Film And Sexism Essay

606 Words2 Pages

Hollywood has recently been under attack by the media for it’s whitewashing of cast and crew, and making sexist films. Even the nominees and winners of awards like the Emmys and Oscars have been criticized for being racist and sexist. While this issue has been going on for decades, it has become a big talking point now a days because of the fast spreading social media environment we live in. Films and art have always played a huge part in the history of mankind. Every culture has its own telling and retelling of stories. Most of the perspectives are from white European people since by World War Two, Europe had colonized 85% of the world. This puts a skewed point of view into art because artists were influenced and repressed by these European people and nations to make sure one story was being told and retold. As film began to take off in the late 19th century, this repressed point of view was still carried out. However, there is a bigger underlying …show more content…

Depending on how the director frames shots, blocks chactarters, and so on, the audience gets put into a perspective and reflects onto it like “the mirror (of the true mirror), and is thus able to constitute a world of objects without having first to recognise himself within it” (Metz, 696). This is problematic for Christian Metz, French film theorist in the late 20th century who specialized in semiotics in film. By the audience reflecting the screen like a mirror, it does not allow for distance to be created from what is being fictitiously presented. Even though the audience “knows that the screen presents no more than a fiction” (Metz, 707), the viewer has to engage themselves in deep critical thought to break through this mass identification issue. However, this is unrealistic since the majority of films are created to keep you immersed in them and not allow for such critical

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