Early 1900 Film Analysis

After the 1950’s and the invention of the television, the view of how women should act has drastically changed. We went from the image of the everyday housewife in a long dress and neat hair to the concept of women being ditsy sex symbols, and occasionally to the strong female heroes who could hold their own against any competitor. As women on TV and in film have progressed, so has society’s view of women and our abilities.

Moreover, few women have leading roles in films especially in ones that are comic based, because the majority of the audience consists of heterosexual males that want to see women in passive roles. Portraying attractive women that abide by cultural norms satisfy most men’s desire for dominance and masculinity. Solomon and Maasik imply in “Heroes and Villains: Encoding Our Conflicts” that economically movie industries consider female lead movies as losses because the safest way to make money is by appealing to adults and children who have already approved of successful cartoon series and books (444). Movie industries are more concerned about making money, so their agenda is to go with what already works and maintain the safest profile. However

The film industry has created the conventional gender roles of society into their movies; A majority of films have supported some of the male and female stereotypes. In the history of the film industry, the role of men is primarilythat of the stereotypical working class man or hero, while the roles of women are primarily portrayed as being somewhat inferior to men. In the 1930s through the 1970s, men held the leading roles in films while women played smaller roles. Men were typically employed, successful gentlemen, while the woman’s only job was a housewife. The film industry was mostly dominated by men. In terms of jobs, women were given mostly family roles and rarely were shown outside of their homes, while men had

In a time of diversified avant-garde theatre, painting and literature, the arts began to mirror revolution and industrialisation through a modernised, progressive flair. With the rise of communism dominating politics, filmmakers concerned themselves with constructing a socialist film industry exposing authorial innovation and political inferences. Man with a Movie Camera (1929) adopted a constructivist approach by utilising experimentalist technique in what was considered to be the early stages of modernism. The director, Dziga Vertov, helped to radicalise cinema by emphasising the fundamental basis of cine-poetics, more commonly referred to as ‘montage’. This non-linear, reportorial documentary differs from the chronological,

In the first part, I will discuss how the movies define and characterize the bad woman and the good woman by looking at and analyzing both the protagonist and antagonist characters. Then, in the second part, I will examine how the movies strengthen patriarchy from the feminist perspective. These findings will support the current writing that is written by Kerry M Mallan about women’s grotesque images in “Witches,Bitches,and Femme Fatales:Viewing the female grotesque in children’s film” (Mallan,2000). Mallan’s paper will talk about the image of bad woman in some animation movies that I will explain further in the next section of this paper.

Starting in the 1970s, women have been portrayed in film through various misogynistic lenses: the male gaze, voyeurism, and sexual objectification; these lenses are still rampant today in modern American film. Apparently,

Throughout history the role of women has changed. Women have made tremendous contributions to society and have actually been getting the credit for it, which hasn’t always been the case. Throughout the history of movies women's roles have started to be reflected as such. In the movies watched in class women's roles have advances from just wives, objects of affection, and secretaries to astronauts, doctors, and mathematicians. This offers a better look at history and better role models for women now.

When talking about this topic a question comes to mind, if men were given these roles would there be a problem? Americans have been frustrated because women are just viewed for their looks, but there are also men in this world who are only given roles for their looks. If women did not want to be viewed as “the girl next door” or “the dumb blonde” then they should not have taken these roles in the movies. It was the 1940’s so it was not like women had no rights, in 1920 the nineteenth amendment was passed giving women the right to vote and more rights towards equality. Women had a voice during this time period and if they wanted a change they could have spoken up and tried to change their roles in movies. Other roles were given to women during this time period showing that women were strong and independent, women were not only given the role for their looks. As the film industry went on women started to gain more roles and have been looked at in some role as “strong women.” The term “strong women” caused more frustration because it shows the women are being viewed as not strong regularly. Even though women gained a lot more power

Designed to prove that a woman can be anybody she desires to be, the legendary

The gap between men and woman have always been around, and it is also implied to the very thing we all love, film. I have come find that it all has to deal with stereotypes, on and off screen. A woman's role in the early years of film was such of script supervisors, and as little as producers. They’re greater impact were in makeup, wardrobe, and set

Many women are cast in a film but only a few land a leading protagonist role. Films like The Hunger Games, Lucy, Maleficent and Divergent are evident to be breaking stereotypical gender roles. Women are shown to be equally strong as men and less emotionally bounded to other characters. In the progressive Hollywood films of today, we visibly see the characters of women to be idealized as heroic, with brave instincts, intelligence, and in support of female empowerment, rather than idealizing their bodies only. Although still films are made that idealize the female bodies, such as female superhero characters, however, it could be safe to say that women will always be seen as a man’s desire or eye candy, so there will always be female roles available which would accommodate these characters for films: It is dependent on the genre of the

In my college class, I have learned that women in films are usually portrayed as a prize for whoever saved the “damsel in distress,” relegating women to the role of love interest waiting to be rescued. And I have never thought of that issue before but since I’m taking a college class about Culture and Gender in Films right now, the informations about female in films helped me for my second concentration. Sometimes people don’t notice what films have portrayed women and how different it is for men.

Since the 1940’s, movies have predominately portrayed women as sex symbols. Beginning in the 1940’s and continuing though the 1980’s, women did not have major roles in movies. When they did have a leading role the women was either pretreated as unintelligent and beautiful, or as conniving and beautiful: But she was always beautiful. Before the 1990’s, men alone, wrote and directed all the movies, and the movies were written for men. In comparison, movies of the 90’s are not only written and directed by women, but leading roles are also held by older and unattractive women. In this paper I will show the variations and growth of women’s roles in movies from the 1940’s though the 1990’s.

“Between 1990 and 1995 only 28.7 percent of speaking parts were women. Similar studies have shown that female speaking parts comprise just twenty-five percent of characters in top films between 1946 and 1955” (Vincent). That is only a quarter of every part, and how many of those women were just there to be a simple love interest or to appear sexy for the male audience, even though women make up for over half the human population on the planet. What is really worrisome is how this is actually somewhat accurate with women being a political minority, being majorly outnumbered in their workforces In 2012 only six out of the top one-hundred films had a roughly equal male, female cast (Lenard). Now not every movie has to have completely equal casts, but when only six percent do, then there is a problem.

The presentation of women on screen is another highlighted issue in many of the gathered sources. Because men were ultimately in control of what went on the screen much of what the audience perceived were women from the male imagination or fantasy. Bernard Beck elaborates in his article Where the Boys Are: The Contender and other Movies about Women in a Man’s World that, “…women have been used to dress up a male story or motivate a male character” (Beck 15). Women were often insignificant and trivial characters. Although, Kathe Davis disagrees to a point. In her article, Davis offers a dissonant opinion to the fore-mentioned insignificance of the female character. She instead describes many female characters as “predators,” and analyzes the roles of lead women in three prominent films of the nineteenth century. In each film, she finds parallels and similarities of cases of “female emasculation” and instances where “women are turned into objects of male desire” (Davis 47-48). Davis does not perceive female characters as being insignificant, just stripped of their power and misrepresented. She discusses how females of power are often portrayed as crazy