Representation Of Feminism In Cinema

Introduction In this 21st century, we can definitely say that Cinema has become one of the important and largest facets of our socio-cultural dynamic. For the type of visual communications that we have today, it has turned out to be the most efficient media.

“It is more or less accepted that film’s function in our culture goes beyond that of being, simply, an exhibited object...film is a social practice for its makers and its audience; in its narratives and meaning, we can locate evidence of the way on which our culture makes sense of itself”(Turner, 1999:3)

And these are the reason why there is an immense growth or inclination of academic discussions and conversation over films, and these discussions are not just limited to art and composition,

There have been worldwide movements on Feminism, a lot has been written and studied about it as how femininity has been dissected at various stages of life. Feminism is a very wide topic to study and research, feminist cinema study being a small but important part of this huge macrocosm topic have helped a lot, films can be considered in examining the depiction of women on screen, movies, television etc. Fram- Kulik have very well stated in their book that,” film can be considered a language of its own, but the language that it uses still symbolizes the same binary order that has dominated our society with its phallocentric perspective” (Fram-Kulik, 2002:1). Cinema has contributed a lot in term of raising this very critical study about feminism; it has helped in diverting the world’s attentions over how wrongly women are depicted on screen. As suggested by the author Kaplan (1983:33) the main reason behind this is,” that all dominant images are basically male constructs”. This issue of male dominance in cinema industry has been very well questioned and documented by feminist cinema