Representation of Women in Films and Male Gaze Theory

Representation of Women
In a recent lesson we learned about the Bechdel Test, this test asks us 3 questions
1. Does this film include 2 women in it?
2. Do they talk to each other?
3. Do they talk to each other besides a man?
We watched a short film explaining about this test to help us understand what we were going to be learning about in the lesson.




We then started to think of films ourselves that we thought passed this test without googling the answers, me and my friends thought of The Shallows, Suicide Squad, Bad Moms and Finding Dory, we did struggle to think of some however we did end up thinking of a decent amount of films that pass. We then started to think of some films that could be potentially counted as post apocalyptic themed which are Divergent and The Hunger Games.
 I have researched more into the gender inequality between men and women in films, on the New York Film Academy Blog I found all the statistics I needed, it really surprised me when I saw the figures. The blog has a chart which shows how women are portrayed on screen in the top 500 films from 2007-2012, only 30.8% of speaking characters are women, as soon as I read this statistic I was blown away, that is a ridiculously low amount! Then 28.8% of women wore sexually revealing clothes and 7% of those 28.8% of women are opposed for men, this is too much now I never realised this until we started to learn about this in lesson, that means that only 2% of women are not dressed sexually on screen, as a student I have noticed that I have grew up seeing this on screen and I really do hope that in the future more films pass the Bechdel test and that women are not used as much to attract men in films. After this I then searched into how many men and women visit the cinema, I was very curious as to what the answer would be, of course after reading into the statistics I assumed that more men went to the cinema, however according to a report on Indie Wire they confirm in 2013 that there are more female movie goers, they only beat men by 2% however I was personally expecting 64% of men to be going to the cinema more than women.

https://www.nyfa.edu/film-school-blog/gender-inequality-in-film/#!prettyPhoto/0/ - website used for research into statistics for the presentation of women

http://www.indiewire.com/2014/03/mpaa-data-shows-that-women-are-still-the-majority-of-moviegoers-207223/ - Personal "how many men and women go to the cinema question" chart


Male Gaze Theory
This theory was developed by Laura Mulvey in 1975, this theory consists of 3 perspectives

•  that of the person behind the camera
• that of the characters within the representation or film itself
• that of the spectator.

 In films the theory occurs when the audience is put into the perspective of a heterosexual man, the scene may focus on a shot of a females curves which puts you into the viewer in the eyes of a male. Male Gaze theory is only used if the curves are highlighted with specific conventions such as slow motions of deliberate camera movements such as showing a female from her waist with the camera going up to show her face later on. The theory suggests that women can view films through different perspectives such as a mans perspective with the way that the theory can be used. Characters that are to be looked at are passive, they are under the control of the male gaze and exist for visual pleasure.