Wednesday, September 4, 2013

the representation of women in contemporary American cinema



REPRESENTATION PAPER
The goal of this assignment is to analyze the representation of women in front of and behind the
camera in contemporary American cinema. Choose 2-3 American films from 2003-2013 to analyze. Be sure they have something in common. They could be from the same genre (e.g.horror; romantic comedy), filmmaker (e.g. Lynn Shelton; Woody Allen), star (e.g. Viola Davis;
Megan Fox), studio (e.g. Disney; an independent), box office (e.g. ‘Top 3 Domestic Grosses of 2011’), etc. Then analyze the following elements for the chosen films:
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Women in front of the camera
? Using Martha Lauzen’s “It’s a Man’s (Celluloid) World” as a guideline, what do you see in
front of the camera? Include information on the protagonist and the estimated ratio of female
to male characters. Feel free to include other elements about the female characters:
leadership, age, race, marital status, and occupation.
? Then examine the female characters using Laura Mulvey’s theories from “Visual Pleasure
and Narrative Cinema.” How are they visually presented? How do they function in the
narrative? Has much changed since the days of classical Hollywood?
Women behind the camera
? Who is calling the creative shots in the films? Look up the films’ directors, executive
producers, producers, writers, cinematographers, and editors. Is the content different when
women are in key creative positions? Use Martha Lauzen’s “The Celluloid Ceiling” as a
guideline.
Once you have collated all the above, synthesize your findings into a cohesive, persuasive thesis
claim about the representation of women in contemporary American cinema. Remember the
thesis can be more than one sentence. Assume the reader has seen the films, so avoid plot
summaries and laundry lists of names and statistics. Get to the meat of the analysis.

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