Women's cinema: Who is imaged most of all?

Women's cinema: Who is imaged most of all?

By Jane Freebury

JAKARTA (JP): The first women's film festival was mounted in
1972 in Edinburgh, Scotland. Big films with broad appeal romped
across the screen, playfully engaging even the most sober-minded
viewer. Around the time of the Edinburgh festival mainstream
films on release included Klute (Alan Pakula), The Godfather
(Francis Ford Coppola), Last Tango in Paris (Bernardo
Bertolucci), Tout va Bien (Jean-Luc Godard), Don't Look Now
(Nicholas Roeg) and Cries and Whispers (Ingmar Bergman), with
Marlon Brando, Donald Sutherland, Liv Ullman, Jane Fonda and
Julie Christie giving performances of their careers for top
directors on both sides of the Atlantic.

This heady artistic belle epoque might have extinguished hopes
of getting anything else up on screen. On the contrary. The
fevered atmosphere gave birth to alternative visions and was
quickly followed by bigger women's film festivals in New York,
Los Angeles, Toronto, Paris and Creteuil, France.

In Jakarta next week there will be a four-day festival of
films from Japan, the United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden, Indonesia,
India, the Netherlands and Australia. Coinciding with
International Women's Day on March 8, the Jakarta International
Women's Film Week will screen a program of films that have been
chosen for their focus on women, and, in the words of the
publicity material, "their lives, struggles, hopes, frustrations
and achievements, whether it be in their personal, social,
political or professional lives".

The choice of films is not in any sense exclusivist or
exclusionist -- they are directed by both women and men.
Inevitably the category "women's cinema" raises questions: Does
this mean soapies and melodramas? What is the basis for the
special attention? Aren't there always women in films?

A festival of women's film is predicated on the view that
women and women's issues do not get equal representation on
screen. The first women's film festivals were organized based on
the argument that women in cinema were exploited and on screen to
cater to male fantasies.

"The image of women in the cinema has been an image created by
men" declared one of the early manifestos, Notes on Women's
Cinema, edited by Claire Johnston in 1973. You could see her but
that didn't mean that she was actually there. The feminist
position argued that to be in front of the camera, to be central
to the frame, had never guaranteed a central position in the film
text. It was argued that a woman's marginality in cultural
production was in inverse proportion to her image being used.

In America in the 1970s polemical books such as Molly
Haskell's From Reverence to Rape had a powerful effect on first
wave feminist thinking. Haskell pioneered the view that movie
roles for women mattered, arguing that the strong women
characters of the 1930s and 1940s -- played by Katherine Hepburn,
Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo and Barbara Stanwyck -- had been lost
to the lithe doe-eyed, long haired lovelies whose roles did not
truthfully or adequately reflect the reality of women's lives.

In 1975, British theorist Laura Mulvey went further in her
polemical article, Visual Narrative and Narrative Cinema. She
argued that women in films were only there to be looked at and
for erotic contemplation by men. Another noted that "despite the
enormous emphasis placed on woman as spectacle in the cinema,
woman as woman is largely absent".

Program

Women and their concerns will be present in all the films
assembled for the festival to be held from March 7 until March 10
at the Erasmus Huis in South Jakarta. At 4 p.m. on March 10,
columnist Wimar Witoelar will moderate a panel discussion with
Danarto, Sita Aripurnami and film producer Budiyati Abiyoga.

The films range from the contemporary films of the early 1990s
back to the 1970s. The 1976 Indonesian film Inem Pelayan Seksi
(Inem the Sexy Servant) by Nya Abbas Acup is considered this
director's best and most successful comedy, with a plot turning
on the role of domestic staff within an upper class family. The
Japanese film Nomugi Toge (Mount Nomugi), a 1979 film from
director Satsuo Yamamoto, takes a look at the exploitation of
female labor in the silk industry.

Ankur (The Seedling), released in 1973, also deals with female
worker exploitation. Directed by Shyam Benegal, one of India's
major art cinema directors, the film tells of a newly graduated,
married urban man who is sent to oversee his father's rural
property. He finds himself in the role of a traditional landlord,
though he says that caste for him does not matter. He has an
affair with Lakshmi (Shabani Azmi, the pre-eminent Indian actress
in her screen debut), the wife of a deaf-mute laborer. The film's
gentle naturalism and its detailed performances bring about a
compelling dramatic closure -- something to watch for.

The World's Most Beautiful Breasts from Germany offers
different diversions. A successful businessman has a collision
with a secretary in a lift, when suddenly her ample bosom is
transferred to his chest. At first he resists this unwelcome
pectoral enhancement but soon cottons on that there is much to be
made out of such remarkable natural assets. The secretary,
meanwhile, happily registers that people have at last stopped
treating her as a bimbo.

Makin' Up, a short film released in 1990 by German director
Rainer Kauffman, is a jaunty piece which will have special appeal
for younger audiences. Frenzy is a cartoonist and her girlfriend
Maisha is a nurse. Frenzy is totally absorbed in her work while
her friend is totally focused on her boyfriends. But two new
boyfriends enter their lives, by accident and design, and the
unexpected happens.

The Last Days of Chez Nous from Australia is a film by
director Gillian Armstrong, who first came to international
attention with My Brilliant Career in 1979. Her work has ranged
from big-budget movies in the U.S. like Little Women and Mrs.
Soffel to a documentary series about a trio of Australian
teenage girls, whose lives she documented at intervals since they
were 14 years old. The Last Days of Chez Nous (1992) observes
changing intimate relationships in a chaotic 'family' household.
Along with it, Belinda Chayko's short film Swimming takes a
plunge.

Two films from the early 1980s are Sally and Freedom (Sweden),
by female director Gunnel Lindblom, and Educating Rita (1983)
both of which connect with the dilemmas confronting today's new
roles for women. The Swedish film has an important connection
with the great director Ingmar Bergman, for whom its director
worked as actor (in The Seventh Seal and Cries and Whispers!) and
as assistant director. This is her story of a woman craving
independence, but now that a new lover brings the desire for a
second child, how can she become free?

Educating Rita, directed by Lewis Gilbert from a screenplay by
Willy Russell, is a two-hander with Julie Walters as an
effervescent hairdresser and Michael Caine as the troubled Open
University tutor who becomes her mentor/teacher when she is
enrolled in literature studies. Don't let the Pygmalion plot
dissuade you from yet another example of fine character acting --
and precisely-honed dialogue -- from British cinema. Both the
film and the two leading actors were recipients of major awards
in Britain (BAFTA) and the United States (Golden Globe).

Belle Van Zuylen from the Netherlands was scripted and
directed by Digna Sinke, whose documentary and feature films have
been featured at international festivals. Set in the late
eighteenth century during the foment leading up to the French
Revolution, it is the story of a woman writer and the young man
who becomes her confidant. It is based on real people -- Belle
van Zuylen was also known as Madame de Charriere -- and real
events.

Organized by Julia Suryakusuma with the support of UNESCO,
the participation of cultural centers submitting films, and with
the sponsorship of AIKON, Bisnis Indonesia, Femina, Kompas and
NAMA Network Communication, the festival opens at 4:30 this
Thursday, free of charge, with Belle van Zuylen and Mount
Nomugi.