By Neena Bhandari

Sydney, 10.08.2004 (WFS): For women in the film and television industry in Australia, it has been a long and arduous struggle to achieve gender equity on and off screen. Much of the changes in the portrayal of women on screen have come about with women filmmakers challenging patriarchal attitudes and making a mark not only in the field of script writing, direction and production, but also technical fields of cinematography, design, sound and editing.

Not long ago, a woman with a professional camera in public would be met with sighs and disbelief. The general notion was that women worked as production secretaries, negative cutters or in the editing, research, makeup and wardrobe sections.

One of the first woman cinematographers, Martha Ansara, recalls how she had cried on the steps of the Sydney Town Hall before shooting a demonstration.” You were made to feel as though you were from Mars. It wasn’t easy to be walking around with a camera on your shoulders”.

With the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s came the revival of Australian films. A group of young women, including Martha, decided to make films about their own condition. They formed the Sydney Women’s Film Group and the Feminist Filmmakers.

“We worked collectively as there was an enormous amount of resistance. We started making a demand on existing institutions, determined to bring social change and with it economic and political change”, says Martha, who has since directed prize-winning social documentaries, experimental films and a feature, but it is her work as a cinematographer that is closest to her heart.

In 1975, the Australian Film, Television and Radio School (AFTRS) started with women comprising more than half the class. The alternative film movement also sprang up around the same time and some like Gillian Armstrong made it into the mainstream quite quickly. She became the first Australian woman director to make it internationally with her landmark feature My Brilliant Career, which was to prove prophetic about her own career as she went on to make some major Hollywood productions.

“There were no feature films directed by women between Paulette McDonagh’s Two Minutes Silence shot in 1932 and My Brilliant Career in 1978. However, between 1922 and 1933, 16 feature films were either produced or directed by women”, according to Julie James Bailey in her book Reel Women: Working in Film and Television.

By late 1970s and early 1980s, documentary filmmakers began putting gender issues on the agenda. Susan Lambert and Sarah Gibson made a film called Size 10 about body image. It was years before anyone started talking about anorexia and bulimia. The 20-minute film sold all over the world and became a key player in the discourse on the social pressures on women’s minds and bodies created by the media hype around The Body Beautiful.

Jane Scott, who began her film career in distribution and production with the British Film Institute and had found it extremely difficult to climb up the ladder in the male-dominated UK film industry, arrived in Australia during this time. She says, “In Australia, I felt one could achieve whatever one had set out to achieve. It was a new industry that was starting to grow and I was in the vanguard of that. It is also a very interesting society for outspokenness, and had a bluntness, an openness which is quite disarming at first, but in the UK I was dealing with an industry full of men, older men who really trivialised my viewpoints”.

For Jane, who has since produced the Oscar winning feature Shine. It is the story of a person that is more important than the gender issue. “Stories behind most of my films portray life in some way that is important to me. I am really interested in family relationships, especially parent-child relationship that is the foundation of our lives. So many people have bad relationships with parents and you can tweak that very quickly with an honest story, touch the heart of the audience. Shine touches on family relationships very meaningfully”.

The AFTRS and the Australian Film Commission have played a crucial role in changing attitudes about the employment of women. In 1982 a group of women committed to improving the position and representation of women in the industry formed the Australian chapter of Women in Film and Television (WIFT), a unique forum for communication, professional development and networking first founded in Los Angeles in 1972.

As Sarah Runcie, one of the founding members of WIFT here says, “While working in Washington D.C, I was amazed at the support women gave one another in networking, information sharing and encouraging younger women filmmakers. It still doesn’t happen that readily in Australia, probably because we don’t have the luxury of having that large an industry and therefore not as many opportunities. The fragility of our own industry has engendered not so much a community feeling, but more of a territorial cliquish aspect to the industry as it is currently.”

The latest survey by the Australian Bureau of statistics shows 15,195 persons, comprising 61 percent men and 39 percent women, employed in the $ 1.5 billion Australian film and video production industry. Women were largely employed part-time and earning an income from documentary and short films, whereas men were more in permanent jobs earning mostly from feature films.

Sarah is keen on documentaries because of the complexities of methodology, where one positions oneself in relation to the subject and audience. She feels, “There has been a strong element of misogynistic representation of women and we have become more sensitive to that in the last 20 years. There has been more awareness even within the public as to what is really a sexist and unnecessarily misogynistic character portrayal in a movie”. She feels roles, whatever they be, should find immediate social reality independent of whatever function they might have in any given narrative or movie.

WIFT’s flagship programme, World of Women’s cinema (WOW) International Film Festival, annually turns a universal lens on all aspects of women’s lives and experiences through the works of established filmmakers and women earlier in their career.

As writer and director of award winning documentary My Mother India, Safina Uberoi says, “We expect women to make films about women, but that can be more limiting than liberating. I think we have passed the stage where we need to tell women’s stories in order to say that women have a view. We should be liberated enough to make stories about anything. One can make a film with all male characters and that can be a very feminist film. I am interested in expressing what it is to be female, but at the same time I am also interested in exploring what it is to be male from a feminist perspective.”

In My Mother India, Safina explores her mother’s journey as an Australian woman who went to live in India with an Indian husband. It looks at India’s history from her mother’s perspective, which though different from the men around her, including her husband and her son, is not set in opposition to them, but in contrast to them.

An increasing number of women in the film industry have definitely influenced the subject matter of the films that are made though there is still an imbalance throughout the entire film crew. Many Australian women today are powerful voices not only as directors, but also producers or people who are deciding the kind of representation on screen. This is evident particularly in three sectors: In documentary filmmaking, both in commissioning bodies and filmmaking; in independent feature film sector as producers, directors, script writers; and in independent short films. However, there is a lack of representation of women’s skill in commercial television, which is reflected in the programming.

As General Manager of SBS Television Independent, Glenys Rowe says, “It is the business for all women now that there is an expectation that they will be in the workforce and it is seen as a good thing. The actual reality of trying to combine motherhood with full-time work is extremely difficult. The baby boomers’ assumptions, and to some degree feminism, is part of that. We can do with a re-look. We fought for what we thought of as rights, but infact our lives may not be better because of those rights. I have a busy urban full-time job and it impinges upon my personal values. My desire to be available to my family and my elderly parents is constrained by simply the number of hours I have in a day. I find that personally compromising. I think a lot of women are thinking on those lines now”.

Her award-winning film, Feeling Sexy, is a story about a young married mother, who is tempted to seduce her young art student. It is a film as much about the life of an artist as it is about the life of a mother.

Today, there are outstanding women figuring in the discussion of Australian cinema, but the battle is far from over. At AFTRS, there were only 20 per cent women applicants this year. In key fields like writing and directing, women are still under represented. For those in the industry, there are the functional constraints for women of working long hours, long outstation shoots, problems of childcare and the insecurity inherent in the nature of the job itself.

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