Gregory Crewdson, Untitled, 1998
From the Indianapolis Museum of Art:
A solitary man stands in a dark driveway holding a six-pack of beer, spellbound by a shaft of light. Gregory Crewdson has carefully composed each detail in this photograph, part of his series “Twilight,” in which various residents of an anonymous town are transfixed by seemingly paranormal forces at dusk.
Citing the films of Stephen Spielberg and David Lynch as influences, Crewdson acts as director to actors and a full production crew. His elaborate process results in a single picture, which he refers to as a “single-frame movie.” Here, small-town America is depicted as both familiar and strange, threatening and miraculous.
hollywood sure has an easy time finding brown and black people to play terrorists, thugs, drug dealers, gangsters, servants, “barbarians”, hypersexualized or desexualized caricatures but all of a sudden you need a lead role and
gosh where did they go i swear we put them here right after zero dark thirty??
“In Hollywood, more often than not, they’re making more kind of traditional films, stories that are understood by people. And the entire story is understood. And they become worried if even for one small moment something happens that is not understood by everyone. But what’s so fantastic is to get down into areas where things are abstract and where things are felt, or understood in an intuitive way that, you can’t, you know, put a microphone to somebody at the theatre and say ‘Did you understand that?’ but they come out with a strange, fantastic feeling and they can carry that, and it opens some little door or something that’s magical and that’s the power that film has.” — David Lynch
Sanaa Lathan, Terrence Howard, Blair Underwood and Harry Lennix to Star in Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’ set in the Caribbean
The film, to be titled Macbett, is written and directed by Aleta Chappelle, who is the first African American woman to direct a film version of a Shakespeare play. The film is set to start pre-production in Sept. 2013 on location in Jamaica and Puerto Rico.
Excited!
Would you be surprised if I told you that, according to the Bechdel Test website, only 5 of IMDB’s Top 250 passed all three Bechdel criteria in 2010? Are we really asking too much of the film industry to include two women, who talk to eachother, about something besides a man? Surely this is the bare minimum of female representation we should expect from films. Women populate more than half of the world and yet we are still so often consigned to being the ‘love interest’ whose lives centre wholly around the male protagonist even to the point where the majority of mainstream films in our cinemas seem to find it impossible, in their entire run-time, to imagine a world in which a woman conducts a conversation that is not about a man.
The image above was created from gathering all of the significant named characters from released Marvel Studios movies as documented on the Marvel Movies wikia.
It’s pretty sad. As you can see, only 22% of the characters are women and half of them are love interests. There are over twice as many supporting characters who are men than women (and none of them function as love interests like the women do.) 84% of the characters are white.
- 60% of the characters are white men, including all the main characters
- 77%of the characters are men
- 76% of the men are white
- 81% of the characters (both genders) are white
- All of the women are white
- Allof the characters of color are men
- None of the characters are women of color
Out of all the films, Thor probably does the best in introducing diverse side characters. Natalie Portman and Kat Denning’s characters pass the Bechdel test within the first five minutes, and some of the Asgardians are played by people of color including Idris Elba’s Heimdall and Tabano Asano’s Hogun. Four white women characters are introduced instead of the other films’ average of one or two. But even then, there’s no question that the main characters of the film are Thor and his brother Loki.
Marvel is working off of decades of existing properties that for years solely focused on white men and a the demographic market of white men. So it makes sense that many of the films would have an abundance of white male characters. Beyond ratios, what doesn’t make sense is that even in the comics there is also an abundance of characters of color, etc. that they are ignoring or underutilizing. There are already five completed films where the titular character is a white man, with more to come. There are no films in the works where the titular character is a person of color or a woman.
…
Women made up at least 40% of the audience of The Avengers, yet only one out of the six Avengers–Black Widow–was a woman. Women also made up 40% of attendees at this year’s ComicCon. Why, given the scarcity of female heroic leads in the existing Marvel films, did Marvel choose to announce the addition of several more male characters but only one new female character?
Read the full article at Racebending.com: On Marvel, Mandarin, and Marginalization
No one cared who I was until I put on the mask.
Talita - 22 - social 