Les relations entre les femmes et l'industrie du cinéma

RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN WOMEN AND THE FILM INDUSTRY

Cinema, Hollywood, red carpets, ceremonies ... Generally, we all think of a world of glitter, strass, luxury and celebrity. When we watch a film in the cinema or at home, it is a moment of relaxation, and we rarely think about anything that can happen behind the scenes.

Nevertheless, cinema is not only a glamorous world as the actors and the media suggest. Indeed, the film industry is a much darker world than one thinks and is becoming more and more scandalous in the media. In recent weeks, these outrages have often been equated with the place of women in this industry and the inequalities that affect them.

Thus, one may wonder if today, women are on the same equal footing as men in the film industry?

First of all, the cinema redefines the status of women as subordinate characters.

The woman in the cinema is clearly dominated by the man because of his wide economic and social superiority. The woman is frequently worshiped but conceived as an erotic object to sacrifice her desire to man. Through cinema, women are depicted only for their beauty and their sentimental characteristics. They are often exposed as ready to leave everything at the slightest opportunity, for any man.

In cinema, the woman’s body has always been the subject of all scenarios. It’s call hypersexualization, which refers to a highly accentuated sexualization, even to the extreme, of a person or something. According to several authors: "hypersexualization is fundamentally sexist; it usually uses the bodies of women and girls, sometimes men and boys. It can have important consequences, especially on our ways of thinking and acting, our sexuality and the level of relationships between men and women. "

It can be seen through many films recently released in the cinema, like 50 shades of Grey. In France, the film attracted the attention of the public for its supposedly pornographic side and, more precisely, pornography in the use of a female readership. According to a 2014 study by psychologists at the University of Michigan, the film would deliver an underlying subliminal message that the heroine voluntarily accepts the extreme domestic violence she experiences in her relationships with her partner: the trivialization of this violence in the couple, the story would put in scene a submissive victim.

Then, the "male gaze". This concept comes from film criticism. He became central in the English-speaking vocabulary of feminism. It was first employed in 1975 by film critic Laura Mulvey in an article entitled "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema". The traditional role of the female character is therefore two-fold: she is an erotic object for the character and for the male spectator. This concept allows to fragment the image to focus on parts of the female body. We are then used to this shooting way the female body (close-ups, camera coming up from the ankles to the face ...). The "male gauze" then allows us to observe an evident masculine domination within the cinema.

Secondly, being a woman in the film industry is a real handicap.

In the first place, the salary. The average income of a French director is 42% lower than that of her male counterpart, revealed the National Center of Cinema and Animated Image (CNC) in a study published this Friday, February 24. Cinema is not immune to gender pay inequalities: in the production administration women are paid on average 38% less than their male counterparts. This gap rises up to 42% for women directors, who are also often given smaller budgets: 3.5 million euros on average against 4.7 million for men.

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