Woman's film

The woman's film is a film genre that includes women-centered narratives, female protagonists and is designed to appeal to a female audience. Woman's films usually portray stereotypical women's concerns such as domestic life, family, motherhood, self-sacrifice, and romance. These films were produced from the silent era through the 1950s and early 1960s, but were most popular in the 1930s and 1940s, reaching their zenith during World War II. Although Hollywood continued to make films characterized by some of the elements of the traditional woman's film in the second half of the 20th century, the term itself disappeared in the 1960s. The work of directors George Cukor, Douglas Sirk, Max Ophüls, and Josef von Sternberg has been associated with the woman's film genre. Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, and Barbara Stanwyck were some of the genre's most prolific stars. The beginnings of the genre can be traced back to D. W. Griffith's silent films. Film historians and critics defined the genre and canon in retrospect. Before the woman's film became an established genre in the 1980s, many of the classic woman's films were referred to as melodramas. Woman's films are films that were made for women by predominantly male screenwriters and directors whereas women's cinema encompasses films that have been made by women.

Definition When the woman's film was still at a nascent stage, it was not regarded as a fully independent genre. Mary Ann Doane, for example, argued that the woman's film is not a "pure genre" because it is crossed and informed by a number of other genres such as melodrama, film noir, the gothic, and horror film. Similarly, film scholar Scott Simmon argues that the woman's film has remained "elusive" to the point of having its very existence questioned. This elusiveness, he argues, is partially due to the fact that the woman's film is an oppositional genre that can be defined only in opposition to male-centered genres like the Western and gangster film. It has also been noted that it is a critically rather than industrially constructed genre, having been defined in retrospect rather than at the time of the films' production. The woman's film was seen as closely related to and even synonymous with melodrama. Other terms commonly used to describe the woman's film were "drama", "romance", "love story", "comedy drama", and "soap opera". Since the late 1980s, the woman's film has been an established film genre. Film scholar Justine Ashby, however, has observed a trend in British cinema that she calls "generic eclipse" whereby films that adhere to all the fundamental tenets of the woman's film are subsumed under other genres. Millions Like Us (1943) and Two Thousand Women (1944), for example, have been described and promoted as war films rather than woman's films. The woman's film differs from other film genres in that it is primarily addressed to women. Cinema historian Jeanine Basinger argues that the first of three purposes of the woman's film is "to place a woman at the center of the story universe". In most other and particularly men-oriented film genres the opposite is the case as women and their concerns have been assigned minor roles. Molly Haskell explains that "if a woman hogs this universe unrelentingly, it is perhaps her compensation for all the male-dominated universes from which she has been excluded: the gangster film, the western, the war film, the policier, the rodeo film, the adventure film". The second purpose of the woman's film, according to Basinger, is "to reaffirm in the end the concept that a woman's true job is that of being a woman". A romantic ideal of love is presented as the only "career" that will guarantee happiness and that women should aspire to. The third purpose of the genre, as suggested by Basinger, is "to provide a temporary visual liberation of some sort, however small – an escape into a purely romantic love, into sexual awareness, into luxury, or into the rejection of the female role". Basinger argues that the major – if not only – action of the woman's film and its biggest source of drama and tragedy is the necessity to make a choice. The heroine will have to decide between two or more paths that are equally appealing but mutually exclusive as, for example, romantic love and a fulfilling job. One path will be right and consistent with the film's overall morality and the other path will be wrong but it will provide liberation. As the films' heroines were punished for following the wrong path and ultimately reconciled to their roles as women, wives, and mothers, Basinger argues that woman's films "cleverly contradict themselves" and "easily reaffirm the status quo for the woman's life while providing little releases, small victories or even big releases, big victories".

Identifying characteristics Unlike male-centered movies, which are frequently shot outdoors, most woman's films are set in the domestic sphere, which defines the lives and roles of the female protagonist. Whereas the events in woman's films – weddings, proms, births – are socially defined by nature and society, the action in male films – chasing criminals, participating in a fight – is story-driven.

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