The Continuum of Film

            Scenes overlap, sequences invert, a few minutes are capture to relative vastness, relative relation to human reality, transformation, transgression and transmogrification; the film is then relevant.

            The original purpose of the motion picture was to enhance the art of photography. Somewhere in the silent film era, film begin to serve its own purpose, seek its own means to an end beyond the stillness of captured moments.

            If “the entire purpose of life is that there is no definite purpose other than to be and become” then the clarity that film can hold serves in a flank, innuendo to a detached reality, another dimension taken from the image of man and given over to the image of the artist.

            The theory of film’s self-recognition, self-awareness is perhaps a preface to the effectiveness of the French New Wave. When the motion cinema was still on its course of evolution, filmmakers were in tandem step, not only with the becoming of technology but with the parallel creation alongside literature. The adaptation of obsolete and obscure novels became the inspiration for screenwriters, for auteurs seeking to not only advance man’s perception of this world but challenge film as it was known.

            Francois Truffaut, the French filmmaker and critic, noted for his 1951 classic “The 400 Blows” was as feared an arbiter of the new wave as Roger Ebert was in the 20^th and 21^st century. “A poet must be cruel to be kind;” in such a notion, both Truffaut and Ebert begin to “bury” mediocre and monotonous film in the hopes that filmmakers may develop into auteurs, to lose the fear of the leap, take a chance to experiment rather conform, thus cease catering to the public’s paradigm image of what film was and begin defining from the terror of the heart and mind what film could be.

            The true splinter in the public image of mainstream and pornographic film came with the release of Just Jaeckin’s 1974 controversial film “Emanuelle,” adapted from the novel by Lowell Blair, that depicts a young lady in Paris who flies to Thailand to discover her sexual identity. Despite offending and violating mainstream obscenity laws in modern nations, Emanuelle was a success, not solely due to its vivid, sexual imagery but its solidity, which was harvested from a salon of artist unafraid to push the set limits of the time. Though dismiss by most critics as obsequious pornography, Emanuelle is underrated as one of the films to shape-shift the world of film today and is the grandmother of fearless filmmakers the world over.

            If film ever fluctuates in depth, it is because the filmmaker lacks depth and courage, forfeits themselves the full scope of dimension that art is. The attitude of film shapes the attitude of the public, but the public wanders if filmmakers fear to roam in directions never before roamed, adapt novels never before adapted, take the time to understand fully what has been consistently dismissed.

[The 200 Phalluses] The Masculine Dominance of Prestige in the Film Industry

     

             The American Film Institute has long been a staple of film culture in the United States since the time Charlie Chaplin begin to expose the world to his “City Light;” but what was created during the antiquation of the silent film era seems to be not only bygone technology but masculine dominance in today’s film industry.

This dominance and inequality has ranged and lingered true in all aspects of mainstream film; the Oscars namely but also in a greater list of prestigious noting; The 100 Greatest films of all time.

            Few have ever experienced the entire list, in fact, unless film was your entire life or livelihood, about 75% of these films will have been beyond your knowledge. From filmmakers as Orson Welles to Milos Forman, these 100 emphasized works of motion cinema has given so much appreciation to perceptive viewers that it left them nearly blind.

Of all the 100 greatest films of all times, none of them have been directed by women, which prompts the question; “Is Male dominance a factor in the critique of chosen films?”

To examine that question and notion, one only has to turn to the British Film Institute’s list of 100 greatest films of all time and again, of the 100 films, none were directed by women, although women entered the filmmaker world just as early as men and since the silent film era, have also given the world marvelous perspective through the lens, helped to evolve film to an apex that the auteurs of the French New Wave begun to live inside of it.

            Many, if not most, of these 200 films were given such exceptional regard inasmuch a woman, usually a central figure, controversial or just “eye candy” became the focal where a script was written and a director exploited. Many caricatures came from these films and many failed to see the woman of the time, and the woman of today, eye to eye. Her place is in frontal view of the camera, not behind it.

            This notion, which surely exposes man in full pursuit of his own potency, in some mythical virility he believes will take life form as Galatea from the breath of Aphrodite, has led to successful female filmmakers and actresses to evoke chances within the mainstream of film. Ostracized by the Oscars and denied slots on the list of legendary films, female filmmakers have continued to do what they have always done, contribute to film but now, with full perception of what is to await their film upon release to the box office; masculine denial of its due & proper.

            In 1998, screenwriters, critics, film historians, the who’s who of the film community was invited to the American Film Institute to choose from 400 compiled films chosen by the AFI. It is fair to say that of the 400 films, most, if not all of them films were male directed. http://www.afi.com/Docs/100Years/movies400.pdf

            What is it about the woman that man seems to be terrified of? Is it that she is omnipotent and her omnipotence may someday surpass, or has surpassed man’s biological impasse? Or is it that he feels that women have no place behind the camera and as long as she remains a source of sexual interest en scene, her fret or flight, her “hysterics” can be avoided if she is given no zenith recognition for her creativity.

            

    Inequality in art tarnishes the one thing of this world that is immortal, that lives on after our cells begin to proliferate. Whether a man aims a camera or a woman aims a camera, who is holding it is of no importance as longs the aim is true, the prose is true, its intent is to tell a story, or retell one that must be told if only to give the world a minuscule break from the coming of guaranteed obstacle. The one thing that is apparent throughout history, for every great man who has accomplished a great feat, there was a great woman whose character and identity was left to drown in oblivion, far from the cheers, the awes and the recognition that was hers from the very beginning.