New Zealand Cinema

New Zealand being across the world is a very small and isolated place. It has a population of 4.8 million. The New Zealand Film Commission was set up in 1978 and provided financial support to New Zealand’s film industry. This produced immediate results as it led to two films being entered in the Cannes film festival in 1980. More finance was brought into the industry via tax loopholes and it enabled 14 films to be in production in 1984. However, when the loophole closed this number rapidly declined to just 5 a year. New Zealand was forced to acquire a new and more complex cultural identity than the one inherited from Britain due to immigration from Asia. Goodbye Pork Pie was the first New Zealand film to recover the costs spent making it in the market.

Lord of the Rings made use of the New Zealand scenery and landscapes and gave New Zealand worldwide familiarity. The scenic landscapes were turned into places from the book such as Shire and Mordor.

Hobbiton is a tourist attraction in New Zealand and consists of the set of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. Fans of the movie can get tours around the set.

Peter Jackson is a New Zealand born director, screenwriter and producer. He is well known for writing, directing and producing The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies.

Bridge to Terabithia and The Lovely Bones are both shot in New Zealand. The look and aesthetic of Terabithia is a reflection of New Zealand and how nice the scenery is. 

Hunt for the Wilderpeople and Once were Warriors are both New Zealand films. Hunt for the Wilderpeople is an adventure comedy film about a man and boy, who end up having a manhunt after them, and the development of their relationship are the man’s wife dies. Once Were Warriors is a drama film that deals with issues like poverty, domestic abuse and alcoholism as well as characters struggling to reconnect with the culture of their people. Both films show different sides, both culturally and physically, of New Zealand but show the importance of family too.

 

Women in Hollywood

Traditionally women had roles in ‘feminine’ areas of film, for example, costume & makeup. There was limited involvement behind camera, however that all started to change in the 1970s. In her women’s survey, Christina Lane writes about women who have made the change from independent to mainstream directing. She writes ‘Before the 1970s, when access to commercial production opened up slightly, women had only two avenues for becoming Hollywood directors: as film actresses or as secretaries/production assistants who worked their way up through the ranks of the system. Only recently have women been hired as directors on the basis of their independent films’

E. Ann Kaplan talks about the four phases in women’s film history in Women in Film: Both sides of the camera. They are:

Up to the 1930s → Women pioneers

1930-1960 → Silencing of women

1960-1990 → White women become more dominant in the US

1990 – present → Growing multiculturalism in women’s cinema

The film industry, including Hollywood, has grown which has led to a rise in female filmmakers. Leslie Felperin wrote in Women Directors (Sight & Sound Special edition):

‘things are basically getting better, albeit slowly. In the film industry, there are more women producers, agents and publicists than there ever used to be – perhaps because women are supposed to be better at “people management”, a crucial skill for these jobs – and many more women screenwriters. The traditionally male-dominated technical fields such as cinematography, lighting and sound are slowly tipping towards a more even gender balance, while the proportion of women directors in the Director’s Guild of America, though only 10 per cent, still represents an improvement over the 1985 level of 4 per cent.’

Barbra Streisand is a perfect example of a woman achieving highly in Hollywood and successfully making the transition from being in a star role to director. Barbra Streisand’s career has spanned over six decades, starting on Broadway, she made her way to Hollywood. She has won Grammy’s, Emmy’s, Golden Globes and Oscars. Barbra Streisand was the first female director-star to gain Best Director nominations. From the film Yentl (1983), Barbra Streisand was the first women to direct, produce, co-write and star in a Hollywood film. She also sang all the songs for it.

Hollywood is also well known for its Hollywood Walk of Fame. The Hollywood Walk of Fame is based in Los Angeles, California and consists of over 2600 stars embedded into the pavement with celebrities’ names. Of all the stars 47% of them belong to the motion pictures category whilst less than 2% belong to theatre. 895 actors have a star, 492 males and 403 females. 

 

Women in films most often are sexualised and portrayed by men for men. Laura Mulvey’s Male Gaze theory from her famous essay titled ‘Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema’ is the concept of men portraying/sexualising women for their pleasure. This is usually done by showing female characters naked, in their underwear or wearing provocative clothing. An example of this is Bridget Jones’ Diary. In multiple scenes the female characters are dressed in skimpy clothes e.g. Bridget wears see through blouses to work and in another scene, we see Lara sitting naked in the bathroom covered only with a folder.

And this isn’t just in romance comedies either, in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, the famous shower scene includes Janet Leigh nude and on the film poster she is in her bra. In horror films, the women are often seen in skimpy clothes or naked.

John Berger states: