Posted on April 27, 2014 at 8:00 am
Here’s a great quiz from Indiewire on films by woman directors, covering more than 170 films going back to the silent era and covering every category and budget size.
Posted on April 3, 2014 at 5:31 pm
It was a galvanizing moment. A divisive moment. An iconic moment.
President George H.W. Bush had just nominated Clarence Thomas to be the second black man and the first black Republican Supreme Court justice. The Senate Judiciary Committee was conducting a confirmation hearing. It was spirited and at times partisan, but nothing out of the ordinary.
And then a law professor from Oklahoma named Anita Hill appeared before the committee to testify that when she worked for Thomas he frequently made crude, offensive, and humiliating comments to her. While she had never filed a formal complaint and had indeed accepted a second job working for him, she said that she had to answer the committee’s investigators truthfully to allow them to make an informed decision about a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court.
This was in 1991. Most Americans were not familiar with the rules on sexual harassment. The all-white, all-male, all-old members of the committee clearly had no clue on how to evaluate Hill’s testimony, or even how to treat her. This documentary, more than twenty years later, looks at what happened and what has and has not changed.
It begins with a 2010 phone message from Thomas’ wife, Ginni, left on Hill’s voicemail, asking her to apologize, and ending with a chirpy “Okay?” Hill is not apologizing. As she appeared 23 years ago, she is still utterly dignified and unruffled, though understandably less formal and more relaxed.
Hill is the youngest of 13 siblings, born on a farm in Oklahoma. Her parents moved there to escape a lynching. Her older siblings attended segregated schools and six of her seven brothers went into the military. Her parents told her she would have to be twice as good to get half as much as her white classmates. She was willing to be twice as good. She was class valedictorian.
The film takes us through the hearing, with the Senators’outrageous questions (“Are you a scorned woman? Are you a martyr?” asked Howell Heflin) and insulting comments (Alan K. Simpson refers to “sexual harassment crap”). She took and passed a polygraph test. Witnesses recalled her telling them about Thomas’ behavior at the time, but no corroborating witnesses with similar stores were permitted. Issues of race and gender are forthrightly explored. Law professor Charles Ogletree, who represented Hill, talks about how no other black man stood up for her. “You don’t do that to a brother,” he quotes. Implied in his decision: “You don’t do that to a sister.” Hill says, “People had a tendency to think that he had a race and I had a gender.”
“There was no way we were going to win,” Ogletree says. “It was a charade.” And yet, with much still left to do, this movie shows how much has been accomplished. Hill did not want to be a public figure and hoped to go back to her work on commercial law. She promised herself to talk about it for just two years. But “If I am not public, there will be a sense of victory over me.” She understood that sexual harassment was not about flirting or seduction but about power and control and humiliation. And it was just one part of the larger issue of gender inequality. The film shows us her work, especially with young women, to teach them what is “okay and not okay.”
It will itself serve as a teaching document to carry the story forward, not just the story of a woman objecting to demeaning treatment from her employer, but the story of a woman who told the truth with “honesty, dignity, and courage.”
Parents should know that this film includes very explicit sexual terms and references including pornography.
Family discussion: What has changed most since 1991? What has changed least? What is the best way to educate young men and women about sexual harassment?
If you like this, try: “Not For Ourselves Alone”
Posted on March 26, 2014 at 3:58 pm
Many thanks to Kevin Sampson for including me in the Picture Lock Women’s History Month special, a panel discussion about the state of women in film, on and off screen. And many thanks to my fellow panelists, casting director Kimberly Skyrme, actress/singer Tia Dae, producer Erin Essenmacher.
Posted on March 20, 2014 at 8:00 am
Author Walter Dean Myers
Myers speaks very personally, about the impact on him as a child who loved books but sought in vain to find some semblance of the world he knew in them.
I needed more than the characters in the Bible to identify with, or even the characters in Arthur Miller’s plays or my beloved Balzac. As I discovered who I was, a black teenager in a white-dominated world, I saw that these characters, these lives, were not mine. I didn’t want to become the “black” representative, or some shining example of diversity. What I wanted, needed really, was to become an integral and valued part of the mosaic that I saw around me.
Books did not become my enemies. They were more like friends with whom I no longer felt comfortable. I stopped reading. I stopped going to school. On my 17th birthday, I joined the Army. In retrospect I see that I had lost the potential person I would become — an odd idea that I could not have articulated at the time, but that seems so clear today.
And he makes it clear that it is just as important for children to read about characters of other races as it is to read about their own.
Books transmit values. They explore our common humanity. What is the message when some children are not represented in those books? Where are the future white personnel managers going to get their ideas of people of color? Where are the future white loan officers and future white politicians going to get their knowledge of people of color? Where are black children going to get a sense of who they are and what they can be?
The same day Myers’ essay appeared, the Guardian announced a new policy for reviewing books intended for children. If the book is marketed only to one gender, they will not review it. Literary editor Kay Guest wrote:
I promise now that the newspaper and this website will not be reviewing any book which is explicitly aimed at just girls, or just boys. Nor will The Independent’s books section. And nor will the children’s books blog at Independent.co.uk. Any Girls’ Book of Boring Princesses that crosses my desk will go straight into the recycling pile along with every Great Big Book of Snot for Boys. If you are a publisher with enough faith in your new book that you think it will appeal to all children, we’ll be very happy to hear from you. But the next Harry Potter or Katniss Everdeen will not come in glittery pink covers. So we’d thank you not to send us such books at all.
As Myers said, books give us an idea of who we are and what we can be. They also teach us empathy for others. They can do this best when they reflect the world as it is, made up of people with many differences and many connections.
Posted on March 18, 2014 at 3:58 pm
On top of the distressing news that Halle Berry’s Storm character in the new X-Men movie has been cut down to one scene — possibly just one line — and Anna Pacquin’s Rogue removed entirely, comes some more bad news. According to CinemaBlend, Marvel’s Kevin Feige has announced that there are no plans to make a female superhero movie.
Marvel has either released, or officially announced, thirteen movies. That includes a trilogy for Iron Man and Captain America and two Thor films, and none of these films have focused on lead females at all. The Avengers counts one female among the core group, as does Guardians Of The Galaxy.
Hey, Kevin, “Gravity” and “The Hunger Games” did pretty well last year. There is a big audience for women-led action movies, and there are a lot of actresses in Hollywood who are ready for those roles. I’m pretty sure you can find some story in the Marvel multiverses that would pass the Bechdel test.
