film reflection

440 CHAPTER 11 Film Theory and Criticism

Carolina coast to the U.S. mainland. This was the first African-American film directed

by a woman to go into general theatrical release.

At a much higher level of box-office success are the comedies of Keenan Ivory

Wayans. These include Scary Movie (2000), Scary Movte Il (2001), and a fond par-

ody of 1970s-era "blaxploitation," I'm Gonna Git You Sucka (1988).

ACTORS Among the present generation of African-American actors, the most

prominent is Denzel Washington, who became one of the few actors to make a suc-

cessful transition from television (the 1980s series St. Elsewhere) to the big screen.

Washington has specialized in playing relatively noble characters in pictures such

as Devil in a Blile Dress and Philadelphia (1993). He made a dramatic switch in

Training Day (2001), where he played a ferociously bad cop, and the industry took

notice. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor with that role.

Washington has often teamed with director Tony Scott (Man on Fire, 2004; The

Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, 2009; Unstoppable, 2010), and he has directed two films,

Antwone Fisher (2002) and The Great Debaters (2007).

In 2005, he returned to the New York stage, playing Brutus in Julius Ceasar, and his

star charisma drew huge audiences and helped to make the play one of its season's hits.

The same year Washington won his Oscar for Training Day, Halle Berry won as

Best Actress for Monster's Ball. The twin victories were highly symbolic. No black

actor had won the award since Sidney Poitier in 1963, and few had even been nomi-

nated. The symbolism of the dual wins enabled the industry to announce the impor-

tance of African-American films and audiences and to acknowledge that it had been

slow to reach this point. Unfortunately, Berry followed her victory with some bad

career moves, roles in the James Bond film, Die Another Day (2002), and Catwon:an

(2004), which audiences avoided.

Thus there are currently no African-American female stars of the magnitude of

Denzel Washington or Will Smith. Angela Basset seemed poised for a major career

after the hit How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1998), but she then suffered the same

kind of career halt that afflicts many women working in film today (discussed in the

subsequent section of this chapter).

Like Washington, Will Smith successfully transitioned from television series to

big-screen films while carrying with him his trademark wisecracking humor. Smith

has made action thrillers (Enemy of the State, 1998) and straight drama (Malcolm,

2001; Hitch, 2005) but has found some of his biggest hits in science fiction. He bat-

tled aliens in Men in Black (1997) and Independence Day (1996) and an army of ro-

bots in I, Robot (2004). The latter film is especially interesting in the way that it uses

Smith's persona to lend a racial subtheme to the film. Smith plays a black cop who

is a bigot—he is prejudiced against the robots who help people with their chores and

who are second-class citizens.

He eventually overcomes his prejudice by learning to appreciate the humanity in

one of the robots who assists him in his case. While the racial subtheme is not a major

part of the film, it adds an interesting resonance to the movie, and it could not have been achieved in the same way with a white actor.

Numerous supporting players bring their distinctive personalities to contem- porary film. Morgan Freeman is one of the most dignified and regal actors ever to appear in Hollywood movies. He carries a natural authority and bearing that have distinguished his appearances in a huge number of films, including Glory (1989),

Ideological Models 441

Unforgiven (1992), Se7en (1995), Deep Impact (1998), and An Unfinished Life (2005). Clint Eastwood cast him as Nelson Mandela in Invictus (2009).

Samuel L. Jackson's street-smart persona, his cockiness, and his extraordinarily expressive voice are essential to Pulp Fiction (1994), Jackie Brown (1997), Shaft (2000), and other films that denote "cool." He has supplied the cartoon voice of Frozone in The Incredibles (2004), and providing one measure of his star quality, he was given one Of the most startling and breathtaking death scenes in recent film in Deep Blue Sea (1999).

Queen Latifa moved from recorded music to an ongoing film career, which only occasionally makes use of her exceptional singing talent—Living Out Loud (1998), Chicago (2002), and Beauty Shop (2005).

Don Cheadle has built a thriving career on memorable character roles in Devil in a Blue Dress (1995), Boogie Nights (1997), Occan's Eleven (2001), and Ocean's Twelve (2004), and he was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for his lead performance in Hotel Rwanda (2004). Other memorable supporting play- ers include Ving Rhames, Ice Cube, and Ice T. To understand why the changes in contemporary film that have brought these players and directors forward are significant, one needs to look at how things were during the first eight decades of Hollywood film.

A SEGREGATED INDUSTRY During the silent and sound film eras, Hollywood movies reflected the racial inequalities that prevailed in America. African-American screen characters were stereotyped and marginalized and were background elements of the plot.

In fact, in silent and many early sound films, black actors did not appear at all. Black characters were played by white actors in blackface makeup. D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) told an epic story of the Civil War and Reconstruction,

HOTEL RWANDA (LIONS GATE, 2004)

Don Cheadle plays Paul Rusesabagina, a hotel manager who sheltered Tutsi victims of a

Hutu-led massacre in Rwanda. Cheadle has an extraordinary range and has played charac-

ters as diverse as stone killer Mouse Alexander (Devil in a Blue Dress), singer Sammy Davis,

Jr. (The Rat Pack), and straight-laced District Attorney John Littleton (TV's Picket Fences).

Frame enlargement.

442 CHAPTER Film Theory and Criticism

and its jnany black characters had notably Caucasian features because of the white

actors who itnpersonatcd them.

Griffith's filin was brilliantly made, and it was extremely racist, offering the rer-

ror group the Ku Klux Klan as the film's hero, saving the South from the chaos of

black rule. Griffith's filmmaking skill made the film's racist politics explosive. Its

hateful vicw of race relations—basically saying that African-Americans should have

ren)ained slaves—triggered rioting and protests when it premiered.

In its long-term impact, The Birth of a Nation proved to have two kinds of in-

fluence. The first, a very negative influence, is that it established the basic gallery of

black stereotypes that Hollywood film would perpetuate for the next 40 years. The

stereotyped black characters in Gone With the Wind (1939), for example, owe much

to Griffith's film. The second influence, a very positive one, is that it led to the

emergence of a

black film industry. Black civic leaders and entrepreneurs realized that film was

far too important a medium to be left in the hands of bigots like Griffith or other

white filmmakers who would create demeaning or stereotyped portraits of black

communities. In the wake of The Birth of a Nation, a number of black production

companies

sprang forth, making black-themed films for African-American audiences. Since

Hollywood had no interest in doing this, these companies operated outside the orbit

of the major Hollywood studios, producing and distributing films on their own cir-

cuits for audiences in major urban centers.

The Lincoln Motion Picture Company (1916—1922), for example, offered audi-

ences messages of racial integration and black middle-class life in such films as The

Realization of a Negro's Ambition (1916). The Ebony Motion Picture Company

of Chicago made black-themed adaptations of famous literary works such as Black

Sherlock Holntes (1918).

But the most important and energetic black producer, director, and financier in

this period of film history was Oscar Micheaux, who wrote, produced, and/or directed

24 films from 1919 to the early 1940s. This was an extraordinary accomplishment,

given that he did not have the support and infrastructure of a major studio behind

him. Micheaux's films aimed to counter the stereotypes of black people found in

Hollywood film, and his work includes Symbol of the Unconquered (1921) and Body

and Soul (1924).

The black film industry was an indigenous response to the problems of

Hollywood studio films. Although the Ebony, Lincoln, and Micheaux films were

made on relatively low budgets and lacked the technical resources that Hollywood

made available to its filmmakers, they gave their audiences much-needed imagery and

stories of African-American life. Hollywood film remained uninterested in providing

this for many decades.

THE HOLLYWOOD ERA During the studio era, from the 1930s to the 1950s, black ac-

tors did appear on screen but always in small, supporting roles and often in a demean-

ing manner. Stepin Fetchit played slow, dim-witted characters who were lazy and

always looking to avoid work. The Mills brothers were incredibly talented dancers,

but they had no chance of playing the lead role in a musical. Their career consisted of guest appearances in a genre dominated by white dancers such as Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly.

Ideological Models 443

WITHIN OUR CATES (MICHEAUX BOOK & FILM co., 1919) Producer-director-writer- entrepreneur Oscar Micheaux was the most important and prolific black filmmaker to emerge in the wake of The Birth of a Nation. Micheaux wanted to counter the hateful images of Griffith's films but also to dramatize the realities of ra- cial oppression in his time. Thus, in this picture, made just four years af- ter The Birth of a Nation, he showed a subject that was absolutely taboo in Hollywood film—the rape of a black woman by a white man. Frame enlargement.

Hattie McDaniel, who played Mammy in Gone With the Wind (1939), felt very conflicted about playing this character, whose sole purpose in the story is to look af- ter her white master, Scarlett (Vivien Leigh). McDaniel reconciled herself to the task by deciding that it was better to play a maid than to have to work as one.

Dooley Wilson was her male counterpart in Casablanca (1942), playing Sam, a pianist and sidekick of the film's hero, Rick (Humphrey Bogart). Sam spends the film in the background of the scenes, worrying about Rick and fussing over his welfare.

Although there were exceptions to these trends—King Vidor's Halleluiah (1929) featured an all-black cast, and Vincente Minnelli's Cabin in the Sky (1943) featured black singers Ethel Waters and Lena Horne in rare starring roles—for the most part Hollywood film centered on white characters living in a white world.

Sidney Poitier The first major African-American Hollywood star did not appear until the 1950s, at a time when the studio system was breaking apart under the influence of television and the rise of independently produced and distributed films. These influ- ences helped to change the character and content of American film.

Sidney Poitier came to the United States from Cat Island in the Bahamas. He

made his film debut in No Way Out (1950) and quickly established a powerful screen

persona. He played dignified characters who frequently worked professional occupa-

tions (doctor, detective) but whose tolerance and humanity were tested by racism and

segregation. Facing these trials, Poitier would do a slow burn on screen but never lose

his cool. His characters would prevail but in ways that demonstrated the ideals of ra-

cial tolerance and accommodation. His high-profile work in the period contains many

screen classics—The Defiant Ones (1958), Lilies of the Field (1963), A Raisin in the

Sun (1961), and In the Heat of the Night (1967).

While continuing as an actor, he went on to produce and direct films, a very

rare accomplishment in that period, and some of these pictures became huge hits,

444 CHAPTER Film Theory and Criticism

IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT (UNITED ARTISTS, 1967)

Sidney Poitier was the first African-American male star in Hollywood cinema. He typically

played characters of grace and noble bearing who confronted discrimination in a racially

prejudiced America. Here, he plays a detective from Philadelphia who reluctantly helps

the chief of police in a backwater southern town solve a murder. Frame enlargement.

especially when they starred Bill Cosby or Richard Pryor ( Uptown Saturday Night,

1974; Stir crazy, 1980).

"BLAXPLOITATION'/ As the civil rights struggle heated up in the late 1960s, Sidney

Poitier's film characters came under attack by segments of the black community

for being too polite and accommodating in the face of racism. An angrier, more ag-

gressive set of black characters appeared in a genre of crime films aimed at African-

American audiences. The genre began with the huge box-office success of two films in

1971 by black directors, Sweet Sweetback's Baad Asssss Song and Shaft.

Hollywood took notice, and the studios began producing scores of black-themed

crime films that were hugely popular until the production cycle ended at mid-decade.

Because their focus was on crime, drugs, and violence instead of the moral uplift of

Poitier's films, national civil rights groups condemned the movies and began referring

to them as "blaxploitation." At the time, the term was a negative one. Today, how-

ever, the term is used more affectionately because these movies were important. They

offered the first triumphant black heroes and heroines in Hollywood cinema and gave

charismatic actors—Ron O'Neal, Richard Roundtree, Jim Brown, Pam Grier, Fred

Williamson, and Gloria Hendry—starring roles.

Melvin van Peebles' Sweet Sweetback's Baad Asssss Song (1971) kickstarted the

era of "blaxploitation." This scruffy, low-budget independent picture about a black

hustler, Sweetback (van Peebles), on the run after killing a pair of racist cops was

enormously popular with urban audiences, who had seen plenty of movies about a

black man chased by police but never one in which he got away. Sweetback was made

expressly for the black community, and its success showed Hollywood that there was

case study NOTHING BUTA MAN

One of the most outstanding black films of this period was made by two white, Jewish filmmakers, whose Jewish sensitivity to segregation and racial bigotry led them to identify with the plight of African-Americans inmid-1960s America. Nothing But a Man (1964) was shot in six weeks for $160,000 during a period of heightened civil rights activity and racist backlash. During produc- tion, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his "l Have a Dream" speech, NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers was murdered, and the 1 6th Street Church in Birmingham was bombed, killing four young girls.

Nothing But a Man portrays the efforts of Duff (Ivan Dixon), a black railroad worker in the South, to marry and start a family with Josie (played by jazz singer Abbey Lincoln in a luminous performance) while rec- onciling with his own embittered father (Julius Harris) and the son that Duff abandoned years ago. Ivan Dixon strongly identified with the character of Duff, and his scenes with Lincoln and Harris are extraordinarily pow- erful and well-acted.

The film was unique in its time for showing African- American actors in close-up, for showing a black couple

Ideological Models 445

courting and kissing, and for its quiet, naturalistic depiction of ordinary life. But the movie offers no easy answers. It powerfully shows the economic factors that preyed on black families, targeting men by making it difficult for them to find work and thereby eroding the family structure. As the film's director Michael Roemer put it, "You take away a man's ability to make a living, and you take away his manhood." This is the dilemma that Duff must struggle with.

Although the film was made by two white men, actors Ivan Dixon, Abbey Lincoln, and Julius Harris all felt that its portrait of southern black life in the sixties was true and very accurate. The film showed African- American characters in their communities and played by black actors in leading roles at a time when this was ex- tremely rare to see on American screens. Sidney Poitier's films, for example, tended to feature a mostly white cast of characters. Nothing But a Man showed that inde- pendent film could get closer to the truth in this period than the well-intentioned studio films that Hollywood was producing. No less an authority than Malcolm X loved this film. a

NOTHING BUT A MAN (Cinema V, 1964) A film unique in its time for depicting ordinary African- American life in the South, and made in cooperation with the NAACP, it portrays a black man coming to terms with father- hood, with his own father, and with the meaning of manhood in an economically unjust society. Frame enlargement.

446 CHAPTER 11 Film Theory and Criticism

an untapped market here, hungry for a new and different kind of film. (Van Peebles'

son, Mario, made Baadassss [20041, a tribute to his father and the film, with son

Mario playing his dad attempting to get the legendary film made.)

That same year, Gordon Parks' Shaft (1971) offered a new and popular hero,

private investigator John Shaft (Richard Roundtree), who, unlike the more wary

and cautious characters played by Poitier, was comfortable, confident, and in con-

trol of his dangerous urban environment. During the opening credits (set to Isaac

Hayes' sensational music), Shaft gives the finger to a motorist who almost runs him

down, and this was one of the first times audiences had seen an angry black man

on screen. Shaft was so popular that Roundtree returned in two sequels, Shaft's Big

Score (1972) and Shaft in Africa (1973). He also had a cameo in the 2000 remake

by John Singleton.

Another hero of "blaxploitation" was Superfly (1972), a heroin dealer, played by

Ron O'Neal, who is looking to get out of the drug business and has to pull off a scam

against a group of crooked white cops to do so. A huge outpouring of films followed—

Slaughter (1972), Hell Up in Harlem (1973), Black Caesar (1973), coffy (1973),

Cleopatra Jones (1973), Foxy Brown (1974), and numerous other flashy gangster, cop,

and action pictures. In Foxy Brown and other films, Pam Grier emerged as one of the

stars of the movement, and Quentin Tarantino paid tribute to the "blaxploitation" era

by casting Grier as the lead in Jackie Brown (1997).

By the mid-1970s, the "blaxploitation" era was ending. Although many of these

films were financed by Hollywood studios and were made by white directors, the

films were supported by African-American audiences. Although they were controver-

sial in their day for offering what some said were negative and stereotyped portraits,

today there is a great deal of affection and nostalgia for these pictures. They were

funky, flashy, in-your-face entertainments and were unapologetic about it—a rare

combination of qualities in any era.

Moreover, until the generation of African-American filmmakers who emerged

in the 1990s, "blaxploitation" represented the only flourishing of black-themed

films since the era of Oscar Micheaux. They were aimed exclusively at black

BAADASSSSS (SONY PICTURES CLASSICS, 2004)

Writer—director Mario van Peebles plays his father, Melvin, making his epochal film, Sweet Sweetback's Baad Asssss Song (1971). Mario in- tended this as a tribute to his father and to the picture that started the era of "blaxploitation." Frame enlargement.

Ideological Models 447

SHAFT (MGM, 1971) Black detective John Shaft (Richard Roundtree) was a new kind of movie hero—tough, street wise, defiant of "the man," and most important, African-American. Hollywood had a long tradition of tough-guy heroes, but they had always been white. Roundtree made Shaft into a charismatic figure for the times, and he returned in two sequels and a remake in 2000. Frame enlargement.

audiences because Hollywood did not believe that black-themed films or films with African-American actors in the lead roles would draw white viewers.

All that has changed today. African-American films are now among the indus-

try's most successful mainstream pictures. Are We There Yet? (2005), starring Ice

Cube and Nia Long, grossed $83 million in the United States and Canada, and stu-

dio market research found the audience to be 43 percent white, 26 percent black,

and 18 percent Hispanic. Barbershop (2002), a comedy about black neighborhood

life, also with Ice Cube, grossed $76 million and drew an audience that was 60

percent black and 40 percent white. Hitch (2005), a romantic comedy starring Will

Smith, grossed $177 million domestically. Nothing succeeds in Hollywood like

success. The mainstreaming of African-American film has replaced the segregated

market in which "blaxploitation" was introduced and should be considered one of

contemporary film's great success stories.

Narrative and Ideology

A final component of ideological film criticism should be noted. This is the close

relationship that exists between narrative and ideology. Ideological film crit-

ics regard narrative as an especially good vehicle for ideology. A film's narrative

shows a series of changes in a situation or a state of affairs and concludes by ex-

plaining how some condition has come about. By so doing, it can embody an ideo-

logical argument.

Fatal Attraction (1987), for example, tells a story about a happily mar-

ried lawyer whose casual adultery produces a nightmare for his family when the

woman he is seeing turns out to be a violent psychopath. In telling a story that

448 CHAPTER 11 Film Theory and Criticism

moves from the allure of casual sex and the excitement of adultery to terror and anxiety and concluding with the death of the female villain and reunification of the family, Fatal Attraction constructs an argument about the importance of family and fidelity and about the violation Of trust and love that can result from casual adultery.

Note, though, that this is an ideological argument and that all these categories—family, love, fidelity, adultery—are ones that the film constructs in the course of developing its argument. As such, one can quarrel with some of the definitions. Was it really necessary, for example, to turn the lawyer's lover into such a monster? In the real world, adultery does not inevitably have such horrific and monstrous consequences. It is essential for the film's ideological argument, though, that these consequences ensue. They enable the film to invoke the impor- tance of family and to conclude its ideological argument with a vision of family triumphant.

Summary Because many films are ideological in an implicit and second-order way, such criti- cism usefully uncovers otherwise unnoticed aspects of social meaning. Good ideologi-

cal criticism prevents viewers from becoming too complacent, too naive about the

way film can display and distort important social and political realities. Ideological

criticism keeps viewers vigilant against the egregious screen distortions of important

social issues.

ncasr.t

FATAL ATTRACTION (PARAMOUNT PICTURES, 1987) Fata/ Attraction builds its ideological argument about the sanctity of marriage and family through a narrative about a psychopath, Alex (Glenn Close), terrorizing her former lover, Dan Gallagher (Michael Douglas), and his family. In this scene, a knife-wielding Alex in- vades the Gallagher home and attacks Dan's wife, Beth (Ann Archer). The film's ideology is conveyed by its narrative. Frame enlargement.

FILMMAKER SPOTLIGHT

Oliver Stone

With much thunder and rage, Oliver Stone revitalized a left-wing and overtly ideological vision in main- stream U.S. cinema, although to call his political vision left-wing is to give it perhaps more unity than it actu- ally possessed. After serving in the infantry in Vietnam and subsequently studying filmmaking at New York University, Stone scripted several violent, pulp films (Midnight Express, 1978; Conan the Barbarian, 1982; Scarface, 1983; Year of the Dragon, 1985) and directed a routine horror film (The Hand, 1981).

In his second film as director, the remarkable Salvador (1986), he began to define his niche as a powerful, sometimes strident critic of U.S. society and foreign policy. Completed during the Reagan era of the early- and mid-1980s as a criticism of the administration's support for a brutal military regime in El Salvador, Stone's film is an act of political cour- age and commitment. Like most of his work, how- ever, it is not without ambiguity and ambivalence. It skillfully dissects the duplicity of U.S. policy in El Salvador and the violence of the regime the United States supported but backs away from acknowledg- ing the peasant revolutionaries as a viable alterna- tive. As a result, Stone cannot find any solution to the horrors he portrays, and his political engage- ment turns into despair.

Stone's next film, Platoon (1 988), put him in the big leagues as a filmmaker. As an antidote to

Ideological Models 449

the comic book fantasies embodied by Sylvester

Stallone's Rambo character, Stone's film was hailed

by veterans and critics as the most realistic portrait

of the Vietnam War yet made. Platoon does have

a surface realism, yet it also employs explicit reli-

gious symbolism and generic narrative formulas. Its

political view of the war is murky, but it portrays

with great intensity the suffering and loss of U.S.

soldiers.

Stone next applied his Platoon narrative

formula—a young man torn between good and

bad father figures—to U.S. capitalism in Wall Street

(1987) and then made one of his least popular but

best films, Talk Radio (1 988), which powerfully por-

trays the free-floating popular rage and anxiety that

threatens U.S. society and democracy.

A grandiose style and an increasingly strident tone

mar some of his subsequent films. Born on the Fourth

of July (1989) contains an extraordinary Tom Cruise

performance as Vietnam vet Ron Kovic, but Stone's

audiovisual style is unrelentingly bombastic. The

viewer is pummeled by its grandiloquence and by a

one-dimensional view of how young Kovic was brain-

washed by macho, jingoistic U.S. culture, personified

by John F. Kennedy in the period the film portrays.

Stone apparently revised his view of Kennedy for

JFK (1 991), which portrays a dovish president eager

to withdraw from Vietnam and killed by Washington

PLATOON (ORION PICTURES, 1986)

Platoon was one of the most influential films of its decade. Avoiding Rambo-style heroics, it shows the war as a horrifically destructive event. The film mixes realism with religious symbolism, as in the Christian imagery em- ployed in this shot showing an American soldier's death. Stone returned to the war in several subsequent films, but Platoon remains his best work on that subject. Frame enlargement.

(continued)

450 CHAPTER 11 Film Theory and Criticism

powers intent on prosecuting the war. While the film is structurally brilliant in its complex montage editing and clear summary of a mountain of assas- sination data, Stone weakens his case by building his argument on a speculative and unproven thesis that Kennedy was going to withdraw from Vietnam. As a result, the film occupies a muddy middle ground, neither a clear fiction nor a responsible historical document.

Attacked by many media commentators for the conspiracy theories of JFK, Stone lashed back with Natural Born Killers (1 994), an ugly account of two mass murderers whose crime spree is glamorized by the news media and who are portrayed as celebri- ties by reporters eager to promote the latest scrap of tabloid sensationalism. The film is a mishmash of disjointed MTV-style technique—flash cuts, off-kilter camera angles, jerky handheld camerawork, random pans, and other visual manipulations that exist for their own sake. The film glorifies and embodies what it pretends to attack: the violence and ugliness in modern U.S. society and its promotion via film and television.

Nixon (1995) is a surprisingly compassionate portrait of Richard Nixon's life and presidency, with a masterful performance by Anthony Hopkins in the

role. U Turn (1997) is an unpleasantly violent film

noir that returned to the disjointed and off-kilter

style of Natural Born Ki//ers.

Stone's films had been vociferous, cinematically

powerful attacks on the power structure in U.S.

society. In carrying out this project, he was virtually

unique among contemporary U.S. directors, who

generally prefer box office returns to social mes-

sages. But Stone grew weary of the controversy his

films were provoking and felt that he had taken a

terrific beating over remarks that he made following

9/11 that suggested the attacks were the result of

U.S. policies overseas. He lowered his public profile,

and as a result, his recent filmmaking has lost the

sharp edge it once possessed. World Trade Center

(2006) is an inspirational tale of lives rescued on

9/1 1, a film that takes no political perspective on

the day's events. W (2008) is a compassionate por-

trait of the young George W. Bush, and Wall Street:

Money Never Sleeps (2010) is a sequel to Wall Street

that lacks the earlier film's anger about high finan-

cial crimes. Whether Stone will return to the aggressively

ideological quality of his earlier work remains to be seen.

A weakness of ideological criticism occurs when a critic too quickly collapses different levels of meaning, moving too rapidly from the specificity of the film, the particulars of the characters and their situations, to the extraction of a more abstract and generalized ideological message. Back to the Future (1985) may be a key film of the 1980s, connected with the era's zeitgeist, but it should not be reduced to that. It is also a clever, multileveled comedy that speaks to its viewers in a variety of ways.

When an ideological critic or theorist pays scant attention to the particular and con- crete details of a film's characters and story situations, in favor of a more abstract social message, it weakens the force and logic of the analysis. It may be that the ideological argument of Fatal Attraction is that sex is bad if it takes place outside of marriage, but the enormously complex concrete details of the film, and the intricacies of its narrative, should not be reduced to such an abstract and blanket statement. Sophisticated ideologi- cal analysis maintains a clear separation between these levels.

FEMINIST MODELS Critics use feminist film theory to analyze representations of gender on screen andthe forms of pleasure associated with them, as depicted for characters in a film andalso for spectators, whose gender identities are constructions of biology as well as

Feminist Models

of society and its values. Fetninist models seek to open up traditional definitions of gender as portrayed in film and to make these problematic by revealing hidden as- sumptions and repressed meanings. Feminist models of criticism often blend elements of psychoanalytic and ideological analysis. The psychoanalytic component is found in atten1PtS to understand the ways that cinema arouses pleasure and desire in audiences and how this tnight differ on a gender basis. The ideological component is found in the efforts of feminist criticism to relate the depiction of gender in film to prevailing social attitudes, assumptions, and practices found in the general society of which film is part.

Elements of Feminist Models IMACÅ.S Feminist film criticism tends to assume two forms. The first is an analysis and description of the ways that films portray gender. Feminist critics may examine the way that visual spectacle and the use of the close-up function in film to present wonlen as visual and erotic objects for the contemplation of a male audience. For feminist critics, the extraordinary visual attention given to the bodies of stars such as Marilyn Monroe or Marlene Dietrich turns these performers into erotic objects for a male audience.

Feminist analyses focus on narrative strategies as well as specifically visual ones. A feminist analysis of Fatal Attraction might concentrate on the fate of the film's nominal villain, Alex (portrayed by Glenn Close). A feminist critic could emphasize the way that the film ideologically constructs the character of Alex as a monster whose outrageous behavior toward the hero's family requires that she un- dergo an extraordinary amount of suffering and physical punishment to atone for her crimes.

Because the film presents Alex as such a monster, the feminist critic might rea- sonably suggest that Fatal Attraction regards female sexuality that is unconstrained by the institutions of marriage and family with a great deal of fear, suspicion, and loathing. Alex is an independent, single, aggressive, and very sexual woman. In the film, she is ideologically suspect because of these very qualities, and the gen- der confusion represented by her masculine name points toward this villainy. By

creating and then destroying this monster, the film offers a very traditional mes-

sage about the ideal role of women as wives and mothers rather than as single

professionals. Feminist theory also focuses on prevailing gender roles assigned to men in

commercial cinema. These investigations have included the phenomenon of the

"hard-bodied" male action hero (Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger,

Jean-Claude Van Damme), a figure of great violence, exaggerated physical prow-

ess, few words, and little introspection. Feminist theory asks about the ideal of

"maleness" that such a figure embodies and its implications for ordinary men and

women.

In recent films, women have assumed this character type. In Lara Croft:

Tomb Raider (2001), Angelina Jolie plays the kind of muscle-bound action hero,

blazing away with automatic weapons, that male action stars have long played.

At the same time, a regressive, and perhaps even sexist, view of women comes

through. Lara Croft can kick butt, but the camerawork and costuming play up

her Barbie-doll figure, with outlandishly large breasts. Is this progress, a feminist

critic might ask?

CHAPTER Film Theory and Criticism

Feminist analyses often practice a strategy of disruption, ainling to offer forrnulations that counter prevailing stereotypes and assumptions about gender and sexual identity or to focus on filrns that disrupt existing assunjptions about what is "natural" and appropriate. Countering or disrupting dominant tnyths is a way of shedding new light onto old problems.

In the 1920s, for example, Rudolph Valentino was a huge star of romantic melodranlas in which he played exotic characters—a matador, an Arab warrior, nutnerous European aristocrats—whose allure for the films' heroines was irresist- ible. The Inovies were extended rituals of seduction, in which Valentino's sexual aura overcalne the heroine's resistance and the Victorian morality which insisted that she must resist.

Valentino and his movies held great appeal for female viewers. He was a surrogate lover for millions of women in the moviegoing audience, and the nature of his appeal, therefore, offers inviting questions for theory to investigate. Accordingly, fen)inist critics have examined the special qualities of his films, which were unusual for presenting Valentino as an erotic object for the camera's gaze, precisely the terms by which women are more typically presented in films for male viewers. Valentino's films—The Sheik (1921), Blood and Sand (1922), A Sainted Devil (1924), Son of the Shiek (1926), and others—concentrated on his qualities as an erotic object, chiefly his physical beauty but also his androgynous mixture of masculine and feminine traits.

The pleasures offered by these movies to Valentino's female fans (and gay male following as well) exceeded the boundaries of what society officially permitted for women in the period. Women were expected to be wives and mothers, and, for the sake of domestic morality, to subordinate their desires to these domains and responsibilities. Scholar Miriam Hanson points out that the Valentino films, by contrast, offered audiences the vision and the possibility of female desire outside

LARA CROFT, TOMB RAIDER (PARAMOUNT, 2001) Muscle-bound action heroes are now played by women, not just men. Lara Croft is com-fortable with a variety of weapons and never met a man she couldn't outpunch and out-shoot. And yet the film gives great emphasis to her exaggerated Barbie-doll figure. Is thisprogress or merely the same old formula of a woman's body put on display in cinema?Frame enlargement.

Feminist Models 453

BEYOND THE ROCKS (FAMOUS PLAYERS-LASI<Y, 1 922) Gloria Swanson plays a woman unhappily married to an older man. On vacation, she meets a dashing nobleman played by Rudolph Valentino, with whom she falls in love. She swoons when Valentino kisses her hand. A major star in the period, Valentino's films showcased him as an object of erotic beauty and desire for female and gay male viewers. Frame enlargement.

of motherhood and family. From this viewpoint, Valentino's movies appealed to impulses in the popular audience that the society of the time was suppressing and denying expression. The films offered "an ideal of erotic reciprocity," a beautiful male lover who desired the woman as much she desired him, an erotic attraction that had nothing to do with social duties and responsibilities and, instead, offered a glori- ous liberation from them. Offering these transgressive pleasures to Valentino's fans, the movies explicitly sexualized an ideal of male beauty, represented in Valentino, presenting him as an object of erotic adoration.

Disruptive readings—interpretations that aim to deconstruct prevailing social myths and assumptions—have focused productively upon the work of director

Douglas Sirk, a Hollywood director who, in the 1950s, made numerous romantic melodramas that used lighting, color, set design and the staging of emotional conflicts among the characters to probe the dark areas of American society—intolerance, preju-

dice, sexual repression.

The concept of "excess" is often applied by scholars and critics to Sirk's work,

designating moments where emotional displays, color saturation, music scoring, or

Other elements of style become overwrought or intensively expressive in ways that

seem unmotivated by the storyline. Such excessive moments are taken as signs of dis-

placement, marking the presence of feelings and desires that polite society does not

accept.

454 CHAPTER 11 Film Theory and Criticism

ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS (UNIVERSAL, 1955)

Douglas Sirk found melodrama to be an excellent vehicle for exploring social repres- sions and taboos. Cary Scott (Jane Wyman) is an aging widow with grown children who falls in love with a much younger man (Rock Hudson) and incurs the wrath of her children, her friends, and her social community for selecting a lover everyone feels is too young for her. Sexual desire in a woman of her age is socially unaccept- able. Pressured by her children to cut off the affair, she agrees and gazes sadly at the wintry landscape outside her window. Sirk films the scene so that the window panes become the bars of Cary's prison. Frame enlargement.

FEMINIST FILMMAKING A second focus of feminist criticism is closely related to the first. It is the exploration of alternative, feminist forms of filmmaking and images of characters. In this respect, feminist filmmaking has sometimes been described as creat- ing a counter-cinema, though in practice it needn't result in that.

One of the great—and most audacious—works of modern cinema is Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Cotnmerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). As its title, which is the main character's name and address, suggests, this is a film focused on the mundane, banal, and trivial details of daily life, but its brilliance lies in Akerman's abil- ity to invest these with great mystery and a compelling sense of the strange.

Akerman was influenced by experilnental filmmakers, such as Andy Warhol and Michael Snow who expanded the viewer's sense of duration, of time's slow crawl, by filming nonmoving subjects or by doing slow camera moves or zooms through empty rooms. Akerman, too, emphasizes the fullness of time and the emptiness of space. She refuses the standard grammar of narrative cinema, composing the film instead in a se- ries of long takes that are precisely framed according to a principle of frontality, so that the camera, most often, is at a 90-degree angle to the back wall of a room or set and regards the characters in a frontal fashion.

In place of the condensed time that operates in most movies, whose plots omit ba- nal and uninteresting details in order to concentrate on dramatic highlights, Akerman insists upon duration, upon the experience of time passing slowly. The film is very long—201 minutes—and very little happens. Over a three-day span of narrative, the camera watches Jeanne Dielman, a widow living with her son and who also works as a

Feminist Models 455

JEANNE DIELMAN, 23 QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES(OLYMPIC FILMS, 1975) Jeanne (Delphine Seyrig) performs her daily chores, framed by ChantalAkerman's static camera in long takes and frontal compositions. In silence andquiet spaces, Jeanne slowly comes apart. Her obsessive-compulsive behaviorsgrow erratic, and she remains unable to express the loneliness and despair thatovertake her. Akerman's landmark film is an audacious work of radical cinemathat disrupts the medium's conventional forms in order to move toward a non-narrative experience of time, its flow, and its duration. Frame enlargement.

prostitute, as she performs her daily routines—peeling potatoes for dinner, making cof-fee, cleaning the bathroom, going into town to shop for food, receiving male clients.Jeanne spends most of her days alone, and the filming style gradually becomes alienating, capturing an essential loneliness that engulfs Jeanne and that isperhaps partly responsible for the psychological breakdown that the film's second half shows. Jeanne's ordered, obsessive-compulsive routines start to come apart—she forgets to turn off a light when leaving a room; she overcooks dinner; she wanders from room to room carrying a pot of food, uncertain where to place it. The film ends with an abrupt and unexplained act of violence.

Jeanne exemplifies two of the archetypal categories to which women have been assigned by men: mother and whore. By meticulously filming Jeanne's daily rituals and the emotionless way in which she conducts them, Akerman's poetic, haunting and disturbing film subverts the categories, making them as problematic as the surfaces Of Jeanne's domestic life come to seem, arenas and spaces laden with anxiety and an alienation that Jeanne cannot articulate.

Agnes Varda's Cleo from S to 7 (1962) is a classic of French New Wave cin- ema, and Molly Haskell has called Varda "the premiere female director of her generation." The film studies the emotional turmoil in a pop singer, Cleo (Corinne Marchand), as she spends ninety minutes awaiting the results of a medical test that she fears will bring a cancer death-sentence. Cleo takes an inner journey during

the length of this nearly real-time film (the film's running time corresponds very

456 CHAPTER 11 Film Theory and Criticism

CLEO FROM 5 TO 7 (CINE TAMARIS, 962)

Mirrors and reflective

surfaces point toward Cleo's false conscious- ness, happy to bask in the adoring gazes of oth-

ers and preoccupied with her own beauty. The slivered images suggest a fracturing of self, a lack of personal integration. Cleo grows as she learns to be the author of her own gaze, to look out at the world-and to take an interest in other people. Frame enlargement.

closely to the time depicted in the story), moving from a self-centered and shallow

outlook, wherein Cleo cannot listen or relate to others, to becoming a more open,

curious, and empathetic person. This change correlates with a shift in Cleo from

drawing pleasure in being seen by others to finding pleasure in seeing the world

around her. Varda shows this change in cinematic terms. As the film begins, Cleo is content

to

be looked at by men and by fans for her beauty. Cleo believes that being alive means

being beautiful. Varda emphasizes mirrors, glass windows and other reflecting sur-

faces, and composes shots that show Cleo's reflections, creating prismatic, split-image

views of the character that comment on her narcissism, selfishness, and lack of emo-

tional integration. As Cleo becomes more responsive to the people and world around her, she be-

comes the author of her own gaze, and the self-reflective, split-image compositions change to ones that show Paris and its people from Cleo's point of view as she regards them with a new level of unselfish curiosity. At film's end, the shadow of illness still pursues Cleo, but she greets the future with a new sense of hope.

Shot on location in Paris, full of charm and energy, Cleo from S to 7 is a cinemat- ically brilliant depiction of a woman's spiritual journey, realized in a clear, eloquent visual design that correlates the connections between self and others with acts of see- ing and, for Varda, of filming.

Varda's background lies in art history and photography, and she has been keenly interested in images, as they bear traces of self and world, as they serve as props for memory, and as they show time's cruel effects on people and places. Her work has alternated between narrative films and documentaries. The latter include Daguerreotypes (1976), portraits of the people and shops on the rue Daguerre, the Paris neighborhood where she has lived for decades. The title references the neighborhood as well as the early form of photography—daguerreotypes—that involved imprinting an image in-camera on the silver surface of a copper orbrass plate.

Feminist Models 457

Her narrative films include two additional classics. One Sings, the Other Doesn't (1977), about the friendship between two women amid the militant women's move- ment of the 1970s, focused particularly upon the struggle over abortion. This widely- known film was a landmark of feminist cinema, in France and abroad, although its straightforward nature makes it a lesser work than Cleo or Vagabond (1985), which

has been called Varda's masterpiece. vagabond portrays the reactions of farmers, shopkeepers, itinerant laborers, and

bourgeoisie who briefly come in contact with Mona (Sandrine Bonnaire), a vagabond wandering the bleak landscapes of southern France in winter. When the film begins, Mona's lifeless, frozen body is found in a ditch, and Varda offers the film as an in-

quiry into who Mona was and what she represented to those who briefly knew her. Mona is a paradox to those whom she comes in contact with. She smells, she's

filthy, she lives outside of society and is uninterested in friendship, work, sex, any sort

of relationship, all the sources of personal identity that an individual typically uses

to create a sense of self. She's smart, lively, with a sense of humor, an ability to enjoy

life, and she refuses all efforts to help her. She thus eludes the social categories that

people try to put on her or use to explain her behavior. Mona is a riddle, and the film

gains its power from Varda's refusal to explain this character. The movie shows how she is worn down from exposure to rain and cold, from

hunger, and from aimlessness to a point where she stumbles into a ditch and, lack-

ing the strength to climb out, freezes to death. Vagabond is attentive to the labels

and perceptions that people attach to women—all of the witnesses interviewed in the

VAGABOND (CINE TAMARIS, 1985)

Agnes Varda's masterpiece portrays an enigmatic

character, Mona (Sandrine Bonnaire), a

drifter whose refusal to conform to social

expectations challenges the belief systems of all

who encounter her. Mona's aimless existence

leads to her death, but Varda offers no easy

answers or conclusions. The film is precisely

conceived and designed. All of its tracking

shots, for example, following Mona as

she wanders a wintry landscape, move from right

to left, opposite the direction in which

Western cultures read printed text. The camera

movements materialize Mona's rejection of

society. Frame enlargement.

458 | CHAPTER 1 1 Film Theory and Criticism

film have hypotheses about Mona that explain her peculiar behavior—but the movie gathers considerable and haunting power from its refusal to validate any and from its acceptance that Mona is fundamentally unknowable. Varda's film looks onto the anlbiguitics of human personality and behavior, and while it explores gender in social terms, its poetic force resides in its acceptance of mystery and in the sobering notion that people can rernain unknowable.

The Piano, written and directed by Jane Campion, stars Holly Hunter (Best Actress Oscar winner for the role) as a mute Victorian unwed mother who travels to New

Zealand to fulfill an arranged marriage to an English farmer living there. Ada arrives in New Zealand accompanied by her child and her piano. The film explores her torturous reception as both a woman and an artist, She confronts a culture that is alien to her and places her into the most restrictive of sex roles, expecting her to be a dutiful wife to a

well-meaning but insensitive and ultimately brutal husband (played by Sam Neill).

The most telling measure of his insensitivity is his refusal to transport her piano from the beach to their plantation home. Unable to speak or unwilling to do so for reasons that in the film remain mysterious, Ada's only form of communication with the world is her music. Denied this by her husband, who abandons the piano and who later mutilates one of her hands, Ada becomes progressively more alienated from her surroundings, sexually, emotionally, aesthetically. A feminist critic might point to the improbability of a male screenwriter or director demonstrating this degree of sensitiv- ity to a woman's psychological and physical plight and such a complex metaphorical understanding of the close relationship between the social oppression of women and control over the rights to speech, art, and communication.

Whereas Varda and Akerman have used cinema in highly personal ways that rework its narrative modes and stylistic traditions, Kathryn Bigelow works within

THE PIANO (MIRAMAX, 1993) In The Piano, Holly Hunter portrays Ada, an unmarried mother coping with life in arustic, remote New Zealand community. Written and directed by Jane Campion, the filmemphasizes Ada's viewpoint and treats the narrative's male characters as supporting,

Feminist Models 459

traditional forms, specifically the action genres traditionally associated with male direc- tors. Her films include Blue Steel (1990), an urban police thriller, Point Break (1991), about a string of perfect bank robberies and the FBI agent sent to investigate, StrangeDays (1995), a futurist thriller about virtual reality, 1<-19: The Widowmaker (2002), a thriller about sailors trapped aboard a cripplied Soviet nuclear submarine, and TheHurt Locker (2009), about a bomb disposal expert in the Iraq War. Because these are

FILMMAKER SPOTLiGHT

Dorothy Arzner

In the Hollywood studio era, film directing was re-garded as man's work, and few women establishedcareers as directors. Dorothy Arzner, however, directed eleven films at Paramount Pictures, oneof the major studios, from 1927-1932, After that, she left Paramount and worked as an independent director-for-hire in Hollywood, making another six films before she ceased directing features. In the 1 960s and 1 970s, she became a professor, teaching directing and screenwriting at UCLA.

Arzner began working in the industry as a writer and an editor. She edited the popular Rudolph Valentino movie about bullfighting, Blood and Sand (1 922), and James Cruze's epic Western, The Covered Wagon (1923). Now an editor of note in Hollywood, she convinced Paramount to give her a vehicle to direct. The box-office success of Fashions for Women (1927) launched her directing career, and she made three more silent films before Paramount entered the sound era and put Arzner in charge of its first talkie, The Wild Party (1 929), fea-

turing Clara Bow, a major star in the period. In the early sound era, Arzner flourished as a dis-

tinct artist in Hollywood. When the Production Code

Administration began operating in 1934, American

film grew more conservative and restrictive in its

depictions of morality, sexuality, crime and religion,

and the years of sound filmmaking from 1930-1934

showcase movies that are much freer and more ex-

plicit in their depictions of these topics.

Arzner's feminist sensibilities synchronized with

this open and tolerant period in American cinema

to produce remarkable films, such as Working Girls

(1 931), a portrait of two sisters struggling with

issues of identity and self-determination during

the Great Depression. As she did in many of her films, Arzner explores the ways that society defines women in terms of marriage and motherhood and, in so doing, undermines a woman's ability to chart a course of independence and self-determination as men are allowed to do.

Arzner's movies are keenly focused on women's issues, and Christopher Strong (1933) depicts a world-famous aviatrix, Lady Cynthia Darrington (Katharine Hepburn), who is so devoted to flying that she has no time for men or for sex. She rises early to train and stay in peak physical shape for difficult flights, such as a round-the-world race that she wins. Darrington's life, however, becomes messy and complicated when she falls in love with a married man, Christopher Strong, and he asks her to give up flying. She refuses to do so, and, upon learning that she is pregnant, returns to the air, sets an altitude record, and then removes her oxygen mask, losing consciousness as she crashes to her death.

The film does not moralize about its topics of adultery and out-of-wedlock pregnancies, and, in fact, suggests that many marriages are stale and un- happy and that this is why adultery is so common. In these respects, it shows how the openness of "pre-Code" Hollywood enabled Arzner to produce startlingly original work.

But more importantly, watching Christopher Strong is like glimpsing an alternative path that Hollywood film might have gone down, had there

been more women working as directors to make

movies, as Arzner did, about strong women seeking

independent and self-fulfulling lives. Hepburn's Lady

Darrington is a dazzling character of a sort not to be

(continued)

CHAPTER 11 Film Theory and Criticism

CHRISTOPHER STRONG (RKO, 1933) Katharine Hepburn is a tough, self-reliant, independent aviatrix who has no time

for romance, until she falls for a married man. Dorothy Arzner's remarkable film

illuminates a pathway that American cinema might have taken in the Hollywood era but didn't. Frame enlargement.

glimpsed again in American film for many decades.

Instead, women depicted in movies directed by men

in this period too often are either unconvincing as

female characters or are defined primarily by their re-

lations to men, principally those of wife and mother.

Arzner's films, however, such as Christopher

Strong or Craig's Wife (1936) often turn the

conventional focus of Hollywood films inside-out

because they do not reaffirm the clichés that were

so standard in the period, such as the idea that a

woman should find happiness not through holding

a career but by making a home for a man. Craig's

Wife is a particularly scathing treatment of this idea.

Feminist film scholars have found Arzner's films to

be fascinating instances of a kind of counter-cinema

to the Hollywood model, and the movies do offer

striking material to this effect. Dance, Girl, Dance

(1940), for example, has a startling scene where

Judy (Maureen O'Hara), an aspiring ballerina who is

working temporarily in a burlesque show, steps out of character on stage to lecture the men in the audi- ence about how pathetic they are in their desire to watch her undress. It's an instance of the male gaze being turned back upon itself.

Arzner, however, considered herself to be a Hollywood professional, not a radical, which is to say that her films are remarkable in many ways but don't reduce to thesis-filmmaking or sloganeering. Like the best Hollywood filmmakers, her movies are tight and crisp. The dialogue is snappy, and the camera is always in the right place to frame the action and to comment on it. These are attributes of strong filmmaking. Arzner was an important Hollywood auteur, and her work is still relatively neglected today. Most of her films, for example, remain unavailable on DVD.

Feminist Models 461 genre pictures, a feminist critic might be interested to uncover minor variations that a director such as Bigelow might create within these standard and traditional formats, Bigelow is an articulate filmmaker and a proponent of the view that women directors

not be ghettoized as makers of soft, sensitive films. Her work is indistinguishable, stylistically, from male-directed

action pictures, and they demonstrate that women can excel as filmmakers in precisely the kinds of material long claimed by men.

Women in Film Under the old Hollywood studio system, few women worked as directors, but many hadvery successful careers as performers in front of the camera, Many also worked behindthe camera as editors or costume designers. One might think that all this has changedin today's film world, but in fact, the changes have not been so extensive. And in onerespect—working in front of the camera as an actor—things today are not as good asthey were 50 years ago. This history provides one of the contexts that feminist film theoryseeks to address and make an intervention into. A brief examination of how women havefared in the Hollywood industry can help to illustrate why issues of feminist filmmakingand of the images of women on film have been important ones for theory to explore.

Actors Women working as actors tend to have relatively short careers today. Because theprime audience for movies is composed of teenagers and young adults, studios courtthis segment of viewers very aggressively, and actors who fit this age range or who can play it on screen tend to get the most work most easily.

Reese Witherspoon has exemplified the young-adult category where women ac- tors today tend to find the most roles. In pictures such as Vanity Fair (2004), Legally Blonde 2 (2003), Sweet Home Alabama (2003), and others, she brings zest, charm, and great good humor to her roles. Her characters set out on the road of life with spirit and self-confidence.

Will she sustain her career over the next decade or longer as she ages beyond the young-adult demographic that she currently plays? She clearly has the range of talent to do so. The question is whether the industry will accommodate the change.

Unfortunately, many women today who age beyond this demographic find that the character roles available to them grow fewer and fewer. The industry makes few films built around mature adult female characters, so the roles start to dry up for ac- tors once they move out of the young-adult age range.

Charlotte Rampling kept her career alive as she aged into her fifties and sixties by

doing most of her later work in European film. In the 1980s, she appeared prominently

in Woody Allen's Stardust Memories (1980) and Sidney Lumet's The Verdict (1982), but

thereafter she worked mostly in France. She worked steadily, with major roles, including

the leads in Under the Sand (2000) and Swimming Pool (2003), where she played the

kind of mature woman who is rarely seen as the major character in Hollywood film.

Another problem is sustaining a career following a breakthrough role. Many fine

actors who enjoyed success in high-profile or well-received films experience difficulties

getting the next role. Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio (The Color of Money, 1986;

The Abyss, 1989), Elizabeth Shue (Leaving Las Vegas, 1995), and Linda Fiorentino

(The Last Seduction, 1994; Men in Black, 1997) all gave very strong performances in

successful films but have not thereafter enjoyed a sustained series of leading roles.

462 CHAPTER 1 1 Film Theory and Criticism

Virginia Madsen (Candymau, 1992) would have been a big star in the old Hollywood studio era. She projects a mature, smoldering sensuality and power that would have brought her great success in the 1940s, but today there are very few pic- tures for this kind of persona. After appearing in a long string of horror pictures, she got rave reviews for her performance in Sideways (2004) but did little film work the following year.

Stars today that are sustaining careers through a series of adult roles with an impressive level of accomplishment include Julia Roberts, who carries the high- power wattage and maturity of the great female stars of old Hollywood. She's played an impressive range of roles, and she's one of the few adult actresses whom the industry allows to carry a film in the lead role (Erin Brockovich, 2000). One reason that Steven Soderbergh cast her in Ocean's Eleven (2001) is because her character does not make an appearance until midway through the film. He wanted an actor with the charisma to make an instant and strong impression on viewers, and Roberts gave him that.

Nicole Kidman also has sustained an impressive career, making consistently good choices about projects and seeking out challenges by working with great direc- tors or great material (Eyes Wide Shut, 1999; The Hours, 2002; Dogville, 2003; and Cold Mountain, 2003). These have included the master Stanley Kubrick, the Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier, and characters as differentiated as the civil war widow in Cold Mountain, the writer Virginia Woolf in The Hours, and Samantha the witch in Bewitched (2005). She's also one of the rare film actors today who is extremely skilled at delivering long monologues (in, for example, Eyes Wide Shut and Birth [2004]).

RABBIT HOLE (OLYMPUS PICTURES, 201 0) Nicole Kidman maintains a careful and shrewd balance in her work between entertain-ment films (Moulin Rouge, Australia) and challenging, character-centered dramas withlimited box-office appeal. In Rabbit Hole, she plays a woman distraught with grief over thedeath of her child and whose inability to recover from this loss threatens her marriage.

Feminist Models 463

Compared with today, old Hollywood had many such front-rank stars whosustained long careers. Bette Davis made more than 100 films from 1931 to 1989,with roles ranging from Queen Elizabeth to romantic leads in two of the great moviemelodramas, Dark Victory (1939) and Now, Voyager (1942). During the 1930s, sheappeared in from three to six films per year.Katharine Hepburn specialized in strong career women. Although she made fewerfilms than Davis, she still appeared in more than 50 movies, a great many of whichare classics—Alice Adams (1935), Holiday (1938), Bringing Up Baby (1938), Thephiladelphia Story (1940), and The African Queen (1951).Other major stars included Jean Arthur (more than 90 films, including Mr. SmithGoes to Washington, 1939), Joan Fontaine (nearly 50 films, including Rebecca,1940), Ingrid Bergman (more than 50 films, including Casablanca, 1941), Myrna Loy(more than 130 films, including Libeled Lady, 1936), Joan Crawford (nearly 100 films, including Mildred Pierce, 1945), and Carole Lombard (more than 70 films, in- cluding Nothing Sacred 1932, in a career cut short by early death).

What has changed today is that the industry does not make enough films with the kind of content that would sustain a large gallery of lead female actors. Therefore, while we have a Julia Roberts or a Nicole Kidman, the type of films the industry funds leaves little room for others to join them.

"Indie" opportunities While the industry rarely gives a blockbuster film project to a female director, women are more likely to find work as directors in independent film or on smaller-budget pic- tures picked up by the majors.

After graduating from film school at New York University, for example, Nicole

Kassell made The Woodsman (2004), about a child molester (played by Kevin Bacon

in a critically praised performance) coping with life in the world after being released

NOW, VOYAGER (WARNER BROS., 1942)

Leading roles for women were much more plentiful during the classic Hollywood era of the 1930s and 1940s. Bette Davis, for example, specialized in playing tough, strong, independent women and made more than

100 films in her career. In Now,

Voyager, her character undergoes

a transformation from shrinking

wallflower to a poised, powerful

figure of high society. Frame enlargement.

CHAPTER 11 Film Theory and Criticism

from prison. Independent film enabled her to transition from film school to profes- sional directing.

After working as a production designer, Catherine Hardwicke transitioned to

directing independent films. Her first feature, Thirteen (2004), is a powerful portrait of Tracy (Evan Rachel Wood in an outstanding performance), a seventh-grader on the skids, involved with drugs and petty crime. She continued her focus on teen characters in a follow-up feature, The Lords of Dogtown (2005). She then had a huge box-office success with the vampire story, Twilight (2008), made for indie production company Summit Entertainment.

Sofia Coppola attained a remarkable level of success (for an indie feature) with Lost in Translation (2003), about the friendship between a melancholy movie star (Bill Murray) and a neglected newlywed (Scarlett Johansson). The film was nominated for several Academy Awards, and she followed it with a period film, Marie Antoinette (2006).

Working on smaller budgets outside the orbit of the major studios can provide more creative freedom and an opportunity to work regularly, although, even here, getting the next project can be a problem. After directing several episodes of the TV series, Honticide: Life on the Street, Lisa Cholodenko wrote and directed the highly acclaimed feature film High Art (1998), a character piece about two women sharing an apartment who become lovers. It was a comeback film for Ally Sheedy, who had been one of the popular "brat pack" actors in the 1980s. Critics praised her blazing performance, but Cholodenko did not have another feature film in release until Laurel Canyon (2002).

LOST JN TRANSLATION (FOCUS FEATURES, 2003) After winning critical praise for The Virgin Suicides (1 999), director Sofia Coppola foundcritical and popular success with Lost in Translation. This quirky low-budget independentfilm grossed an amazing $1 1 9 million worldwide, a level of success that gave Coppola anew degree of bargaining power in the industry. She followed Lost in Translation with aperiod film, Marie Antoinette (2006). Frame enlargement.

Feminist Models 465

THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT (FOCUS FEATURES, 2010)

Nic (Annette Benning) and Jules (Julianne Moore) share an awkward meeting with the birth father (Mark Ruffalo) of their chil- dren. Lisa Cholodenko's film exemplifies the character-centered dra- mas that are more com- monly found on today's indie circuit than in big studio pictures. Frame enlargement.

In that picture, which Cholodenko also wrote, she gave Frances McDormand one of the best roles of her career as a free-spirited music producer living in the famed bohemian neighborhood long favored by folk and rock musicians. The film explores issues of aging, parenting, and sexuality with real sensitivity and insight. She re- turned to these issues in The Kids Are All Right (2010), in which Annette Bening and Julianne Moore play a gay couple whose children search out their birth father. Made for indie Focus Features, the film was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar.

Case study REAL WOMEN HAVE CURVES

Home Box Office (HBO) has been very receptive to the work of women directors and grants its filmmakers a great deal of artistic freedom. Lisa Gay Hamilton's Beah: A Black Woman Speaks (2005), Liz Goldwyn's Pretty Things

(2005), Ivy Meeropolis' Heir to an Execution (2004), and numerous other films produced and directed by women

have found a home on HBO.

The HBO production Real Women Have Curves

(2002) is one of the best films of recent years to portray

what it means to grow as a woman, and a Latina, in

the United States today, where oppressive beauty stan-

dards stigmatize women who are not thin and health-

club toned. The film is a coming-of-age story about

Ana (played by first-time actress America Ferrera), a

Mexican-American woman from a working-class family

who has an opportunity to go to college on scholar-

ship. Her mother opposes this because she does not

want Ana to leave the neighborhood or her class back-

ground, and Ana must decide what she will do.

The film gracefully integrates its many observations about class, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality and adds a great deal of humor to the mix. Ana is heavy (her mother calls her "fatty"), but she feels good about her weight and about herself, and she attracts the romantic attentions of a boy in her class.

Ana works with a group of overweight women at the sewing factory run by her sister Estella, where, for low wages, they make inexpensive dresses that are then sold by others at high prices in swanky depart- ment stores. One of the themes of the film is to be comfortable with the type of body that you have, and in one of the film's best scenes, the women, sweat- ing in the hot factory, remove their outer clothes and work in their underwear, comparing their cellulite and rolls of flesh while joking and dancing with a new sense of energy. Ana's mother is appalled, but Ana admonishes her, saying that real women look like this.

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466 CHAPTER 11 Film Theory and Criticism

REAL WOMEN HAVE CURVES (HBO, 2002) America Ferrera is Ana Garcia, struggling with issues of beauty, class, and success in a sensitive coming-of-age story that avoids cliches. Screenwriter Josefina Lopez based the story on her own experi- ences. Frame enlargement.

The film's writer and director are Latinas who were determined to show a different image of Hispanic characters, who are often portrayed in mainstream films in a context of crime, guns, or drugs. Director Patricia Cardoso is a graduate of film school at the University of California Los Angeles, and she came to the United States from Columbia in 1987. Screenwriter Josefina Lopez was born in Mexico and came to the United States with her family as undocumented residents. She became a legal resident in 1987 through the Simpson-Rodino Amnesty Law, passed in 1985, that provides amnesty for undocumented aliens. While living as an "illegal," she worked in the sewing factories of Los Angeles,

and from that experience, she wrote the play from

which the film was adapted.

The play focused on the women in the sewing fac-

tory, working and joking but always fearful of an INS

raid. Her screenplay moved the focus to Ana and made

the film into a coming-of-age story, a portrait of class in

America, and a critique of contemporary beauty stan-

dards. The movie masterfully balances and integrates all

this material and does so with heart and humor.

Well directed as the film was, though, Patricia Cardoso

did not have another film in production until Nappily Ever

After (2005). This is the enduring challenge that indepen-

dent filmmakers confront. Finishing one film does not

make getting the next one necessarily any easier.

Production Executives and Personnel Achieving an active and successful career actually can be easier outside directing. In the executive offices of Hollywood's major studios, some of the most powerful people in the industry have been women. These have included producers and studio executives.

Kathleen Kennedy has produced many of the industry's most successful and highest-profile pictures—War of the Worlds (2005), Seabiscuit (2003), and Signs (2002). Gale Ann Hurd's track record as producer includes Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003), Hulk (2003), and Armageddon (1998). Until her recent death, Debra Hill maintained an active producing career—Crazy in Alabama (1999), Escape from L.A. (1996), and the Halloween series. As their credits demonstrate, the in- dustry's most powerful female producers are not ghettoized into making "women's pictures" or "chick flicks." Their work includes some of the most prominent contem- porary action films.

Feminist Models

Working at the highest level of industry influence, Sherry Lansing was a studiochief. She was chair of Paramount Pictures, one of the Hollywood majors, from theearly 1990s until 2005. She was responsible for such films as Braveheart (1995),Titanic (1997), and Saving Private Ryan (1998). In its 2003 Women in EntertainmentReport, The Hollywood Reporter named her Number 4 on its list of the 100 mostpowerful people in Hollywood. After two years as entertainment president of Fox Broadcasting, Gail Bermanwas appointed president of Paramount Pictures. Amy Pascal became chairman ofcolumbia Pictures in 1999 and was promoted to chairman of its parent company,Sony Pictures Entertainment, in 2003, where she oversees all the company's produc-tion in movies, television, DVD and video, games, and mobile phone technologies.And in terms of production personnel, two of the most brilliant and steadilyworking film editors have been Ann V. Coates (Lawrence of Arabia, 1962; andunfaithful, 2002) and Thelma Schoonmaker (Raging Bull, 1980; Taxi Driver, 1976;The Aviator, 2004). Women, however, traditionally have found work as editors, evenduring Hollywood's classic period, because editing, like costume design, was regardedby men in the industry as ''women's work." Thus, while women have long worked as editors, their employment aspowerful studio executives and chiefs is a significant development. Despite this,

however, the industry remains relatively lopsided in the opportunities that it grants to women, with clear boundaries existing in the roles that are available in front of the camera and the slots that are available behind it. For women actors and filmmakers, Hollywood remains a difficult environment in which to work.

Summary Feminist criticism has made a major contribution to the understanding of how gender perspectives and gender biases influence film images about the world and the way narratives are organized to privilege male characters and experiences at the expense of strong female characters. To a large extent, this bias in favor of male experience re- sults from the extraordinary power male filmmakers have long enjoyed relative to the much smaller number of women directors in charge of major productions. Because of this power, men have constructed images of women in films, and, for a feminist, these images necessarily say more about men than women. Accordingly, feminist criticism emphasizes the importance of women directors having an artistic voice in the world of cinema as a means of balancing the voices that male directors have long commanded.

Feminist theory has also called attention to the work of repression in cinema, that what a film does not show or say may reveal key assumptions about gender and about the way the social world is structured. Resistant and disruptive interpretations by a critic

can reveal these hidden and repressed areas of meaning and the prohibited or taboo areas

of content they point to.

Gender is one of the many screens through which human experience is filtered,

and, while it has a profound impact on the terms by which people live their lives, it is

not the only means for ordering one's experience of the world or organizing the

design of films. Sophisticated feminist criticism understands when best to apply

accounts emphasizing gender differences and to what degree. The feminist sensibility

behind Cleo From 5 to 7 or The Piano is more profound and enters more deeply into

the design of those films than does the fact that Blue Steel or Point Break are directed

by a woman. In the latter case, the weight of genre and traditional commercial

CHAPTER 11 Film Theory and Criticism

formulas tends to minimize the distinctive voice that a female director might use. As

with all models of criticism, the feminist critic must develop a sensitive understanding

of which material will most benefit from her or his distinctive tools of analysis.

COGNITIVE MODELS Cognitive film theory studies the ways viewers understand

and interpret visual and

auditory information in film and how specific structural features, such as editing or

lighting, may cue responses or invite particular kinds of interpretations. Cognitive

film theory focuses on (1) the viewer's perception and emotional experience of visual

and sound information, and (2) the ways that viewers organize and categorize these

perceptions in order to derive meaning from a film. With its emphasis on perceptu-

ally based interpretation and understanding, cognitive film theory derives many of its

principles and assumptions from research in perceptual psychology, computer science,

and communications. The cognitive film theorist is less concerned with developing an

interpretation of the content of a specific film than with understanding how viewers

in general process audiovisual information in order to extract meaning from films.

Elements of Cognitive Models For cognitive film theorists, viewers understand visual and auditory information

by using perceptual and interpretive processing. Perceptual processing refers to

sensory perception by viewers. Interpretive processing refers to the higher-level

interpretations that are placed on sense information. Let's consider how cross-

cutting—a convention of continuity editing used to suggest that two or more events

are occurring simultaneously—elicits both levels of response from viewers.

Understood in terms of perceptual processing, a viewer watching a cross-cut

sequence sees a succession of shots flashing by on the screen as an alternating series.

One series, for example, may show a swimmer desperately racing for shore while

the other series shows a shark cutting through the water. Understood in terms of interpretive processing—the cognitive or active interpretational response to sensory information—the viewer draws an inference from the alternating series of recurring images. That inference is a presumption of simultaneous action, the assumption that the narrative lines presented in the cross-cut sequence are occurring at the same mo- ment of time.

These two levels of processing emphasize the basic perceptual skills that the medium of cinema builds on as well as the viewer's contribution to the creation of meaning in cinema. The distinction between the terms highlights the difference be- tween the actual on-screen audiovisual information and what a viewer attributes to that information. Cognitive film theory, therefore, studies the ways that spe- cific audiovisual designs in cinema communicate information to the viewer who responds with an active interpretation. Another example can help to clarify this. A basic rule of continuity editing is the eyeline match. In terms of perceptual pro- cessing, a viewer watching a sequence cut using the eyeline match sees a series of close-ups or medium shots of actors oriented so that the directions of their gazes are in complimentary directions—one looks screen left, the other looks screen right. From the interpretive perspective, viewers respond to this editing code by inferring a relation of proximity and communication between the characters. The

Cognitive Models 469

MOONSTRUCK (MGM/ UNITED ARTISTS, 1987) Cognitive theory stresses how viewers perceive and interpret audiovisual informa- tion. Viewers give that infor- mation a higher-order level of meaning and structure than the images and sounds themselves convey. These two shots from Moonstruck illustrate the eyeline match. In terms of perceptual infor- mation, all a viewer sees are separate images of Cher and Nicolas Cage looking in dif- ferent directions. But viewers organize the shots by infer- ring, across the cut, that the performers are looking at each other. This level of infor- mation is not in the images themselves; the viewer sup- plies it. Frame enlargements.

viewer infers that characters presented using the eyeline match are communicating with one another and/or are near each other.

SCHEMAS Attention to interpretive processing enables cognitive film theorists to ex-

amine the ways that a viewer's responses to film are guided by a series of schemas, or

frameworks of interpretation. A fundamental assumption of cognitive film theory is

that viewers' responses to film are not strictly sensory driven, that is, are not entirely

explainable as immediate responses to the visual and auditory information contained

in the film. Viewers bring to this information a large set of schemas, or frameworks of

interpretation, that they have developed through personal experience in the world, as

members of given cultures and societies, and as experienced film viewers.

Using schemas, a viewer can understand and interpret visual and narrative informa-

tion in an extremely efficient and rapid fashion. To viewers familiar with science fiction

movies—viewers whose experience in this genre has enabled them to develop an exten-

sive set of interpretational schemas—a bright light on a character's face coupled with

an awestruck expression instantly evokes the idea of an alien presence. Viewers familiar

with Westerns will have schemas attuned to that genre. They know that a cowboy