because I didn't have the time.'' The one thing on which even their critics agree is that women directors are especially sensitive in their handling of actors. On the set of ''Love'' in Canada, Candace O'Connor explained that from an actor's point of view in a story involving rather explicit sex, a woman director is a plus all around. ''I keep waiting for Annette Cohen to say, 'Oh, for God's sake, Candace, relax -so it's a nude scene, so what?' I've heard it so often from men. But I know she won't. There are just some things I don't have to explain to a woman.'' Candace O'Connor's male co-star, Robin Ward, was equally enthusiastic: ''I've worked for women directors often in the theater. This is my first experience with one in films, and I can tell you that, given my druthers, I prefer a woman director. They're so much more willing to discuss things with you. There is none of that mysteriousness that some of the male directors seem to enjoy wrapping things up with.''

Ideally, a significant influx of women on the directorial scene would add a whole new perspective to the human experience: the filmic equivalents of Joyce Carol Oates, Margaret Drabble or Joan Didion. It was evident in ''The Heartbreak Kid,'' a satire on the ethnic male's fantasy of the WASP princess that could surely only have been done justice to by an ethnic female like Elaine May. It was evident in ''Hester Street,'' Joan Micklin Silver's film of an immigrant woman growing up to the realization of her own strength. It was evident in Lee Grant's short film ''The Stronger,'' wherein Strindberg's old tale of two women battling over a man became an altogether different story in which the man was a virtual irrelevancy. And it is there in her new film, ''Tell Me a Riddle,'' in which flashbacks are used not simply to detail a dying old woman's past but to let the audience into her imagery, to show not only what the woman is thinking, but how she thinks it.

But some women directors have felt impotent and deprived of selfexpression for so long that, in their frustration, what sometimes comes out when they finally do get the chance to direct is hostile feminist excess: films in which too much time is spent dealing with menstruation, rape and abortion - the kind of wallow that few women, and even fewer men, want to sit through.

These are probably the kind of excesses that first efforts inevitably bring, and will pass, but many women think that the time has come for female directors to put aside the overall subject of ''women'' for a while.''I find them so icky,'' says Mai Zetterling (once billed as the ''Swedish Sex Bomb,'' now a well-regarded director in Europe), ''all this adoration of the tummy - women standing in front of mirrors oiling pregnant bellies.''

Most women directors are not interested in pouring their anger onto the screen, nor are they interested in being pigeonholed. Nancy Dowd, who wrote the original story of ''Coming Home'' and the raunchy, brutal script for the movie ''Slap Shot,'' about the very male sport of ice hockey and is making her directorial debut in ''Love,'' asks, ''How come no one is interested in what a woman thinks about freedom?''

Small subjects, films about interpersonal relationships -the kind of pictures European film makers, both male and female, make - these are the pictures that the majority of women directors say they want to make. But, too often in America, these are contemptuously tagged ''women's pictures'' by studio heads, who consider them the kiss of death at the box office. Despite the success of films like ''Kramer vs. Kramer'' and ''Ordinary People'' (voted 1980's best film by the New York Film Critics Circle), the suggestion is that people aren't ready for real life on the screen.

In Europe, the picture has traditionally been somewhat brighter for women. Directors like Lina Wertmuller, Mai Zetterling, Agnes Varda and, in Britain, Betty Box have found a market for their incisive, satirical looks at their societies' foibles. But the European movie is a vastly different animal from the American breed. There, movies are still regarded as individual artistic efforts.

And in North America, the Canadians have traditionally had more room for women, because, explains the producer Renee Perlmutter, ''Our country is too young to have an old-boy network that disdains women. We have a whole different sensibility to our sex.''

But even in Canada, it is significant that the French-speaking section of the country has many more women film directors than the English section. In the United States, however, any woman who wants to direct finds herself struggling with one key question: Can her sensibilities ever fit into a financial reality that says the average cinema goer is a 14-to 24-year-old male?

Karen Arthur, who will begin shooting her third major motion picture, ''Lady Beware,'' in April, and had to raise her $4 million budget from independent investors after Universal, which had optioned the project, dropped out, says, ''I battled endlessly with (a studio head) over the picture. There was one scene where the girl goes to do her laundry and finds the crotch cut out of her panties and the nipples out of her bras. Any woman would be completely terrified by that. (He) thought it was funny.''

''I can relate to 'The Deer Hunter' and 'Apocalypse Now,''' she adds, ''but it appears a man can't relate to my world. It's the essence of the problem.'' Thwarted in their attempt to make major feature films, some women directors have tried a different route. Barbara Peters, who doesn't mind being called ''the Queen of B Pictures,'' has been making exploitation films - like ''Humanoids from the Deep,'' ''Moving Violation'' and ''Candy Striped Nurses'' -heavy on sex and violence and packed with car crashes, stunts and chases. She believes that more women would make action pictures if they weren't so intimidated.

''Look, it's like a bunch of little girls trying to get into the boy's baseball game,'' she says, ''and being told, 'Go away, you're not good enough.' So they say, 'O.K., we'll go over to Mary Jane's yard and play our own game.' They stick to what the men aren't doing.''

One area which has become a safe haven for women is the documentary field, and many and varied have been the contributions of women directors to it. But in the United States, documentaries are considered nonprestigious and uncommercial, i.e., they don't make money. The field is one in which a woman can get stuck and from which there is relatively little movement into feature films.

''We shouldn't try to be protected from the battle,'' declares Karen Arthur, ''just because we haven't been to war before. I adored those meetings with (a studio head). They gave me a chance to sharpen my negotiating talents. They taught me how to work him better, how to manipulate. Men are battle-scarred from these meetings. They know the players. We don't even begin to understand the rules.''

So far, the biggest commercial success for a woman director since Elaine May's ''Heartbreak Kid'' belongs to Claudia Weill, who had to put together three grants to make her first success, ''Girlfriends,'' a modest little picture which convinced Columbia Pictures to ante up $7 million for ''It's My Turn.'' Before these two films, Miss Weill, who has been working in film production ever since her student days at Radcliffe, produced and directed the documentary, ''Joyce at 34'' and did some 20 segments of ''Sesame Street'' for public television before directing ''The Other Half of the Sky,'' the chronicle of Shirley Maclaine's trip to China which won an Academy Award nomination.

Before ''It's My Turn'' was released, it was reportedly mucked about with considerably. Hollywood sources say that the producer Ray Stark had so little confidence in Miss Weill that he took the film away from her for editing. But Ray Stark has a reputation for being crass and insensitive with directors, male or female, and many women expressed little sympathy for Miss Weill's plight.

''What exactly did she expect,'' snorts Nancy Dowd. ''Anybody who makes a film for Ray Stark must expect the worst.'' Nevertheless, the film survived and audiences are seeing it, and the next woman to come along may find it easier because of Miss Weill's success. Box office returns on the film are excellent, an indication that if given the big studio treatment - major distribution, widespread advertising and marketing - a woman's film can be just as succcessful as any other good, well-promoted film. Meanwhile, the fate of women directors is unenviable. They make ends meet by teaching, stage directing or consulting on films directed by men. They live frugally, and they keep moving.

Joan Tewkesbury, whose first film, ''Old Boyfriends,'' brought her a flurry of attention, and who has just finished shooting ''The Acorn People,'' a Movie of the Week for NBC-TV, says, ''You've got to keep the momentum going. I'm moving to New York to do more theater. You can get awfully stale in this town sitting around listening to all the deals the boys are making.''

Nancy Dowd is writing a play for England's National Theater. Some women are even making movies. Joan Micklin Silver, who has a production company with her husband, will begin shooting ''Medallion,'' a contemporary thriller in the political arena, sometime in 1981, and Lee Grant is planning a comedy ''chase'' film for shooting next spring.

Others are still trying to get projects off the ground. Adell Aldrich's ''Twinkle, Twinkle, Martha Hinkle,'' starring Valerie Perrine, is currently being considered by several studios. Amy Heckerling's ''My Kind of Guy'' went the rounds from Universal to M-G-M before being dropped - a common enough experience, but evidently more so when women directors are involved.

Meanwhile, many women search for a mentor - usually a male producer -who will in some way further their career. Or they write, hoping to tie themselves to a commercial project that the studios want enough to let them direct. And always there's the struggle to raise money.

''You have endless dinners with men whom you convince yourself are interested in investing in your movie,'' says Karen Arthur, ''when all the time they're looking at your breasts. They evaporate when you suggest getting together with your lawyer.''

Sometimes the temptation to give up is overwhelming. Joelle Dobrow, a news and specials director, says, ''It's crisis time for me. If it doesn't happen in the next six years, it's all over. I'm not 22 anymore. I'm a director, it's all I know. What am I supposed to do, open a restaurant?''

Elaine May, the woman director with perhaps the most talent, has apparently given up directing films, because Polly Platt says, ''She did it for her personal life. This can be a very defeating town and at some point you have to say, what am I giving up for this? The resource committee appointed by the Directors Guild to look into the plight of women in films had been scheduled to make its final report by last Oct. 8.

The guild's national executive secretary, Michael H. Franklin, waited at the appointed time. Not one member of the committee showed up, nor were any apologies sent.

A top executive at a major studio said that on the advice of a labor-relations lawyer it was decided that by taking part in this program the studio would be locking itself into voluntary mandates and putting itself in jeopardy.

Lawyers for the Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers say that the resource committee was in trouble on several counts. The National Labor Relations Act prohibits the making of employment decisions on the basis of guild membership and the group met only with guild members. Also, by restricting their interview candidates women, says the A.M.P.T.P. lawyer, the resource committee was discriminating against other minorities in the guild. But it was clearly stated at the women's meeting with the producers that other minorities would be next, that this was simply the first in a series of such affirmative-action efforts.

Unofficially, members of the producers' association complain that the guild is simply playing politics. ''They were facing the threat of suits from their own women members,'' says one lawyer. ''They're simply trying to protect their own rear ends by passing the buck to the producers.'' Nevertheless, an angry national board of the Directors Guild voted to file a complaint for discrimination against the production companies with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which will hear the case on Jan. 19.

It may do them little good, and it could produce a backlash. ''If a man has a woman forced on him,'' says 20th Century Fox vice president Claire Townsend, ''he'll hate her. He'll want her to fail. And it will do more damage to women further down the line.'' The prospects for women directors are perhaps most promising for actresses who are interested in directing: people like Barbra Streisand, Lee Grant, Anne Bancroft (who made her directorial debut with ''Fatso''), Dyan Cannon, whose short film ''Number One'' was well received and was nominated for an Academy Award, and Lee Remick, who plans to direct her next film. These women could make it to a secure stephold because they have the visibility and clout that the others lack. They are accustomed to dealing with the power brokers, and they have the added advantage of being able to finance their efforts by their acting.

''I edited 'Tell Me a Rid-dle' while acting in 'Charlie Chan,''' says Lee Grant, ''and finished the mixing (while) doing 'The Fright' in Montreal. It's exhausting, but it works.''

Most reasonable people in the industry agree, however, that there simply hasn't been a sufficient body of work from any woman director to really tell who, if any, is likely to have staying power.

Watching from the sidelines, Polly Platt, a production designer/producer who with her former husband, Peter Bogdanovitch, launched such successful films as ''The Last Picture Show'' and ''What's Up, Doc?'' says that, regrettably, she has not yet seen anyone she considers a really exciting talent among the ranks of women directors.

''But just to keep things in perspective,'' she says, ''don't forget that John Ford made (over 130) films, the first 45 of them were absolutely lousy. And Peter and I plowed through many of Hitchcock's efforts made in England. Most of (the very early ones) were quite dreadful.''

Fay Kanin is optimistic: ''If anyone had told me 10 years ago that there'd be so many women producers today, I wouldn't have believed it. It's just snowballed. I know it'll be harder for directors, but it will come.

How much harder, is the question. For every film that actually gets to the screen, there are 50 to 100 in development that never make it. That means it takes over 100 production executives to make about five films. Becoming a director, therefore, is approximately 20 times more competitive than being a producer. No wonder then, as Fay Kanin admits, ''It's going to be two steps forward and three back for a while, but it will come. Sherry says we'll get to the day when none of us will have 'woman' as (an automatic) prefix stuck in front of our title.''

For women directors that day can't come soon enough.

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Of course, film directing is one of the most exclusive professions in the world, with only a handful of men or women ever getting the opportunity to direct a major motion picture. If it's difficult for men, women feel that for them it sometimes seems nearly impossible.

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The Nun is a 2018 American gothic supernatural horror film directed by Corin Hardy and written by Gary Dauberman, from a story by Dauberman and James Wan. It serves as a spiritual spin-off to The Conjuring 2 and is the fifth installment in The Conjuring shared universe. The film stars Taissa Farmiga, Demián Bichir and Jonas Bloquet, with Bonnie Aarons reprising her role as the Demon Nun, an incarnation of Valak, from The Conjuring 2. The plot follows a Roman Catholic priest and a nun in her novitiate as they uncover an unholy secret in 1952 Romania. It is followed by a sequel , released in 2023.

Warner Bros. Pictures and New Line Cinema announced The Nun, a spin-off film to The Conjuring 2, which had opened five days earlier, with Safran and Wan producing. The initial script for the film was written by David Leslie Johnson. Hardy had signed on to direct The Nun with a new screenplay from Wan and Dauberman. Principal photography began in May 2017 in Bucharest, Romania, and during filming, the set was blessed by an Eastern Orthodox priest.

The Nun was released in the United States on September 7, 2018, by Warner Bros. Pictures. Critics praised its performances and atmosphere, but criticized its weak narrative and inconsistent logic. It grossed $366million worldwide, becoming the highest-grossing film of the series. In 2023, a sequel , was released with Michael Chaves directing and James Wan and Peter returning as co-producers.

In 1952 Romania, two nuns living at the Saint Cartha's monastery are attacked by an unseen evil force. The surviving nun, Sister Victoria, flees from the attacker, a demon appearing as a nun, and hangs herself. Her body is discovered by Frenchie, a villager who transports supplies to the nuns.

The Vatican sends Father Burke with Sister Irene, a nun in her novitiate, to Romania to investigate. The pair meets Frenchie, discover Victoria's body, and take a key from her corpse. Inside the abbey, they meet the Abbess, who informs them that the nuns observe silence during the night so they need to return the next day. That night, Burke is rescued by Irene after being buried alive in the graveyard by the demonic entity.

The next day, Irene and Burke return to the abbey, but only Irene can enter as it is cloistered. She meets the other nuns and learns that they are praying constantly, swapping in shifts, to keep the entity at bay. The abbey was built in the Dark Ages as a castle for the Duke of St. Carta, a powerful aristocrat obsessed with the occult. The duke summoned the demon through a rift in the catacombs but was killed by Christian knights, who sealed the rift with a vial filled with the Blood of Christ. However, the bombings during World War II reopened the rift, unleashing the entity. Burke identifies the demon as Valak and discovers the Abbess has been dead all along.

Irene is attacked by Valak and joins the nuns in prayer to ward it off. When she reunites with Burke and Frenchie, she discovers that none of the nuns she had seen and talked to were real and she had been praying alone. Sister Victoria had in fact been the last nun in that abbey and had sacrificed herself to stop Valak from possessing her.

Theorizing that Valak can only be stopped if they seal the rift again with the blood of Christ from the reliquary the same way the knights did, the trio retrieves the vial with Victoria's key. Irene asks Burke to elevate her status to a professed nun, which he does. In the tunnel, she is possessed by Valak but Frenchie smears the blood of Christ on her face, casting out the demon. Valak starts to drown her in a flooded chamber. Irene, who had kept some of Christ's blood from the vial in her mouth, spits it into the demon's face, banishing it as the rift is sealed. Frenchie resuscitates Irene and reveals his real name is Maurice. Unbeknownst to the others, during the attack, Maurice was possessed by Valak.

Twenty years later at a university seminar in Wakefield, Massachusetts, Carolyn Perron watches as Ed and Lorraine Warren present footage of their attempt to exorcise a possessed older Maurice. Maurice grabs Lorraine, showing her a vision of Ed dying, which initiates the Warrens' investigation of the Perron farmhouse haunting.

Additionally, Patrick Wilson, Vera Farmiga, and Lili Taylor appear in archive footage from The Conjuring as Ed and Lorraine Warren and Carolyn Perron, respectively.

Production

Development

On June 15, 2016, Warner Bros. Pictures and New Line Cinema announced The Nun, a spin-off film to The Conjuring 2, which had opened five days earlier. Peter Safran and James Wan produced. The initial script for the film was written by David Leslie Johnson. On February 17, 2017, it was announced that Corin Hardy had signed on to direct The Nun with a new screenplay from Wan and Gary Dauberman. During the filming of Annabelle: Creation, Safran revealed that The Nun would chronologically come first in The Conjuring Universe, making it a further prequel to The Conjuring series and Annabelle series. He said, "We have a board that we created that has what we hope will ultimately be our series of movies. We have it in chronological order, so we can keep track of where it all happens."

On April 5, 2017, Demián Bichir was cast in the film, as a priest investigating a nun's mysterious suicide. Taissa Farmiga was cast shortly after, as a Roman Catholic nun in her novitiate. Corin Hardy later said that he initially did not want to cast Farmiga due to her being the sister of The Conjuring star Vera Farmiga, but changed his mind when he saw her auditions, "I watched 100 auditions for this role and she had some kind of presence outside of her own body that is evident, and she's phenomenal." Bonnie Aarons was then set to reprise her role as the "Demon Nun" character Valak from The Conjuring 2. Charlotte Hope, Jonas Bloquet, and Ingrid Bisu were subsequently announced to star, rounding out the main cast.

Principal photography for the film began on May 3, 2017, at Castel Film Studios in Bucharest, Romania, with Maxime Alexandre serving as cinematographer. Film director Corin Hardy had a Roman Catholic priest bless the set prior to filming. Scenes were filmed in the Palace of the Parliament building in June, for a fee of €5,000 per hour. Filming also took place at the Corvin Castle in Hunedoara and in Sighișoara, Transylvania. Hardy saw a handprint in the dust while filming in Mogoșoaia, which he believed to be that of a ghost. Hardy announced on his social media accounts that production had wrapped on June 23, 2017, after 38 days.

Post-production

The Nun reportedly went under extensive reshoots. The Curse of La Llorona cinematographer Michael Burgess had worked on the film. Wan also worked as a second unit director under Hardy.

The original musical score for The Nun was composed by Abel Korzeniowski, and was released on August 31, 2018, by WaterTower Music.

On June 13, 2018, a teaser trailer was released. In August 2018, a short advertisement for the film was removed from YouTube due to an unskippable jump scare that violated the platform's "Shocking Content" policies. The studio spent an estimated $90million on prints and advertisements for the film.

Warner Bros. Pictures had initially scheduled The Nun to be released in the United States on July 13, 2018. In February 2018, it was announced that the film's release date would be pushed back to September 7, 2018. The film was released on Digital HD on November 20, 2018, and on Blu-ray and DVD on December 4, 2018. On May 31, 2022, it was released alongside other The Conjuring Universe movies on Blu-ray, excluding The Curse of Llorona.

The Nun grossed $117.4million in the United States and Canada, and $248.6million in other territories, for a total worldwide gross of $366million, against a production budget of $22million, becoming the highest-grossing film in the franchise. Deadline Hollywood calculated the net profit of the film to be $155million, when factoring together all expenses and revenues.

In the United States and Canada, The Nun was released alongside Peppermint and God Bless the Broken Road, and was originally projected to gross $32-37million in its opening weekend. By the week of its release, forecasts had been increased to $36-45million from 3,876 theaters. It made $22.4million on its first day, including $5.4million from Thursday night previews, both the highest such numbers for The Conjuring films. It went on to debut to $53.8million, also marking the best figure of the franchise, and became the first film in almost a month to finish ahead of Crazy Rich Asians at the box office.

In other territories, it currently ranks as the highest-grossing horror film of all time in twelve markets, including Indonesia, Brazil, Romania and UAE; in the Philippines, the film was the highest-grossing horror film of all time until it was surpassed by Insidious: The Red Door in 2023.

Critical response

On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 24% based on 209 reviews, with an average rating of 4.4/10. The site's critical consensus reads, " The Nun boasts strong performances, spooky atmospherics, and a couple decent set-pieces, but its sins include inconsistent logic and narrative slackness." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 46 out of 100, based on 32 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "C" on an A+ to F scale, the lowest of the series.

Several reviewers criticized a lack of consistent narrative logic. Donald Clarke of The Irish Times wrote, "To compare it to a ghost train would be to understate the narrative cohesion that habitually governs those seaside entertainments." Matthew Rozsa for said, "By overly relying on jump scares, The Nun uses a mechanical approach toward instilling fear rather than a more profound understanding of terror." Writing for , Katie Rife compared it to Gothic horror by Mario Bava and Hammer Films, praising the "giddiness" but criticizing the "heavy-handed" exposition and lack of suspense.

The review for the film summarized the spirituality evident in the film: "Evil is real, the movie tells us, but so is God. Spiritual trappings are everywhere. And when in doubt or danger, you can't go wrong with a little prayer." In her review of the film published in the National Catholic Reporter, Sr. Rose Pacatte, a nun belonging to the Daughters of St. Paul, stated "that there are two Catholic theological aspects of this film that are accurate: one is that the devil exists, and the other is that Mary, the Mother of Jesus, will show us the way." Another religious sister, Nicole Reich, stated in her review of the film published on Syfy Wire that if Valak was a real demon, he would never be able to reveal himself while the "sisters were in perpetual adoration ... because the Lord was present".

Sharon Gilham was nominated at the 2018 Fright Meter Awards for Best Costume Design for this film. The film won at the 2019 Golden Trailer Awards for Best Horror Poster.

In August 2017, Wan discussed the possibility of a Nun sequel and what its storyline might entail: "I do know where potentially, if The Nun works out, where The Nun 2 could lead to and how that ties back to Lorraine's story that we've set up with the first two Conjuring s and make it all come full circle."

In April 2019, it was announced by Peter Safran that a sequel was in development. He stated there was a "really fun" storyline planned for the film, and commented that there was an "inevitability to another The Nun movie". Later that month, Akela Cooper signed onto the project as screenwriter, while Safran and James Wan will serve as producers.

On April 26, 2022, Warner Bros. Pictures officially announced the movie as a part of its upcoming slate at the 2022 CinemaCon. The following day, it was announced that Michael Chaves will direct the film. Principal photography began on April 29, 2022. Bonnie Aarons was confirmed to be reprising her role as Valak.

References

External links

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The Nun is a 2018 American gothic supernatural horror film directed by Corin Hardy and written by Gary Dauberman, from a story by Dauberman and James Wan. It serves as a spiritual spin-off to The Conjuring 2 and is the fifth installment in The Conjuring shared universe.

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Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga reprise their roles as real-life demonologists - this time tackling a haunting in working-class England - in James Wan's sequel to his 2013 horror hit.

They're ba-aack. Three years after The Conjuring rattled the multiplex with old-school horror, director James Wan ups the ante with an excellent sequel. His focus again is a documented case from the files of the Warrens of Connecticut, the shockingly white-bread demon fighters whose involvement with the so-called Amityville Horror put them on the pop-culture map - and also made them objects of derision. Wan's expert deployment of genre jolts is no less in evidence this time around, but as he takes his time - perhaps even a bit too much of it - interweaving the Warrens' story with that of the Hodgsons, in the London borough of Enfield, he crafts a deep dive into dread. The film builds to a symphonic climax of heaven-and-hell emotion.

The returning Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson imbue the roles of Lorraine and Ed Warren with the kind of lived-in nuance that illuminates their recent brilliant work on cable series - Bates Motel and Fargo, respectively, shows that traffic in their own brands of horror. Along with an excellent Madison Wolfe, as the 11-year-old girl who's tormented by a restless spirit, or perhaps something worse, they lead an ace cast in a terrifically atmospheric plunge into '70s-vibe melancholy. There'll be nothing shocking about the feature's muscle at the box office.

Where the first film found the Warrens in the relative anonymity of their pre-Amityville days, The Conjuring 2 is set a decade later, when the clairvoyant Lorraine has insisted they take a break from case work. It's not merely an attempt to lay low amid a mounting tide of talk-show scorn; she's shaken to the core by a vision she had during their Amityville investigation - brought to chilling life in the séance sequence that opens the movie. But when the Catholic Church requests their assessment of a troublingly intractable situation in England, they pack their Bible and go.

The screenplay, credited to Chad Hayes, Carey W. Hayes, James Wan and David Leslie Johnson, structures its based-on-true-events drama as a tale of two households in distress, bringing them together after a somewhat distended hour. For single mother Peggy Hodgson (Frances O'Connor) and her four children, life has turned into a constant state of emergency, especially for Janet (Wolfe), who's sleepless from being tossed-about, levitated and frequently possessed by an angry entity who claims he wants his home back.

That home, a council house with crumbling paint and moldering corners, stands as a gloomy embodiment of domestic despair and economic uncertainty; the children's father has abandoned the family, and the Thatcher era has dawned. But even as the eerily unfinished basement fills with water, the upstairs bedroom of Janet and her older sister, Margaret (Lauren Esposito), its walls bedecked with David Soul posters, is alive with tween dreams - until it becomes the locus of the family's nightmare.

The house is an extraordinary creation by production designer Julie Berghoff, one of several key creative collaborators who have worked with Wan on both movies; the others are costume designer Kristin M. Burke, editor Kirk Morri and composer Joseph Bishara, and their contributions are essential to the film's dark power.

With their clear, direct language and compassion, the Warrens arrive as a source of hope and stability for the Hodgsons, including the two youngest (Benjamin Haigh, Patrick McAuley), and their sympathetic neighbors (Maria Doyle Kennedy and Simon Delaney). Open-minded but unconvinced of the nature of the household's troubles, Lorraine and Ed can't dissuade parapsychologist Anita Gregory (Franka Potente) from her aggressive naysaying. (Charges of "children's pranks" still dog the events in Enfield, which also were the subject of a 2015 British TV series.)

The Warrens' straightforward earnestness fuels the film, more so than their Catholicism. Amid the chills and thrills, the childhood anxieties and vulnerability, Wan has made a celebration of the demonologist duo's marriage. (As she was on the first film, Lorraine Warren, 89, is credited as a consultant here, as are three of the Hodgson children.)

In this Conjuring, the haunted-house tropes play second fiddle to something less graspable, even though there's no question that a game of fright is in full, masterful swing. Cinematographer Don Burgess' camera prowls and swoops, Bishara's choral score sends shivers up the spine and Wan uses prolonged silence as well as sounds - creaking floorboards, a screeching backyard swing - to maximum unsettling effect. The director knows how to turn objects, from an antique zoetrope to a ringing telephone, into icons of free-floating evil or, in the case of a crucifix, into tools of redemption.

Yet incidents of Janet's possession, however well realized, grow repetitive. At the same time, Potente's character is curiously sidelined for much of the action, when a more thorough integration of her skepticism into the story would only have enriched it.

Another investigator, on the other hand, enhances the pic in unpredictable ways. Played with compelling ambiguity by Simon McBurney, amateur researcher Maurice Grosse begins as something of a well-meaning nuisance, if also a much-needed supporter. The moment when he reveals, in a few guileless words, what drew him to the paranormal, the movie's stake in matters of love and heartbreak, longing and mourning, is brought into sharp relief.

Distributor: Warner Bros.
Production: A New Line Cinema presentation in association with Ratpac-Dune Entertainment of a Safran Company/Atomic Monster production
Cast: Patrick Wilson, Vera Farmiga, Madison Wolfe, Frances O'Connor, Lauren Esposito, Benjamin Haigh, Patrick Mcauley, Simon McBurney, Maria Doyle Kennedy, Simon Delaney, Franka Potente
Director: James Wan
Screenwriters: Chad Hayes, Carey W. Hayes, James Wan, David Leslie Johnson
Story by: Chad Hayes, Carey W. Hayes, James Wan; based on characters created by Chad Hayes and Carey W. Hayes
Producers: Peter Safran, Rob Cowan, James Wan
Executive producers: Toby Emmerich, Richard Brener, Walter Hamada, Dave Neustadter, Steven Mnuchin
Director of photography: Don Burgess
Production designer: Julie Berghoff
Costume designer: Kristin M. Burke
Editor: Kirk Morri
Composer: Joseph Bishara
Visual effects supervisor: Ariel Velasco Shaw
Casting: Anne Mccarthy, Kellie Roy, Rose Wicksteed
Rated R, 134 minutes

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They're ba-aack. Three years after The Conjuring rattled the multiplex with old-school horror, director James Wan ups the ante with an excellent sequel. His focus again is a documented case from the files of the Warrens of Connecticut, the shockingly white-bread demon fighters whose involvement with the so-called Amityville Horror put them on the pop-culture map - and also made them objects of derision.

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Male and Female Characters In Disney Movies

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Male and Female Characters In Disney Movies

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The conversation over diversity in Hollywood has boiled over this year, as the #OscarsSoWhite boycott--and ensuing reaction to host Chris Rock's Asian-targeted jokes--showed just how many fronts the industry is failing on. Gender inclusivity remains tantamount and new data shows just how little women speak onscreen compared to their male characters

Data scientist Matt Daniels and software developer Hanah Anderson examined the scripts of 8,000 movies, ultimately compiling the number of lines of male and female characters in 2,000 of those films. It's likely the largest undertaking of script analysis ever.

Daniels, who previously helped put together an analysis of movies that pass the Bechdel test, spent six weeks working on this project with Anderson in reaction to the reception of the Bechdel test project.

"The response to that project was that you can't expect The Patriot or Noah's Arc to have at least two women that speak to each other when that didn't happen historically: People were criticizing making gender diverse films because it would involve altering history," says Daniels, talking over the phone. "Yes, it's a valid point, but I thought it was a very small reason why there's no gender inclusivity, though I had no data to back it up. I wanted to get as many films as I could that crossed all genres."

Perhaps the most curious claim they validated: Men speak more than women in Disney's princess movies, an assertion first researched by linguists Carmen Fought and Karen Eisenhauer earlier this year. Daniels and Anderson doubled the sample size to 30 Disney films, including Pixar. Men have the majority of dialogue in 73% of Disney films; even in films whose main characters are female, such as Mulan, the dialogue skews male. According to their research, Mushu, her protector dragon, has 50% more lines than Mulan herself.

Of the films they mapped, the researchers struggled to find a genre that wasn't male-dominated. The dialogue in romantic comedies is on average, 58% male, according to their analysis. 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.
Everything You Need To Know About The Hollywood Pay Gap
Ageism in Hollywood is also proven in the data, which linked IMDB information to scripts. Explains Anderson: "If we look at the age of the actresses at the time of filming each of the films, as the actresses get older the number of lines they are likely to get decreases. But as men get older, they're likely to get more lines," Anderson says.

Actresses only had the most number of lines--they were the lead--in 22% of films. Women are more likely to be in the second place for most number of lines, which occurs in 34% of films, and women occupy at least two of the top three roles in a film only 18% of the time. That same scenario for men occurs in about 82% of films.

The data backed up previous studies published by The Annenberg School at USC's Media, Diversity & Social Change Initiative study. In 2014, only 28.1% of characters in 100 top-grossing films were female. Only 21 of those films featured a female lead or co-lead and none of those films had a female lead over the age of 45.

Since the data is sorted by actor, it offers future potential for analysis: age, ethnicity, and so on. Head over to Polygraph to read more.

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Men Have More Lines Than Women In Disney Movies, Rom-Coms And Every Other Genre

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The conversation over diversity in Hollywood has boiled over this year, as the #OscarsSoWhite boycott--and ensuing reaction to host Chris Rock's Asian-targeted jokes--showed just how many fronts the industry is failing on.

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How Female Characters Are Under-Represented In Films

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How Female Characters Are Under-Represented In Films

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The latest study on women in front of the camera finds that female characters are still significantly under-represented on the big screen.

The numbers underscore why pics like " Gravity" ( pictured), toplined by a Sandra Bullock, remain a rarity at the multiplexes. Female characters accounted for only 15% of protagonists in the 100 highest-grossing domestic films of 2013, according to the study "It's a Man's (Celluloid) World" by veteran researcher Martha Lauzen, exec director of the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State U.
FULL REPORT: "It's a Man's (Celluloid) World"
The femme protagonist stats are up 4% from 2011, the last time the survey was conducted, but down 1% from 2002.

Female actors accounted for 30% of all speaking parts in the survey, which has examined some 7,000 screen characters across 300 pics since 2002. Only about 13% of 2013's top 100 pics featured an equal number of female and male characters.

"Overall, we have seen little movement in the numbers of female protagonists and females as speaking characters over the last decade," Lauzen said. "Moreover, female characters are less likely than males to have identifiable goals or to be portrayed as leaders of any kind ."

The numbers for minority females are even lower. African-American female representation on screen climbed to 14%, from 8% in 2011, but down from 15% in 2012. Hispanic characters were flat fro 2011 at 5% and up from 4% in 2002. Asian-American female characters are few and far between, accounting for 3% in 2013, down from 5% in 2011.

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Study: Female Characters Under-Represented in Movies

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The latest study on women in front of the camera finds that female characters are still significantly under-represented on the big screen. The numbers underscore why pics like "Gravity" (pictured), toplined by a Sandra Bullock, remain a rarity at the multiplexes.

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How are women represented in the action movie genre

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How are Women Represented in the Action Movie Genre? Empowered Female Role Models or Highly Sexualised Chicks with Guns? Introduction This essay will be lookin...

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Is it a bird, is it a plane, or is it a feminist whining again about fairness and the patriarchy? Seems like each and every time an action movie dawns some feminist somewhere starts harping about how we need more female heroes. Why should men have all the fun, they ask? Why is it just MEN who are saving the day? Why do MEN get to be the crushing skulls? Feminists will insist WOMEN should be doing these things too. Because equality and "strong women role models." And women are awesome badasses who can totally cream a dude and fight crime with their fists and girl kicks.

Hey, who doesn't love girl kicks? They're fun, right? The above scene from Serenity is one of my favorites, mostly because I love violence and kicking. Realistically, though, this slight female would've been taken out by any number of these guys, for though her technique is fancy, she's a wispy waif who probably buys double zero size leggings in the junior section. Probably can't even squat 150 lbs. Sorry, chicky.

Here's about the time women, some of whom aren't even feminists, are making their "resting bitch face" an active one. You're scowling at me from behind your glowing screen. You're judging me. How dare I say women make lousy action heroes. What about Ripley from Alien? Sarah Connor from Terminator? Or the Mary Sue of Mary Sues Rey from Star Wars: The Force Awakens? Heck, what about that chick in the last Mission Impossible movie who was, let's admit it, pretty cool? WHY CAN'T WOMEN BE ACTION HEROES!!!???

Because men were action heroes first, and women insisting they do it too, for the sake of "equality" is pathetic copying. It's actual gender appropriation. By insisting women should do what men did first, for the simple reason of just... "we want to do it to because the men did it" undermines the base idea of feminism. Bear with me for a second and allow me to explain with more of my words.

Do I think women shouldn't be heroic? Of course not. Women are heroes. But they're heroic in their own ways. They don't need to copy men to be heroes. Allow me time to lay out my case.

Most women aren't as physically strong as most men. Therein lies the greatest reason women cannot be credible, believable action heroes. ACTION HEROES. As in being heroes via their action through their raw, physical strength and a capacity for swift violence. All of which are prerequisitesfor action hero status. To you feminists who want to make women action heroes: stop it. You're actually doing women a great disservice and reinforcing a horrible and unattainable goal - in order for a woman to be "heroic" and a "strong woman" she has to have the physical strength of a man and exact physical violence on men. Cropping your hair short and wearing men's clothes isn't the same thing.

Simply stated, Hollywood's formula: strong women=manly women.

See a problem here? The idea that in order to be heroic a woman needs to be manly. The notion reinforces the stereotype that in order to be elite and noteworthy, in order to be great, a woman should have superior physical strength. The physically dominating badass woman who destroys men with roundhouse kicks and right hooks, while entertaining to watch, is also the model female action heroes are based upon. Which kind of undercuts the entire feminist agenda in one sweeping motion, doesn't it?

In trying to make women more "heroic" and "strong" a bunch of MEN sitting at their desks and writing these "strong women" have made their chicks more like dudes. In strength alone. You'll notice many of these super strong women are still petite and girly, with small waists and giant knockers. Know why? Their first role isn't to be "heroic." It's to be a sex symbol. They serve as a male fantasy.

A basic requirement of action heroes is their hero-complex, the need to save people. Be rescuers. Charge into danger and save the day. Sorry not sorry, but men more naturally fit for that role than women.
OMG, HOW DARE YOU! WOMEN ARE HEROES TOO. SHUT UP!!!
I know, the nerve of me to say women aren't as physically strong as men and most do not have the desire to rush into danger to save people. I suck at life and I'll quit all the things.

Just kidding, no.

I'm not saying a woman can't save the day or rescue someone, but women are heroic in other ways besides the physical, and to insist women must save people the exact same way MEN save people is still reinforcing the idea women should be more like men. And you feminists who cut your hair and dress like men? Yeah, you're also guilty. It's a rejection of femininity in favor of masculinity.

See the theme?

Here's another manly hammer drop on you. Men like saving women. Women like being saved by men. Men do not like being physically saved by women. Women do not like being physically saved by women. You may not like that truth. You may hate the idea that men get to be physical action heroes. But I'm not alone here. The market, on the whole, has rejected the idea of female action heroes in staring roles. Female action heroes are only marketable if they're part of an ensemble surrounded by men (see Avengers above), not when they're sold as the sole protagonist (see the failing Supergirl numbers).

Social justice warrior agendas cannot trump human nature. As much as they'd like to.

Storybooks have been hitting this tale for hundreds of years, and recently feminists have been trying to cut this one down like they cut their boxy man hairdos. MEN are the ones who dash into danger and save. They're physically more capable and mentally more wired to do so. Fire-fighters, police officers and soldiers are male-dominated for those aforementioned facts. I know you feminists are out there throwing tantrums because I dare suggest women aren't physically as strong and men like to be heroes. Exceptions to every rule? Sure, but we're not talking exceptions here, we're talking the rule. Just like there are some feminists who shave their armpits.

The great irony of the modern feminist movement is this: they're trying their darnedest to do exactly what men have already done. By wanting to be something which has been dominated by men (action heroes) feminists are pathetically saying "ME TOO, I WANT THAT TOO!" rather than forging their own heroic paths. They're copying. Worst of all, they're copying men - usually strong, white men, the biggest of cardinal sins to the feminist left.
Look at all these male heroes. Women should be superheroes too. Let's copy the men and call it EQUALITY.
Sameness. It's what's for dinner, served up cold and moldy by feminists to the rest of the world (read Why Modern 'Feminism' Sucks, and I'm not One of Them).

The dirty little secret though is I'm right. Men make better action heroes for all the reasons already listed, and audiences prefer to see men as heroes saving the day. Call it gender roles, call it sexism, call it whatever you like. Angelina Jolie may think she's a badass woman, but she's too small to beat up other women, much less other men. Our suspension of disbelief has its limits.

Could some women beat up men? Sure. Some women. But even a physically strong woman, who might weigh upwards of 160 pounds, still couldn't out muscle a 220 pound man. See the difference?

Thus ends my explanation on why women make crappy action heroes. But here's a different angle for those of you screaming at me for daring to say something true. Women can be heroes, but not in the same way men are heroes. Because men and women are different! To suggest the only way to be heroic is to be physical is, well, sexist. Which was my entire point. You feminists are being sexist against women and their innate abilities if you think women should be heroes by being like men!

Strong women exist, they're real, but they're not like men. Women have incredible instincts to protect, to nurture and defend. Women are fearless when protecting something or someone they love. They're passionate about just causes. They champion for justice. Women are cunning and sly. Heck, look no further than the original feminists of yore (not the modern feminists of blue armpit hair) to find brave women who advocated for positive change. Without roundhouse kicks.

Who are some of these fictional female heroes who excel at saving without cracking skulls? Karen Page from Netflix's Daredevil for one. She's brave, smart, gutsy. She's strong-willed. She is a hero through resourcefulness, cleverness, and provides the hero (Daredevil or The Punisher) with information required to take the enemies out.

She also has zero problem speaking her mind to the men.

A similar hero is Harry Potter's Hermione Granger for much of the same reasons. She relies on knowledge and logic to solve problems. Through her cleverness, strong will, and learned skills, she saves the hero, sometimes from himself, through all seven books.

If you're paying attention, if you're willing to see past the obvious, male action heroes we all know and love turn to WOMEN in their moments of weakness. They turn to WOMEN for much needed guidance and support on how to save the day. These big tough men who save, who dash into danger, need women with gumption and strength of character, to save them.

Action hero saves world => woman saves action hero. I'm pretty okay with that.
~Written by Courtney Kirchoff

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Dear Feminist Hollywood: Stop Trying to Make Female Action Heroes a Thing...

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Is it a bird, is it a plane, or is it a feminist whining again about fairness and the patriarchy? Seems like each and every time an action movie dawns some feminist somewhere starts harping about how we need more female heroes. Why should men have all the fun, they ask?

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.....The technology of movies is a topic we have briefly touched upon in class and on the blogs. A post by Sugar Spice brought to my attention the writings of Laura Mulvey, the film theorist who first came up with the idea of a male gaze in cinema. After reading her essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", I began to look at the film industry in a new light. Today, there is definitely an inequality between men and women working in the film industry. In fact, out of the 250 top grossing films of 2007, only 15% of the directors, writers, executive producers, cinematographers, and editors were women. ("Statistics...") But how did this inequality come to be? It is my theory that since the beginnings of the film industry, when males completely dominated the important production jobs, the male gaze has become a necessary visual narrative tool; and because of this unconscious acceptance of the male gaze, these techniques have become standard for all directors, regardless of their gender. The camera became, in many ways, gendered independently from the gender of the director. From here, I believe that the assumption is made that Hollywood is a male-dominated industry, because the mainstream movies being produced are much more male-friendly than female-oriented. This, in turn, has led to Hollywood actually being a male-dominated industry; and while the percentage of women working in high-level jobs has increased over time, it hasn't been by much. The early gendering of the camera has led to a very gendered film industry world today.

.....In the Fiction and Film course I took in high school, all of the classic movies we watched to learn about successful camera work and ideal technique were directed by males: "Psycho", "Apocalypse Now", and "The Graduate" are three examples. All three of these movies have a male protagonist. Because of this, these movies often include shots that show the world from a male perspective, and as a result of this all three display some element of voyeurism. The shower scene in "Psycho", the scene with the Playboy girls in "Apocalypse Now", and the way Mrs. Robinson is filmed in "The Graduate" all frame the women as Mulvey describes: "woman as object the combined gaze of spectator and all the male protagonists in the film. She is isolated, glamorous, on display, sexualised." (Mulvey p 12) The camera becomes the male gaze, and films the woman in a way that uses her as an object of the male's perception of his world. Not one of the movies we watched showed the male characters through a female gaze.

.....In my experience with classic and essential films, Mulvey's male gaze is responsible for much of the effectiveness of the visual storytelling methods. When these films were accepted as the epitome of visual storytelling, the methods used to make these movies were accepted as canon to good filmmaking. There are definitely examples of the male gaze being used in movies today, and I believe this is partially due to the fact that there were almost no women working in important artistic positions in early Hollywood. Male directors, cinematographers, and editors were the ones whose visions were being realized. Through this monopoly on what was seen as great cinema, the male directors gendered the camera. The male gaze that worked for these earlier movies became a standard technique, and became the status quo for camera work.

.....Today, the male gaze of the camera has clearly persisted. Some excellent examples of this are Sophia Coppola's films. She is the only American woman to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director, for her film "Lost in Translation". There are many shots in this movie that film that show Charlotte, played by Scarlet Johansson, in a way that emphasizes her as a woman being an object of someone's desire. This movie has no narrator and is filmed from no specific character's perspective. However, despite the fact that there is no real narrative justification for this, the male gaze is clearly at work in this movie. Our first introduction to Charlotte is a shot of her lying around in her underwear, filmed in a way that presents her as an object of attraction. In contrast, the other main character of the movie, played by Bill Murray, is never filmed in the same way that Johansson's character is. This movie, despite being directed by a female director, shows instances of the male gaze, and it is not the only female-helmed project that does this. Judging from the success of "Lost in Translation", this male gaze technique persists as an effective method of storytelling, and it has become so popular that even female directors employ it when there is no real narrative compulsion to do so.

.....The statistics I presented in the beginning of this paper show that there truly is a dominance of males today in important artistic and production jobs. Because movies have catered to the male gaze for so long, it makes sense that males have continued to dominate the industry. The acceptance of the male gaze by most makes it easier for a male director to tell his story, whereas a female director must either work within the parameters of this accepted male gaze or work hard to escape it and find another way to tell their story. Women working in Hollywood are still seen as breaking some sort of stereotype, and this is because they are traditionally viewed as the other or the object in the movies produced by the industry. In an interview with Stephanie Allain, vice-president of production at Columbia Pictures, she explains what it is like to be working in a "boy's world":

"When you try to be one of the guys, you lose. You're not one of the guys. You have to celebrate who you are. And that's what I try to do. It's a tightrope. You do have a responsibility to make movies that are commercial, and you do try to tow the studio line. But I do get upset when I see women portrayed as objects; that's not the kind of movie I want to pour a year of my life into." (Weintraub)

.....Many people suggest that the way to fix the problem is to simply hire more women into these positions; however, it is clear from Allain's quote that this in no way completely solves the problem of unequal representation. Hiring more women may have an effect, but there is no evidence that this solves the problem. (Lovey) I am skeptical that the simplest and most effective solution to this problem is to just hire more women to direct movies. Clearly, industry standards have been set, both artistically and professionally, with a distinctly male undertone. Mulvey describes this in her article, saying that "it faces us with the ultimate challenge: how to fight the unconscious structured like a language...while still caught within the language of the patriarchy. There is no way in which we can produce an alternative out of the blue" (Mulvey, 6) I think this quote also applies to the way in which the films today are still embedded with the male gaze. The technique has become an unconscious aspect of film, and this male bias in the films themselves have carried over into the employment statistics of women in the industry itself.

.....If we want to see a change in the way the film industry handles women, we must look beyond the accepted male gaze of the camera and begin to accept new ways of using the camera as a technology of storytelling. There are women today who do phenomenal work on movies that break the traditional confines of narrative cinema, but these movies are almost never given recognition for their excellence. These independent and less mainstream movies must be given a chance to be seen by more people, and thus add new methods to the library of what is possible and effective.

WORKS CITED

Lovey, Claire. "Women representing women." MediaEd. 2004 <http://www.mediaed.org.uk/posted_documents/womenrep.html>. Accessed 18 March 2009.

Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema." Screen Autumn 1975: 6-18. (accessed through a link provided by SugarSpice in her blog posting)

"Statistics on the State of Women in Hollywood." Women & Hollywood. <http://womenandhollywood.com/statistics-on-women-and-hollywood/> Accessed 12 March 2009.

Weinraub, Bernard. "The Talk of Hollywood; Women Criticizing Women's Film Roles." New York Times 2 June 1993

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It's A Man's World - The Male Gaze and the Film Industry

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The technology of movies is a topic we have briefly touched upon in class and on the blogs. A post by Sugar Spice brought to my attention the writings of Laura Mulvey, the film theorist who first came up with the idea of a male gaze in cinema.

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Girl enters coffee shop. Orders intricate-sounding latte. Rushes off toward very important meeting only to run smack into a tall, strapping man casually strolling through the door. Their eyes lock, coffee flies all over his white T-shirt, and 90 minutes later they're walking down the aisle as the film rolls to credits.

Just some harmless rom-com fun, right? It's actually a lot more complicated.

"[Romance] is a really rich and complex genre that is often written off as chick flicks, like they don't mean anything," Dr. Michele Schreiber, an Emory University professor and author of American Postfeminist Cinema: Women, Romance and Contemporary Culture, told The Huffington Post.

"I think [women] recognize the degree to which once the narrative is recognized as a romance, it brackets off or eliminates [attention toward anything else]," she said. "You're so focused on that romance narrative resolving itself that it brackets off any other things that you might notice or appreciate or think through about that woman's life."

Narratives that focus on a woman's love life to the exclusion of everything else are pervasive (just run a simple Bechdel Test for evidence). And with a notable lack of other types of female-led arcs, they make up the vast majority of representations of women's lives we see on screen.

HuffPost Entertainment spoke with Schreiber about the impact of romance narratives, the state of women in the film and TV industries and how increased representation is essential to progress.
Romantic comedies promise a false fantasy.
While Schreiber doesn't think viewers are duped into believing rom-com narratives wholeheartedly, she does say they can influence real-life expectations. Some films subtly convey the idea that rom-com fantasies can happen by showing characters who watch and comment on romantic comedies within the films then achieve their own happy endings. Even the protagonist of 2011 film "Friends with Benefits" -- who openly scoffs at the rom-com within the rom-com -- ends up living out an almost identical narrative by the movie's end.

"First they laugh at that film as the romance film within the film," Schreiber said. "But then the film that they're in eventually resolves itself in a similar fashion."

But in real life, those movie endings are rare. According to Schreiber, evidence that the rom-com fantasy hinders real women's relationships can be found in popular self help books.

"It's really remarkable how many self help books aimed at women talk about how toxic romantic comedies are, and how they need to rid themselves of the ideas of romance and men that they see in romantic comedies if they want to find long-lasting real life love," said Schreiber.
Romantic narratives need complex female characters, not perfect ones.

Image Credit: CBS

"Strong female character" has become a buzz phrase in conversations about improving two-dimensional representations of women in film and television. But Schreiber (similarly to Sophia McDougall at New Statesman) stresses the need for complication rather than perfection.

"I think one of the misconceptions that a lot of people have about feminist critiques of mass media is that we're looking for all positive," Schreiber said. "But I think what we see is positive is complexity. We want complexity and diversity. We want women characters that reflect the complexity of actual women. Not all women are awesome and positive, you know?"

As Tasha Robinson wrote at The Dissolve, adding so-called positive female characters who don't actually have substance into films isn't helping to solve the lack of representation. "[It] isn't actually a feminist statement, or an inclusionary statement, or even a basic equality statement," Robinson wrote, "if the character doesn't have any reason to be in the story except to let filmmakers point at her on the poster and say 'See? This film totally respects strong women!'"
The films from what many would consider the "golden age of the rom-com" (which birthed "When Harry Met Sally" and "You've Got Mail") contained conflicting messages about women's lives.
Schreiber groups romantic films ("primarily comedy but also dramas") from the early '80s through, roughly, the first decade of the 21st century, into a cycle which she says conveyed conflicting messaging about women's lives.

"I don't think any of this is conscious on the part of the filmmakers, but I think nobody knows what to do with women after feminism," Schreiber said. "There's this desire to tell these timeless romantic stories, but to tell them in that era you need a woman who has benefited from feminism, who is a career woman who has interests and things going on in her life other than her romantic relationship."

"Those films contain a lot of potential contradictions," she continued. "Which isn't to say that feminist politics are somehow in opposition to romantic love. I'm just saying that to tell a woman that she can be independent and professionally successful and put off long-term partnership for a long time, and childbearing if she chooses to have children, but then put that woman in a traditional romantic narrative is kind of telling two stories at the same time."

While Schreiber believes that particular cycle is over, she's concerned that the contradictory representation may be followed up by no representation at all. "I don't think you're necessarily seeing [traditional romantic comedies] replaced by a lot of female-driven films of any genre," she said.
The film industry should be taking cues from TV.
To see more complex, realistic renderings onscreen, representation behind-the-scenes needs to change. "More diversity overall -- in gender and in race and ethnicity and sexual preference -- that can only be a good thing," Schreiber said.

The current TV landscape is a step in the right direction, as increased numbers of women working as writers, directors, and show runners have led to well-rounded female characters on shows like "Girls," "The Good Wife," "Broad City" and "Scandal."

"Over the last twenty years you've seen more television with the proliferation of basic cable and premium cable. There are more creative opportunities available," she said. "I don't want to suggest I think that its easy for women to break into television. It's still largely a male-dominated medium. But I think that obviously you're seeing more representation of female creative personnel in TV than film."

It's also easier for television shows to more fully incorporate non-romantic elements of women's lives into story lines, and explore conflicts in romance narratives that wouldn't fit into a traditional romantic comedy.

"The narrative of television shows take place over such an extended period of time that [relationships] do [resolve], but it takes a really long time so that happy ending takes on different meaning," Schreiber said. "Sometimes it seems like a relationship on a television show has come to its solution, but it's not necessarily the ending because something can come into play that can disrupt."

Where Schreiber does see hope for the film industry is in new production companies, such as Reese Witherspoon's Pacific Standard, which focus on bringing women's stories -- only some of which include romance -- to the screen.

"[Witherspoon] was very successful this year," Schreiber noted, "doing both 'Wild' and 'Gone Girl,' so I think the fact that there are people doing that in film, and doing well at that in film, hopefully will bring good future prospects."
All images Getty unless otherwise noted.

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How Romantic Comedies Are Failing Women (And How To Fix It)

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Girl enters coffee shop. Orders intricate-sounding latte. Rushes off toward very important meeting only to run smack into a tall, strapping man casually strolling through the door. Their eyes lock, coffee flies all over his white T-shirt, and 90 minutes later they're walking down the aisle as the film rolls to credits.

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The representation of women in horror films

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I am researching into how women are represented in horror films. Often women are represented as vulnerable, naïve and powerless (with a few exceptions) or as hypersexual damsels in distress, Mark Jancovich, "it may be useful to make a distinction between the beauty and the beast in the horror film" (Horror, The Film Reader) suggesting...

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Traditionally women are represented in horror films as the damsel in distress and are usually being attacked by the killer because they have committed a sinful act. This idea is supported by the website "bellaonline.com" as they say that "Horror films, and the slasher subgenre, are famous for portraying women as hypersexual damsels in distress who are usually murdered within the first five minutes as punishment for their indiscretions...". The stereotype of the dumb blonde is supported by the book "Studying the media an introduction" by Tim O'Sullivan and co say that "the dumb blonde stereotype might include: blondness, seductive body language, strong makeup"- page 129. This is supported in "Scream" by the character tatum Riley who gets killed in the most sterotypical way.

This is supported by the video below where a sinful Tatum gets killed.

Women are traditionally represented as the victims and men represented as the monster and hero. This was how women used to be treated before women had equal rights to men; so that was how they were portrayed in horror films. The book "Men, Women and Chainsaws" by Carol J Clover supports this "The functions of monster and hero are far more frequently represented by males and the function of the victim far more garishly by females. The fact that female monsters and female heroes, when they do appear are masculine in dress and behaviour and often in name and that male victims are shown in feminine postures at the moment of their extremity..." - Page 12. This extract explains the typical representation of men and women in horror films and the roles they have; that men are the heroes and killers and that women are the victims and only the hero or killer if they show masculine attributes. This is supported in "Scream" by having strong female roles whom when are not damsels in distress are out fighting to find the killer, in a previously male role. When gale rescues Sidney she is wearing a rather masculine looking leather trench coat and it stanced very dominantly. This is an example of a woman in a male hero role.

Horror films also tend to follow the same narrative structure of a male killer on the rampage that kills his victims one by one until he is killed by the remaining female victim. This is also supported by the book "Men, Women and Chainsaws" by Carol J Clover "A phychokiller who slashes to death a string of mostly female victims, one by one, until they are subdued or killed, usually by the one girl who has survived." - Page 21. This suggests that when a female character is the hero and survives the killer to kill or capture the killer herself that women are represented as strong and powerful and therefore that women have empowerment over men; which is feminist ideology. This happens in the film "Scream" when the character Gail Weathers shoots the killer as well as Sidney the main female character manages to overpower the killer for a period of time. This is a modern ideology of how women should be represented in horror films, which has been influenced by feminism as well as modern culture. The narrative structure of horror films is parodied in "Scream". This is supported by the website http://www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk "Scream also revitalized the genre by making the very conventions of the genre the subject of the film... The film's parodic double-coding allows Scream to be both a horror-film-proper and a meta-film about horror films, seeking to "incorporate" the text's first "critical commentary" within its narrative structure. This technique of revealing the narrative structure of horror allowed audiences in on the secret of the narrative. The film "Scream" by revealing the narrative structure "changed the genre and industry".

However now with the influence of feminism and modern ideologies women in reality are more successful therefore the representation of women has changed in horror films to intelligent women who try to figure out who the killer is and stop them such as Gail and Sidney rather then be overwhelmed with fear and get killed as they stereotypically were before. Feminism has also influenced the change in ideology of the representation of women. This is supported by the book "Image and Representation" by Nick Lacey which says "feminism is an example of an emergent ideology that forced the dominant ideology to adapt but not to change fundamentally"- page 104. This suggests that feminism changed popular culture to think of women in more dominant roles and so their function in horror has changed.

The realism of "Scream"; a psycho killer changes to the surreal in "The Ring"; a supernatural child killer. This suggests that psycho killers are being replaced with the supernatural killer and therefore the horror genre itself is changing. This is due to the influence of modern culture.

This is supported by "mtv.com" This website says that "Horror films tend to be particularly popular in times of political unrest, economic depression, war, terrorism, all kinds of domestic strife...It seems that people need an escape, so they go to horror films to exorcise a lot of this angst that they have ... These films put a picture to our deepest fears and allow us to deal with these fears from the safety of our theater seats." This suggests that our culture influences how what we see as horror and with each new modern terror our ideology of horror changes and therefore when a tragic event occurs then what society fears is what we perceive as horror.

Women were traditionally represented as the damsels in distress such as in "Psycho" who were being punished for their sins by men; this reflected our culture at the time. However with the influence of feminism and our new ideology of powerful women our modern culture no longer sees women as victims but as strong women in both hero and killer characters such as in "Jennifer's Body". The horror genre itself is influenced by what our culture perceives as horrific; war, terrorism, global issues, political issues all affect what society fears. This has what has changed the horror genre and why women are represented now no longer as the victims but strong, powerful heroes and even killers because women have more power in society; which is the fear of traditional anti-feminists. Whereas a global fear is terrorism which is why the horror films today such as "Saw 2" focus less on male and female representation and more on working together to escape from the fear itself; of death.

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Traditionally women are represented in horror films as the damsel in distress and are usually being attacked by the killer because they have committed a sinful act. This idea is supported by the website "bellaonline.com" as they say that "Horror films, and the slasher subgenre, are famous for portraying women as hypersexual damsels in distress...

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Representation of Women In Quentin Tarantino Films

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Representation of Women In Quentin Tarantino Films

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Kill Bill cont.
It was rumoured that Tarantino had a fascination/ admiration for Uma, and this is reflected in the way in which the camera lingers on her.

"Some of the violence perpetrated against the women characters has an uncomfortably voyeuristic feel to it... feel more like depictions of his own sexual fantasies....He professes a love for 'strong women' ..."
- Online Article form -Women and News' (source 9)

My focus film- Kill Bill Pt1 & 2

Kill Bill stars Uma Thurman as 'The Bride' in revenge for her former Boss and lover who attempted to kill her.

Uma's character completely
subverts
all typical representations of women.
About Tarantino.
Tarantino was born on March 27th 1963, in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Quentin was raised by his mother alone; could this be a link to the way in which he views women?
The Representation of Women In Quentin Tarantino Films

Kill Bill-pts 1 &2 (2003)
Jackie Brown (1997)
Death Proof (2007)

"This movie does not take place in the universe that we live in. In this world women are not the weaker sex...This could be taken as anti-feminist in that he is inferring that in the "real world" women are the weaker sex...perception that women are the weaker sex, which is true."

"Her behavior ranges from stereotypically feminine as a blushing bride, to a caricature of masculinity as a sword-wielding assassin...female when she wants to charm men and male when she wants to intimidate aggressors...essentially feminist."
-Online article (source 8)
Jackie Brown
Jackie Brown's character is a very strong woman, who plays against stereotype in which she works in crime as opposed to being a victim of it. Although in some ways in this film she is victimised, she is undoubtedly a very tough character.

"Grier is outstanding as the titular minor leaguer about to move into the big time, delivering an utterly convincing portrait of a woman who finds strength through desperation" -Empire Magazine. (source 10)

Death Proof
The synopsis of 'Death Proof' follows two women who are stalked at different times, by a scarred stuntman who uses "death proof" cars to execute his murders.
Death Proof was the second part of Grindhouse (source 12)

"A woman's bum in extremely small and revealing shorts"
-Online article from 'The F Word' (source 6)

Low angle shots allow the audience to look up at Abernathy (Rosario Dawson) and admire her body and the way she moves.

She appears to have full control over him; weakening him with her sexuality

Controversy
. Is Tarantino being sexist, or empowering the women in this film?
Conclusion
In this scene we see Jackie Brown in full control of Gangster and Boss, Ordell Robbie (Samuel L. Jackson) as she holds him at gun point.

Male characteristics in her. (source 8)

Its difficult to conclude the way in which Tarantino represents women
Its clear there is great controversy over Tarantino's films

"Many of his female characters are strong, empowered women...the girly girls all die, and the strong women live." - online blog. (source 7)

-Biography (source 15)
Clip from burried
The male Gaze
Laura Mulvey John Schroeder

"Film has been called an instrument of the
male gaze, producing representations of
women, the good life & sexual fantasy from
a male point of view."

-sources 14 & 16
Clip from jackie brown; feet
"Jackie Brown is a complex character attempting to negotiate the power differentials in the United states.....To their male gaze, Jackie Brown is not a complex person, she is simply a commodity with no use value." -Feminism in the study of religion (source 11)
"Among the 100 highest-grossing movies at the U.S. box office in 2012, the study reported, 28.4% of speaking characters were female. That's a drop from 32.8% three years ago"

"When they are on-screen, 31.6% of women are shown wearing sexually revealing clothing, the highest percentage in the five years the USC researchers have been studying the issue..."

-LA times (source 5)

"If you want to portray somebody moving, you show their feet walking..." (source 11)
Is Tarantino Sexist, or does he empower women?

"One of the reasons I like Tarantino more than I used
to is that his women's roles have been getting stronger" -Guardian article (source 4)

Camera is more Static
Audience feel uncomfortable & claustrophobic.
"Tarantino shoots the scene so as to emphasise Louis' uneasy awareness of Melanie's body, with close-ups of her foot, adorned with rings, next to his drink, and shots that emphasise his view of her bare legs. Ordell's relation to the spectacle of Melanie's body is to ignore it, to treat Melanie only as a waitress or servant."

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The Representation of Women In Quentin Tarantino Films

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Kill Bill cont.It was rumoured that Tarantino had a fascination/ admiration for Uma, and this is reflected in the way in which the camera lingers on her. "Some of the violence perpetrated against the women characters has an uncomfortably voyeuristic feel to it...

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33 Feminist Films Every Girl Should See in Her Lifetime: Buzzfeed - How many have you seen?

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We recently asked members of the BuzzFeed Community to tell us what film made them feel proud to be a woman. Here's what they said.

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Feminist Film Criticism in the 21st Century

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The detailed work of film criticism may seem an outdated form of scholarship. Yet when engaged through a feminist perspective, film criticism notices the scandal of women's marginalization. It responds to that marginalisation in multiple ways-in detail, in outline, through engagement with history or writing about the contemporary moment.

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Over the last year, we've seen women in ad campaigns dispel negative stereotypes (#LikeAGirl by Always); sweat it out in the gym ( This Girl Can - Sport England); stop being self-critical (Dove again); talk about periods (Hello Flo) and quit saying 'sorry' (Pantene). Oh and, a personal favourite, seen Potty-Mouthed Princesses Drop F-Bombs for Feminism, dreamed up by fashion brand FCKH8.

Zumba: This Girl Can style...

Welcome to the world of femvertising: where the hard sell has been 'pinkwashed' and replaced by something resembling a social conscience, and where advertisers are falling over each other to climb on board the feminist bandwagon.

And this week - we had the latest chapter of #LikeAGirl from Always.

On the face of it, this might seem like a giant step forward for the industry. But is it as heartwarming as it seems? Aren't we still just being sold to? Surely half the world's population can't be 'having a moment'.

"There's been a groundswell towards brands telling the truth and getting behind a cause," Mediacom CEO Karen Blackett tells me. "Once upon a time ads were aspirational. But now they have to tell real stories, based on what we all experience".

Roisin Donnelly, brand director at Proctor and Gamble agrees. "Adverts now have to reflect our reality and the future we want. That means role models for women."

So rather than objectifying women and selling them idealised versions of themselves, the advertisers are cottoning on to the idea that honesty sells too.

A still from the new feminist Always campaign

It's what women want. Last year, lifestyle website SheKnows surveyed more than 600 women about femvertising. A staggering 91 per cent believed that how women are portrayed in ads has a direct impact on girls' self-esteem, and 94 per cent said that depicting women as sex symbols is harmful.

It also showed that femvertising can pay - half (52 per cent) had purchased a product because they liked how the ads potrayed women.

Blackett suggests the move towards honesty in advertising is, in part, down to the recession. But I think the answer is much simpler: social media.

Women have long held the spending power. Now, through social media, we've found a place to communicate that. We can hold advertisers - and anyone else perceived not to be meeting our needs - directly accountable (think Protein World's 'beach body ready' billboards).

We can expose the realities of female life (#EverydaySexism) and rally behind causes via hashtag activism (think #bringbackourgirls #iammalala #yesallwomen). We can go into battle to see Jane Austen out on the tenner or to defend the victims of Gamergate.

Here is a place where the soft power - read influence - of women has never been more apparent.

Our online presence is dominant ( we use social media more, and we do 62 per cent of all online sharing).

We also have increasing power in the workplace - British boards now have 23.5 per cent women according to the latest Lord Davies report.

Sheryl Sandberg

Combine the influence of Facebook and Twitter with the potency of Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In message and you're starting to see how we got here.

Little wonder that advertisers feel they have to get on board.

The latest burst of femvertising began with two near simultaneous campaigns last summer; Sport England's This Girl Can and #LikeAGirl from Always.

Jennie Price, head of Sport England, tells me: "For a long time we'd wanted to tackle the gender gap, but we felt it was important to start with the women and not the sport. There was no point sticking a skirt on something seen as a 'male activity' to make it seem feminine.

"Turns out, other people were thinking the same thing".

This Girl Can, which shows 'real women' (a phrase I don't much like - who isn't real?) putting themselves through their paces. They sweat, grunt, grimace and push themselves to the limit as they exercise. It's a powerful message and one that's also had plenty of ad-world back slapping (along with #LikeAGirl it won a coveted glass lion at the Cannes Lion ad awards earlier this month).

The starting point for the campaign was research: through talking to women came the realisation that they weren't doing sport out of fear of being judged, even though 75 per cent wanted to.

Always' #LikeAGirl campaign was born from a similar place - studies done by the brand that showed a significant drop-off in girls' confidence during puberty.

The original video, released last June, showed girls and women reacting in different ways to the phrase 'like a girl'. Its latest instalment, launched this week, tackles confidence and those things girls are told they can and can't do.

Here then are two ad campaigns that, on the surface, seem to eschew the hard sell in favour of social improvement (after all it's hard to measure whether a soft campaign is actually encouraging girls to buy more pads).

The advertisers asked women and girls how they felt and - instead of feeding them back what they think they wanted - chose to portray what they'd been told: our deepest insecurities (some have criticised such ads for knocking women down so they can build them up again).

Of course, we're still being sold to and that's the rub. Question is: do we care? As long as the right messages are reaching audiences, can we overlook how they get there?

While Pantene's 'sorry' advert was admirable, it's hard to see how having shiny, swingy hair is going to further equality. And Karl Lagerfeld sending Chanel models down the SS15 catwalk wearing couture and holding placards that read 'Feminist but Feminine' was horribly contrived.

Patene's sorry advert prompted discussions

It smacked of a company adopting feminism because it seemed trendy; out of self interest. That's where brands like Sport England and Always have got it right - they're turning the mirror back on us. The moment those women in the first #LikeAGirl ad understood they'd been fed a cliche about their own gender was powerful, regardless of the motive.

As director Lauren Greenfield (behind #LikeAGirl) told Telegraph Wonder Women in an exclusive blog at the time:

"When these moments of realisation occurred in real time, we knew something profound was happening in front of the cameras. Both I and some of the women on set were moved to tears".

That's the power of femvertising done right. It brings us together in an - often funny- moment of self-recognition, before pulling back the curtain to expose an ingrained cultural stereotype.

Roisin Donnelly tells me that #LikeAGirl has now been seen by 85 per cent of schoolgirls in the UK, largely through them sharing it with each other. And aversion of ad was shown during this year's Super Bowl in the US - the first sanitary towel brand to do so.

The word 'girl' being adopted and shared among girls is one thing. But how does it sit with women? I asked Jennie Price whether it could be seen as condescending.

"Girl was a word we really tested," she tells me. "It was key to us not to be patronising. In the end, we decided that it was OK to call ourselves girls and reclaim the word."

"It was even the theme of my teenage daughters' sports day," adds Donnelly.

Indeed, femvertising is hugely popular with millennials who, recent studies show, value ethics over money.

Little wonder brands are going above mere broadcast campaigns to appeal to this audience. Always has is setting up an education programme to get information about puberty into schools. Pantene has started the Shine Strong fund to support the American Association of University of Women's Campus Action Project. Verizon, who made 2014's Inspire Her Mind ad, aimed at getting more girls into STEM subjects is handing out financial awards to schoolgirls.

But this younger generation of women will see through such advertising strategies if they become too shallow. The more brands strive to appeal to them via 'social movements' or experiments, the more they risk becoming formulaic.

Into the swing: men, women, boys and girls were asked to give an impression of being 'like a girl' in the first Always #likeagirl advert

To remain convincing, such campaigns can't just push the perceived feminist agenda through a hard sell. They need ads that are built for women by women, from the ground up.

Part of the problem, of course, is that currently only three per cent of creative directors are female. "Although we are seeing more thank the lord," says Karen Blackett who says in the past much of the industry was "male, pale and stale".

So where next for femvertising? Personally, I think we desperately need more diversity on our screens. Dove and Pantene might be tackling issues of female low self-esteem, but they're still selling cosmetic products and most of the women in their ads wouldn't look out of place on the catwalk.

We also need to see more men taking on traditional 'woman's jobs' around the house (Donnelly tells me that in Iceland and Nordic countries it's the norm to see men washing up on screen. But those nations are also light years ahead in terms of gender equality - a self fulfilling prophecy perhaps.)

Plus, if femvertising is truly going to be real isn't it about time we saw red, not blue, liquid used in ads for sanitary towels and tampons? (It's a myth that ASA rules prohibit this).

Karen Blackett tells me we need to reach a place where the 'women's angle' ceases to be noticeable. "We need to see a move away from 'feminist ads' to a place where all adverts have an inherently female viewpoint," she says. "We need to normalise the experience of being a woman in advertising. If companies have any sense at all they will embrace it and future proof their business."

Price agrees: "We need to normalise this tone of voice and not make women out to be special. We need to reach a point where we're not different".

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How advertising hijacked feminism. Big time

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Over the last year, we've seen women in ad campaigns dispel negative stereotypes (#LikeAGirl by Always); sweat it out in the gym ( This Girl Can - Sport England); stop being self-critical (Dove again); talk about periods (Hello Flo) and quit saying 'sorry' (Pantene).

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Published:

Disclaimer: This essay has been submitted by a student. This is not an example of the work written by our professional essay writers. You can view samples of our professional work here.

Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of UK Essays.

Films have long been used as a tool to portray human imaginations and ideas that are sometimes deemed impossible in reality. The characters in films have had a huge impact, with regard to gender stereotype, on audiences of all ages (Neuendorf et. al., 2010). Though there have been debates of how female characters are being portrayed in films, from being submissive to hyper-sexualised and lately, adopting more dominant roles in films, has there really been a change in male characters in films instead (Gilpatric, 2010)? Have male characters in films adopt female traits like how the female characters have adopted manly traits? This paper looks into how the portrayals of male characters in films have changed or are changing and how they affect gender construction.

The feminist movement has constantly fought for women's right and equality so as to place women on equal standing to men in the society. This revolution has since been translated onto the silver screens as films depict women playing prominent and dominant roles in films (Gilpatric, 2010; Neundorf et. al., 2010) which is a stark contrast to the past when women played a submissive and subservient roles to the male character. Furthermore, films mirror the changing nature of our society, expecting men to behave in accordance to societal expectations deconstructing the male stereotype. Thus, the increasing trend in films shifting away from portraying men as having the traditional masculine trait, reconstructing it to more what termed today as the "New Age Men (NAM)" has been a result of the increasing prominence and dominance of females in films and the evolving nature of the society.

The NAM is thus seen as a fusion of having both the traditional traits of males and females, embracing both masculine and feminine traits. Here, masculinity is defined as having the "size, physical strength, rejection to authority and the use of physical force" (Eschholz and Bufkin, 2001). Along with those masculine traits, the NAM are also expected to have traits like caring and being able to handle housework. The birth of the NAM has been heavily attributed to the rise of females in films and the changing nature of the society. Men today feel there is a need to differentiate themselves from females in films to assert their dominance in the industry and to reintegrate into the society, deconstructing the male stereotype.

Female Characters in Films Today.

Male characters in films are moving away from having masculine traits due to the rise of female prominence and dominance in the roles they play by adopting those masculine traits. Female characters like Lara Croft and Kill Bill highlights the point that traits like submissive and subservient are no longer being associated with female character. The casting of the Bond girl character is as equally important, receiving just as much attention as the casting of James Bond himself, and though a Bond film may lack the innovative gadget, never has there been a Bond film without a Bond girl (Neuendorf et. al., 2010). This accentuates that the women's roles are equally important to the Bond character. Men, who relate closely to Bond who usually portray masculine traits, view this as a challenge to their masculinity as the Bond character is dependent on the female character. The lack of innovative gadgets also portrays a crisis in masculinity since men regard these technologies as 'macho' (Neuendorf et. al., 2010). This is further amplified with female characters playing main characters in films being created with complex and enthralling personalities relative to male characters who are rather one-dimensional and are of minor interest (Russell-Watts, 2010).

Women are also selected to play roles previously played and deemed suitable for men. Though Lara Croft and Kill Bill props to mind, the Hamlet by William Shakespeare is another example. Despite Hamlet being a male character, women have been manifesting their interest to play the role and there has been an increasing trend of women getting selected to personify Hamlet (Howard, 2007). Moreover, the Hamlet is known to be involved in violence as portrayed by the character Alexandra Tranda, who parallels the happenings of Hamlet to the events occuring in her life and ends up killing her father (Howard, 2007). Violence is defined as "any intentional infliction of physical pain or harm" (Eschholz and Bufkin, 2001) and has a positive correlation to masculinity (Eschholz and Bufkin, 2001; Neuendorf et. al., 2010; Gilpatric, 2010) thus proving an increase in violence equates to in an increase in masculinity. Men feel the idea of a women hamlet as unhealthy and feel ashamed for a woman to take the Hamlet role (Howard, 2007). This is an indication to men that women are challenging their masculinity and dominance in the film industry especially in roles crafted for men.

The rise of females in films adopting a more masculine nature and playing characters deemed more suited for men resulted men to feel challenged in their masculinity and has since led to a crisis in it. Men feel there is a need to differentiate themselves from the female characters and assert their masculinity and dominance within the society, re-constructing the gender stereotype to create the NAM.

The Dynamic Nature of the Society.

Films impact audiences (Gilpatric, 2010) and may portray a reflection of the society. The dynamic nature of the society portrayed through films has been a contributing factor to the deconstruction of the male gender stereotype to form the NAM. Relative to the past, women today are generally more educated, enabling them to take up jobs also held by men (Buchbinder, 2008). Accelerated by the feminist movement, women today are equally as likely as men to be casted to play professional roles and jobs like doctors and lawyers (Gilpatric, 2010). There is an increase of female characters holding major roles from 12% in 1960 to 32% in 1990 (Neuendorf et. al., 2010) and female characters in films can be a true representation of their position in the society as 51% US workers who hold high-paying management and professional jobs are women (Gilpatric, 2010). Similarly, most young man today expects to go through at least three major career changes in his life (Buchbinder, 2008). Also, improvements in the economy have enabled both women and men to spend on luxury items. "Narcissistic concern with one's look and body," traditionally marked as feminine are being linked to men, making it harder to comply with the traditional masculinity trait of a man (Buchbinder, 2008).

There has also been a shift in the portrayal of men in films today. In the past, men have always adopted the central figure but roles recently played by men and women in films have been blurred as the gap between masculinity and feminity. According to Breillat, "There is no masculine psychology in my cinema. They contain only what women feel and desire. Therefore, men must not try to recognise themselves in my male characters" (Russell-Watts, 2010, p. 72). This shows that men play secondary roles to women in today's films restricting them to relate to the traditional male masculinity. Moreover, men are also increasingly portrayed in films as the figure of the schlemiel. Schlemiel is a Yiddish word which means "a foolish personâ€¦a social misfit" (Buchbinder, 2008, p. 228) and is unable to "meet the performance and attitudinal requirements of traditional masculinity" (Buchbinder, 2008, p. 230). For instance, Bond girls have been known to play independent and intelligent roles even outwitting Bond himself in the latest Bond movie. Despite Bond films representing Bond as having a chauvinistic persona (Neuendorf et. al., 2010), this places Bond in the Schlemiel category of a "foolish" character causing men to view this as a crisis to their masculinity.

These factors when combined has resulted men to lose its masculine traits and restricted them to conform to the traditional masculine traits deconstructing the traditional male stereotype and reconstruct the NAM to help them assimilate back into society and be of an equal standing or higher to the women.

Stereotypes Still Prevails.

Some might argue that despite the rising prominence and dominance of women, the subservient and submissive nature of women's portrayal still prevail while men's masculinity are still confined to the traditional stereotype. Women in films are still regarded as subservient and submissive as the dominance exerted is based on a maternal motif, creating a stereotype of mothers or wives to save her child or loved ones (Gilpatric, 2010). Moreover, the societal movement of feminism is lacking, as women in films today still report to a more dominant male character (Neuendorf et. al., 2010), acting as a "sidekick" to a male character and getting involved in a romantic relationship with them (Gilpatric, 2010). Male characters though may have less masculine traits as portrayed by Robert in the movie Romance, his masculinity is emphasised through his occupation, being the boss of the main female character (Russell-Watts, 2010). This proves that despite being portrayed as dominant character in films today, women still conform to the gender stereotype of the traditional feminine traits of reporting to a more dominant male character. Some may argue also that films may not be a true reflection of society hence the portrayal of men as less masculine are not true. Films portray women as successful only when they are thin and attractive (Neuendorf et. al., 2010) when in fact, success is judged based on merit and not only looks. Building on, by showcasing one man as less masculine in the form of the schlemiel figure, subtly it provides a foil for other male characters to stand out, bringing out the masculine traits in the other male characters, (Buchbinder, 2008) indicating that male characters in movies still conform to the male gender stereotype of masculinity.

New Age Man is the New Man.

Despite the portrayal of women as subservient and submissive, women are still just as likely as men to commit violent acts in films. Presently, women are more likely to show acts of aggression (Neundorf et. al., 2010) and masculinity levels in male and females have increased (Eschholz and Bufkin, 2001). Though many may argue that the feminist movement may not have reached its promised desire, it cannot be regarded as a failure. Women's role in movies has since increased transcending the traditional feminine traits (Gilpatric, 2010). No longer women are being portrayed as one-dimensional who plays stereotypical female characters. Moreover, men today are unlikely to conform to the traditional form of masculinity although they may still hold superiority over the female characters as masculinity portrayed by men in films today is excessive in nature and something that men cannot relate to. The rugged masculinity shown through characters played by Mel Gibson, Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger is being described as a "fantasy" (Eschholz and Bufkin, 2001). Men feels there is a need to form a new identity something that they can relate to and has slowly since give rise to the birth of the NAM. Though portraying men as less masculine or as the schlemiel figure helps to bring out the masculinity in other male characters (Buchbinder, 2008), this very need has proved that there is a decreasing trend in films, which showcase men as masculine.

Conclusion.

Films have evolved tremendously down the years and will continue to do so at such rapid rate. As women's roles in films continue to rise and take centre stage, male characters in films have since taken steps in the opposite direction, adopting lesser of the traditional masculine traits but instead adopt more feminine traits. This has not being helped by the changing nature of the society where women continue to rise in status at workplaces challenging men for jobs. The birth of the NAM has been heavily attributed to the rising dominance and prominence of female characters in films and also the changing nature of the society. As the world become more globalized, women's status in society is also expected to improve and NAM may well form a new stereotype for men in times to come.

(1996 Words)

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Published: Disclaimer: This essay has been submitted by a student. This is not an example of the work written by our professional essay writers. You can view samples of our professional work here. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of UK Essays.

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The Male Gaze Laura Mulvey - Download as a PDF or view online for free

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Feminist Film Theory is a theory that discourses about women's participations and roles in almost every field in the community and in the society in general. In this modern world, women are not only limited on one single field of expertise. In every turn, the presences of women are extensively felt. May it be in politics, in Dramas, in Science, in Literature, in Arts, in Politics, in the Governance and even in Films.

The progression of Women's Influences to the World of Drama, Comedy, Films and Movies, dated from the early Centuries of Television Productions and Cinema. Elizabeth Montgomery, for instance, from the situation Comedy Bewitched, was admired and loved by her role in the sitcom. She effectively carried her role and the show, as real and as lovable as she was. Beautiful and sunny and praise-worthy.
Evolution of Feminist Film Theory over years
Woman filmmakers are not from today but way back since the beginning of 19th century. And the first feminist movement happened to protect the women from gender difference to equal pay in the industry and acknowledging woman claiming her own rights and interests. The subjectivity to women expressing herself didn't complete until the start of second feminist movement.
Feminist Film Theory
Feminist Film Theory, generally is about theoretical film criticism that arises from feminist politics and theories governed by the second wave feminism rooted from sociological theories concentrated on the how the public scrutinizes how women delivers the attitudes, scenarios, and characters given to them to portray in a particular film in a television or cinema screens. Some even disputes the diverse distinction between the male and female roles in a film which involves the public's opinions and criticisms that have both a vital importance in the development of the given notions. This abstraction helps in the further analysis of the Feminist Film Theory.

It is said to be hypothesized by scholars that the parts of the women in a movie or drama is only the perception of the society about women and their functionality in the craft. Not long ago, specialists in a particular branch of Feminist Film Theory has elaborated their exertion on their dissertation and perusal on the discourses of the theory, taking as well into account grasping even the domains of Television and Digital media where the women workforce also thrives itself in interlacing success.
Feminist Film makers
In the genre of Filmmaking, there are notable women around the globe who are working behind the camera who are excellent in the field of history-making film industry.

Kathryn Ann Bigelow, the remarkable female director of the 2008 Movie "The Hurt Locker"

Sofia Coppola, of "Lost In Translation, having in her blood the legacy of her father, Francis Ford Coppola, her distinct filming approach concentrates on the affluent and the juvenile and the wealthy characters and individuals that she hones in her hands

Catherine Hardwicke, the female director of the first movie of the worldwide successful Twilight series, who has drawn so much awe and high esteem from the public for her work on the teen vampire-inspired movie. She is the reason for the phenomenal career rise of the then unknown British young actor, Robert Pattinson she first casted to portray as her Vampire Edward Cullen. Catherine Hardwicke is notoriously noted for her Indie teen motion pictures. Other than Twilight, she has also shined in her "Thirteen" as well as in her "Red Riding Hood"

Haifaa Al Mansour, the very first Saudi Arabian filmmaker who made a mark with her exceptional craft, such as her Venice Awarded "Wadjda"

Phyllida Lloyd, the sensational female director of the films "Mama Mia", and the biographical movie about Margaret Thatcher entitled as "The Iron Lady" portrayed by the Award-winning actress, Meryl Streep

Criticism
The influences of feminism in the world of filmmaking, shows the unparalleled power and flexibility and talents and skills and broad expanse of the female gender in the industry. However, there are film critics that debates the women's functionality, the purposes of their presence and activities, and how the cinema or TV-viewing public regard the roles of women's personifications may it be in a drama, a comedy, a sitcom, most of all in a big screen cinema.
Example
Feminist Film Theory - The Iron Lady

A critically acclaimed British biopic motion picture concentrating on the life and endeavors of Margaret Thatcher with an interminable service period stretching from 1925 - 2013 as a Prime Minister of United Kingdom during the 20th century. As directed by Phyllida Lloyd, Thatcher was depicted principally by an award-winning actress Meryl Streep. However, the young Thatcher was represented by Alexandra Roach. Jim Broadbent acts as Thatcher's husband Denis Thatcher and Harry Lloyd being the young Denis. Anthony Head was casted as her cabinet member turned second in command, Geoffrey Howe. Despite the interlacing evaluations of this motion picture, Streep's rendition of the lady Prime Minister was vastly applauded and was remembered as one of the first rate portrayal she has ever done in her entire occupation garnering her 17th Best Actress Nomination in Academy Awards for her role thus bringing home the bacon. Not only did this movie showered Streep her first Oscar Award trophy after twenty-nine years from her first win, she was also presented with her third Best Actress in a Motion Picture Drama award in the Golden Globe and her 2nd British Academy of Film and Television Arts Award as a Best Actress in a Leading Role. In the plot of the movie, the story launched in the times of 2008. The aged Thatcher walks unnoticed through a shop all by herself she went forth to purchase some milk. Old and powerless and suffering from impaired reasoning and reminiscing the shining days both of her personal and white-collar lifestyle, and about the pain of losing her other half and enduring the hardships of differentiating the variation of the bygone from the current. The movie's subject matter convey's about the empirical cost Thatcher recompensed for gaining her competence. This film is fully packed with a series of flashbacks from Thatcher's life starting from her struggling adolescence, recounts of her hardships to position herself as a Lady Member of the legislature. Further flashbacks depicts the authoritarian yet mature persona of Thatcher who were belligerently blustering at her executives. This highly praised motion-picture film was first released in December 26, 2011 in Australia and in United Kingdom in January 6, 2012 then in France on February 15, 2012.

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Feminist Film Theory is a theory that discourses about women's participations and roles in almost every field in the community and in the society in general. In this modern world, women are not only limited on one single field of expertise. In every turn, the presences of women are extensively felt.