The screenwriter has said that “Belle” was initially inspired by her seeing the painting of Dido and Elizabeth at Scone Palace in Scotland. The painting, worth seeking out online, gets more beautiful the more you look at it. In the ease of their postures and the warm and confident expressions of their faces, one can see that those young women knew something – their own worth and each other’s.
While she was an undergraduate at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland in the 1990s, Misan Sagay visited the nearby Scone Palace, where a rare double portrait caught her eye. Painted in the Gainsborough style of aristocratic figures in an Arcadian landscape, the canvas showed two young women swathed in lustrous satin, gleaming pearls circling their swan necks. The vivacious one on the left is biracial; her unhurried companion is white.
Ms. Sagay, who is Anglo-Nigerian, studied the wall label. It read: “Portrait of Lady Elizabeth Murray, circa 1778.”
Naturally, Ms. Sagay was curious. What of the woman on the left, whose forearm Elizabeth clasps so fondly?
In 2009 Amma Asante, a British-born filmmaker of Ghanaian parentage, received a screenplay written by Ms. Sagay. Attached was a postcard reproduction of the painting. Even before reading the script, Ms. Asante recalled, “I was inspired by the image.” She said that in European paintings of the late 18th century, blacks were often depicted as lower-class figures to affirm the higher status of the white subject. “I knew how unique it was,” she said, “that the black woman was not looking with adoration at the white woman, and that the white woman was tenderly touching her companion.”
I just saw “Belle.” It is so good. I have no time to blog right now, but I’ve got to tell you how extraordinary this film is.
I’m going to list the reasons, and hopefully, I’ll have time to come back later and tell you more. It’s remarkable I saw this movie today because I just blogged about the talk where feminist scholar bell hooks said she was sick of seeing black women being raped on screen, how she was willing to see more films about slavery, but it had to be a different take than black woman as victim. At the same talk, flimmaker Shola Lynch said she wanted images that fed her. Watching “Belle” is like satisfying a craving I’ve had for my whole life. The narrative turns many stereotypes on their heads, and that is beautiful to see.
#1 Black female protagonist
Dido Belle is the star of this movie. I’m going to call her Dido from now on because that’s how she’s referred to in the film. I’m guessing “Belle” made a better title. How many films have we all seen where the black girl is the BFF of the white girl? In this movie, the blonde, blue-eyed cousin has the supporting role. Dido is the hero of this movie, she is the one with alll the screen time, who makes choices, takes risks, and goes through a transition.
#2 Female cousins are not cardboard opposites or rivals
One cousin is black, the other white but both girls are both smart, compassionate, and beautiful, there is not an “attractive” one and a “smart” one. They are complex. And, get this, are you sitting down? They are friends. They love each other. There is complexity and also conflict but not in a cookie cutter way.
#3 Class, race, and gender are all addressed brilliantly
This is the first film I’ve seen that addresses intersectionality like this. There are so many great lines and plot points that show the complexity of these issues. I’ll list a few. Dido is the daughter of a an English aristocrat and a slave. When Dido’s mother dies, her father comes to take her to his estate. A captain of the English navy, he leaves Dido with his uncle, the most powerful judge in England. Dido’s father can’t return because he is following the king’s orders, and he dies. This all happens in the first 10 minutes of the movie. The captain leaves Dido his money, 2000 pounds a year. So Dido is a rich woman, an heiress.
Dido’s white cousin gets no money from her family because her father is a “scoundrel” who, after her mother died, married another woman. All his money is going to his new family. The cousin must marry wealth, she has no income of her own and British law forbids inheriting from her grandfather because– do you watch Downton Abbey– she’s female.
So great lines ensue when the cousin says to Dido, this is not an exact quote “I envy you, you are free. I must marry money, and I’m forbidden from making any on my own. I am my future husband’s property.”
That line is there to remind the audience that women were slaves. Women’s bodies belonged to men. Women were not allowed to have their own income. I’ve had so many debates with people, and I have since high school, where I’m told “Women were never slaves.” Huh? Not only are women descended from slaves fairly recently in human history– think about laws about property, income, the vote which in the USA we’ve only had for 94 years– but in much of the world in 2014 women are still slaves.
There are more great plot points. The cousins get in an argument and the white one calls the black one illegitimate. Dido says, “My father loved me. You are the one who was abandoned by your father and that is why you are in the financial state you are in.” It’s clear the cousin agrees, she’s the “illegitimate” one.
#4 Role of art in passing down narrative
There are many points in the movie where paintings are shown. When Dido first goes to the estate, as a little girl, she looks at a painting of her grandafther with a black boy servant/ slave.
At another point, Dido sees a painting of a slave bowing down worshipfully to a white man and remarks how paintings are like reality.
The movie makes clear how we are all affected and influenced by the “media” of the day, at that time, black people shown in repetitive images as inferior to whites.
In contrast, Dido and her cousin are painted together as equals. In the movie, they are the same size, right next to each other. In this painting, the real one, the white girl is more prominent, but it was radical at the time. I am glad in the actual movie both figures are the same prominence. The painting is commissioned by the uncle and at the end of the movie, whe nthey show the real painting. I cried. I didn’t know it existed.
Art creates reality and reality creates art. I love how “Belle” makes this truth a central theme of the movie.
I’ve got to research this movie, but I’m curious what role that painting had in inspiring the fillmmaker and keeping Dido’s story alive.
#5 Role of capitalism is race/ gender/ class
The movie addresses how the slave trade was crucial to the British economy. That is the reason so many people supported slavery. This brings to light how entrenched industries are today in our culture– the billion dollar beauty business for one– and how people benefit financially on all kinds of levels by maintaining inequality.
#6 Great roles for FIVE women in this movie!
There are many strong female characters. All the acting is great– Miranda Richardson, Emily Watson are in the movie. (Tom Wilkinson is amazing, as always, playing the uncle.)
#7 Romance
“Belle” is loved and adored by a man for her brilliance and strength. There is no sex and one kiss but you feel the heat between the characters, rare indeed. In fact, this movie is so sqeaky clean, I wonder if the director and producers etc wanted parents to feel comfortable bringing their children to it. It’s not a “children’s movie” but I think it’s a great one for kids to see. I’m going to take my 10 year old daughter. As I just wrote, there is no sex/ nudity, and I would take my 8 year old to see it as well, except that you need to understand sex/ reproduction to get the whole white blood/ black blood legal issue. I have not had “the talk” with my 8 year old yet, so I’m not going to bring her.
Also, in order to understand the movie, your child will need to understand the concept of insurance. The central debate of the narrative is that a slave trade boat threw its “cargo” overboard because there was a lack of water and they were going to die anyway. The insurance company argues it doesn’t have to pay because the “cargo” could have been saved, that diseased slaves were thrown overboard because the insurance was worth more than the humans.
With those caveats (if they know about sex and if they can understand the basic concept of insurance) I’m recommending “Belle” for kids 8 years old and up.
Reel Girl rates “Belle” ***HHH***
Update: “Belle” was inspired by the painting. From SFGate:
The screenwriter has said that “Belle” was initially inspired by her seeing the painting of Dido and Elizabeth at Scone Palace in Scotland. The painting, worth seeking out online, gets more beautiful the more you look at it. In the ease of their postures and the warm and confident expressions of their faces, one can see that those young women knew something – their own worth and each other’s.
While she was an undergraduate at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland in the 1990s, Misan Sagay visited the nearby Scone Palace, where a rare double portrait caught her eye. Painted in the Gainsborough style of aristocratic figures in an Arcadian landscape, the canvas showed two young women swathed in lustrous satin, gleaming pearls circling their swan necks. The vivacious one on the left is biracial; her unhurried companion is white.
Ms. Sagay, who is Anglo-Nigerian, studied the wall label. It read: “Portrait of Lady Elizabeth Murray, circa 1778.”
Naturally, Ms. Sagay was curious. What of the woman on the left, whose forearm Elizabeth clasps so fondly?
In 2009 Amma Asante, a British-born filmmaker of Ghanaian parentage, received a screenplay written by Ms. Sagay. Attached was a postcard reproduction of the painting. Even before reading the script, Ms. Asante recalled, “I was inspired by the image.” She said that in European paintings of the late 18th century, blacks were often depicted as lower-class figures to affirm the higher status of the white subject. “I knew how unique it was,” she said, “that the black woman was not looking with adoration at the white woman, and that the white woman was tenderly touching her companion.”
Did you see that line? “I was inspired by the image.”
Jill’s total compensation as executive editor was not meaningfully less than Bill Keller’s, so that is just incorrect. Her pension benefit, like all Times employees, is based on her years of service and compensation. The pension benefit was frozen in 2009.
“Meaningfully less”? WTF does that mean? But the actual money is only part of the issue here. Since I graduated from college, I’ve been told: When offered a salary, women accept that number while men take it as a negotiation point. Women must learn to ask for more, I was told. Yet, the response to Abramson indicates, once again, that when a man asks, it’s normal. When a woman does, she’s a pushy bitch who may end up losing her job.
How many women do you think are asking for a raise today after watching the fate of Jill Abramson? Oh, right, that’s the point.
Yesterday, the New York Times’ announcement it was replacing Managing Editor Jill Abramson with Dean Baquet, after her brief three year tenure with no transition time and no good-bye, in what Rebecca Traister calls “a singularly humiliating firing” was one more act of sexism by the so-called liberal institution.
Several weeks ago, I’m told, Abramson discovered that her pay and her pension benefits as both executive editor and, before that, as managing editor were considerably less than the pay and pension benefits of Bill Keller, the male editor whom she replaced in both jobs. “She confronted the top brass,” one close associate said, and this may have fed into the management’s narrative that she was “pushy,” a characterization that, for many, has an inescapably gendered aspect.
Irrespective of the specific circumstances in this case, such words as “abrasive,” “pushy,” and “brusque” tend to irk professional women, who have come to recognize them from countless studies demonstrating that female leaders are almost always seen more negatively than male ones—a phenomenon also known as the competent-but-disliked dilemma.
The more critical issue, though, is that the gap in pay between women and men is quite real and stubbornly persists at 77¢ on the dollar in spite of the many advances women have made. Even after factoring in differences in occupation, education, and years of experience, according to Harvard’s Claudia Goldin, a significant gulf in female vs. male pay still exists. Still, no one seems able to do much about it.
In April, Republican senators voted down the latest bill meant to address this disparity: The Paycheck Fairness Act would have made it illegal for employers to retaliate against employees who discussed their compensation and would have allowed for more government monitoring of what workers are paid.
What about movies for children? I have three young daughters. Aside from the pink ghetto, kids’ media — whether PBS or Disney — put male characters front and center. Female characters are sidelined or not there at all — just look at the posters for children’s movies (with the exception of ‘‘Brave’’). There is no reason for the imaginary world to be sexist.
Margot Magowan, San Francisco, posted on nytimes.com
It’s upsetting and damaging that the New York Times is so sexist because it’s a force in determining which stories are “important.”
Here’s a quote I use often from Half the Sky by reporters Nicolas Krsitof (who works at the Times now) and Sheryl Wudunn (who used to work at the Times.)
When a prominent dissident was arrested in China, we would write a front-page article; when 100,000 girls were kidnapped and trafficked into brothels, we didn’t even consider it news
In honor of Jill Abramson, here’s a list of Reel Girl’s blogs on sexism at the New York Times:
Dylan Farrow’s op-ed on Woody Allen’s sex abuse was sent to many papers, all who rejected it. I am assuming the Times was one of those papers. It was columnist Nicolas Kristof who posted Farrow’s letter on his blog. Yet, the Times did publish Woody Allen’s rebuttal as op-ed.
Last week, four black feminists participated in a panel discussion hosted by the New School titled: “Are You Still a Slave? Liberating the Black Female Body.” The talk– an in depth discussion about the influence of imagery and narrative on our culture and its role in creating our actual reality– went on for almost two hours. Yet, out of all this, the media reduced trenchant analysis into a sound byte, pitting one black woman against another: “Feminist scholar bell hooks calls Beyonce a terrorist.”
I encourage you to watch the whole talk. I know you probably won’t, because, as I wrote, it’s two hours long. I didn’t intend to sit through it all myself, but I was so excited and fascinated by what these women were saying, I couldn’t stop listening to them.
These 4 women are creating new narratives and images, beyond woman as victim, sex object, slave. The discussion about Beyonce, specifically her Time cover where she’s shown in her underwear (which totally bummed me out as well when I saw it– why, why, why, the issue is about the most influential people and she’s practically naked, do you know how few women make it to the cover of Time?) is a few minutes of a larger, important talk about women, power, and the nature of reality.
Here’s how bell hooks began the discussion:
Part of why I’m so excited and proud to be here today is that I’m up here with black women who are all about redefining and creating a different kind of image, liberating the black female body
Not a fan of “12 Years a Slave,” hooks says:
If I never see another naked, enslaved, raped black woman on the screen as long as I live, I’ll be happy.
YES! I could not agree more. I am so sick of watching women get raped. After the talk, someone in the audience challenged hooks, saying she felt conflicted about hooks’ reaction to “12 Years:’
we still need to have those conversations about rape and violence on stage…how can we have those conversations, the role of slavery and colonization on women’s bodies? Can we make space for both?
Here’s how hooks responded:
Because we have been so saturated, I mean, I think one of the big lies that’s going around is, “Oh, we never talked about slavery, oh, we don’t have images of slavery.” We had “Roots” and more “Roots,” and there’ve been all these different books and productions, so that I think of that as a kind of myth building thing when people say, “Oh, we don’t have images.” Notice I didn’t say I don’t want to see anything about slavery. I don’t want to see those same tropes over and over again.
hooks speaks about some narratives that involve slavery she’d like to see, for example, when John Wollman and the Quakers met and decided they could not support slavery and believe in the god they believed in, that in fact, they owed back wages to slaves.
that would be an interesting film for me… more interesting to me as an image, as an idea than the repetitive image of victimhood, and I think that they’re all kinds of images and stories out there that could bring us into a different level of understanding.
hooks was making exactly the same point about Beyonce. She was referring to the repetition of sexualized images of women and how the inundation is an assault on our brains, especially for kids:
I see a part of Beyonce that is, in fact, anti-feminist, that is assaulting, that is a terrorist, in especially terms of the impact on young girls. I actually feel like the major assault of feminism in our society is has come from visual media… The tirades against feminism occur so much in the image making business…What I’m concerned about constantly in my critical imagination is why is it we don’t have liberatory images that are away from, not an inversion of, what society has told us, but our own sense of: what am I looking like when I am free?
The tirades against feminism occur so much in the image making business
hooks wants new images. She says:
I would never want my child to see “12 Years a Slave” because it’s the imprint of the black, female body as victimized.
Again, totally agree. Obviously, “12 Years” isn’t a movie for kids, but I see endless books and movies, supposedly feminist ones where girls are mocked for being girls, then they rise above it and prove everyone wrong. Fuck that. I hope in children’s media I never have to read about or watch another girl dressing up as a boy, fighting or cooking “as good as a boy can,” from Mulan to Tamora Pierce to Elena’s Serenade to endless Minority Feisty. The reason this trope is awful for girls– and boys– is because before your child can understand the narrative, she needs to understand sexism. Instead of having Colette in “Ratatouille” give a whole speech about male dominated kitchens, why not make a movie with a female top chef and her best friend is a female talking-cooking rat? Audiences will buy that a rodent can run a three star restaurant but not a female? Like hooks says, we are saturated with this same old, same old. If we weren’t, it would be a different story (ha.) The slavery narrative in all its forms has its place, but we need a break. It’s too dominant. There are many other stories to tell.
By the way, hooks walks her talk. She wrote Happy to be Nappy for kids in 2001, and in this discussion, she says she includes it in her most important, favorite works.
Another speaker on the panel, Shola Lynch, is a filmmaker whose most recent production is a documentary about Angela Davis.
In referring to her film as “a political crime drama with a love story at the center,” she reframes Davis’ narrative. Next, Lynch is making a movie about Harriet Tubman, who she calls an “action heroine.” Can you believe there hasn’t been a movie about Harriet Tubman? Lynch says that even though Tubman’s story is true, people don’t “believe” it. The same phenomenon happened with the Davis movie. About selling that film, Lynch says:
So then I have conversations where somebody’s like, “Oh, it’s a great film as a documentary, but the only reason I would support it is I have to know who the main male characters are because it’ll be flipped to be a narrative, women’s stories don’t sell”… Her story is true, but not possible. People don’t believe it. But it’s all true.”
Talking about why she would rather make movies about heroes than victims, Lynch refers to “symbolic annihilation:”
Symbolic annihilation is two things: not seeing yourself, but it’s also seeing yourself only denigrated, victimized etc, and what that does to you. We can talk about all the things that denigrate us, but I’d rather shift the camera, shift my gaze, and look for the images and the people and the places that feed me. I really do think, you talk about children, the more we create our culture, our cultural images– the books you write, the films I make, the alternatives, that these are artifacts that live, and they speak to people whether we’re there or not, bodies of work, and that is critical. I want to give one example. My daughter, she’s 4. She’s never known me not working on the Angela Davis film which took 8 years. She was so excited when I could show her the trailer. ..The trailer is like 2 minutes long and she watched that trailer over and over and over again…She would point out all the characters, she loved going ‘That’s Angela’s mom.” So she created Angela’s family and a sense of community just by watching this thing over and over again. But that’s not what I wanted to share. So she’s a little girl, she wants to be a princess, I’m trying to convince her she wants to be a warrior princess, that’s blonde and poofy and glam. She woke up one morning and her hair was all out, just like, you know, big, out, out, out. Usually it’s like, “Oh mom, my hair is too puffy.” This morning, after watching the trailer over and over again, she said, “I have Angela Davis hair.” So I thought I was making this political crime drama with a love story at the center etcetera, etcetera, etcetra, but I was also making another image for young people to see and to perhaps relate to. And I was blown away, because I can tell her she’s beautiful all day long. I’m her mom, doesn’t count. The more we create the alternative universe which then becomes the universe.
Another panelist, writer Marci Blackman, echoes Lynch’s point:
My characters are the people who I grew up seeing every day who I don’t see, not just in literature, I don’t see them on TV…They weren’t there in the worlds that I was inhabiting when I would sit and go to the library and read, so I decided I wanted to write them, and I wanted to write people like me who I wasn’t seeing in the books either. I wanted to create these characters and put them out there, and I think what you say about self-representation and putting it out there to count as a counteract against these other images.
The journey to freedom has also been so much about the journey of imagination, the capacity to imagine yourself differently, counter-hegemonically, and that’s why the imagination is so important because Shola imagined Angela Davis in a different way from the images we had of her. That imagination of oneself, I would like us to end on that note and people can speak about creativity, because it is striking to me and I didn’t think about this when we were putting the panel together that for each of us, creativity and the uses of imagination have been what led us into the freedom we have. It has been what enhances my life every day. To be able to think and create and leap and jump beyond where I feel like we have been told, theoretically, intellectually that we should go.
Imagination inspires reality inspires imagination in an endless loop. It’s magic. That’s the point bell hooks was making about Beyonce. If you still don’t get it, here’s one last quote from hooks and then watch the video for yourself.
We can gather strength from the diversity of people’s stories, the diversity of people’s imagination.
BLAMING WOMEN IS ALWAYS IN FASHION! Never forget it.
I am reminded that times like these call for Jimmy Buffet:
Some people claim that there’s a woman to blame,
But I know, it’s my own damn fault.
Yes, and some people claim that there’s a woman to blame
And I know it’s my own damn fault.
Every time I hear “Margaritaville” on the radio (which is often, I live in San Francisco) I get a feeling of calm and relief. Men can take responsibility for their actions. More importantly, people can. Let’s stop being victims. Stop pointing– or shaking– your finger at someone else and clean up your side of the street. It’s good for America.
Tonight, I took 4 kids to see ‘Legends of Oz: Dorothy’s Return,’ the first children’s movie of the year (yes, it’s May) to feature a female protagonist. For that reason alone, I recommend ‘Dorothy’ for your kids. There will be a total of 18 children’s movies starring males in 2014, while just 6 will star females. Your kids will get a handful of chances to see a female be front and center. Note that in the poster below, Dorothy is insulated by 8 male characters, making her a Minority Feisty. The china doll on the right is another Minority Feisty. The third MF in the movie is Glinda, who spends most of the movie as a puppet.
Crowd scenes were male dominated, whether they were soldiers, flying monkeys, judges, police, or trees, females mostly went missing. But, Dorothy is the star of this film. She is heroic, she’s “the one” to save Oz, and she saves her hometown too. All this is a rarity in children’s movies, so I hate to write this, but there’s something almost unbearably bland about Dorothy. I wish she had more personality, was funny or silly, something. I never, not for one minute, lost myself in this movie.
Every time I see a mediocre Oz movie (recall last year’s James Franco vehicle) I pray Hollywood will make a movie about Ozma, the rightful ruler of the land over the rainbow. I’ve adored Ozma since I was a kid, she’s such a great character. Hollywood, are you listening?
Beggars can’t be choosers. Also, I’m 45, and the kids with me, ages 5 – 10 seemed into ‘Dorothy,’ so Reel Girl rates ‘Legends of Oz: Dorothy’s Return’ ***HH***
Feminist scholar bell hooks is all over the media for calling Beyonce a terrorist. But that’s not the shocking part of the New School hosted debate. Writer Marci Blackman was on the panel, and she spoke about being stopped by TSA agents while returning from Florida last week because they couldn’t tell if she was male or female. Gender ambiguity is clearly offensive and dangerous to America, right? The TSA’s discrimination and abuse of power ought to be making headlines today. Here’s Blackman’s story as told to bell hooks (transcribed by me because I couldn’t find it anywhere else.)
After I come out of the body scan, they ask me for my boarding pass again, which they’re not supposed to do. And I give the man my boarding pass, and he waves over a female TSA agent who comes over and pulls me aside for a pat down search, and I asked why. And they wouldn’t say anything to me, and I said, “Look, I need to know why.” And so the first response was: “Well, we always search everybody three times.” And I said, “Well that’s clearly not true, because the ten people before me just walked right on through and got their bags. So why me? What is it about me that made you stop? Did something go off in the scan?” And finally she said, “It’s because we can’t tell if you’re male or female…ma’am.” So now, not only am I not in this box that I can’t find and that I wouldn’t want to get in anyway, but now, I’m a criminal, because I’m not walking or sitting or fitting or squeezing myself into this box that’s defined for me by somebody else.
Watch the video here, Blackman’s story is 23 minutes in.
