Throughout the world when many people think of India the first thing that comes to mind is Bollywood. Bollywood has created a major mark in India and around the world. In 2011 CNBS reported Indian cinema as being $2.2 billion industry which creates 1,200 movies yearly, provides over 1.8 million people with jobs, and has more than 14 million theater viewers daily (Jetley). People who have had little to no expose with Bollywood films may wonder what makes Bollywood films stand out in the global market, and the answer is easily the presence of songs and dances in the films. Song and dance is a creative form of art and has been embedded in Bollywood cinema since the 1930s (Marcoux, and College). Every popular Bollywood film has at least 3 songs and dances sequences , and these sequences allow the characters to freely express their emotions in what is seen to be a “dream sequence” (Marcoux, and College). In Indian films women are represented as the object of men’s desires, and are often seen and not heard. Song and dance in Bollywood cinema allows women to express their sexual desires in a non-disruptive way, specifically I argue that this is attained through women who are rendered as respectable.
Bollywood films portray unequal power relations between the female and male characters. Male are allotted to have sexual desires and are portrayed to be active lookers, while females on the contrary are represented passively and seen as the objects of the male gaze (Mulvey, 11). Spectators watching the film unconsciously identify with the male characters due to the narration of the film and the way the camera caters to the male gaze (Smelik, 494). Women are not shown to have sexual desires throughout the course of the film because of the ...
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...till being rendered as respectable women.
Works Cited
Anneke Smelik, And the Mirror Cracked: Feminist Cinema and Film Theory, London, Macmillian, 1998. 491- 585. Web. 04 May 2014.
Jetley, Neerja P. "Behind the Song and Dance, Bollywood’s Flop Story." CNBC.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 05 May 2014.
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Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1989. 14 - 26.
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Kaplan, Ann. "Women and FilmBoth Sides of The Camera." Google Books. Methuen & Co., n.d. Web. 04 May 2014.
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Mulvey, Laura."Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality/Screen. London: Routledge, 1992.
An example of the media degrading and objectifying women is Laura Mulvey’s ‘Male Gaze’ theory. In Laura Mulvey’s essay ‘visual pleasure and narrative cinema’; she discusses the term ‘Male gaze’. In film, the male gaze occurs when the audience is put into the perspective of a heterosexual man, for example, a scene may focus with specific conventions such as slow motion or deliberate camera movements on a sexual aspect of a woman’s body, forcibly putting you as the viewer in the eyes of a male. This theory suggests that the male gaze denies women human identity, manipulating them to the standard of manifest objects to be appreciated solely for their physical appearance. The theory implies women can more often than not only watch a film from
Westford, Massachusetts: The Murray Printing Company. Company, 1978 Kulik, Sheila F. Home Page. 17 Feb. 2000 http://www.feminist.com/femfilm.html. Rosenberg, Jan. “Feminism in Film.”
Gender and the portrayal of gender roles in a film is an intriguing topic. It is interesting to uncover the way women have been idealized in our films, which mirrors the sentiments of the society of that period in time. Consequently, the thesis of this essay is a feminist approach that seeks to compare and contrast the gender roles of two films. The selected films are A few Good Men and Some Like it Hot.
Williams, Linda. "Film Bodies: Genre, Gender and Excess." Braudy and Cohen (1991 / 2004): 727-41. Print.
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Mainstream movies are about men’s lives, and the few movies about women’s lives, at their core, still also revolve around men (Newsom, 2011). These female leads often have male love interests, looking to get married or get pregnant. Strong independent female leads are still exist for the male view, as they are hypersexualized, or the “fighting fuck toy,” (Newsom, 2011). This depiction has created a culture where women are insecure and waiting for a knight on a horse to come rescue and provide for her as well as the acceptance of women
Led by Laura Mulvey, feminist film critics have discussed the difficulty presented to female spectators by the controlling male gaze and narrative generally found in mainstream film, creating for female spectators a position that forces them into limited choices: "bisexual" identification with active male characters; identification with the passive, often victimized, female characters; or on occasion, identification with a "masculinized" active female character, who is generally punished for her unhealthy behavior. Before discussing recent improvements, it is important to note that a group of Classic Hollywood films regularly offered female spectators positive, female characters who were active in controlling narrative, gazing and desiring: the screwball comedy.
The idea of male gaze in cinema is best addressed by Laura Mulvey in her article “Visual Pleasures and the Narrative Cinema”. One idea she looks at is the notion that women are related to the image, and men assume the role as bearer of the look. She quotes “In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.” The traditional exhibition role is what Sarah Polley must overcome in order to express female and national identity in a position of strength. In order to do this she must alter some the traditional constructions associated with the gaze in cinema to bring in order to critique the gaze that is male.
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Over the years, Bollywood has emerged as its own distinct identity in the global Film industry. Bollywood is the global leader in production of movies with a staggering 27,000 featured films and thousands of short films. ( Pillania 1) However, Hollywood is still the leader in revenues generated. Due to the growth of the Indian market and globalization, Bollywood has made its way to the international markets. Globalization is often misrepresented as the growing influence of the western culture in the world and so we tend to state that Hollywood is influencing Bollywood to a great extent. An argument can be made to justify the validity of that statement. However, this paper aims at presenting the influence of Bollywood on Hollywood in terms of music, dance and visual representation. This papers deals with a specific part of globalization, providing evidence that it
Also, the film revealed women empowerment and how superior they can be compared to men. While demonstrating sexual objectification, empowerment, there was also sexual exploitation of the women, shown through the film. Throughout this essay, gender based issues that were associated with the film character will be demonstrated while connecting to the real world and popular culture.
Madison, D. Soyini. "Pretty Woman Through the Triple Lens of Black Feminist Spectatorship." From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender, and Culture. Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1995. 224-35. Print.
Feminism is a movement that supports women equality within society. In relation to film, feminism is what pushes the equal representation of females in mainstream films. Laura Mulvey is a feminist theorist that is famous for touching on this particular issue of how men and women are represented in movies. Through her studies, she discovered that many films were portraying men and women very differently from reality. She came up with a theory that best described why there is such as huge misrepresentation of the social status quos of male and female characters. She believed that mainstream film is used to maintain the status quo and prevent the realization of gender equality. This is why films are continuously following the old tradition that males are dominant and females are submissive. This is the ideology that is always present when we watch a movie. This is evident in the films from the past but also currently. It is as if the film industry is still catering to the male viewers of each generation in the same way. Laura Mulvey points out that women are constantly being seen as sexual objects, whether it is the outfits they wear or do not wear or the way they behave, or secondary characters with no symbolic cause. She states that, “in traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote it-be-looked-at-ness.”(Mulvey pg. 715). Thus, women are nevertheless displayed as nothing more than passive objects for the viewing pleasure of the audience. Mulvey also points out through her research that in every mainstream movie, there is ...
The stories on screen are about men and their conflicts, their dreams, their aspirations, their tragedies, their revenge, their desires and their heroism. The women exist only in relation to those men, as their mothers, their wives, and especially their lovers. (shodhganga