Susanne Bier

Susanne Bier is a Danish writer, director, and filmmaker. She studied Religion, then Architecture which led to her interest in set design and Film. Bier graduated from the Danisch School of Film in Copenhagen (1987). As stated by film critic Lisa Schwarzbaum, Director Susanne Bier's has an expressive way of storytelling; in which she accomplishes the rare feat of realistically incorporating violence in another part of the world into an intimate study of shifting domestic relationships. We do live in a fraught world of interconnections, Bier makes clear, and what happens far away matters, in unexpected ways, close to home. One such film that exemplifies her talent is “Brodre” released in 2005. This is actually one of my favorite films that I’ve ever seen. I find this film intense and at times disturbing, because of its portrayal of two brothers and their troubled personal and family lives. The changes that these two brothers undergo show how circumstances can drastically change people's lives in unforeseeable ways. In the beginning we see two brothers that remind us of the story of Cain and Able in some ways. One brother is happy and has a family and the favorite of the family. The other is the black sheep so to say, and is released from prison in the beginning of the film. As the film goes on we're invited into the lives of these brothers. We get a glimpse of human relations on the screen. “Brodre” is also one of the only films to show so graphically how the traumas of war can transform someone into a deeply disturbed maniac. One of the brothers in this case experiences a grizzly incident as a prisoner of war which changes him for the duration of the film.

Bier likes to have a lot of close-ups and extensive use of handheld (camera) in her films. She likes to get close to her actors and give us a view from every angle no matter what the situation is. Her style of filmmaking captivates us and achieves suspense of disbelief rather quickly. We almost feel as if we’re a part of the film with the characters in each scene. Being an aspiring filmmaker myself I admire her for her achievements and style of filmmaking. I agree with what she says below about being restricted by a fixed camera position. The story is completely different and more realistic in terms of how the story is told by the camera when we don't limit ourselves to a static position.

“I use it [hand-held-camera] in order to enable actors to move around freely because I want them to be truthful at all times and that means they should be able to move and not be bound by a fixed camera position. I think if it's used for style it's a mistake. It's there to do something very specific.” – Susanne Bier

With a fine balance of compassion and hardheadedness, this movie explores the shattering of an illusion entertained by men, more than by women, of their godlike autonomy, and their reflexive fury at its sudden loss wrote Stephen Holden (NY Times). Susanne Bier's films almost always deal with the happiness and tragic events or despair that effect this happiness. She credits this to having grown up in a Jewish family where the importance of family was generated. Though Bier's credits officially date back to 1992, she achieved her first significant breakthrough in 1999, when she directed “The One and Only” a well-received romantic comedy about dating, marriage, child-rearing, and adultery. That film reportedly grossed a heftier amount than any picture in Danish history. Bier has had 13 nominations and 23wins to date! This is an amazing achievement for any filmmaker regardless of gender, race or ethnicity.

Maya Angelou (Post 5)

Maya Angelou is well known for her poetry, best-selling literary work, TV and film acting appearances, TV screen writing work, dancing background, and civil rights activism in the 1960’s. However, many people may not know that she has also directed films. Her most well known film is “Down In the Delta.” The film is based on a grandmothers will to rescue her daughter from drug and alcohol abuse, and prevent her grandson from getting caught up in the inner city streets of Chicago. To save her family, grandma Rosa pawns a silver candelabra called “Nathan” that has been in her family since the 19th century in order to buy bus tickets for her daughter and grand children. Rosa’s plan is to send her family to rural Mississippi for the summer, and give her drug, alcoholic daughter the responsibility of earning money to return home and buy the family’s heirloom back from the pawnshop.

In reference to the article Author/Auteur, authoring in film made by women is characterized by the authors approach by simultaneously conforming to and subverting patriarchal literary standards. Angelou has conformed to the traditional patriarchal standards by sticking to the conventional stereotypes of women caring for their families.

Her authoring essence is also apparent with her use of confrontation with culture. This is evident in her approach with Thomas’s character. She uses his character to confront the difficulty of staying away from gang violence for a young black boy living in the inner city.

According to the Author/ Auteur article, women also demonstrate their authoring ability by creating monstrous or madwomen characters, such as Loretta’s character. This is evident in the scene where Rosa’s finds Loretta strung-out in a crack house.

The article also discusses the authoring signature. Angelou expressed her authoring signature in a 1999 Ebony magazine article.

"In all of my work, I try to tell the human truth--what it is like to be a human ... what makes us stumble and tumble and fall and somehow miraculously rise and go on from darkness into light," …"This is what drew me to Down in the Delta. It is a story of these very kind of human truths, a story to remind us that, as human beings, we are more alike than different."

Critics have applauded her use of poetry and her ability to relay a message to the audience with her sensitive and intelligent approve to the subject.

Yasmin Ahmad

Yasmin Ahmad (1958-2009) was a controversial internationally renowned, award-winning film director and writer from Malaysia. Her films were often centered on racial interactions involving love in the face of racial or religious intolerance. This was a reoccurring theme when addressing these types of conflicts in her home country of Malaysia.

She has won awards at the Malaysia Video Awards, Association of Accredited Advertising Agents in Malaysia, Malaysian Film Festival, Berlin International Film Festival, and Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival.

The following is a short film she made entitled, Chocolate. At the beginning of the film the boy's mother lashes out at him for not wanting to leave Malaysia, believing that the Malays (who rule the country) will not give equal opportunity for progression to the Chinese (I believe they are a Chinese family). Shortly after a customer appears (a young Malay girl) and despite the boy's apparent liking to her, he treats her unfavorably after his mother reaffirms her disgust in the Malays, poisoning the boy's mind and not allowing himself to treat her kindly.

Sepet (which could be translated as "slit eye"), is one of her most successful films. Based on a relationship between a Chinese boy and a Malay girl, it touched a very sensitive place with respect to race amongst the people of Malaysia, where the memory of the terrible 1969 riots between Chinese and Malays is still strong. Ironically, Ahmad was married to a Chinese man. She made the film for $400,000 and shot it in Ipoh, where Chinese and Malay communities live in close proximity. This film was released after her death.

Trailer for Serpet:

Some of her other feature films include:

Rabun (My Failing Eyesight, 2003)

Gubra (Anxiety, 2006)

Mukhsin (2007)

Muallaf (The Convert, 2008)

Talentime (2009)

This is a commercial she made about a young Chinese boy and his crush on a Malay girl. The last line says, "Our children are color blind. Shouldn't we keep them that way? Happy 50th Anniversary from Petronas."

I think that as an auteur, Yasmin was a pioneer in exposing the harsh reality of life for the racial sub-groups in Malaysia and how the ignorance and lack of understanding from all sides is perpetuated by family and passed down to the younger generations. Her openness about her rejection of stereotypes, racism and fundamentalism is clear in her films, and she makes a provocative and powerful statement with her art, yet always peaceful and promoting harmony. I learned about her through research, I had never previously heard of her or her work, but from the little that I have learned about this woman, she has seemingly won the respect and admiration of many, Malays and Chinese alike. I don't believe that she received a large amount of publicity while she was living, yet I think she has been recognized posthumously. The fact that she was a woman and Malaysian may not have helped her in receiving the recognition that she should have received while she was a living artist.

As with any activist, their voice and power for expression are always powerful tools that they use to benefit whatever cause they are advocating. In the case of Yasmin, I think that she was pushing for a movement very important amongst the interest of her people and the fact that she was a woman, married to a Chinese man, this gave her more of a powerful image and made her a more powerful auteur. As we discussed in class, the director is the voice, channeling his desires, his opinion, his vision into what ultimately creates the image of the film. Yasmin, sensitive to the racial issues in her country, used and expressed that sensibility to promote awareness amongst her fellow Malaysians and citizens of the world, to not only advocate for change within the borders of her own people, but globally. This kind of auteur wins my ultimate respect, and I think that directors with this type of positive and progressive vision should be recognized more.

Post 5

Kimberly Pierce is a skillful film director who is widely recognized for her successful independent film Boys Don’t Cry released in 1999. The film is based on the life of a transgender individual Brandon Teena who passes off as a man to pursue her love interest who is a woman. The film was a low budget film but garnered attention through word of mouth. Kimberly Pierce has established herself as a director who explores concepts of gender, relationships of lesbians, homosexuals, and transgender experiences. This is represented through her most notable role as director of Boys Don’t Cry feature film and the television drama The L word. The L word title of the show could be referred to as love, liberal, lesbian or a variety of other words. The shows display the life of lesbian, transgender, and bisexual relationships in the Los Angeles area of West Hollywood.
In reference to the article Author/Auteur, women’s cinemas are characterized by its project to work with or against narrative by shifting the gaze and exploring gender relations. Kimberly Pierce’s film Boys Don’t Cry challenged conventional films which focus on the romance between a man and a woman. In Boys Don’t Cry, Brandon Teena struggled with her identity and her emotions. She fell in love with a woman and was willing to personify a male identity to pursue her. She understood that if she pursued her with her real identity as a woman she might be ridiculed or her life may be in danger. Once it’s discovered that Brandon is a female, she is violently raped and murdered. Brandon Teena embodies a transgender individual who happens to fall in love with another woman. She was discriminated by two convicts who took her life. The brutal murder and rape scenes create anger towards the two male convicts. The two men represent an impediment to her happiness and are images of male intrusion.



Kimberly Pierce success of Boys’s Don’t Cry is a personal reflection of her dedication and diligent work as a film maker. The film began as a project for her thesis graduate degree at Columbia University. She read about the story in an article and the details of the story drove her to do further research on the story. She traveled to Fall City, Nebraska to perform research and attended the trial of the two homicide suspects. She was awarded a Princess Grace Award and received a grant at Columbia University. Her grant and involvement with the Sundance Film festival helped her to develop her film project into a feature film.
Kimberly Pierce is an example of an avant guarde film director who challenged conventional films by presenting a film which explored the life and ordeal of a transgender individual. In reference to the article, “Author/Auteur, the author uses the term “Gynocriticism” to describe the process of presenting the voices of the silenced. Pierce’s work presents the lives and displays appreciative interpretations of women’s sexual experiences and desires.

Diablo Cody's "Juno"

Diablo Cody (a pen name; Cody's birth name is Brook Busey) is a leading example of a feminist voice penetrating the film world, and in turn, the representation of women in film, through the screenwriting process. Throughout her screenwriting career, Cody has exclusively written films and television shows about women's experiences; a sampling of her projects includes Showtime's The United States of Tara, about a suburban mother with multiple personality disorder, and the 2009 black comedy film Jennifer's Body, about a demon-possessed female serial killer who preys on teenage boys.

However, Cody undeniably came to fame for her 2007 comedy-drama film Juno, about a teenage girl's experiences with pregnancy. The film amassed huge success, becoming the highest-grossing film ever for its distributor, Fox Searchlight, and winning Cody the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.



The film is extremely successful as a case study for film analyst Josephine Donovan's concept of "gynocriticism" (Humm 95). Film theorist Maggie Humm, who heavily uses gynocriticism while analyzing the films of Dutch filmmaker Marleen Gorris in the piece "Author/Auteur: Feminist Literary Theory and Feminist Film," relays Donovan's definition of the term as "a way of assessing works of art specifically in relation to the interests and desires of women... it involves a separate female way of thinking, and a recognition that women's experience has been effectively silenced by a masculine culture" (Humm 95).

From a gynocritical lens, it is clear that Cody wrote the film as a direct subversion of the typical portrayal of the young female experience. She portrays her main character, Juno, as intelligent and mature, a deep thinker who wasn't pressured to have sex with her boyfriend, but instead convinced him to have sex. Previously, a character like Juno was almost unheard of in film, especially in a coming-of-age film where the female protagonist gets pregnant. Rarely ever are young women depicted as wanting sex without being "pressured" or, as many feminist bloggers like to call it, "slut-shamed." Yet Juno is unashamed of her sexuality. She unapologetically thinks about sex: during one scene of the film, Juno imagines what her love interest Paulie Bleeker's penis looks like inside of his track shorts; a thought that most girls have, yet which is a completely non-existent thought for young women in film. Juno has sex with Paulie because, well, she wants to. And though many viewers of the film wrongly interpreted that Juno's sexual encounter with Paulie was her first time having sex, Cody vehemently denied this in a 2009 interview with BUST magazine, saying, "Who said it was [Juno's] first time? Way to jump to conclusions. It was [Paulie's] first time, not hers."

The film's topic, teen pregnancy, obviously garnered attention due to the heated discourse surrounding pro-life and pro-choice options for young pregnant women. Though Juno chooses to carry her baby to full term before giving him up for closed adoption, the film is obviously told from a pro-choice perspective. This is particularly displayed when Juno is shown going up to an abortion clinic and beginning to make an appointment for an abortion before changing her mind. Cody even writes Juno as considering all options; Juno listens as a pro-life heckler outside the clinic tells Juno that unborn fetuses have fingernails, replies, "Really? Hmm," and walks into the clinic anyway. Because Juno is shown as weighing two sides of a decision, and inevitably making an educated choice, Cody's film is clearly showing abortion as a choice that should be left up to women to think about and decide on. Again, unlike most teen films and almost all film and television depictions of abortion, which depict female protagonists who have had an abortion as emotionally traumatized, Cody chooses to subvert the norm by depicting Juno as not at all traumatized by abortion. She sees it simply for what it is, an option, and she chooses not to have one simply because it doesn't seem to be the right choice for her personally.

Furthermore, the storyline surrounding the adoption process of Juno's child subverts normalized ideas about the nuclear family and who society sees fit to raise children. When Juno decides to give her child up for adoption, she chooses a husband and a wife who are young, friendly, upwardly mobile, and most of all, "cool" - the husband listens to Sonic Youth records with Juno and shares her interest in old-school punk rock. Juno also chooses them because the husband and wife seem very happy together, and the wife, a successful businesswoman who cannot have children of her own, wants a child so badly. However, later in the film, the husband and wife get a divorce, as the husband reveals he does not really want a child as much as his wife does. Juno is upset by their divorce, as she has become so used to the idea of her child being raised by these two people. Eventually, though, Juno comes around and gives her baby up for adoption to the wife, who she knows will love the child. Cody's decision to include this storyline directly speaks to the idea of the nuclear family - a wife, a husband, 2.5 children - as the only type of family "fit" to have children as oppressive and outdated. Juno gave her child to a woman who does not have a husband, but is successful, educated, and most of all, loving. By doing this, Cody validates families that are perceived as outside the norm, and furthermore, makes the statement that a woman can have both a successful career and a family, regardless of whether or not she has a husband.



There is no doubt in my mind that Diablo Cody's screenplay is what made Juno a feminist film. Told by someone unfamiliar with a woman's experience, the film would have been a completely different story and would lack the autonomy and agency that Cody gives her main character. Most importantly, the film would not have the same message. At the film's end, after Juno gives birth to her child and he is taken away, she cries, only to be told by her father that, "One day, you'll be here under different circumstances." Her father's statement is a powerful one; he is telling his daughter that life moves on, and though she has had a baby when she wasn't prepared to raise one, one day she will have a baby that she is prepared to raise. By writing this, Cody is validating women's lives as more than just baby makers. She is saying that life does not end with teen pregnancy. It does not make you a bad person, and it does not mean you will never be loved or never have children in the future. Cody's message is positive and hopeful. Analyzing Juno through gynocriticism makes it clear that Cody has successfully used her auteur-ship as screenwriter to spread an empowering, very feminist message through film.

Beginning this assignment, I could not think of one female director, and low and behold I find one, that directed one of my favorite movies: Lost in Translation. The entire Coppola family have written and directed some of my favorite films. Although Sofia Coppola has had to live in the shadow of the director of such films as the Godfather, and Apocalypse Now, she has become in my eyes a success in herself. Interesting enough Sofia Coppola started her acting career at the age of one year old starring as a little boy called, Michael Francis Rizzi in the Godfather. She is a model, writer, actress, cinematographer, director, and producer. She has been nominated for over twenty awards for directing, and has won eight; which include three British Academy of Film and Television Arts Awards, three golden globes, and two Oscars for her films Lost in Translation in 2003 and Marie Antoinette in 2006. From my impression of Sofia Coppola she seems like an incredibly gifted and artistic person who has been surrounded and continues to surround herself by creative people.

Although I am a fan of Lost in Translation, I am reluctant to glorify Sofia Coppola’s success based wholly on her own accomplishments. She is the daughter of one of the greatest directors of all time. Does this mean that critics are giving her credit for her work based on the work itself or because she is the daughter of Francis Ford Coppola? Myself, I feel as though her work is much different than her father’s and is in itself wonderful, creative, and glorifying for women in the film industry. She has won awards many awards in her first years of directing where it took some men in the same field much longer. If she was making films that were in fact not films worth watching and winning awards, I would feel as though she is not worthy of her accomplishments, but in my eyes is a successful, creative director, artist, actress, producer and so much more.

Image Source 1: http://img2.timeinc.net/ew/dynamic/imgs/030929/14356__sc_l.jpg
Image Source 2: http://img378.imageshack.us/ifs/585/img176/1/sofialg2.jpg
Image Source 3: http://www.dvdtimes.co.uk/images/RikBooth/Lost%20in%20Translation.jpg

Wimnonline.org

So I was searching the internet and I can across this one website called http://www.wimnonline.org and I thought that it was a great resource for women's news. The main purpose of this website is to increase the presence of not only women, but emphansizing women of color, low- income women, and lesbians in the public debate. One of the things they do is try and analyze the representaions of women in the media through differenet essays, lectures and other representations in the media. Its also a sets up organizations that give information to train women and social justice groups to hold media outlets accountable to the public interest. They are advocates for policy reform and structural change and work with journalists to broaden the quantity and diversity of women's voices appearing in the media. This website also acts a source for a wide variety of news outlets including the Los Angeles Times, People, Advertising Age, Fox News Network, ABC News Now, Comedy Central's "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" and Pacifica Radio. It also includeds a number of aricles, essays and op-ed pieces written by WIMN's staff and board members and have been published in numerous publications ranging from the Chicago Tribune and Newsday to Ms. and Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture, as well as educational and general interest anthologies and a growing number of college curricula. Another area that the wesite aims to inform about is Women in News and Media. They have a quote on their website that says, "There is no "media democracy," no media justice, without women" What's also great about this wensite in that they probidea consistent progressive feminist voice for women as stakeholders in the media reform and media justice movements, insisting that the "universal" issues of structural and economic reform are understood as interconnected with institutional biases around gender, race, class and sexuality in media content and in the media industry.