While pondering who might be the current audience for foreign films about familial drama, I found myself wondering why is that the intricate narrative of family life is considered to be a female form of entertainment. Like those books girls read as teenagers—Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, Mrs. Dalloway—that boys (and later men) are sure to dismiss, understanding the treacherous but fascinating web of family is of interest only to us. What is most frustrating in a post feminist society is not that our contributions are still dismissed, undervalued, and exploited. These problems in the late 20th and 21st century have taken on a good bit of elasticity, in that we are less dismissed, undervalued, and exploited. The problem for my generation of women is one of interest, or what seems to be a shocking inequality of it. While most women enjoy the tastes and interests of men, after centuries of having no choice, so little effort is made by men to enjoy the tastes and interests of women. In the case of filmmaking it could be said that our stories, and the perspective from which we tell them, might receive the proper critical attention—Bright Star, The Hurt Locker, Lost In Translation—but they also garner unnecessary anger and more often complete indifference from mass audiences. Preferring anger, the disinterest is a stinging snub with a subtext of, we don’t think you make bad films because we won’t even watch them. Less than nine percent of directors in Hollywood today are women, and if their movies go unwatched, be they about poetry, war, or intimacy, should we be fighting for more representation or more interest? Obviously both.
The Death of a Producer
July 27th, 2010 § 1
New Notes on Nostalgia
May 22nd, 2010 § 0
New York City is a place that inspires a great deal of nostalgic sentiment, so passionate and opinionated that it often feels exclusive, like how we sometimes feel when talking to our grandparents. While the elderly tend to remember their past with exciting fondness, their dismissal of the present is always a little unnerving. Growing up with one great-grandmother born in 1905 instead of two younger grandmothers, I was always captivated by her quaint stories. At the same time I felt a bit wary of them, like the children in a Ray Bradbury novel who simply can’t believe that the elderly were once young. Just as we all feel a little like the first children to ever roam grassy backyards, it’s hard to accept that there ever was a time before our vivid present.