The relationship between the female body and the camera lens has varied greatly since the origins of narrative cinema in the late 1800s. While it’s true that modern day films have reluctantly progressed into featuring women as strong, active leads, this was not always the case. In early film noirs of the 1940s and 1950s, there were common occurrences of the femme fatale trope; Ava Gardner in The Killers (1946), for instance. The femme fatale character is a woman that is quiet, mysterious, and above all- seductive. In Robert Siodmak’s film noir adaptation of a short story by Ernest Hemingway, Ava Gardner plays Kitty Collins. Kitty Collins embodies the femme fatale archetype by contributing silent but deadly sex appeal to the film. Gardner herself concluded in her tell-all memoir that the role of Kitty Collins, “defined my image as the slinky sexpot in the low-cut dress, leaning against a piano and setting the world on fire.” 

The femme fatale is on the less passive side of common narrative tropes for women in films. There are, of course, more blatant demonstrations of passive women in cinema narratives; particularly in slasher horror films, the disposable woman that is killed off in an often brutal way, as a vengeance based motivation for the male lead. Alternatively, another passive narrative path most often selected by script writers of indie films is the manic pixie dream girl. This trope became categorized by the bright haired, bubbly, and unstable characters that serve as the end goal of fruitless romantic endeavors by a male lead. Kate Winslet’s portrayal of the damaged Clementine in Michael Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) is the ideal archetype of the manic pixie dream girl. Film critic Nathan Rabin explained the manic pixie dream girl as the “bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.”

While these ubiquitous tropes remain undeniably intriguing each time they are woven into a film narrative, they portray women in an ultimately sexist light. Media theorist and philosopher Noël Carroll theorized that: “recurring images of women in popular media may have some influence on how people think of women in real life.” Carroll concludes that the way women are perceived in everyday society is correlated to the way they are presented and subsequently viewed on screen. Carroll’s concept here is provided throughout an in depth analysis of Visual and Other Pleasures by feminist film critic Laura Mulvey. Mulvey’s Visual Pleasures is universally viewed as a pivotal text in film criticism. This subversive feminist writing has ignited discussions of the women’s role in the film industry since the late 1980s.

In Visual Pleasures, Mulvey presents a strong theory regarding visual fascination and the male gaze. Mulvey adheres psychoanalysis to her explanation, as a tool to understand unconscious meanings and subliminal messages within historic cinematic works. Visual Pleasures begins by addressing the fascination for movies through an understanding of spectatorship: “The fascination of film is reinforced by pre-existing fascinations within the spectator and social formations that molded him.” Visual Pleasures goes on to further extrapolate erotic ways of looking and the impact that these standards have on the ways in which women are viewed in reality. 

Women working in film have suffered ongoing gender based obstacles and oppression since the industry’s origin; both in front of the camera and behind the scenes of cinema production. The ongoing progression of feminism in the cinema field was sparked during the American female liberation movement that began in the late 1960s and lasted through the 1908s. Pivotal moments in feminist history during this time were echoed in the purposefully subversive projects of radical female filmmakers which documented the movement through a uniquely feminine lens. The impact of these projects continue to spark conversations in the post-feminist- and post #MeToo- American film industry. This essay will expand upon these pivotal moments and attempt to understand how these cases changed the ways in which women are perceived. 

The 1970s in America was a time of great social change in many spheres; especially for women. The first wave of feminism had seen the fight for women’s suffrage and ongoing post-war labor issues. The second wave of feminism, starting early in the 1960s and running through the 1980s, brought forth conversations of the woman’s true purpose. Domestic life and gender roles were questioned alongside the popularization of the birth control pill, which gave women the opportunity to become independently sexually liberated. Betty Friedman’s 1963 text The Feminine Mystique set a precedent for the second wave of feminism, bringing to light questions that had been on the minds of restless domesticated women. Friedman defined the feminine mystique as “the problem that has no name”:

“The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries…lay beside her husband at night- she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question- ‘Is this all?’”

Socio-political movements, such as the second wave of feminism, are almost always accompanied by an outbreak of artistic expression. The second wave of feminism brought just that and more, introducing a spectrum of female artists that had chosen various art forms as an outlet for their rage at the patriarchy. One of the most prominent mediums chosen by women artists throughout this period was independent experimental filmmaking. 

A small number of women were making independent films prior to the 1970s: there was Lois Weber (active during the 1900s through the 1920s), Dorothy Arzner (active during the 1930s through the 1940s) and Maya Deren (active during the late to middle 1940s through the middle of the 1950s), to name a few outliers. These women were few and far between, however, and often erased from the modern understanding of cinema origins. Maya Deren preluded the works of feminist filmmakers in the 1970s, sticking out like a sore thumb in a sea of male filmmakers with her wild hair and blunt voice. Deren’s films often dealt with the concept of time in relation to the female form: “a woman has strength to wait, because she’s had to wait. She has to wait nine months for the concept of a child. Time is built into her body in the sense of becomingness. And she sees everything in terms of it being in the stage of becoming.”

While the predecessors to the feminist film movement in the 1970s were primarily on their own, female filmmakers during the liberation movement were accompanied by other artists that shared and supported the same vision. One of the first women to take the leap and present subversively feminine work was Carolee Schneemann (1939-2019). Schneemann’s 1967 work Fuses was as impactful as it was controversial. Fuses was a voyeuristic short film that featured Schneemann in an act of lovemaking with her then-partner, James Tenney. This film was particularly controversial as it blurred the line between pornography and experimental film. Film theorist and author B. Ruby Rich was in attendance at the intense screening of Fuses at the University of Chicago in the early 1970s. Rich described the screening as “a big event, promoted and anticipated, claiming one woman’s sexuality up there on the big screen. Is there any way to convey the sense of risk and courage that accompanied those early screenings, back when scarcely any films by women had been seen, received, or apprehended as such?” Men that viewed Fuses were angry that the film depicted a woman in a sexual act finishing to completion, but the male process of ejaculation is not explicitly depicted. Schneemann once confessed to Rich that the audience at screenings of her films became so aggressive that, “she began using the cover of darkness to sneak out of her own screenings, on hands and knees, while the show was still in progress and the audience verbally hostile.” 

While some found Schneemann’s Fuses to be offensive, Rich firmly holds that, “…the filmmaker had the nerve, brilliance, or bad taste (depending on your point of view) to star herself in this exploration of sexuality, her camera stationed in front of the bed while she and her lover, James Tenney, made love.” Rich continues to praise Schneemann’s analog filmmaking process in relation to her narrative skills: 

“In her attempt to reproduce the whole visual and tactile experience of lovemaking as a subjective phenomenon, Schneemann spent some three years marking on the film, baking it in the oven, even hanging it out the window during rainstorms on the off chance it might be struck by lightning. Much as human beings carry the physical traces of their experiences, so this film testifies to what it has been through and communicates the spirit of its maker. The red heat baked into the emulsion suffuses the film, a concrete emblem of erotic power.”

Rich expands upon Schneemann’s sheer courage regarding the production and presentation of disruptive projects; Schneemann’s work was clearly radical and provocative for the time. Fuses struck a chord with not only critics, but fellow women who saw their discontent reflected in Schneemann’s shadows. Schneemann’s unabashed display of female pleasure, overlaid with analog film of crashing waves on a sea shore, was gritty and uncensored. Carolee’s headstrong attitude inspired unhappy women to consider the possibilities of their own sexual liberation. 

Another radical display of feminine liberation was caught on camera by Yvonne Rainer, a former renowned dance choreographer and more presently, a filmmaker. Rainer is a former ballet dancer that transitioned her career into filmmaking. She notes on the relationship between her filmmaking and dancing in an interview with the Museum of Modern Art: 

“Early on, I began to question the pleasure I took in being looked at, this dual voyeuristic exhibitionistic relation of dancer to audience…this collusion that I ascribe to, the balletic presentation of the self, where the audience becomes the mirror and the dancer is always checking out the mirror of the audience’s gaze, this was problematized in this dance. So when my body faced the audience, for instance, I devised a movement for the head, or redirected the gaze, so it’s very obvious I am never, the performer is never looking at the audience.” Rainer’s natural affliction for utilizing her body as a storytelling device came in handy when she decided to transition to filmmaking. Her film The Man Who Envied Women (1985) dealt with redirecting the male gaze by averting the audience’s attention to a woman. The female characters are represented solely by their off-screen voices. 

Rainer recalls her vision of, “a very sensual erotic interplay between them (the characters) physically, while they’re each reciting these long monologues. His is based on Foucault, about power. So I choreographed the interactions of these two people separating, going toward each other, embracing, and in this very narrow space; sometimes she’s wearing a very sexy dress, sometimes she’s wearing coveralls.” Yvonne Rainer raised questions about androgyny alongside a continuation of the feminine mystique. She methodically created this inquisitive tension by placing either her own body or the bodies of written characters in visually opposed ways. Rainer compared The Man Who Envied Women to films of the film noir period: “Relating it to film noir, where it’s the man’s voice that always controls the narrative, I had a female voice controlling the narrative of The Man Who Envied Women.” 

Among Yvonne Rainer’s most memorable projects is Trio A (1978), a filmed performance that involved Rainer once again confronting the male gaze. According to the React Feminism organization, Trio A embodied two primary characteristics: unmodulated continuity and its imperative involving the gaze; “The eyes are always averted from direct confrontation with the audience via independent movement of the head or closure of the eyes or simple casting down of the gaze.” 

Over the course of four or five minutes, Rainer or one of her trained performers would dance continuously while refusing to make eye contact with the audience. This was a performance of intentional distance, to reflect upon the tensions risen by the confrontational male gaze of which women are so often objected to. Yvonne Rainer’s No Manifesto poem, written in 1965, emphasized her intentions to reject standards and societal pressures: “No to spectacle. No to virtuosity. No to transformations and magic and make-believe. No to the glamor and transcendency of the star image…”

Liberation of the female body in film did not ignore lesbian communities, which began to expand rapidly in the nineteen seventies, when those who opposed patriarchal standards took the microphone. Barbara Hammer, arguably the most prominent lesbian filmmaker at the time, rose to popularity with her 1978 film, Dyketactics. This film put lesbian intercourse into the spotlight for the first time, utilizing the tangible sense of sight and touch. Barbara Hammer, a Hollywood born lesbian filmmaker, created Dyketactics as a way of subverting the objectifying male gaze by reclaiming the female body. The women in this film hold the camera themselves, taking control of the lens that documents extreme close ups of their genitals. In Dyketactics, the women have the power to express the reality of their womanhood without relating it directly to the sexually driven male desires. 

Hammer’s application of the lesbian aesthetic was pioneering in a time where lesbian narratives were simply unheard of, let alone celebrated. Her ability to present intimacy from an explicit yet tasteful perspective was refreshing in a time where pornography was developing into the booming industry it is. In comparison to present times, it is clear that narratives regarding the experience of female pleasure have increased in popularity, but are simultaneously still relatively uncommon. 

In a 2020 study of the gender gap in the film industry by the team at Palgrave Communications, an online academic journal, stated that,

“Movies are the fulfillment of the vision of the movie director, who controls all aspects of the filming. It is well known that movie directors are primarily white and male. With such a gender bias, it is not surprising that there is a male gender dominance in movies.” 

One unit of measurement in the examination of sexism in films is the Bechdel test, named after comic strip illustrator Allison Bechdel. Bechdel’s comic was inspired by a concept once argued by Virginia Woolf in an essay from 1929 titled, A Room of One’s Own. In Woolf’s precedent setting essay and Bechdel’s popular comic, the expected roles of women are interrogated; and in Bechdel’s comic, satirized. Woolf expressed, “All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple…They are now and then mothers and daughters. But almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men.” In Allison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For comic strip, two lesbian characters declare the elements that must be included to make for a good movie. According to Bechdel’s characters, the film must: a) have at least two women in it, who b) talk to each other, c) about something other than a man. The concept behind the comic strip refers to the exclusion of queer women or women in general from popular entertainment. The Bechdel test has taken on a life of its own, and is still relevant today as an amusing method to measure the diversity of gender in creative narratives. 

Palgrave Communications summarizes their findings in relation to the Bechdel test: 

“Our results demonstrate that a gender gap remains in nearly all genres of the film industry. For instance, three and a half times more relationship triangles in movies have a majority of men. In terms of the top ten most central movie roles, again there is a majority of men. However, we also saw an improvement in equality over the years. Today, women have more important movie roles than in the past, and our Bechdel test classifier quantifies this improvement over time by calculating a movie’s overall score.” From Schneemann to Rainer to Hammer, there was an array of female filmmakers of the nineteen seventies that challenged their viewers to reconsider the way they perceive women. Since the seventies, there have been large strides taken in the industry in the direction of inclusion and awareness. There is progression in the role of both in front of and behind the camera. The #MeToo movement that picked up speed in the mid twenty tens brought attention to an overwhelming abundance of rape culture in the popular television and film industry. Women’s voices have been positively amplified as the problematic systemic structures in the industry are becoming exposed. The tales of oppression are concerningly common in the film and television sectors to this day. The women that chose to tell these controversial stories in the nineteen seventies were creating creative space for women artists that simply did not- rather, were not allowed to- exist prior.

If not for these subversive projects, the only voices of women that society would have to refer to in popular media would be unrealistic and likely written by men that are incapable of fully grasping the female experience. As true equality remains a generous distance away from the current standpoint of sexism in the film industry, it is only sensical to examine the cases that paved the narrow path for female voices to shine through.