Woman's film
Woman's films usually portray stereotypical women's concerns such as domestic life, family, motherhood, self-sacrifice, and romance.
The work of directors George Cukor, Douglas Sirk, Max Ophüls, and Josef von Sternberg has been associated with the woman's film genre.
[15] The third purpose of the genre, as suggested by Basinger, is "to provide a temporary visual liberation of some sort, however small – an escape into a purely romantic love, into sexual awareness, into luxury, or into the rejection of the female role".
[15] Basinger argues that the major – if not only – action of the woman's film and its biggest source of drama and tragedy is the necessity to make a choice.
As the films' heroines were punished for following the wrong path and ultimately reconciled to their roles as women, wives, and mothers, Basinger argues that woman's films "cleverly contradict themselves" and "easily reaffirm the status quo for the woman's life while providing little releases, small victories or even big releases, big victories".
[18] Unlike male-centered movies, which are frequently shot outdoors, most woman's films are set in the domestic sphere,[19] which defines the lives and roles of the female protagonist.
[19] The plot conventions of woman's films revolve around several basic themes: love triangles, unwed motherhood, illicit affairs, the rise to power, and mother-daughter relationships.
The ordinary woman who becomes extraordinary is a character (like, for an example more recent than Haskell's classification, Katniss Everdeen) who "begins as a victim of discriminatory or economic circumstances and rises, through pain, obsession, or defiance, to become mistress of her fate.
[33] A common motif in Hollywood's woman's films is that of the doppelgänger sisters (often played by the same actress), one good and one bad who vie for one man as Bette Davis in her double role in A Stolen Life (1946) and Olivia de Havilland in The Dark Mirror (1946).
Woman's films allow their respective female protagonists to escape their everyday lives and their socially and sexually prescribed roles.
The beginnings of the genre can be traced back to D. W. Griffith, whose one- and two-reelers A Flash of Light (1910) and Her Awakening (1911) feature the trademark narratives of repression and resistance that would later define a majority of women's films.
[44] Attempts to create modern versions of the classic woman's film, updated to take account of new social norms, include Martin Scorsese's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974), An Unmarried Woman (1978) by Paul Mazursky, Garry Marshall's Beaches (1988), and Fried Green Tomatoes (1991) by Jon Avnet.
The film tells the story of three young women during World War II and offers its heroines the opportunity to escape their old lives.
Bend It Like Beckham (2002) emphasizes the key generic theme of female friendship and casts the heroine in a conflict between the restrictions of her traditional Sikh upbringing and her aspirations to become a football player.
Jeanine Basinger notes that woman's films were often criticized for reinforcing conventional values, above all, the notion that women could only find happiness in love, marriage and motherhood.
They implied that a woman could not combine a career and a happy family life, but they also offered women a glimpse of a world outside the home, where they did not sacrifice their independence for marriage, housekeeping, and childrearing.
[48] Others have argued, however, that the narratives of these films offer only the repressive perspective and that viewers must read the texts "against the grain" to be able to find a liberating message.
Woman's films that were selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" include It Happened One Night (1934), Imitation of Life (1934), Jezebel (1938), Gone with the Wind (1939), The Women (1939), Rebecca (1940), The Lady Eve (1941), Mrs Miniver (1942), Now, Voyager (1942),[51] Gaslight (1944), Mildred Pierce (1945), Leave Her to Heaven (1945), Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948),[10] Adam's Rib (1949), The Heiress (1949), All About Eve (1950), All That Heaven Allows (1955), Gigi (1958), My Fair Lady (1964), Funny Girl (1968), Wanda (1970), Grease (1978), Norma Rae (1979), Coal Miner's Daughter (1980), She's Gotta Have It (1986), Thelma and Louise (1991), The Joy Luck Club (1993), Selena (1997), and Titanic (1997).
