Assigned Films
Carmen Jones director
Who is Otto Preminger?
The roles women typically filled in the early silent era, before narrative film fully developed. Give an example.
What are the roles that required characteristics typical of femininity: dexterity, neatness, attention to detail.
Examples include: cutting, joining, touch-ups on negative, cleaning/polishing positive, addition of color frame-by-frame.
Famous propaganda filmmaker and star of "mountain films."
Who is Leni Reifenstahl?
First African American actress to win an Academy Award. For which film.
Who is Hattie McDaniel for her role in Gone with the Wind.
Finish this sentence: "Woman as...man as..."
What is, "Woman as image, man as bearer of the look"?
The Hitch-Hiker director
& describe one of characters in the film
Who is Ida Lupino?
Who is:
Roy - mechanic and friend to Gil, on a fishing trip
Gil - draftsman and friend to Roy, on a fishing trip
Emmet Myers - the serial killer, with one eye perpetually open
The film that effectively rendered Uplift irrelevant. Explain why.
What is The Birth of a Nation?
It was the first film to be shown in the white house and publicly endorsed by President Woodrow Wilson
The name of a German director who was a writer (novels and screenplays) and married to a famous director.
Name one of the films written by her.
Thea von Harbou
Metropolis and M (either example)
An example of a later 1950s sitcom with narratives built around family problems, coming-of-age challenges, and child rearing.
What is Father Knows Best? Leave it to Beaver?
Define scopophilia.
What is the pleasure in looking, fetishizing the object of the gaze, with woman presented as erotic spectacle?
Wonder Woman director
& story summary
Patty Jenkins
About Diana, who longs to leave the island Themyscira to explore the world. She gets this opportunity when US pilot/spy Captain Steve Trevor crash lands onto her island, bringing enemy soldiers from WWI with him. Diana leaves with the "Godkiller" sword, on a quest to stop Ares (God of War) for good. She crosses enemy lines with Trevor and his party to try and infiltrate the German High Command, locate the deadly mustard gas and destroy it. In a twist of events, she finds out that the man she has been pursuing as Ares, Ludendorff, is not Ares at all, but rather Sir Patrick Morgan is. He reveals to her that she is the God killer, not the sword. Following Steve's sacrifice (he destroys the gas and himself), she kills Ares.
The first woman to own and operate her own studio.
Name and describe at least one of her films.
Alice Guy-Blache (also the first to make narrative films)
One of the following:
A Rolling Story - a man enters a barrel that rolls down a series of hills, hijinks ensue.
Making an American Citizen - an Eastern European couple emigrates to the U.S., where the husband receives a series of lessons in "Americanism"
This director is responsible fore starting the impressionist and surrealist movements (in film) but not credited.
Name one film by her from each movement.
Germaine Dulac
The Smiling Madame Beudet - impressionism
The Seashell and the Clergyman - surrealism
The only female director working in the 1930s/early 40s.
Name one of her films (that we watched in class).
Dorothy Arzner
(Any one of these) What is The Wild Party, Christopher Strong, and Dance Girl, Dance?
The theory on which narcissistic voyeurism is based. Describe it.
Give an example of how we see this in cinema.
What is the mirror stage - the moment at which the child recognizes themselves in the mirror, they see the mirror image as a more complete, more perfect version of themselves.
In film noir, when the main character gains control/possession of the woman; or in other films in which the character investigates/seeks to demystify the woman; in so doing the spectator (audience) also gains control, through narcissistic processes.
The Smiling Madame Beudet director
& story summary
& historical significance
Who is Germaine Dulac?
Mrs. Beudet, a sensitive, cultured, and creative (music) woman is in an unhappy marriage with a man who is crass and constantly makes jokes that he will "off" himself. After she refuses to go to a play with her husband, he leaves her at home and locks the piano. Frustrated, she decides to load the gun with which he does his "joke." The next day, she regrets her decision, and tries to stop her husband from shooting himself. He turns the gun on her, as a joke, and fires it, nearly hitting her. He mistakenly assumes that she wanted to commit suicide and embraces her, a "happy" reunion. Only Mrs. Beudet is still not smiling.
It is one of the French Impressionist films - not the first, but a major one.
Why the early motion picture film industry needed "Uplift"...
Example of an Uplift film/director and why
What is the bad reputation of the film industry - because of:
the types of images shown on the screen (featuring violence and exploitative nudity)
the space in which the films were shown (the crowded/dirty/low quality nickelodeons which were "hotbeds" of improper behavior)
the types of audiences who saw early films (women and children especially, but also working class and immigrants, all of whom Uplift felt patronizingly "protective")
Lois Weber - because of her middle class background, her bourgeois marriage, and because she was a woman - seen as bringing artful films with "lessons"
The title and director of the first animated feature film.
Describe the style of animation.
The Adventures of Prince Achmed by Lotte Reiniger
What is silhouette puppetry - characters are 2-D puppets with moving parts, who move across a background that is also made of intricate designs.
Only female director to work in the film noir genre.
Describe her career.
Who is Ida Lupino?
She was first an actress, studying acting and performing from her teenage years. After coming to Hollywood, she starred in Warner Bros. films in which she played the tough girl/femme fatale type. She started directing in in the late 1940s and into the 50s, even starting a production company with her husband. When the company moved exclusively to distribution, she had little to no opportunities in feature film production. She moved into television production, directing and acting.
Name and describe the three elements of the female gaze, according to Jill Soloway.
Feeling seeing: using a subjective camera to get inside the protagonist, feeling their emotions and gaining insight into their thought process.
The gazed gaze: using the camera to show how it feels to be the OBJECT of the gaze.
Returning the gaze: "We see you, seeing us." Gazing at the gazers, one can become the SUBJECT, instead of the OBJECT.
The Blot director
& story summary
& movement of which the film is a part
& director background
Who is Lois Weber
Centers on the Griggs family. The father is a college professor, paid a measly sum for his job, the mother is a stay-at-home wife, trying to make do with what little they have, and the daughter is a librarian, very smart and beautiful. The film has two narratives - one centering on the socio-economic status of the Griggs', whose neighbors (the Olsens) are much better off than them; and the second centering on the daughter, Amelia, who has a few suitors, including one of her father's students, Phil West, the next-door-neighbor boy Peter Olsen, and the Reverend Gates.
What is the Uplift Movement - which sought to bring cinema to a more respectable, middle class audience.
Lois Weber was an actress then writer. She and her husband worked together as a team until she emerged as the main creative force. Her career ended/took a downturn around the time that they separated/divorced.
Two conflicting or overlapping theories as to why so many women from the silent era slipped into obscurity in the industry and in history.
At least two:
Their successful careers were tied to partnership with a man, after that partnership (usually marriage) was over or ending, their career also ended.
Hollywood shifted into streamlined production, with vertically integrated studios, bolstered by an influx of cash from Wall Street. The major studios were solidified and independent companies (including those owned/operated by women) slowly went out of business; and/or the changes to the business were not conducive to the looser/more malleable independent companies.
The women were "banished" from the film industry starting in the late 1910s and early 1920s.
There were no women in the silent film industry in creative positions (obviously this theory has been debunked).
Describe the moral discourse of pronatalism and its relevance to gender roles.
Explain how this changed the subject-matter and/or the way Germaine Dulac made films.
What is the policy for women to marry and have children? During WWI, women had experienced more liberty in the workplace and at home. Following the war, there was tension between the freedom women desired and the expectation for them to fulfill their societal role (as mothers).
As a filmmaker, Dulac had to shift from overt feminism to more implied feminism.
Summarize the story and analyze representation of gender in Trifles
Trifles is about a wife who suddenly decides to hang her husband by the neck while he is sleeping. The story covers the aftermath, with witnesses, the police, the county attorney, and their wives looking through the evidence left behind.
The men stomp around from one end of the house to another, rarely in the kitchen itself with the women. The women are left in the kitchen to gather some things for the accused (Mrs. Minnie Wright). While the men are loud and seem to be uncaring of the domestic space, the women are hyperfocused on what is in or out of place, and out of habit start to "clean up" before stopping themselves (since it is a crime scene). This hyperfocus allows them to notice the evidence that points to Minnie's guilt. They empathize with Minnie, one remembering how she used to sing, how she was when she was a girl, or remembering their own memories of loneliness and the quiet. After the men arrogantly criticizs the women's comments about the stitch-patterns, the women take the condemning evidence with them.
First African American actress to be nominated for Best Actress in a Leading Role.
Describe her career.
Describe her troubles in the industry.
Dorothy Dandridge
She started acting from a young age, alone and with her sisters as the Dandridge Sisters. After a few small parts in the 1930s, her career began to blossom in the 1940s, at which point she secured leading roles. The types of roles offered to her progressively diminished in quality, with her on-screen character subjected to implied or directly visible violence. After a decline in her career and some personal heartbreaks, she died in 1965 of an overdose.
She was portrayed as Hollywood's Dark Star, acting in roles that positioned her everything from an African American woman to a Polynesian girl, with her skin lightened or darkened accordingly. She was hounded by the press and portrayed as a promiscuous/oversexualized woman, which often matched her "on-screen" persona.