Film and Feminism

“Then came the awakening. That is, the moment arrived to repeat what had been said in images and derive consequences from it.” -Sexual Difference, 1987, by The Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective

What are the connections between feminism and film? Endless.... One very basic tenet is that fantasy is the most essential tool available to feminists. The only way to step outside a patriarchal world that disguises itself as neutrality is imagination.

Here is a fantasy about fantasy: 9 to 5, written by the same woman who wrote 3 Women, a utopia versus Altman's dystopia. (Thanks to the genius team of Emily Ryan and Michael Goodstein for pointing out the essential connection between these films.)

Revenge Through Fantasy:





(Also, why didn't Jane Fonda make more comedies?)


More from Sexual Difference:
“The social status is assigned the female sex is such, wrote Carla Lonzi that, ‘…a man would prefer never to have been born if he had to contemplate it for himself.’ Women have borne it, bear it, helping themselves in part—a part difficult to measure—with fantasies. It is difficult to know at the moment to what extent fantasies help us to bear our difference when we find ourselves exposed to the exhibitions of the male sex. Usually one finds out when it is too late, when, that is, the power to fantasize diminishes. Then the female mind surrenders and falls into that state which psychologists call depression.”