Textual analysis update

Textual analysis completed for Fantastic Four and Catwoman, placed in notes folder.

Institutional data for Fantastic four (2005)

Directed by: Tim Story
Written by: Mark Frost
Michael France
Distributed by: 20th Century Fox
Release date: 08 July 2005
Budget: $87 million
Gross revenue: $330 million
Starring: Ioan Gruffudd
Jessica Alba
Michael Chiklis
Chris Evans
Julian McMahon
Rating: PG-13
Widest Release: 3,619 theaters

Reviews for Fantastic four

An opportunity squandered by Marvel, which really needs to watch its quality control more closely... Daniel Etherington- Channel 4 Film

No disgrace, but it's far from a classic either... Joe Utichi- Film Focus

The result is hardly fantastic, but it is quite a lot of fun... Nev Pierce - BBC

A better than average comic book effort... Joe Lozito- Big Picture Big Sound

Despite a good cast, this is a badly made film that only barely works as brainless filler... Rich Cline- Shadows on the Wall

The film is affable enough, though nothing much seems to be at stake... Rob Gonsalves- eFilmCritic.com

Source: http://uk.rottentomatoes.com/m/fantastic_four/

Invisible woman/Sue storm

Brilliant and beautiful scientist Sue Storm headed up Victor Van Doom’s research department at the world famous institute for science. She is reunited with her old boyfriend Reed Richards, when Von Doom’s company agrees to fund a space mission to test his scientific theory on evolution. Sue signed on as a member of the crew-a decision that would forever change her life. After the fateful accident, Sue is left with the ability to make herself disappear. As the invisible woman she is also able to generate invisible force fields and fire invisible power blasts from her hands. In the film I’m using Sue is played by the actor Jessica Alba.

Textual analysis update

Supergirl textual analysis completed and added to media folder.

Supergirl trailer

Catwoman trailer

Fantastic four trailer

Change of text

Mystique from Xmen is actually a villain not a superhero, so i will add Sue Storm from Fantastic Four instead.

Social role theory

A role is usually defined as a set of expectations about the way individuals with certain social identifications will most likely act in certain situations. It is said that when human beings are engaged in almost any set of behaviors they are conveying information about themselves that tells others that they are playing a role (Birenbaum). Roles can be ascribed or acquired. An ascribed role is a role that we are given and did not earn. An example of an ascribed role could be daughter, mother or girlfriend. An acquired role is the opposite of an ascribed role. Acquired roles are roles that we’ve earned such as doctor or nurse.

Roles are important because the typical comic book superhero almost always has an alter ego, meaning they usually carry-on normal lives outside of their superhero persona. For male characters in the 1940s-60s, these roles are diverse and typically prestigious. In contrast, female characters were usually given very few roles with limited upward mobility. Because of the civil rights movement, second wave feminism and the sexual revolution, the late 1960’s changed this landscape for women and their comic book counterparts.

Catwoman – Selina Kyle

Whether viewed as a superhero, a villain or simply the love-interest of Batman, Catwoman has endured many character transformations and is still holding strong today. Introduced in 1940 as a sexy and seductive jewel-thief, Selina Kyle, Catwoman’s alter ego, has typically worked low-end, non-prestigious jobs. In 1951, Selina Kyle is revealed to be an air stewardess with amnesia, in 1954 she is seen running a pet-store, and in 1969 she’s the owner of a beauty salon. Throughout all of her professional jobs, she is seen wavering back and forth between villain and superhero, but the creators never really decide on either. One can also see the obvious sexual-tension between Catwoman and Batman with Catwoman as the usual instigator. In 1967 Catwoman can be seen starting a jealousy war with Batgirl over the love of Batman.

With such transformations, Catwoman remains a complex character. But because of the limited social roles available to women, Catwoman’s complexity was relegated to her dark personality and not her life outside of crime.

Catwoman, through her radical split of conscience between "good girl" and "bad girl," literalizes this contradiction. Created by artist Bob Kane, she was inspired, in part, by Hedy Lamarr, whom Kane admired for her "great feline beauty." When she first appeared in Batman No. 1, Spring 1940, she was known simply as The Cat, a female burglar. Her real name was Selina Kyle, and originally she was characterized as a sybaritic socialite whose initial impulse to steal stemmed from ennui. Over the years, both her origin story and her costume have undergone several redesigns. While in some cases the costume changes parallel (and signal) character transformations, in others they seem to be purely for the sake of fashionable appearances. Indeed, in another instance of comic-book chauvinism, female characters are typically subject to more stylistic makeovers, whether radical or restrained, than their male counterparts. Submission to the dialectics of fashion is presented as another expression of a fetishized femininity. Fetishism is a defining ingredient to Catwoman's wardrobe. She is best known, perhaps, for catsuits that cleave to the body, due in large part to the portrayals of the character by Julie Newmar in the television series Batman (1966) and Michelle Pfeiffer in the film Batman Returns (1992). Typical of the intermedia cross-pollination for which superheroes are famous, the costumes of both actresses served to inspire and influence those worn by Catwoman in her comic-book representation.

As apparel, the catsuit has long been identified with the dominatrix, an archetype frequently associated with Catwoman. Michelle Pfeiffer's performance strengthened this connection by spotlighting the themes of alpha-cat and submissive kitten-like behavior. Her costume, which co-opted the traditional iconography of the dominatrix, included associated paraphernalia such as a whip, gloves, and high-heel shoes.

The visual and symbolic language of Catwoman resonates strongly in fashion, especially in the work of Thierry Mugler, John Galliano, Dolce & Gabbana, Gianni Versace, Jean Paul Gaultier, and Alexander McQueen. All these designers, like Catwoman (and, indeed, female comic-book characters generally), have been attracted to the wardrobe of the dominatrix and its associations of a liberated sexuality. Conceptually loaded and psychologically coded items such as catsuits, corsets, bustiers, and harness bras, usually in black "wet-look" materials like leather, rubber, and polyvinyl chloride, have in the hands of these outré designers achieved widespread acceptance as exotic-erotic haute couture. But in co-opting these sexual clichés, fashion has, in the process, muted their meanings and sanitized their subtexts. In much the same way as comic books, fashion presents elements of fetishistic sexuality stereotypically, undermining, or at least redirecting and repositioning, its subversive, sadomasochistic underpinnings. While presented blatantly, erotic energies, like the feral nature of Catwoman, are tamed, neutered, and, ultimately, neutralized.

My Question

How has the representation of female superheros changed over time?

The texts i will be looking at are:

-Supergirl
-Catwoman
-mystique (X-men)

Interesting interview by BBC radio 4

As the London Film Festival gets underway the organisation Women in Film and Television are holding a special event to look at why female directors still find it hard to break into the mainstream film making.Martha is joined by Sharon McGuire, Director of Bridget Jones' Diary, and Jane Cussons, Chief Executive of Women in Film and Television to discuss what can be done to put more women behind the camera.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/womanshour/2002_45_fri_01.shtml

Employment of Women in films statistics

http://www.wif.org/images/stories/news/lauzen_2008_celluloid_ceiling.pdf

The gaze and the female spectator theory

In considering the way that films are put together, many feminist film critics have pointed to the "male gaze" that predominates in classical Hollywood filmmaking. Laura Mulvey's essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" gave one of the most widely influential versions of this argument. From an explicitly psychoanalytic viewpoint, Mulvey argues that that cinema provides visual pleasure through scopophilia and identification with the on-screen male actor. Mulvey argues that Freud's psychoanalytic theory is the key to understanding why film creates a space where women are viewed as sexual objects by men. She says that it is the combination of the patriarchal order of society and looking as a pleasurable act (voyeurism) that create film as an outlet for female sexual exploitation. An important observation that she makes is that the dominance that men embody is only so because women exist. According to her, without a woman to compare to, a man and his supremacy as the controller of visual pleasure are insignificant. She argues that it is the presence of the female that defines the patriarchal order of society as well as the male psychology of thought.
Mulvey identifies three "looks" or perspectives that occur in film to sexually objectify women. The first is the perspective of the male character on screen and how he perceives the female character. The second is the perspective of the audience as they see the female character on screen. The third "look" joins the first two looks together: it is the male audience member's perspective of the male character in the film. This third perspective allows the male audience to take the female character as his own personal sex object because he can relate himself, through looking, to the male character in the film.
In "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", Mulvey calls for a destruction of modern film structure as the only way to free women from their sexual objectification in film. Essentially we must take away the pleasure in looking that film allows for by creating distance between the male spectator and the female character. The only way to do so is to destroy the element of voyeurism and "the invisible guest".
Mulvey's argument comes as a product of the time period in which she was writing. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" was written in 1973 and published in 1975. This was during the time period of second-wave feminism, which was a period concerned with the women's achievement of equality in the workplace and the psychological implications of sexual stereotypes. Mulvey calls for an eradication of female sexual objectivity in order to align herself with second-wave feminism. She argues that in order for women to be equally represented in the workplace, women must be portrayed as men are: as lacking sexual objectification.
Mulvey posits in her notes to the Criterion Collection DVD of Powell's film. That the homosexual male spectator is actively disinterested in the female onscreen as "sex object" implies that he is reading films through a far clearer lens (again, to reference Peeping Tom.
B. Ruby Rich argues that women’s relationships with film is instead dialectical, consciously filtering the images and messages they receive through cinema, and reprocessing them to elicit their own meanings.
Coming from a black feminist perspective, bell hooks put forth the notion of the “oppositional gaze,” encouraging black women not to accept stereotypical representations in film, but rather actively critique them. Janet Bergstrom’s article “Enunciation and Sexual Difference” (1979) uses Sigmund Freud’s ideas of bisexual responses, arguing that women are capable of identifying with male characters and men with women characters, either successively or simultaneously. Miriam Hanson, in “Pleasure, Ambivalence, Identification: Valentino and Female Spectatorship” (1984) put forth the idea that women are also able to view male characters as erotic objects of desire. In "The Master's Dollhouse: Rear Window," Tania Modleski argues that Hitchock's film, Rear Window, is an example of the power of male gazer and the position of the female as a prisoner of the "master's dollhouse".
Carol Clover, in her popular and influential book "Men Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film" (Princeton University Press, 1992) argues that young male viewers of the Horror Genre (young males being the primary demographic) are quite prepared to identify with the female-in-jeopardy, a key component of Horror narrative, and to identify on an unexpectedly profound level. Clover further argues that the "Final Girl" in the psychosexual sub-genre of Exploitation Horror invariable triumphs through her own resourcefulness, and is not by any means a passive, or inevitable, victim. Laura Mulvey, in response to these and other criticisms revisited the topic in “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ inspired by Duel in the Sun” (1981). In addressing the heterosexual female spectator, she revised her stance to argue that women can take two possible roles in relation to film: a masochistic identification with the female object of desire that is ultimately self-defeating or a transsexual identification with men as the active viewers of the text. A new version of the gaze was offered in the early 1990s by Bracha Ettinger, who proposed the notion of the "matrixial gaze".

Realism and counter cinema

The early work of Marjorie Rosen and Molly Haskell on representation of women in film was part of a movement to make depictions of women more realistic both in documentaries and narrative cinema. The growing female presence in the film industry was seen as a positive step toward realizing this goal, by drawing attention to feminist issues and putting forth alternative, more true-to-life views of women. However, these images are still mediated by the same factors as traditional film, such as the “moving camera, composition, editing, lighting, and all varieties of sound.” While acknowledging the value in inserting positive representations of women in film, some critics asserted that real change would only come about from reconsidering the role of film in society, often from a semiotic point of view.
Claire Johnston put forth the idea that women’s cinema can function as "counter cinema". Through consciousness of the means of production and opposition of sexist ideologies, films made by women have the potential to posit an alternative to traditional Hollywood films. In reaction to this article, many women filmmakers have integrated "alternative forms and experimental techniques" to "encourage audiences to critique the seemingly transparent images on the screen and to question the manipulative techniques of filming and editing".

http://www.thestage.co.uk/news/newsstory.php/16828

Questions and topic details

Questions:

"How has the representation of women changed in Science Fiction films from The Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman to Aliens?"
- "What do the films of Marilyn Monroe tell us about the role of women in the cinema of the '50's and '60's?"
- "Feminist or Mysoginist? Women in the work of Quentin Tarantino"
- “How are the representation of women in the films of Ridley Scott perceived by his fans?”
- “Do the representation of women in Disney films mirror the societal and cultural changes that have dominated gender cinema over the last 70 years?”

Topic details:

Research into the relationships between female filmmakers and the industry as well as between their films and their spectators and/or female spectatorship of film. [Filmmaker is defined here as director, actor, producer, screenwriter or other personnel for example editor, production designer, director of photography].
Gender issues such as equality of opportunity for women filmmakers in the industry. Issues of gender representation in films. Feminist critical perspectives. Popular criticism. Audience reception. Candidates may draw on examples of films classed as ‘feminist films. Films made for female audiences and films made by women as well as female responses to other films.

The curious case of Benjamin Button review task

Is the critic positive or negative?
- Negative
• What angle does the article take? (What is it discussing?)
- Plot and how it makes no sense at all
• Which elements of the text do they like/dislike?
- They liked the special effects (make up dept)
-disliked pretty much everything
• Do they make reference to any other texts?
-The Notebook- mentioning characters, authors, and directors
• Who it the critic – could this affect their position?
-Peter Bradshaw-the Guardian newspaper
• What is the original source (not Rotten Tomatoes) is this reliable?
- The Guardian newspaper- it’s seen as very reliable
• Could this affect the comments?
-it will only give the of the type of audience which read that paper (intellectual, middle class)
• Did you find the comments useful?
-it gave me an insight of what the plot is about
• Have you learned anything from the critics’ comments?
- Yes, the pros and cons of the film and if it is worth watching

Is the critic positive or negative?
- Positive
• What angle does the article take? (What is it discussing?)
-discusses the role of the actor Brad Pitt and how significant it is
-the plot
-why he thinks the director did what he did
• Which elements of the text do they like/dislike?
- The story line, about how the technological level fascinates him
• Do they make reference to any other texts?
-Thelma and Louise (1991)-compared Pitts acting in both films
• Who it the critic – could this affect their position?
- Sukhdev Sandhu
• What is the original source (not Rotten Tomatoes) is this reliable?
-Telegraph is reliable because it is a well established newspaper
• Could this affect the comments?
- As in the guardian view, not a lot of people read the telegraph; it has its own audience. So would not give it on a objective perspective, but rather a subjective one
• Did you find the comments useful?
- Yes, I found these useful because the reviewer went into the technological levels of this film and demonstrated the significance of some issues
• Have you learned anything from the critics’ comments?
- I have learnt about similar text and the way the directors other films are and that this one is totally opposite to what he usually directs

Is the critic positive or negative?
- Positive
• What angle does the article take? (What is it discussing?)
-comparison of actors in similar films and how they contrast
• Which elements of the text do they like/dislike?
- Digital and prosthetic de-ageing techniques
• Do they make reference to any other texts?
- Forest Gump
- Titanic
• Who it the critic – could this affect their position?
- Ian Freer
• What is the original source (not Rotten Tomatoes) is this reliable?
- Empire magazine- within the film industry yes because its main focus is cinematic
• Could this affect the comments?
- I think it can, because it has to cater for many audiences, it gives both cons and pros to make it as neutral as possible but then gives its own opinion at the end allowing others to give their verdicts to
• Did you find the comments useful?
- In this case no, because everything for and against the film has been discussed
• Have you learned anything from the critics’ comments?
- I got an insight into emotional factors involved the creation of the film, in the sense of how it was designed.