Mona Lisa Smile. Dir. by Mike Newell. Columbia Pictures, 2003.
In the movie, Mona Lisa Smile directed by Mike Newell, a new art history professor at Wellesley College teaches her female students alternatives to their seemingly preordained futures as wives and mothers. In this paper we will examine women's roles in the 1950's through Mona Lisa Smile and compare this film to actual experiences of Wellesley collage graduates. In 1953, a time when women's roles were rigidly defined, free-spirited, art history professor Katherine Watson (Julia Roberts) begins teaching her dream job at Wellesley College. Wellesley is an all-female campus with a prestigious reputation for academic excellence, however, despite its name it is an
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She had the needed depth and dimension required for the role. Her seaming guarded attitude allowed her role to be tough enough to resist the girls and the faculty. I personally do not like Dunst (Betty) as an actress but that just made her manipulative "rich bitch" role even more believable. She is intent on making everyone around her feel unworthy and the viewer spends most of the movie hating her spoon-fed beliefs, until the end when the character earns empathy from the audience after she reveals her hardships with her husband and mother. Stiles' character Joan does the most growing in the film as she opens up to the possibility that she does not have to follow her sweetheart and could focus on her own education. Goodwyn's character Connie played an add-drama' role to the movie. The viewer never disliked her but never really liked her. The most liberal of the girls is Giselle, played by Gyllenhaal, who plays the role of the campus slut. I am not sure the purpose of this women bashing role, it just made the movie "dirty". Giselle's affinity for sleeping with professors and married men is so revolting that not even in the end was her character salvaged, but she did play the part well.
The film's title, of course, is a reference to the Mona Lisa, the famous painting by Leonardo da Vinci. One of the songs chosen was of the same name, originally performed by Nat King Cole, which was preformed
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Get AccessShe was kind of annoying because she was too good at playing a two goodie two shoes, but I loved her voice anyway. John Travolta had the acting skills to play Danny because he was an Elvis Presley wanna be. Stockard Channing, I wish was more a nice girl than when she acts like a spoiled little girl who always wants it her way. I think that she did amazing at playing her role as Betty Rizzo, but i feel like she was a bit old like in her early 30’s to play a role as a teenager. Jeff Conaway was great at playing his role because he knew how to act like greaser, but he also looked like one too. Talking about looks he also looks to old to play a role of a teenager which is Kenickie. Didi Conn was good at playing an airhead so it helped her play the role of Frenchy, but that’s what i mainly liked about the role. Dennis C. Stewart had a bad boy vibe so it helped with his role as Leo Balmudo. He looked kind of old to play the role just like Stockard Channing who played Betty Rizzo and Jeff Conaway who played Kenickie. Now onto the body paragraph where I’ll be describing what I like and what i
For example, at the height of the Women’s Rights Movement, women were very rarely seen within the sector of higher education; but today, however, women are more prevalent in higher education than at any other point in recent memory. Not only has higher education become more of an integral norm for women, but the increasing prominence of women within higher education is reflective of a fundamental societal shift – women are no longer being forced to stay within the confines of their home, but are now able to focus on their education as well as their increasing job opportunities. Additionally, women have also become more prominent within the political realm – both in terms of running for office and having the right to vote – as well as the higher tiers of corporate America; which illustrates that, as time goes on, they are becoming increasingly more powerful and are being afforded a myriad of desirable positions and benefits that used to only be available for men. With the indisputable progression of women in mind, it becomes challenging to comprehend how a film like She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry can capitalize on its foundation of activism within the current societal climate. Although there are still – and may always be – various opinions regarding women’s rights, it is clear that, since the Women’s Rights Movement, women have been presented with countless opportunities that they would not have been able to take advantage of approximately 50 years ago. As a result, a film like She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry almost seems redundant, if not somewhat
She’s beautiful when She’s Angry tells the story of the women's movement from 1966-1973. This documentary tells a story through the use of footage, photographs and interviews from the women who helped shape second wave feminism. There were a few key players during that time, such as Kate Millett, Susan Brownmiller, Frances Beal, and Betty Friedan. Throughout She’s Beautiful when She’s Angry these women discuss issues that were problematic during this time period, most of which still are today. A few examples are child care, rape, birth control, and the right to not get married and start a family. This historical overview of this time period reminds us that feminists continue to fight for many of the same rights, fifty years later.
In On the Equality of the Sexes Murray counteracts these sexist ideas and demands educational opportunities for women. Murray receives an education that was uncommon for a women of
Every girl growing up always use to play dress up in clothes as a childhood past time for fun. Cindy Sherman used that passed time as a way to create art with photography and is known for her talent of this act and taking self-portraits of it. Her ideas come stereotypes of women throughout past and present society. These self-portraits are known to “confront and explore the representations of women in society.” (Jankauskas).
Gender roles have been, and unfortunately still are, evident in our everyday lives for quite sometime. Women are often portrayed as sexual objects, or delicate individuals; a body with no brain or strength. These traits are easily found within many novels and movies- old and new. In Alfred Hitchcock’s films, Rear Window and Strangers on a Train, Hitchcock begins his films representing women with the same characteristics as stated above. They are very stylish, attractive and presented as second-class individuals to males. But after examining these two films, Hitchcock does something that many directors in his time would not have dared to do. By making the women the heroine and arguably the protagonist of the storyline, Hitchcock proves to
The characters Sherman portrays, lighting, clothing and expressions are cliché of what is present in cinema, so much that viewers of her work have told Sherman that they ‘remember the movie’ that the image is derived from, yet Sherman having no film in mind at all.[iv] Thus showing that her word has a pastiche of past cinematic genres, and how women are portrayed in cinema and photography and how Sherman has manipulated the ‘male gaze’ around her images so they become ironic and cliché.
Judy Chicago (artist, author, feminist and educator) has a career that now spans five decades. In the late 1960s, her inquiry into the history of women began a result of her desire to expose the truth of women’s experiences, both past and present. She still continues on a crusade to change the perception of women from our history, “Women’s history and women’s art need to become part of our cultural and intellectual heritage.” (Chicago, 2011) Through our history women - their struggles, accomplishments and contribution to history, have been overlooked, downplayed and even completely written out of a male dominated society and culture. In anthropologist Sherry Ortner’s 1974 essay “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” she supports this view, writing “…woman is being identified with—or, if you will, seems to be a symbol of—something that every culture devalues,” (Ortner, 1974) Where Mendieta's work primarily came from a striving to belong and an understanding of where she came from, I feel that Chicago's aim was to find a place for all women, past and present in this world, starting with herself in the art world. Chicago did explore her peronal heritage in later works entitled 'Birth Project' and 'Holocaust Project'.
You can see that when viewing a painting like this there are many questions that arise in your mind. Looking at the Mona Lisa I get drawn in and a sense of wonderment comes over me. I start to imagine the person in the painting and what her smile was really about. A strong, confident women is what I think she was, and that was brought out beautifully by de Vinci. I also think that the way he painted the Mona Lisa shows a lot about what and how Leonardo viewed women. Many say that it was painted for the love of his mother. What do you
Since the 1940’s, movies have predominately portrayed women as sex symbols. Beginning in the 1940’s and continuing though the 1980’s, women did not have major roles in movies. When they did have a leading role the women was either pretreated as unintelligent and beautiful, or as conniving and beautiful: But she was always beautiful. Before the 1990’s, men alone, wrote and directed all the movies, and the movies were written for men. In comparison, movies of the 90’s are not only written and directed by women, but leading roles are also held by older and unattractive women. In this paper I will show the variations and growth of women’s roles in movies from the 1940’s though the 1990’s.
The Accidental Feminist: How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness and We Were Too Distracted By Her Beauty to Notice M. G. Lord 2012
There is some disparity between the way critics and philosophers like Judith Butler view Cindy Sherman's work and the way that Cindy Sherman speaks of her photographs. It may be the disparity that exists between many modern artists, who often operate on an intuitive level, and the philosopher critics who comment upon them from a theoretical perspective or a pre-established framework. On one level, Cindy Sherman may only be playing "dress-up" (as she herself admits) in her famous History Portraits (1989-90) (Berne, 2003). On another level, however, her "dressing-up" may be indicative of a deeper problem in modern gender identity theory which is the problem of "becoming" woman (Butler, 1994) or, as Judith Butler sees it, the problem of performativity. In the History Portraits, Sherman may certainly be said to be "performing" and perhaps even attempting to "become" the male and female characters she represents in her work. Indeed, it is upon such a premise that philosopher critics and gender theorists find her work so engaging. This paper will examine Cindy Sherman and her History Portraits in relation to Judith Butler's gender theory, the portrayal of the self, and how gender identity has changed throughout the course of modern history. It will examine representations of womanhood from Romantic Idealism to Post-Modernism and will also
Since its humble beginnings in the later years of the nineteenth century, film has undergone many changes. One thing that has never changed is the filmmaker’s interest in representing society in the present day. For better or worse, film has a habit of showing the world just what it values the most. In recent years, scholars have begun to pay attention to what kinds of ideas films are portraying (Stern, Steven E. and Handel, 284). Alarmingly, viewers, especially young women, are increasingly influenced by the lifestyle choices and attitudes that they learn from watching these films (Steele, 331). An example of this can be seen in a popular trope of the “romantic comedy” genre in this day and age: the powerful man doing something to help, or “save” the less powerful woman, representing a troubling “sexual double standard” (Smith, Stacy L, Pieper, Granados, Choueiti, 783).
The film, Mona Lisa Smiles, is actually in the 1950’s era it’s displays story associated with art teacher who teaches preservation college students to question their traditional and social roles. Her aim is to change the old fashioned and traditional ideas influencing the mind of young females. The film displays cultural and social ideologies influencing young female intelligence. It indicated exactly how societal pressures along with acceptability are able to have an effect on young female actions and thinking process as well.
She's a really contemporary female, particularly for the 1950s. She brought her California design to the university and it is incredibly enthusiastic about each arts as well as the pupils of her. Watson thinks which the pupils of her are bright and young and may do a lot with the day of theirs. The cultural conformity they are supposed to be to focuses on after matrimony for females. Although an extremely good connect is produced in between the mentor as well as pupils, Watson's perceptions are actually. very contemporary as well as incompatible together with the primary society of this university.