By T. M. Murray

In the midst of the global Corona Virus pandemic, cinema-going is no longer feasible and high-profile film releases have been postponed. Film streaming is at an all-time high as we sit at home looking for ways to occupy ourselves.  It’s the perfect time to catch up on old classics and reflect on the kinds of films we choose to watch.

‘To gain control of the representational agenda for the nation is to gain considerable power over individuals’ view of themselves and each other.’ 

                                     -- Graeme Turner (Film As Social Practice, 1988)

Feminists have good reasons to think about the kinds of product they consume, since the vast majority of films are produced, written and directed by and for men. This has resulted in a set of visual conventions that construct viewer identification around a male point-of-view and cast women almost exclusively as objects of a male gaze. In addition, the narratives of the vast majority of films stick to narrowly patriarchal ideological formulae, casting women in stereotypical roles: victim, wife, girlfriend, ‘helper’, erotic distraction, damsel in distress, evil temptress, or castrating villain. Traditionally, female characters are narratively ‘punished’ when exerting too much power or transgressing phallocentric expectations. None of this should surprise us, since women have a relatively small role in constructing public images of ‘womanhood’.

In her study of employment figures for behind-the-scenes women working on the top 250 domestic grossing films in 2011, Dr Martha M. Lauzen of San Diego State University found that women comprised only 18% of all directors, executive producers, producers, writers, cinematographers and editors working on the US top 250 domestic grossing films. This represents an increase of 1 percentage point from 1998. Women accounted for 5% of directors, which is half as many as were directing films in 1998.

In their analysis of 200 top grossing films of 2014 and 2015, The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media found that in 2014 only 11% of them featured a female lead and in 2015 only 17% of the top grossing films had a female lead. Male characters were twice as likely to speak as female characters in the top grossing films. Overall, male characters spoke 31.8% of the time in films compared to 14.5% of the time for female characters.

On average, the top 100 grossing non-animated films of 2015 earned $90,660,000 each. Films with female leads made considerably more on average than films with male leads:

$89,941,176 for female leads compared to $75,738,095 for male leads.

Films led by women grossed 15.8% more on average than films led by men. Even though women played leading roles in action blockbusters such as Star Wars: The Force Awakens (Daisy Ridley), The Hunger Games Series: Mockingjay Part 2 (Jennifer Lawrence), and The Divergent Series: Insurgent (Shailene Woodley), overall, male characters appeared and spoke on screen three times more often than female characters in action films.

In addition, female actors generally earn less than male actors for equivalent sized roles, with Angelina Jolie (the highest paid female actor in 2013) making $33 million per film on average, roughly the same amount as the two lowest-ranked leading men Liam Neeson and Denzel Washington. Of the 16 biggest paychecks earned by actors per film in 2013, not a single one was earned by a female actor.[1]

In the United Kingdom, the situation for women working in the film industry isn’t much better. A June 2015 report by the UK Commission for Employment and Skills showed that in 2012 only 26% of employees in the digital and creative industries were female, substantially lower than the national average of 47%, and down from 33% in 2002.[2] 

The sheer scale of the film industry has important cultural implications. The entertainment industries constitute our hegemonic culture and our norms of acceptable behaviour. In the 1980s and ‘90s media scholarship interrogated how corporate-owned media shaped its products, thus contributing to how consumers perceive gender, race or class. More recently, however, academics have tended to peddle the view that consumers are ultra-resilient and completely free and active in their viewing choices, thus taking critical focus away from the industrial supply side of the relationship.  Media products come from a culture and reflect its moral norms and values. But they also speak to that culture, reinforcing and legitimising its norms and customs, or subverting and interrogating them. 

I would not want to suggest that there is an intrinsic ‘male’ way of seeing because of an intrinsic biological difference between male perception and female perception. Rather, there are narrative and visual conventions to which the vast majority of corporate media products have faithfully adhered. It is time to interrogate how we arrived at so many assumptions about ‘masculinity’ or ‘femininity’ in the first place.

Studying Feminist Film Theory (Auteur, revised edition 2019) explores the various ways in which gender has been represented in the predominant Hollywood narrative tradition. But in addition to looking at these mainstream representations through a series of case studies, I also look at how various non-traditional films from around the globe have empowered women. These dissident offerings have taught viewers to look at gender through new lenses: women exert sexual agency; sometimes men are objectified as objects of a female gaze and ‘bad girls’ do not get punished for their ‘sins’ against normative patriarchal values. There is a great wealth of feminist films that simply don’t have the financial backing and/or mainstream distribution channels of multibillion-dollar, mass-media conglomerates. But while these little gems are denied mass-market visibility, seeking them out is well worth the effort.  With that in mind I present my ‘TOP 30’ shortlist of ‘must watch’ feminist films. They are not in rank order and I am sure that I have overlooked some absolutely stellar feminist films and for that I may be duly chastised in the comments section, so I welcome readers suggestions and critical responses.   

[1] New York Film Academy report, ‘Gender Inequality in Film’ (2013) and Women’s Media Center report, ‘The Status of Women in the U.S. Media 2014’.

[2] ‘Proportion of Women in the digital and creative industries falling’, Accessed online on 2 April, 2020 at: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/proportion-of-women-in-the-digital-and-creative-industries-falling