Women in Cinema
It can be said with no exaggeration that without
women there would be no cinema. Sadly, this is so not because the natural
concerns of genuine womanhood have been addressed in film, but because from the
very beginnings of cinema a woman has been made the centerpiece of attraction,
an object of desire. This systematic cultivation of women as objects of desire
has been akin to the gradual process of drug addiction: at first, the effects
were rather mild and pleasantly stimulating - and thus considered not only
harmless by both men and women, but even liberating - however, as time went on
and doses increased, a feverish state of dependency set in. What has started
out as a quest for liberation from convention ended up being a different form
of enslavement.
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| Marilyn Monroe in "Seven Years' Itch" Source:www.telegraph.co.uk |
Today women can be seen to have divided themselves
into roughly two groups: those, who continue to perceive this enslavement as
"liberation"; and those, who vaguely sense that the real search for
the true liberation of women has not even begun.
Cinema, in particular, has made a devastating
contribution here. One definition of 99% of cinema would be to say that it
specializes in creating beauty-substitutes. Through personality cults of stars,
through promotion of escapism into fantasy, it creates images, which encourage
superficiality and vanity - the two qualities that are already sufficiently
developed as it is within all of us. And since women, due to their superior
intuitive faculty, are more susceptible to suggestions through imagery than
men, the effect on the female population has been nothing short of catastrophic.
Most women are no longer able to separate vanity from beauty; to be an object
of desire has become synonymous with being beautiful. During her televised
funeral, Princess Diana (a role-model for millions of girls and women around
the world) was eulogized (by an anchor-woman) as "an object of every man's
desire". 
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