TMRW MAGAZINE

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Magazine articles by young women talking about the representation of females in the film industry are about as common as baking potatoes. Or beige walls. Or brown hair. There’s little more I can tell you that’s not already been covered in 500+ op-eds & one billion Twitter headlines - but if I can tell you nothing new, I may as well put it in one place.

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W O M E N I N F I L M : 2 0 1 7

women in film: 2017

WORDS BY JESS ENNIS

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culture

*Statistics correct as of mid-October 2017

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ou might be forgiven, this year, for thinking that film had fallen behind TV in the race to be the Most Inclusive Medium - between BBC’s second series of Top of the Lake, Hulu’s adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale (side note: Elisabeth Moss is killing it), and HBO’s Big Little Lies, stories about women have dominated the small screen. And importantly, they’ve been putting women behind the camera as well. With Top of the Lake being masterminded once again by Jane Campion, The Handmaid’s Tale being co-adapted and produced by the novel’s author Margaret Atwood and directed by Reed Morano, and Big Little Lies having its production spearheaded by Reese Witherspoon herself, it seems like TV at large is beginning to heed the knowledge that there ain’t no one who can write women like women.

The film industry has yet to pick up on this to the same extent.

We’re beginning to get some of the roles, sure - Wonder Woman and Atomic Blonde spring to mind - and in the case of the former, even a small slice of the directorial action (WW was directed by Patty Jenkins, who is set to become the highest paid female filmmaker). But it still feels like we’re being given a small slice of cake whilst our male counterparts eat the whole damn gateau. It feels like we still can’t be trusted on our abilities to bring the box office big bucks.

The BFI launched an online platform, Filmography, earlier this year, which has collated some interesting statistics on the makeup of British film.* In 2017, out of 2,519 credited cast roles, 1,532 were men. Less than half that, at 721, were female. The gap is even larger when it comes to the crew. Across all production departments, there were 5,981 credited male crew members – there were 2,932 female members. This disparity is never evenly shared, and despite a vast online presence of women invested in the creation of film, there are some truly unbelievable gaps. Of 88 Directors of Photography, 78 were men. 7 were unidentified, meaning that British film in 2017 – the entire industry – only used three female Directors of Photography.

Of writers, it is much the same. Out of 95 credit writers, 75 were male, and 15 were female. Directors? 68 male, 13 female. Of 425 executive producer credits, 307 were male, whilst 90 were female. The proof is, as they say, in the pudding. Feminist films and leading women might be making the news, but they’re still in the minority. A big story might hold a powerful woman, but there’s a strong chance that she was written by a man. At the fundamental level of content creation, never mind the content itself, women are still endlessly underrepresented.

Of course there are exceptions – Sofia Coppola’s return to form with The Beguiled, Amma Asante’s latest offering, A United Kingdom, and Greta Gerwig’s directorial debut, Lady Bird. But is there anything more indicative than this - I had to Google those. What did I not have to Google? Baby Driver. Blade Runner 2049. Dunkirk. The year’s biggest films are still male.

And they’re still not great to women.

Leaving aside the seemingly distant dream of equal representation, of the same esteem for female production members, we’re also still having problems on a smaller level.

In the biggest films of 2017, we’re still facing fundamental issues with the way women are portrayed, even in supporting roles.

(Side note here: I’m not trying to trash talk anything, but point out some pervasive flaws in films that I otherwise thoroughly enjoyed.) In Baby Driver, we’re faced with three women. One: an ethereal memory of a beautiful mother, whose purpose is to drive the lead male’s angst. Two: a sexy but superficial woman, whose purpose is to stick her tongue down Jon Hamm’s throat & then get killed - to drive the antagonist’s angst. Three: a young waitress who falls in love with and risks imprisonment for a man she barely knows who is a criminal and, by the end, an actual murderer.

Blade Runner 2049 begins to do slightly better in the form of Robin Wright’s Lieutenant Joshi, a hard-faced, stoic, but unwaveringly loyal woman - who dies protecting the lead male.

We’re given a female antagonist who seems perpetually furious

without any real personal motive, and then dies. And we’re given a doe-eyed girlfriend, Joi, who is, as Charlotte Gush of Vice puts it, ‘a holographic housewife’. Who dies. Giant adverts of naked women dominate the landscape, enacting the most dramatic form of ‘sex sells’ imaginable. Blade Runner, despite being an intensely thought-provoking, quietly intelligent sciencefiction film, still can’t manage the simple task of creating one three-dimensional woman who doesn’t die.

So what’s the issue here? Is it that because women have less access to the production of films, they have less influence in the finished product? After all, you can’t write a script if the door to the writer’s room is locked from the inside. Or is there something fundamentally darker about this? Is it because, in Hollywood, and the film industry at large, there is still a continued lack of respect towards women?

Right now, at this cultural moment, it feels like it might be the latter. We’re living through Weinstein-gate, we’re hearing stories about powerful filmmakers exploiting, sexually harassing, and raping women. We’re hearing stories about body-shaming, about verbal abuse, about women’s fears to be alone in rooms with high-powered men. It’s 2017, and women are still pushed to pander to power-mad men so that they can keep their careers. If women are not given the basic and fundamental right to respect - if they’re still forced to try and ‘earn’ it, or if they fear that one wrong move will have it taken away forever - how can we possibly see any progression visually?

If the purpose of art is, as the aphorism goes, to hold a mirror up to society, then it’s no wonder that what it’s reflecting back is some god-awful ridiculousness.

And so change, in the opinion of this angry young woman, needs to come from every angle. Culturally, we must learn from what the Weinstein scandal has shown us about men in high-powered positions, and we must listen to the female voices who have so beautifully and eloquently spoken up for women everywhere. We must unlock that writer’s room door and open it wide, so that the women who want to write for the screen can. We must offer them the director’s chair, behind the camera, and pay them for their talents as we would a man. And we must start seeing content that reflects this respect - well-rounded, developed, and crucially fulfilling roles.

So, fellas, cut the cake in half. We’re not bothered about our figures, anyway.

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women in film: 2017