Final Essay

Study Task 9

The words I chose to highlight the overall synthesis and development of my project were Patriarchy, Male Gaze, Aesthetics, Modification, Reinvention, Transformation, Fashion, Film, Stars and Icons. Overall, one thing lead to another during the research stages which is evident in my visual journal, the progression of start to finish is something I tried to show especially in my practical work.

Ted Talk - The women in film revolution begins with you, Naomi McDougall-Jones

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gj2pWl1vjCY

Notes
- 'the movies you watch don't just effect your hobbies, they effect your career choices, your emotions, your sense of identity'
- 95% of the movies you have ever seen were directed by men
- 55% of the time you have seen a woman in a movie she is partially naked
- 'prism of one perspective' - male
- moviesbyher.com
- 'this is about making a better world' - finishing statement

Ted Talk - Girls in Film, Alicia Malone

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kk_5KQzstew

Notes
- 'lack of girls in film' - directors
- 100 top-grossing films of 2012, 4.1% of directors were women
- 'lack of women working behind the scenes'
- 'not getting their perspective told on screen'
- 'lack of interesting female characters'
- San Diego State University, top films of 2014, 12% had a female protagonist.
- 'women's stories are simply not being told'
- Connecting through story-telling
- 'audiences learn about the world through films and they learn about themselves'
- Stereotypes instead of role models
- Charlize Theron 'how rare it was to find a character which is not just strong, but also allowed to be broken and vulnerable, in short, human'

My Fair Lady

The use of an icon is evident specifically in My Fair Lady. Audrey Hepburn was and remains a role model to many people. The change of her character in this film is evident mostly through the way she dresses. These screenshots (above) show this gradual transformation. Throughout the film, the focus of the audience's gaze is on Eliza Doolittle, this is obvious due to the elaborate costumes and general aura of Audrey Hepburn in comparison to her fellow actors, who generally wear dull colours and fade into the background as to not distract from the focal point.

Pretty Woman

Here are some screenshots I took from Pretty Woman. I made some interesting observations about the way women seem to be 'transformed' after an encounter with a man. Similarly to in Grease, the modification of Vivian's (Julia Roberts) clothes mimic that of Edward's (Richard Gere) fashion style. Many things could be drawn from this. Is Vivian conforming to the preferred aesthetic of male desire, or is she simply changing her own style due to personal growth? 

Grease

Whilst watching Grease, one of the most popular films in the genre of make-over movies, I took some screenshots of examples of Sandy, the female protagonist, before she modifies her appearance. Interestingly, the change she makes at the end of the film is reflective of Danny's style, therefore, to be accepted by him. Whether or not this would have been a permanent alteration for the character, or just a demonstration of Sandy's ability to be 'one of the guys' is not stated. Throughout the film, Sandy embodies the naive, girl-next-door image. Meeting Danny obviously has a fundamental impact on her, influencing the choices she makes and ultimately transforming not just her visual appearance, but her understanding of the world. 

Transformation Movies

After talking to Pete, I realised the direction I want to take my project in centres around transformation or 'make-over' movies. The concept of someone adapting their visual representation and the reasons for this is something I am interested in researching further. The first films that come to mind are Grease and Pretty Woman, where the influence of a man is essential to the female character's transformation. I intend to look into these first and think about the aspects that may fuel the theme of my essay.

Tutorial with Pete

My tutorial with Pete today helped me to define the films I may want to focus on for my case studies within the essay. Getting started and writing a plan is always the hardest part of the essay for me. Once I get into it I actually quite enjoy the process. I am feeling as though I can get a pretty good start on this soon, although I am stepping away from my draft a lot, I prefer the research and concept behind my new thesis.

What if I had been the Hero? - Sue Thornham

Notes from Text

• 'In films like Miss Congeniality (Petrie, 2000), Legally Blonde (Luketic, 2001) and The Devil Wears Prada (Frankel, 2006) these negative traits are associated with a feminism that is now irrelevant and which must be rejected by the heroine in her search for successful female selfhood'.
• Mulvey (male gaze)... 'thus presents as neutral or natural what is in fact a highly constructed mode of discourse'.
• Virginia Woolf... 'women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size'.
• 'If feminist theory has critiqued femininity and the multiple sites and structures through which it is constructed, postfeminism celebrates its return. It is a femininity still naturalised as both destiny and ideal for women, to be achieved through constant self-surveillance, self-modification and consumption, but one which is now seen as productive of female power and pleasure. The difference comes through the operation of choice: this very traditional-looking femininity is presented as the outcome of individual choice for the contemporary young woman'.

New Intro & Developed Essay Question

To what extent do the pressures of western cinema influence women to modify their appearance?

This essay aims to highlight and question the idea that the film industry embodies the patriarchal views of western society when it comes to aesthetic expectations on-screen, particularly considering the portrayal of women in relation to gender roles. Why there is such a presence of a male gaze within film seems to be obvious when looking at who the people are behind the camera. According to the New York Film Academy, there is a 5:1 ratio of men to women working in the film, which could be a direct indication of inequality within the industry, both in regards to the opportunities for women to work as a director/film maker, and also in relation to the way women are seen in film altogether. Because such a large proportion of men are writing and directing female characters, they are more often than not going to be created from the perspective of male desire. Therefore, women end up being confined to their appearance and appropriated for the male characters, who by default of their gender, are more relatable to the men who created them.

Key Text - Stars & Audiences, Richard Dyer

Notes from Text

• 'images of stars construct the fantasies and pleasures of moviegoers' - Link to Mulvey, fantasy.
• Spectatorship theory... 'moviegoer is positioned according to the pleasures of male heterosexual desire'.
• 'Others, while recognising the difference of the stars, determined to overcome it, either by aspiring to the ideals of feminine 'attractiveness' which the star represented'.
• 'Stacey calls these relationships 'cinematic identificatory fantasies''.
• Masochism... 'central to the allure and power of Marlene Dietrich'.
• 'Dietrich added her idiosyncratically cool sensuality which represented her indifference to male desire'.
• 'With masochism, ultimately the victim retains control of the masochistic contract, requiring the dominator to submit to the desire of the dominated'.
• 'styles were designed as spectacle for male desire' - Star styles, icons.

Further Notes

• Stars... 'escapist spectacle'.
• 'identifications with stars motivated by practical actions outside the cinema'.
• 'actions they took to transform the self and construct similarity between moviegoer and performer'.
• 'Hollywood film became integrated with the consumer economy in America'.
• 'films displayed fashions on the screen and there was a movement to transfer screen fashions to the high street' - Way in which a society is influenced to change their appearance.

Femmes Fatales - Mary Ann Doane

Notes from Text

• 'The woman who wears glasses constitutes as one of the most intense visual cliches of the cinema' - Link to transformation movies.
• 'concerned with repressed sexuality, knowledge, visibility and vision, intellectuality, and desire'.
• 'In dishonored (1931), Dietrich assumes a masquerade when she works as a spy'.
• 'Marlene Dietrich once again appears to demonstrate her control over male, she literally plays with the veil'.
• 'Apart from any intradiegetic deception or duplicity attached to the feminine'.
• 'She is not the subject of feminism but a symptom of male fears about feminism'.
• 'The femme fatale is the figure of a certain discursive unease, a potential epistemological trauma'.
• 'for her most striking characteristic, perhaps, is the fact that she never really is what she seems to be' - Icon.

• Femme Fatale definition - An attractive and seductive woman, especially one who will ultimately cause distress to a man who becomes involved with her'.

Undressing Cinema - Stella Bruzzi

Notes from Text

• Challenging theories around femmes fatale... 'But why presume that a tempting female image is necessarily conditioned by either the narrative of the films she inhabits or the framework of male fantasy?' - Women are over-identified by their appearance, both on and off screen.
• 'the vicissitudes of female dress ultimately undermine the woman and render her subservient to (and the victim of) the man who retains his iconographic stability'.
• 'The justification for this sacrificial offering of the desirable, feminine woman has been sought in her appearance: the conscious eroticisation of her look through seductive clothing and make-up, and the use of this look to manipulate men'.
• 'Woman (unlike man), is even required by society to make herself an erotic object. The purpose of fashions to which she is enslaved is not to reveal her as an independent individual, but rather to offer her prey to male desires; thus society is not seeking to further her projects but thwart them' - Society represses women when it comes to their ambitions/opportunities.
• 'Fashion is used, in De Beauvoir's estimation, to absent women and reduce her to an idealised sign'.
• 'The pursuit of elegance and beauty, therefore, is appressive, trivialising and demeaning'.
• 'Men's clothes are functional, women's are not'.
• 'Doane's argument comprehensively disempowers the femme fatale... the construct and embodiment of a dominant male fantasy'.
• 'Despite her ability to manipulate and seduce the men around her... the femme fatale is somehow impotent and harmless'.

NY Film Academy - Gender Inequality

https://www.nyfa.edu/film-school-blog/gender-inequality-in-film/

I found this info graphic on the New York Film Academy website which looks at the ways in which women are treated in the film industry. I wasn't surprised to learn that there is a ratio of 5:1 men to women working in the film industry as it is evident in the way that gender roles are portrayed on-screen.

I was however surprised at some of the other figures shown, only 30% of speaking characters are women and in relation to fashion/clothing, 28.8% of women wear sexually revealing clothes in comparison to just 7% of men. Following this, 26.2% of women actors get partially naked, while only 9.4% of men do. There is a clear difference between men and women in all of the statistics shown, which pinpoints the way this evidently filters down in to the narrative of the stories we see.

Fashion, Culture & Identity - Fred Davis

Notes from Text

• Chapter 3 - Ambivalences of Gender: Boys will be Boys, Girls will be Boys.
• Gaultier's 1984 fall men's collection - sarongs and pants-skirt... 'They'll share the same wardrobe, but they'll wear it differently. Men will stay masculine and women feminine'.
• 'Looked like the sort Marlene Dietrich would wear. His boutiques turned out to be a lot more popular with chic women than with men' - Pierre Cardin, Paris, late 1950's.
• 'Small wonder then that feminists, rather than viewing current androgynous style as symbols of sexual equality, regard them suspiciously as but another subtle sexist device for muting the egalitarian demands emanating from the women's movement'.
• 'the boyish androgynous look, it is alleged, serves at one and the same time to appeal to latent homoerotic impulses in men and assuage fears over a loss of power to women' - Dietrich.
• Chapter 2 - Identity ambivalence, fashion's fuel.
• 'Dress, then, comes easily to serve as a kind of visual metaphor for identity and, as pertains in particular to the open societies of the West, for registering the culturally anchored ambivalences that resonate within and among identities'.

• Ambivalence definition - the state of having mixed feelings or contradictory ideas about something or someone.
• Androgynous definition - Partly male and partly female in appearance, of indeterminate sex.

Study Task 8

Rationale

• What is your theme?

My theme is based around the impacts of fashion within the film industry and how this links to the way women view their own appearance in a patriarchal society.

• How are you exploring it visually (methodology)?

I have been exploring this theme beginning with line and collage in relation to the topics of aesthetic within society (more generally) and then narrowing it down to looking at fashion icons within film and primarily their audiences.

• Why are you doing it this way?

To start with I wasn't too sure which part of my research I wanted to focus on, so I began with a breadth of different responses to the theme, now I am focusing more on a particular area (audience and film).

• Materials?

Using collage I can manipulate images that already exist and make them into something new, describing the issues (such as the alteration of appearance) I acknowledge within my research. Also, I want to use line to reflect the regimented views within the film/fashion industry as to what is/isn't acceptable, as well as the male gaze and journey of the industry through the decades.

• Any key theorists who have influenced this?

The views of the male gaze have been influenced primarily by John Berger in 'Ways of Seeing' and Laura Mulvey in 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema'. The key theorists I am looking at link somehow to audience and they way they are affected by what they see in film. I want to explore this further and re-focus my practical work on this.

Re-focusing

I have decided to focus on one element of my research in relation to patriarchy as it feels like it is getting a bit chaotic. The main problem for me is that I am finding it difficult to think about how to narrow down my research and pinpoint one theme within everything I have been exploring so far. Do I focus on consumerism and product, the fashion industry, film, makeup, trends, advertising or role models?

After much deliberation, I have chosen to focus on female fashion trends and icons in relation to gender roles within the film industry, as this is where my research is headed. Keeping this in mind as a theme may start to help me navigate my way through the essay a bit better. This is also a subject I am very interested in and feel that I could produce some interesting visuals from it.

Study Task 7

Study Task 6 - Development