Sexism is far from over in film and radio.
Cinema could be so beautiful – if it didn’t reproduce all the crap we deal with in real life. With sexism and gender stereotypes, for example. How did one of Hollywood’s poster men so clear-eyed? “Men have a significant advantage: we get wrinkles, become fat and bald or white-haired and nobody cares.”*
For years, the “MaLisa Foundation” and partner institutions have been investigating the role of women in front of and behind the camera. And whether there are signs of progress towards more equality. The latest analysis, now presented by the University of Rostock, bears the unwieldy title: “Progress study on audiovisual diversity”. 390 films that were shown in German cinemas between 2017 and 2020 were examined. But if you compare the results of this study with the previous one from 2017… progress is rather non-existent.
Well, at one point there is some joy. Women are now almost as often protagonists in German film as their male colleagues. This is also evident in streaming services like Netflix; there serial heroines are completely self-evident and very successful. Germany clearly had some catching up to do. Just a few years ago, important roles were filled much more frequently by men than by women.
So the proportion of women on screen has increased. But that’s it with the good news. The joy fades as soon as you look at the design of the female roles. It’s about the well-known, unnerving patterns: women have to be young and slim to get their chance, while men can be fat and wrinkled without any problems. Figures of women over 30 are becoming increasingly rare; and when it comes to figures over 50, two-thirds are male. Conclusion: The image of women that is drawn there is as sexist as ever.
In addition, as the Rostock professor Elizabeth Prommer describes, women are “told in the context of partnership and relationships”. Even Prommer is surprised “how narrow the narrative corridor for female film characters still is. There are many facets of men, women don’t.” German cinema productions don’t depict all the diversity of female life – that women have jobs, skills, desires, goals and passions that are by no means only geared towards the male universe. Apparently, the filmmakers still haven’t grasped the 50-year-old, woman-loving joke: a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.
The finding is significantly better if a woman directed or wrote the screenplay. Then women will not only be more visible in the film, they will also be portrayed differently. But even behind the camera, women are still not wanted. They were only allowed to direct a quarter of the 390 cinema films and they were responsible for the screenplay for just under a quarter of them. Do those responsible for such backwoods decisions really realize how much it pisses off more and more women to continue to expose themselves to such bad conditions? Whether in front of or behind the camera or in the auditorium?
* Oh by the way: The male insight at the beginning of the text comes from George Clooney. Decades earlier, his colleague Doris Day said it inevitably more charmingly: “It’s not me getting older, but my cameraman.”
