To make my research more substantial, I have looked at some academic texts from the library based around the portrayal and place of women in visual/film culture.
Feminist Visual Culture by Claire Pajaczkowska
I found a book about women in different forms of art and design, as well as film. A useful chapter I came across focuses on graphic design.
I thought by gathering some information on this, that it would be helpful to my design solution and how I approach it as I'm researching feminism.
Some facts I found:
The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) indicated that out of 1,074 art directors working in Britain, only 158 are listed as being women.
Most key positions of power in advertising agencies are held by men: the report statistics showed that under the category of 'Agency Management', for example, 422 men were employed as opposed to 114 women.
"While most design history and criticism claims to be non-ideological and value-neutral, it is in fact that design has been controlled and produced by men." - Michael Rock and Susan Sellers
"private experience could be revealed through art [design] in order to influence cultural attitudes and transform stereotypes" - Suzanne Lacey
"graphic communication represents a chance to develop a powerful voice without having to speak up in public." - Veronique Vienne
Feminist criticism has challenged sexual stereotyping in visual culture. It also questions how women can bring a "different understanding" to designing and visually communicating.
Some artists, activists and pieces to look up:
- A typeface called 'Pussy Galore' by WD+RU 1995
- Sheila Levrant de Bretteville
- Laurie Haycock Makela
- Women's Action Coalition (WAC)
- McQuiston - From Suffragettes to She-devils: Women's Liberations and Beyond
- Bretteville's 1973 poster project entitled Pink
Reading this book has opened my eyes a bit more to how women are involved in graphic design, and how it is certainly a good thing to tackle sexist visual ideals.
Women in film
I moved onto the 'women in film' section and learned about how women are represented in film.
Men producing film end up replicating the constraints that the patriarchy holds over how femininity is represented.
1970s: Films were starting to be made 'by, for and about women'. Modes of production and consumption were being transformed, and 'counter cinema' was born.
Counter cinema - alternative cinematic practices which deliberately countered some of the classic Hollywood cinema traits.
Claire Johnson in 1973
"at this point in time a strategy should be developed which embraces both the notion of film as a political tool and film as entertainment. For too long these have been regarded as two opposing poles with little common ground."
'Non male'
Under a system which privileges the male as the 'maker of meaning', woman can only be defined as 'non male'; 'in the asymmetry of patriarchal culture, woman is defined as other, as that which is not male.Freud has used the term 'scopophilia' to describe how the desire to look may become an active and controlling gaze in adulthood and in extreme cases:
it can become fixated, producing excessive voyeurs and peeping Toms, whose only sexual satisfaction can come from watching, in an active controlling sense, an objectified other.
In cinema this desire is manipulated and naturalised by the combined use of three aspects of the gaze: that of the camera, the spectator, and the gaze between the characters.
The narrative of the film, the editing and the 'triple gaze' combine to endorse the active male perspective as owner of the gaze and (as Johnston also argued) as maker of meaning within the narrative. Women are contrasted as narratively passive and, 'The determining male gaze projects its phantasy onto the female figure which is styled accordingly.'
In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.
Deep Impact, GI Jane - Final girl
The heroines of each might be compared with what Carol Clover terms the 'final girl'. They are identified by her androgyny, her intelligence and resourcefulness, her independence and her non-sexual behaviour (in horror films, she is frequently set apart from her sexually-charged teenage peers, with the suggestion that her survival is linked to her abstinence). She is freer to act than women in most films, having an active, interrogating gaze. She pushes the narrative forward through her actions, providing a challenge to the passive role historically defined for women. In psychoanalytic terms, she is defined as a phallic woman, one who most definitely denies her lack.
Women's Pictures Feminism and Cinema by Annette Kuhn
During the 1960s Hollywood films became increasingly violent, that women characters were increasingly represented as victims, and that the days of the powerful female star and the 'independent woman' as a character were gone. Haskell offers a sociological explanation for this finding, arguing that: 'The closer women come to claiming their rights and achieving independence in real life, the more loudly and stridently films tell us it's a man's world' (Haskell, 1975, p. 363).I didn't realise that things got worse for female representation in the 60s, and it seems it was because women were starting to stand up for themselves.
Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema by Marcelline Block
I found a lot of interesting content in this book, which seemed to discuss some recent films that I have been watched avidly, including Coppola's and Apatow's work. It has helped me to analyse more thoroughly the details within the films and the techniques used.
Director: Sofia Coppola
Coppola's films are neither chick flicks nor teen films, but they represent young women's experiences and often have a "girly" or youthful focus in terms of their costumes, graphics, and soundtracks.
Coppola's films at best fall under the ambiguous political and theoretical umbrella known as postfeminism. Coppola's female protagonists are caucasian girls and women who lounge about -often in their underwear- shop compulsively, and are passive-aggressive.
Politically, postfeminism is either uninterested in women's rights and gender equality or takes these for granted. Postfeminism often positions itself against the "killjoy" elements of feminism whose orthodoxy means that women should not enjoy "girly" pleasures.
The lack of an explicit feminist agenda may render Coppola's films a postfeminist pleasure for those willing to accept un-empowered women subjects.
Parties, shopping and music seems to be her only frames of reference.
Coppola's films may seem politically ambiguous in terms of aesthetics, as her questionable framing of women's faces and bodies dances a fine line between duplicating and effectually exploiting the way the various social observers of her characters such as pubescent boys, older men, and the French court view women.
All three of Coppola's films are innovative, but not in ways that would repel a mainstream audience. Rather than shocking the viewer, Coppola's work seems capable of fostering a new experience of women characters that creates empathy and understanding, and she does this through form. Over the course of her first three feature films, Coppola appears to refine her interest in and execution of conveying a woman's inner life and experience through her exterior. She not only hones in on her female subject by reducing the number of characters, but also develops her cinematography and editing to gain the most depth.The Virgin Suicides
Despite it's title, Coppola's film, like the Jeffrey Eugenide's novel on which it is based, is not so much about suicide as it is about youth and what Coppola herself calls the "'epicness' of teendom." The girls' dying young embalms them forever in what patriarchal culture would consider their most exquisite form, and images of these nubile blondes will forever haunt the neighbourhood boys who obsessively watch and spy on them.
While the fantasies are generated by onscreen male characters, they also belong to the film's audience, for these are the manifestations of a collective cultural memory of girlhood, a memory generated at the intersection of personal experience and archetypes produced by popular culture.
Lost in Translation
In general, Charlotte spends a lot of her time in her underpants, which at first seems problematic as it fosters her "to-be-looked-at-ness," to use Mulvey's term.
However, the way she lays and moves around is not performed for the male eye; she is generally without an onscreen male surrogate for the viewer, and the way she frequently folds up her body has the opposite effect of display.
Likewise, in the scene where Charlotte performs karaoke, Johansson's singing voice (thin and stumbling) and the pink wig she wears seem to ironize or deflate what would traditionally work as erotic spectacle, drawing attention to the act of performance and masquerade.
The increased time alone with the female protagonist is accompanied by a new type of shot used by Coppola: Charlotte seen from over her shoulder, which seems to encourage the viewer to identify with her point of view rather than objectifying her. (We are looking at Charlotte and with Charlotte).
A similar use of jump cuts is found when showing Charlotte making herself up in the hotel bathroom. Charlotte's own contemplation of her face, application of lipstick and playing with her hair would encourage us to objectify her as well, but again, the splicing of these images through jump cuts disrupts our visual pleasure of any one image.Overview
While most critics find Coppola's films to be successful as mood pieces, some are wary of her achieving this atmosphere by having female characters spend so much time on their backs or in bathtubs.
Characters' silences in Coppola's films are often used in direct contrast to other people's talking, which is usually rather vapid, making their silence a marker of intelligence.
In coppola's work, women's silence is less about a refusal to enter the patriarchal symbolic order according to Jacques Lacan and more about the inadequacy of words to convey feeling.
Creator: Judd Apatow
Knocked Up
Judd Apatow's Knocked Up whose message seems to be that marriage and maternity are the only options for an accomplished woman who gets pregnant after a one-night stand with an unemployed male slacker.
As the success of Knocked Up demonstrates, mainstream American film continues to portray a patriarchal fantasy. Feminist scholarship is necessary and women's filmmaking is a tool for correction.
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