About

(Header photo of Bae Doona [center] and others from the 2012 film Cloud Atlas based on the 2004 novel of the same name by the British novelist David Mitchell.)

“The foreign is within me, hence we are all foreigners. – Julia Kristeva”

Why is this conversation important? 

Women, girls, and people of color (and other “Others”) are under-represented on film and in the film and tv industry. Some things to consider (also see Stats):

• A study by the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, as reported in the UK’s Daily Mail found that “Women [are] ‘grossly underrepresented’ on film, taking just 28% of speaking roles in Hollywood… and those who do get lines are mostly sexualised teenagers
• In 2012’s hit US films, just 28.4% of speaking roles were female compared with 32.8% in 2010 and 29.9% in 2007.
• In 2012, 31.6% of women were sexualised, highest in five years and 56.6% of teenage girls were sexualised in Hollywood films in 2012.
• The majority of all female roles are for 21 to 39-year-olds.”
• Leading men age but their love interests don’t
• Significant employment and wage gaps continue for “women and minorities” as reported in a 2011 LA Times article.
• A 2013 article from ThinkProgress reports on the gaps for writers in television, “Of 1722 writers who wrote for 190 shows, 519 or 30.5 percent of them were women, and 269 of them were people of color. For women, those numbers are up 5 percent from the 1999-2000 television season—as the report put it, “At this rate of increase, it would be another 42 years before women —roughly half of the U.S. population – reach proportionate representation in television staff employment.” And for people of color, the rate of increase is more mixed: the percentage of Asian and Latino writers has risen 2.9 percent since 1999-2000, but the number of African-American television writers has grown much more slowly in the same time period, rising from 5.8 percent to 6.5 percent of overall writers. If the percentage of African-American writers is going to rise just .063 percent, it will take 87 years for black television writers to reach proportional representation in their industry relative to their current presence in the U.S. population.”
• Characters that were written as people of color or as non-European/Euro-American characters are often “whitewashed” by Hollywood.
• Women and people of color, combined, are the majority in the United States. According to the 2012 U.S. Census data, “female persons” make up 50.8% of the U.S. population.
• People who were “white alone, not Hispanic or Latino” accounted for 63%.
• According to a 2013 Nielsen report, women were 51% of the U.S. moviegoers (people who saw a movie in an actual movie theater) in 2012. 36% of moviegoers were people of color (“Hispanic” “Af-Am” “Asian/Other”).
• Arabs and Arab Americans have been vilified throughout Hollywood’s history 
• Native Americans have played an essential role in American cinema and have largely been vilified or romanticized
• According to Bechdeltest.com just 55% of thousands of movies evaluated fully pass the Bechdel Test, (“a simple test which names the following three criteria [about a film]: (1) it has to have at least two women in it, who (2) who talk to each other, about (3) something besides a man”), “There are 4094 movies in the database, 2257 (55.1%) of which pass all three tests, 443 (10.8%) pass two tests, 971 (23.7%) pass one test and 423 (10.3%) pass no tests at all.”
• Our society continues to be a segregated one. “Will white people go see films that prominently feature or star actors of color? Apparently, according to a 2011 article in Pacific Standard magazine, the answer is no: “As [Boston Globe film critic Wesley Morris] noted, nonwhite actors played major roles in only two of the 30 top-grossing films of 2010. Studio executives believe white audiences prefer to see white characters, while black audiences want to see black characters, so they increasingly make films for each demographic.” 

ABOUT ME: I’m a Korean American poet and writer (sunyungshin), literary journal editor (thisspectralevidence), full-time teacher, and occasional book critic and freelance journalist. Since a young age I have been fascinated by all aspects of the art and world of filmmaking.

There are plentiful resources on film in a variety of media but I couldn’t find many stable online resources or journalism dedicated to examining the state of cinema (especially in Hollywood) in regard to the participation and representation of people of color, women, girls, and other sub- and side- and overlapping categories of “Others”–which include immigrants, people and culture of the LGBTQI community, those outside the middle- and upper classes, those with “disabilities,” the incarcerated, the “foreign,” etc.

This blog is a place to share information about these issues, try out ideas, and hopefully invite other voices to discuss–ultimately in the service of being some small part of a more vital cinema–one that invites instead of silences; truth-tells instead of represses and maims; a cinema of beauty and strangeness and essentially of liberation rather than subordination.