Depictions of Women in Film

The way women are portrayed in film is very familiarized and the audience seems blind to the stereotypes. The majority of the movies are written out of the male perspective or as they call it ‘the male gaze’. The female characters shown are almost as outdated today, as they were 50 years ago. Together with four other students I studied women in movies by diving into storylines, movie scripts, and appearances. At the end we made a publication to express our urgency.

The publication consists of 3 main chapters explaining the stereotypes we found after our research; ‘The Mother’, ‘The Makeover’ and ‘The Manic Pixie Dream Girl’. We provided images from the picked scenes and script lines accompanying it. I decided to use red paper to make it look like old script paper, as back in the day scripts would be printed on red paper in order to make it harder to copy them.

The entertainment business prioritizes the sexualization of women over a realistic image of women. The normalization of these depictions is harmful to the image we have of women in our society. There exists an unrealistic standard with a different attitude towards women as a result. The movie industry as we know it today cannot be ignored. How much influence these movies have on the audience is unsure, but we do know that repetition causes normalization. The image of women created in entertainment should be way more accurate to reality than it is now. There should be more space for women to step behind the camera as well as in front of it.

Looking back at this project a year later, I see how urgent this topic was considering the attention the Barbie movie got after its release. The Barbie movie calls out the same stereotypes of women in our personal lives and the entertainment industry that we talked about, and even more than that.

Davina is a Dutch social artist and graphic designer based in Rotterdam. She froms visual strategies across music, community and identity, reflecting the worlds shaped by sound and collective culture.

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Email: davinapoot@live.nl
Insta: @davinapoot.works