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.