The Relationship Between Women and Film

1170 Words3 Pages

The Relationship Between Women and Film

My hypothesis is ‘the representation of women in Japanese

action/thriller films and, Hollywood action/thriller films focusing on

the Asian genre, are different’.

I started my investigation by looking at secondary research; the first

being the internet. I used the search engine ‘Google’ which was useful

in providing a range of sites focusing on my hypothesis. I started by

typing in ‘Japanese representation of women vs. Hollywood

representation of women’. This search was too broad, and I realised

that I needed to refine my search to get specific areas of interest

regarding my hypothesis. The internet is a mass media platform that

needs to be used correctly to search for the correct information

needed, and thus searches cannot be too broad. Therefore, I decided to

search for specific films that I would be referencing. These films

included ‘The Ring’ (Japanese – 1998 and Hollywood version - 2002),

Japanese anime with specific reference to ‘Princess Mononoke’ (1997),

Kill Bill Vol.1’ (2003) and ‘Mulan’ (1998), a Disney film reflecting

Asian culture and genre. I started by looking at the films’ synopses

to work out how each film reflected the representation of women. Two

sites which proved really useful were www.imdb.com and www.cinema.com

that provided detailed plot analysis and reviews.

However, I wanted to gain further knowledge about the representation

of women in these films, and not just about the film plot itself. As I

was going to later research into ‘Kill Bill Vol. 1’ with a textual

analysis and questionnaire, I wanted information about Quentin

Tarantino and his views on his film. I typed in ‘Tarantino interviews

about Kill Bill’. This provided a large amount of sites about the

film. The first site I came across was the official movie site

www.killbillmovies.go.com/vol1. This was useful in providing

information on the movie, cast and crew. However, it was much more

like a marketing promotion for the film rather than analytical

information. I then came across two more sites with interviews with

Tarantino about the making of ‘Kill Bill Vol.

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