The Awakening of Women’s Consciousness in the Western World: The Case of Women’s Films Directed by Women in Europe and America

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-170-8_17How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Women directors; Women’s cinema; Europe and America; Feminism; The Theory of Staring and Being Stared

Abstract

The rapid growth of the three women’s movements was accompanied by an explosion in the number of feminist films, both of which confirmed that only by expressing the realities of historical situations in their voices could women finally achieve a breakthrough against patriarchal cultural ideas. This paper is divided into three parts, each taking the three waves of feminism as a division point and summarizing and analyzing eight films directed by representative female creators influenced by the three waves of feminism. It also combines feminist, psychoanalytic, communication, psychological, gaze, and counter-gaze theories to analyse and study the plight of women in different situations, ages, stages of life, social roles, and gender perceptions in the selected films, as well as the existential dilemmas faced by their creators. The aim is to explore the transformation of women’s status in society and their own process of breaking through the shackles of thought and to jointly explore the choice of female themes and the influence of feminism in the world, especially in films created by female directors in Europe and the United States, and to summarize the laws and processes of their creation. After the sub-feminine movement, the female figure in Western cinema began to shift from one-way male objectified subjects to anti-objectified objects with female self-awareness. Eventually, they evolved into non-traditional women who are challenging to define directly.

Copyright

© 2023 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Hanzhi Deng
AU  - Yuexuan Yang
PY  - 2023
DA  - 2023/12/31
TI  - The Awakening of Women’s Consciousness in the Western World: The Case of Women’s Films Directed by Women in Europe and America
BT  - Proceedings of the  2023 5th International Conference on Literature, Art and Human Development (ICLAHD 2023)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 160
EP  - 171
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-170-8_17
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-170-8_17
ID  - Deng2023
ER  -