Dorothy Arzner- Hollywood Changes

I was interested in doing my post about a prominent lesbian in the industry of visual art or film. Arzner was a woman in the 1930's who started off her career by being offered behind-the-scene positions that have everything to do with the production of media. It's quite significant that, although, she was not the first woman to be involved behind the lens, she has adapted plenty of parts of development within producing her own representations of women that beforehand were not exposed to the public eye.

The correlation between queer and feminist studies is great because both groups are highly misunderstood and misrepresented in our patriarchal society. They are sought after and given negative connotations equally. As a matter of fact, in class we have talked about how women who overtly admit to being feminist are ridiculed and brushed off as "butchy", "lesbians", "unsanitary", "mean", and "male-haters". Radicalism described this way can also give feminists names like "anarchists". In the case of Dorothy Arzner, she was recognized immediately as a woman who mixed her beliefs and depictions of women in her films. Her sexual orientation held great precedence over the plots of her stories and how active women are shown to be over their own fates.

Arzner's accomplishments relate directly to the philosophy and analysis of gender roles posed by John Berger, Jean Kilbourne, Shirin Neshat, and Bell Hooks in all of their forms and styles. They use people like Rachel Maddow, Katie Couric, and Hillary Clinton to demonstrate how women empowerment and equality can exist when there's more knowledge and exposure about how such a sexism began...



Come on now, do we need this? (Advertisements like the one above)
http://www.broadsheet.ie/2012/02/26/hideously-sexist-ads-of-yore/


A few pictures Arzner has directed are Working Girls, Dance, Girl, Dance, and The Wild Party. In The Wild Party, specifically, the young women are dressed more revealing than women were during that time period. Also, since the story is about young women who would much rather party and have fun than be at school or follow any code, it reflects anti-domesticity to a certain extent. All sorts of taboo was made sure to exist within Arzner's films because of her personal opinions about women and how they were viewed. The women in her films were permitted to have control, have fun, have the credit. Pulling together erotic scenes of prostitution and female-to-female sexual encounters could not have been easy for a good amount of the public to digest-other than, maybe, women themselves. They were allowed to see characters that, perhaps, held true to their individual desires. Even today, a lot of the gay and lesbian films are in the foreign film sections, predominantly in different languages with indie funds because it is still not completely a "norm" for Americans to accept.


http://filmnoirphotos.blogspot.com/2011/12/bevy-of-beauties-wild-party.html

The same goes with women in cinema, as we have seen critics spit back (feministfrequency with the Smurfette Principle) to the majority of filmmakers. It was drastic, necessary, and risky for Dorothy to develop this name for herself through a lens that in 2012 still isn't understood or accepted. In trying to find information about her art or how she developed these characters and scenarios based on her biography, it's easy to bump into articles about her "scandalous" ways. She was said to have been involved with a lot of women she cast in her films, or at least set up that way because she was out about lesbianism. The impact of her work is not only through what she decided to direct on, but that she was bold enough to send her messages through Hollywood and promote herself as a mainstream woman artist.




Cited:

http://www.glbtq.com/arts/arzner_d.html

http://www.filmdirectorssite.com/node/437