Women's picture

Woman's film

Definition

Identifying characteristics

Unlike male-centered movies which are frequently shot outdoors, most woman's films are set in the domestic sphere, which defines the lives and roles of the female protagonist. Whereas the events in woman's films – weddings, proms, births – are defined by nature and society, the action in male films – chasing criminals, participating in a fight – is story-driven.

The themes in woman's and male-oriented films are often diametrically opposed: fear of separation from loved ones, emphasis on emotions, and human attachment in women's films, as opposed to fear of intimacy, repressed emotionality, and individuality in male-oriented movies. The plot conventions of woman's films revolve around several basic themes: love triangles, unwed motherhood, illicit affairs, the rise to power, and mother-daughter relationships. The narrative pattern depends on the activity engaged in by the heroine and commonly includes sacrifice, affliction, choice, and competition. The maternal melodrama, the career woman comedy, and the paranoid woman's film, a sub-genre based on suspicion and distrust, are the most frequent sub-genres. Female madness, depression, hysteria, and amnesia were frequent plot elements in Hollywood's woman's films of the 1940s. This trend took place when Hollywood tried to incorporate aspects of psychoanalysis. In the medical discourse in films like Now, Voyager (1942), Possessed (1947) and Johnny Belinda (1948), mental health is visually represented by beauty and mental illness by an unkept appearance; health was restored if the female protagonist improved her appearance. Friendship among women was fairly common, although the treatment was superficial and focused more on women's dedication to men and female-male relationships than on their friendships with each other.

History

The beginnings of the genre can be traced back to D. W. Griffith whose one– and two–reelers A Flash of Light (1910) and Her Awakening (1911) feature the trademark narratives of repression and resistance that would later define a majority of women's films. The genre was particularly popular in 1930s and 1940s, reaching its zenith during World War II. The film industry of that time had an economic interest in producing such films as women were believed to comprise a majority of movie-goers. In line with this perception, many woman's films were prestigious productions which attracted some of the best stars and directors. Some film scholars suggest that the genre as a whole was well-regarded within the film industry, while others argue that the genre and term "woman's film" had derogatory connotations and was used by critics to dismiss certain films. Production of women's films dropped off in the 1950s as melodrama became more male-centered and as soap operas began to appear on television. Although Hollywood continued to make films marked by some of the features and concerns of the traditional woman's film in the second half of the 20th century, the term itself disappeared in the 1960s.

The genre was revived in the early 1970s. Attempts to create modern versions of the classic woman's film, updated to take account of new social norms, include Martin Scorsese's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974), An Unmarried Woman (1978) by Paul Mazursky, Garry Marshall's Beaches (1988), and Fried Green Tomatoes (1995) by Jon Avnet. Similarly, the 2002 films The Hours and Far from Heaven took their cues from the classic woman's film. Within British cinema, David Leland returned to the formula of the 1980s woman's film in The Land Girls (1998). The film tells the story of three young women during World War II and offers its heroines the opportunity to escape their old lives. Bend It Like Beckham (2002) emphasizes the key generic theme of female friendship and casts the heroine in a conflict between the restrictions of her traditional Sikh upbringing and her aspirations to become a football player. Lynne Ramsay's Morvern Callar is based on the woman's film tradition; a young woman escapes to Spain and pretends to be the author of her boyfriend's novel. While Morvern's journeys and transformations allow for liberation, she ends up where she started.

Response

Basinger notes that woman's films were often criticized for reinforcing conventional values, above all, the notion that women could only find happiness in love, marriage and motherhood. However, she argues that they were "subtly subversive". They implied that a woman could not combine a career and a happy family life, but they also offered women a glimpse of a world outside the home, where they did not sacrifice their independence for marriage, housekeeping, and childrearing. The pictures depicted women with successful careers as journalists, pilots, car company presidents, and restaurateurs. Similarly, Simmon notes that the genre offered a mixture of repression and liberation, in which repressive narratives are regularly challenged, partly via mise-en-scène and acting but also by conflicts within the narratives themselves. He further states that such resistances were present in some of the earliest woman's films and became the rule with Douglas Sirk's postwar American woman's films. Others have argued, however, that the narratives of these films offer only the repressive perspective and that viewers must read the texts "against the grain" to be able to find a liberating message. Critics such as Haskell have criticized the term "woman's film" itself. She writes:

See also

References

Notes

Bibliography

• Altman, Rick (1998). "Rebirth of a Phantom Genre". In Browne, Nick. Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0520918559. http://books.google.com/books?id=lgFhfjS2hNsC&pg=PA27.
• Ashby, Justine (2010). "'It's been emotional.' Reassessing the Contemporary British Woman's Film". In Bell, Melanie; Williams, Melanie. British Women's Cinema. London; New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0203872000. http://books.google.com/books?id=3ydEcsTY1VcC&pg=PA153.
• Basinger, Jeanine (1994). A Woman's View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930–1960. London: Chatto & Windus. ISBN 978-0701160937. http://books.google.com/books?id=tbZVNPT6x6EC&printsec=frontcover.
• Basinger, Jeanine (2010). "The Woman's Film. When Women Wept". In Mintz, Steven; Roberts, Randy. Hollywood's America: Twentieth-Century America Through Film. Chichester; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 978-1405190039. http://books.google.com/books?id=rc3_uYBKo6sC&pg=PA163.
• Doane, Mary Ann (1987). The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film of the 1940s. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-0253316820. http://books.google.com/books?id=FLWP6SPGQuYC&printsec=frontcover.
• Doane, Mary Ann (1986). "The Clinical Eye: Medical Discourses in the 'Woman's Film' of the 1940s". In Rubin Suleiman, Susan. The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0674298705. http://books.google.com/books?id=8pS9-6kjnFoC&pg=PA152.
• Ferriss, Suzanne; Young, Mallory, eds (2008). Chick Flicks: Contemporary Women at the Movies. New York: Routledge. ISBN 9780415962551. http://books.google.com/books?id=KZ3oqbNWV0AC&printsec=frontcover.
• Haskell, Molly (1987). From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies. Chicago: Chicago University Press. ISBN 978-0226318851.
• Hollinger, Karen (1998). In the Company of Women: Contemporary Female Friendship Films. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 978-0816631773. http://books.google.com/books?id=2LEO2teXAnIC&pg=PA27.
• Langford, Barry (2005). Film Genre: Hollywood and Beyond. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 978-0748619023. http://books.google.com/books?id=tFyANhgDs2sC&printsec=frontcover.
• Neale, Stephen (2000). Genre and Hollywood. London; New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0415026055. http://books.google.com/books?id=JOusYmxYQQ0C&pg=frontcover.
• Simmon, Scott (1993). "'The Female of the Species.' Origins of the Woman's Film at Biograph". The Films of D.W. Griffith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0521381284. http://books.google.com/books?id=mz04AAAAIAAJ&pg=PA68.
• Walsh, Andrea (1986). Women's Film and Female Experience, 1940-1950. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO. ISBN 978 0313391118.

Retrieved from : http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Woman%27s_film&oldid=465545416