La Femme By Dr. Paola Bonifazio

Today’s filmmakers have three areas to focus on: the event or theme of the film, the audience who will be watching the film, and lastly, the individual characters and the roles they play and how they are portrayed and interpreted. Many of these films bottom line objectives are to focus on the “erotic needs of the male ego.” The focus on fetishistic scopophilia tend to slant the view such that we see the world as being dominated by men and that woman are

In Hollywood film women 's roles have varied quiet considerably between genres, geographical placement, and period settings. These factors contribute to the different representations of women 's roles in the film they are present in. The roles are diverse going from the traditional maternal role to that of manipulative murderer. Women 's roles in movies can be almost equal to the male roles, and the co-stars are not given the majority of the acclaims just because they are male. Society has set certain standards that women are supposed to follow. The most common image of women is that they are very passive and try to avoid conflict in any situation. More and more in society women are breaking down the social barriers that confine them to their specific roles. The films Rear Window and Resident Evil show women in roles that are untraditional for our society. These two movies help to show how women are rebelling against social norms and that they are taking more active and aggressive roles. In film noir’s we can see women represented as the femme fatale, a woman whose mysterious and seductive charms leads men into compromising or dangerous situations. In action movies we see the heroine who is strong both physically and mentally, and has the ability to use weapons. Women seem to be more trapped than men because they are supposed to live up to society’s standards dealing with beauty and size, which are more physical characteristics. These specific guidelines have been set by

The author, Jackie Stacey is a British feminist film historian. The main goal of her research is to understand the specific pleasure and engagements of British cinema audiences in the 1940s and 1950s. Stacey received 350 letters from women who went to the cinema 2-3 times a week during this period of wartime as cinema going was at an all-time high. Within the book, Stacey discusses Laura Mulvey’s Male Gaze and how Mulvey’s analysis of the pleasures of Hollywood cinema led her to conclude that the spectator position offered is a ‘masculine’ one. She talks about how there are 3 looks within the dominant mode of Hollywood cinema; the camera(man), the editor and the director. She emphasizes on how all of these looks work together to create the effect of seeing the female characters as objects of desire through the eyes of the male characters.

This genre is typically modern, perky and upbeat, but the common narrative in all of them is that it features a woman who is strong and she overcomes adversity to reach her goals. There is also a message of empowerment that also struggles with a romantic predicament and using comedy to poke fun at the male characters. Industries are still producing soppy romantic comedies for the female audience but the divide between the standard chick flick and romantic comedy is slowly disappearing. Similarly to the beginning of this essay it is evident that institutions are moving in the direction of women’s place in culture in relation to this film genre; women are usually shown as the super power since they are made to appeal to the female audience. However

This paper will look at how the movies portray women in a way that women can relate to regardless if it’s an insulting

Film provides audiences with specific constructions of male, and female, which draw on the prior assumptions and associations the viewer holds about gender. Various female tropes reoccur in films, such as the ‘spinster’, the promiscuous woman, the housewife, and the virgin. These stereotypes reinforce pre-existing societal norms and ideas that can often be harmful and undermine the complexity of women. Traditionally, these tropes occur as a result of a lack of development of female characters and the frequent depiction of women through the lens of the ‘male gaze’. This results in more passive female characters who, it appears are simply there to be “looked at and displayed”

Women evidently create films, too. Still, the institution of film-making is undeniably dominated by men. Even if men are not always creating the film, they are nevertheless controlling who does; the male gaze “is not always male, but it is always male-dominated (654). This control is not meant to refer to “anatomy” per se, but the idea that film contributes to the supremacy of men over women regardless of its author (654). This type of control is significant because it implements a preference for films which depict women who are aligned with patriarchal assumptions; men as subjects and women as objects (654).

Over men, the femme fatale has the power. Her ability to manipulate men and use her body unashamedly to do so, uses the man’s desire against him. Lynn Bracken and Dinah Brand are powerful characters who both contain stereotypical elements of the femme fatale. They can control the men around them and the audience is able to see the extent of their power. They exist as something that is ‘other’ existing outside of the bounds that have originally been set for them allowing them to set their own rules. This both fascinates and terrifies the men in their lives as it they believe it is a direct challenge to their masculinity as they cannot control these women. Thus, the femme fatale is something that exists outside of male dominance and has power

Film has the power to inspire and influence and it is vital that cinema reflects these opinions. Although many old stereotypes still exist in films, it is clear that attitudes are changing. With the emergence of action heroines, the banishing of some stereotypes and postfeminist attitudes female empowerment through film has become stronger than

Women’s roles in movies have changed dramatically throughout the years. As a result of the changing societal norms, women have experienced more transition in their roles than any other class. During the period of classical Hollywood cinema, both society and the film industry preached that women should be dependent on men and remain in home in order to guarantee stability in the community and the family. Women did not have predominated roles in movies such as being the heroin. The 1940’s film Gilda wasn’t an exception. In Gilda, the female character mainly had two different stereotypes. The female character was first stereotyped as a sex object and the second stereotyped as a scorned woman who has to be punished.

A gender reading is perhaps one of the more basic ways to view a text. Gender inequality is a prominent issue not only in society, but also in films. In modern day society, we have reached a time where feminine expectations are no longer for women to be traditionally delicate, dependent, and weak. Instead they

Even though male gaze is still the fundamental construct in modern films, I do not think lesbians and majority of women these days enjoy objectification. Women are trying to break through gender differences and evolve as equal being to men. In trying to explain how women are positioned in films, Kaplan says “Psychoanalysis a crucial tool for explaining the needs, desires and male-female positioning that are reflected in film” p. (). Kaplan uses psychoanalysis to argue how women take

Filmmakers use traditional gender stereotypes to produce characters audiences can easily identify with by portraying conventional images of a person with identifiable characteristics. In previous years, the dominant representation of a women in film has been the passive, subjugated protagonist. However, through the development of female empowerment and added feminist representations of film, the female heroine transformed to become strong and independent women in her own right, as an individual character.

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.

In society, women are often perceived as the weaker sex, both physically and mentally. In modern times women have leveled the playing field between men and women, and feminism is a highly discussed topic, but for years, women faced discrimination and prejudice both in life and in the workplace, due to their sex. This way of thinking flooded into the world of film. In their works, the authors of each of the various sources address the limitations and liberations of women both on and off the screen in nineteenth century Film and Cinema. Not every source is completely filled with information related to the research topic, but they do cover and analyze many of the same points from different perspectives. Prominent points addressed in each