Name: Yashika Galiyan

Subject: Feminist Film Theory

Semester: 2nd semester

Examination roll number: 21210723071

QUESTION: Bring out two significant elements of 1930s and 40s

films. Do you think this justifies the category of ‘woman’s film’?
Could any parallel be established with Bollywood films in this
context?

The woman's film is a film-genre which includes women-centered

narratives, female protagonists and is designed to appeal to a female
audience. Woman's films usually portray "women's concerns" such as
problems revolving around domestic life, the family, motherhood, self-
sacrifice, and romance. These films were produced from the silent
era through the 1950s and early 1960s, but were most popular in the
1930s and 1940s. Woman's films are films that were made for women by
predominantly male screenwriters and directors whereas women’s
cinema encompasses films that have been made by women. The term
“woman’s film” carries the implication that women, and therefore
women’s emotional problems, are of minor significance. however, a film
that focuses on male relationships is not pejoratively dubbed as a man’s
film but a psychological drama.
In the thirties and forties, it was as regular an item in studio production as
the crime melodrama or the western. In the thirties and forties, the
heyday of the “woman’s film,” it was as regular an item in studio
production as the crime melodrama or the Western. At the lowest level,
as soap opera, the “woman’s film” fills a masturbatory need, it is soft-
core emotional porn for the frustrated housewife. The weepies are
founded on a mock-Aristotelian and politically conservative aesthetic
whereby women spectators are moved, not by pity and fear but by self-
pity and tears, to accept, rather than reject, their lot. As in the film “Dark
Victory”: The two loved ones may unite out of loneliness, but always with
the shadow and memory of the “great woman” (vivid and in her prime)
between them. If woman hogs this universe unrelentingly, it is perhaps
her compensation for all the male-dominated universes from which she
has been excluded: the gangster film, the Western, the war film, the
policier, the rodeo film, the adventure film. Basically, the woman’s film is
no more maudlin and self-pitying than the male adventure film where
men are seen roaming the plains, or prowling the city, in old clothes and
unshaven, the days before settling down or going home. In such films, the
woman becomes a kind of urban or frontier Xantippe with rather limited
options. She can be a meddling moralist who wants the hero to leave off
his wandering; or a last resort for him, after his buddies have died or
departed; or even just shadowy past; or a nagging nice-girl wife, who
pesters the hero to spend more time with her, instead of always working
or killing. The domestic and the romantic are entwined, one redeeming
the other, in the theme of self-sacrifice, which is the mainstay and
oceanic force, high tide and low ebb, of the woman’s film.
A woman’s virginity (infant fodder, indeed!), and where and how she lost
it, is at least as important as the high and mighty manly themes of the
films Grierson approved of. The deprecation of women’s films takes a
different form among critics who are not socially conscious—the
aesthetically open, “movie-movie critics” represented, in the thirties and
forties, by Agee, Otis Ferguson, Robert Warshow, and Manny Farber.
There, the prejudice is more subtle: It is not that they love women less,
but that they admire men more. Even Ferguson and Agee, who were
enraptured with certain female presences on the screen, reserved their
highest accolades for the films that showed men doing things and that
captured the look and feel of down-at-heel losers, criminals, or soldiers,
men battling nature or big-city odds. Central to the woman’s film is the
notion of middle-classness, not just as an economic status, but as a state
of mind and a relatively rigid moral code. The persistent irony is that she
is dependent for her well-being and “fulfillment” on institutions like
marriage, motherhood that by translating the word “woman” into “wife”
and “mother,” end her independent identity. It is the fiction of the
“ordinary woman who becomes extraordinary,” the woman who begins
as a victim of discriminatory circumstances and rises, through pain,
obsession, or defiance, to become mistress of her fate. The difference
between the soap opera palliative and the great woman’s film (Angel,
Letter from an Unknown Woman) is like the difference between
masturbatory relief and mutually demanding love.
The themes of the woman’s film can themselves be reduced to four
categories, often found overlapping or in combination:
 Sacrifice
 Affliction
 Choice
 competition

In the first, the woman must “sacrifice” herself for her children, her
children for their own welfare, marriage for her lover, her lover for
marriage or for his own welfare, her career for love or love for her career
—e.g., Morning Glory, Madame X etc. The sacrifice film may end happily,
but with the joy of suffering, the pain of joy. Indeed, most of the thirties’
and forties’ woman’s films ended tragically, an indication perhaps of the
vision women had of themselves. In the second category, the heroine is
struck by some “affliction” which she keeps a secret and eventually either
dies unblemished (Dark Victory), despite the efforts of her doctor-turned-
lover, or is cured (The Magnificent Obsession), by the efforts of her lover-
turned-doctor. The third category, “choice,” has the heroine pursued by
at least two suitors who wait, with undivided attention, her decision; on
it, their future happiness depends (The Seventh Veil). In the final
category, “competition,” the heroine meets and does battle with the
woman whose husband (fiancé, lover) she loves (The Great Lie). While
deciding the man’s fate, the women will discover, without explicitly
acknowledging it, that they prefer each other’s company to his. The
obtuseness of men generally is implied by their inability to perceive love
or (in the case of the second category) disease.

The woman’s film underwent a change between the thirties and forties,
affecting and affected by the change in the image of women themselves.
The forties were more emotional and neurotic, alternating between the
self-denying passivity of the waiting war wife and the brittle
aggressiveness of heroines like Davis and Crawford; thirties’ heroines
were spunkier and more stoical than their forties’ sisters, the difference
perhaps between a stiff and a quivering upper lip. Thirties’ films unfolded
against a normal society, whose set of standards the heroine
automatically accepted. The social structure wavered in the forties, with
women moving up the employment ladder and down from the pedestal,
paying for one with their fall from the other. There is, as a result, a
constant ambivalence in forties’ films, a sensibility that is alternately hard
and squishy, scathing and sentimental. A growing ambivalence and
coyness in films began in the thirties and ran into the forties.

Men were nervous not so much about women taking their jobs—the
firing of women directly after the war and the reinstatement of protective
legislation that had been temporarily suspended would take care of that
—but about women leaving the home “untended” as they crept back to
work. For it was a fact that once women had savored the taste of work
and independence, many didn’t want to go back to being “just
housewives.” And so in films working women (who were statistically older
than their pre-war counterparts) were given a pseudo-toughness, a
facade of steel wool that at a man’s touch would turn into cotton candy.

Lead actors are always shown as saviours. Women are shown as either
helpless victims or cunning villains. In general, hero is the one who solves
everyone’s including heroine’s problems. Stalking and eve-teasing are
depicted as love in Indian movies. In many mainstream movies, female
characters falls in love with these abusers. Due to this, several young men
are harassing women in the name of love. In 2015, an Indian man in
Australia was accused of stalking, and after analyzing the incidents, the
court came to a conclusion that his obsession with Bollywood films is the
cause of his behaviour. Heroines were portrayed as submissive, prefers to
be homemaker, not career oriented and bears the brunt of abusive husband
silently. Now the female characters in movies are more realistic and are
many actresses are not doing such kind of meaningless roles. With the
movie "Kabir Singh" breaking records at the box office and people
applauding the protagonist for all the wrong reasons, it is time for a
moment of retrospection. Well, I’m definitely not blaming the movie for
portraying a misogynist character. Kabir Singh’s story deserves to be
narrated but alongside the portrayal of such a controversial character in
Indian cinema comes a heap of responsibilities. Justifying the flawed
behaviour does not help.

Crawford, in the transition from glamour girl to self-reliant woman,

reveals not just what a woman must do once her sexual commodities are
no longer in demand, but suggests that a terrible loss is sustained in the
process. For a woman trading on her looks, survival and adaptability are
gained at a price, the price of the inner self, the core, the continuum that
exists in most men unaltered by phases or changes of life. It is something
men are born with, or given a sense of almost at birth; it is the bedrock
sense of self on which they build. But women, when they gear their lives
to men and neglect their own inner resources, are caught short by the
aging process and must suddenly develop in ways that could not have
been foreseen.

Generally—and typically—the only films that allowed dignity to working

women were those based on historical figures, real-life women, the
singularity (and therefore non applicability) of whose achievement would
not make them a threat to men. Or to other women. In Blossoms in The
Dust, Greer Garson’s dedicated woman battling to erase the stigma of
illegitimacy from birth certificates (based on a historical case) is no
problem. Yet, despite the safety of the nineteenth-century milieu,
Katharine Hepburn’s feminist in A Woman Rebels was too threatening.
The film flopped and ushered in her period of “box-office poison.” But
through all these films, she refuses to be humiliated or look ugly. Her
combined integrity, intelligence, and proud, frank beauty rise to the
surface, making us feel, with her, the difficulty and joy of being such a
woman. Hepburn expresses (the terrified eagerness of a woman for
psychological rape, as for her first sexual experience), and yet her entire
life and persona suggest exactly the opposite and are a victory over this.
She evolved, developed, played different parts, and in remaining true to
her intractable self, made some enemies. And she made life difficult
those who believed that a woman could not be brilliant and beautiful,
and ambitious and feminine at the same time.
Given the fictional necessity of woman’s self-sacrifice—a premise we
rightly challenge today—the heroine’s attitude was often resolute and
brave, an act of strength rather than helplessness. Nor did she deal in the
eternal hope and the endless postponements of tragedy provided by soap
opera. Rather, hers was a more exacting and fatalistic form of “escape,”
in which certain steps or non-steps were decisive and irrevocable.

The woman’s film reaches its apotheosis under Ophuls and Douglas Sirk in
the late forties and fifties, at a time when the genre was losing its mass
audience to television soap opera. Eventually women-oriented films, like
the women-oriented plays from which many of them were adapted,
disappeared from the cultural scene. The derisive attitude of the eastern
critical establishment won the day and drove them out of business. But at
one time the “matinee audience” had considerable influence on movie
production and on the popularity of certain stars. This influence has
waned to the point that the only films being made for women are the
afternoon soaps, and there is very little attempt to appeal to women in
either regular films or nighttime television.

The love and loyalty, the yearning and spirituality, the eroticism
sublimated in action and banter, the futility and fatalism, the willingness
to die for someone—of women’s fantasies as traditionally celebrated by
the woman’s film. The woman’s film, its themes appropriated by the
man’s film, has died out, and with it a whole area of heterosexual feeling
and fantasy. For the woman’s film, like other art forms, pays tribute at its
best (and at its worst) to the power of the imagination, to the mind’s
ability to picture a perfect love triumphing over the mortal and
conditional. The lovers in Back Street are finally united—in the
resurrection of filmed time. In Peter Ibbeston, Ann Harding and Gary
Cooper, separated by prison walls, live their love in their dreams and in
the bowery radiance of Lee Garmes’ cinematography. They are transfixed
at the sublime moment of their love (denying yet improving on reality) by
the power of the imagination, by the screen, and by their permanence in
our memories.