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THE ROLE OF WOMEN IN FILM:
HIS GIRL FRIDAY, SEMI-TOUGH
&
FLIRTING WITH DISASTER
The history of women in the cinema can be traced back to the early days of film production, beginning ca. 1896 with films by director Alice Guy Blache, such as "The Cabbage Fairy" and "The Bewitched Fianc?." With the advent and popularity of the so-called "silent era" of film production, women began to be depicted as various stereotypes, such as "damsels in distress," weak-minded, timid city girls and impoverished "white trash," while men played an overwhelming majority of lead roles, usually as heroic figures who rescue these "damsels" from a plethora of dangerous situations. In a study of one hundred films released between 1930 and 1940, part of the "Golden Age" of American cinema, "eighty percent focused on the love/hate of a man with a good/bad girl, while fifty percent had the good/bad girl opposing another bad girl" (Doane 134).
Likewise, another study showed that between 1930 and the 1970's, four types of roles for women were dominant in the American cinema-first, "The Pillar of Virtue," a good example being Hattie McDaniel as the morally stout housemaid in 1939's Gone With The Wind; second, the "Glamour Girl" like the sex goddess Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes or the German "bombshell" Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus; third, the usually sexually frustrated "Emotive Woman" such as the sexual vixen Elizabeth Taylor in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, and lastly the "Independent Woman," two prime examples being Katherine Hepburn in Guess Who's Coming To Dinner and Jane Fonda, the stalwart prostitute in Klute.
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In the 1950's, when cinema began to "reaffirm male dominance and female subservience by showing women as mere sex objects" (Manchel 235), the contempt generated by film producers for showing strong, powerful...
Cain (afterward coupled by Mickey Spillane, Horace McCoy, and Jim Thompson) -- whose books were also recurrently tailored in films noir. In the vein of the novels, these films were set apart by a subdued atmosphere and realistic violence, and they presented postwar American cynicism to the extent of nihilism by presuming the total and hopeless corruption of society and of everyone in it. Billy Wilder's acidic Double Indemnity
Film Comparison Almodovar's Prisons Prisons can be more than a place where one is confined for what they have done. A prison can be a great number of things; a prison can be a psychological, social, emotional, or physical construct. Pedro Almodovar explores these four types of prisons in two of his films, Volver and Todo Sobre Mi Madre (All About My Mother). In both of these films, the characters find themselves
Com). Pricilla Dean, despite her odd and some might say crooked features and curvy figure, had an interesting though brief career offering audiences a unique and fierce performance in Outside the Law in 1920 (Stanford.edu, 2011). It's rare nowadays to have published short fiction in movie magazines. This one utilizes five stars under the headline and above the title. This article demonstrates that human beings still write simple "how-to" style articles even
Film Analysis on Farewell, My Concubine Farewell, My Concubine: Lies that become realities The film Farewell, My Concubine uses the lens of two men's lives to chronicle the political and social upheavals that gripped China first during the communist and then during the Cultural Revolutions. These men are extraordinary and unique: they are actors in the famous, traditional Peking Opera. However, the film argues that the artifice they are forced to use
The natural world allows us to show of more of our individual talents, whereas the urban landscape seems to only allow us to show what is needed of us in terms of industry. Modern Times echoes these themes and images of the early representation of the modern city. However, the film is much more comedic, but with the same message. For example, the factory scene shows the same monotony. It
Film Noir Among the various styles of producing films, it has been observed the noir style is one that has come to be recognized for its uniqueness in characterization, camera work and striking dialogue. Film Noir of the 1940s and 50s were quite well-known for their feminine characters that were the protagonists, the femme fatale. This was most common with the French, later accepted in the United States. There might have
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