POSTED October 8 2013
Visual Pleasure and Voodoo Demographics
Dorothy Arzner
What was it like for a girl to come of cinematic age in the 1970s and 1980s as the women’s movement opened closed doors and American movies slammed those doors shut? Some thoughts here. Please share your thoughts.
I think this is a fine, extremely interesting and wonderfully written, essay that contains within it the seeds of a finer essay. What you write is so personally focused that it seems irrelevant (and obvious) to say that your experience and mine differ (I’ve never been moment-to-moment gender-focused and it’s not because I’m unobservant or insensitive — I think this is true of many people, even people drawn strongly to the intense plains/planes of art). My reaction to that scene in The Godfather is quite different and less symbolically attuned than yours, for instance. And a longish professional life working around movie studios makes me pretty certain that nothing much that is “core” has changed and will ever change; things are simply permitted to be a lot coarser these days than they used to be. I’m very glad you wrote this, though, and look forward, as always, to your next piece. Curtis Roberts